Member Spotlight:
the Brentwood business
building AI that works.

Every month the Brentwood Chamber of Commerce newsletter puts one member front and centre. In the August 2026 issue, that member was Mohamed Omar, who runs SHINIMINI LTD from here in Brentwood under the trading name The Scaling Firm. He joined the Chamber in June, so being asked for the spotlight barely two months later was a nice surprise.

The full interview runs across a page of the newsletter. What follows is that conversation with a bit more room to breathe, along with the parts local business owners tend to ask about afterwards.

"AI that does the work rather than just talks about it"

The first question the Chamber asked was the simplest one, and it is the one Mohamed says he gets most often at networking events: what does your business actually do?

In practice that means systems that sit quietly in the background of a business and handle the jobs nobody enjoys. In the newsletter he listed them plainly: answering missed calls, booking appointments, chasing reviews and invoices, drafting emails, editing videos, and running the busywork so the owner does not have to.

The part that tends to surprise people is that these are not off-the-shelf products. Each build is put together around one business at a time, which is deliberate. As he put it in the interview, they are built bespoke "so they replace the pile of monthly subscriptions most owners pay for and never fully use." Most small firms in Brentwood are quietly paying for four or five tools that each do a tenth of what they promised.

He does not use the word supplier

One line from the spotlight that got picked up locally was about how he sees the relationship:

Alongside SHINIMINI he is building a second company that independently tests and stress tests AI systems for safety and accuracy, with a particular focus on the tools now moving into healthcare. It is a different discipline to the automation work, but it comes from the same instinct: if a system is going to be trusted with real decisions, somebody had better check it properly.

A hundred businesses, ten hours each

The spotlight also carried the target Mohamed has set himself in this area, and it is the reason the free workshops and free audits exist at all.

That is a stated aim, not a claim about what has already happened. It shapes how the work is priced and sequenced: the first step is always free, because the fastest way to find out whether automation helps a particular business is to look at it properly rather than sell it something.

• Free workshops for local businesses, teaching what is genuinely useful now rather than what sounds impressive.
• A free AI audit of your business: a focused look at where the hours actually go, and a plain-English list of what to fix first. Yours to keep either way.
• Builds only when they pay for themselves, starting with one automation rather than a platform migration.

The principles underneath it

Most of the spotlight was not about technology. The Chamber asked about first jobs, mentors, setbacks and advice, and the answers say more about how the business is run than any service list would.

On starting out

Mohamed's first real venture came at eighteen, building e-commerce websites and running the advertising behind them. Before that he was taking computers apart from about the age of seven, purely to see what was inside. His summary of that period: "no job is too small if you do it properly."

On mentors

Asked whether he had mentors, the answer was yes, many, and the reasoning was practical. "I have always looked for mentors when I am stepping into unfamiliar territory, because someone who has walked the path before you can save you years." The thread he named running through all of it was to "stay humble enough to keep learning and respect the people who help you along the way."

On setbacks

The most personal answer in the piece was about how he handles things going wrong. He treats setbacks as information rather than disasters, and he was open about where that came from.

On advice for anyone starting up

"Truly believe in yourself, and know exactly who you are before you chase anything." The rest of that answer was about getting clear on your values and non-negotiables so that when an opportunity turns up you can read it properly, talking to real customers early, and automating the parts of the work that drain you. Which is, more or less, the business model described back to itself.

Why Brentwood, specifically

SHINIMINI could be run from anywhere. It is run from Brentwood on purpose, and the local work is not a marketing layer on top of it. Mohamed joined the Chamber of Commerce in June 2026 and works alongside Brentwood Connected, the town's BID, and follows the Borough Council's economic growth work.

He closed the spotlight on something that had nothing to do with automation at all: "be proud of who you are and where you come from, and let others be proud of theirs too," with thanks for the life he has been able to build here in the UK.

If you run a business in Brentwood, Ingatestone or Shenfield and you are curious rather than convinced, that is the right starting point. A coffee costs you half an hour. The audit costs you nothing.