Today we’d like to introduce you to Ben Harper.
Hi Ben, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
My career has taken a slightly unconventional path. I started out in law enforcement analysis in the UK, which gave me a strong foundation in discipline, resilience, and problem-solving. From there, I made the leap into entrepreneurship and built a marketing company that was ultimately acquired.
After the acquisition, I founded a B2B SaaS platform, which deepened my experience in technology and showed me firsthand how quickly the way businesses are discovered and evaluated was changing.
I later moved to the US and founded LLM Listed (https://llmlisted.com). We help businesses understand and improve how they appear in AI-generated recommendations and search results. As more people use platforms like ChatGPT to find companies, products, and services, being visible within large language models is becoming increasingly important.
Looking back, each chapter – from law enforcement to marketing, SaaS, and now AI – has built upon the last. The common thread has always been solving problems, adapting to change, and building businesses around where I believe the market is heading.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It definitely hasn’t always been a smooth road. One of the biggest challenges came while I was running my B2B SaaS company. We had just invested heavily in growth and hired an entirely new sales team – then, about a month later, the world went into lockdown. Almost overnight, buying decisions stalled, priorities changed, and the plans we had built around suddenly looked very different. It forced us to adapt quickly while managing the responsibility of having a new team relying on us during an incredibly uncertain period.
The acquisition of my marketing agency also brought challenges I hadn’t anticipated. Selling a business can look like the finish line from the outside, but the period afterward was complicated, and we faced a number of difficulties with the buyer. That experience taught me the importance of choosing the right partner, understanding what happens after the deal closes, and ensuring expectations are aligned on both sides.
Those experiences were difficult, but they strengthened my resilience and judgment. They also taught me that entrepreneurship is rarely a straight line. Plans will change, circumstances will fall outside your control, and the real test is how quickly you can adjust and keep moving forward.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
LLM Listed helps businesses understand and improve how they’re represented by AI platforms such as ChatGPT. As consumers increasingly turn to AI for recommendations – asking everything from which software to buy to which local provider to trust—it’s becoming essential for brands to know whether they appear in those answers, how they’re described, and how they compare with their competitors.
We specialize in LLM visibility: helping businesses measure their presence within AI-generated answers and identify opportunities to become more discoverable and accurately represented. Traditional SEO focuses on ranking within a list of search results; we’re focused on what happens when AI gives someone a direct recommendation.
What sets us apart is our focus on making this emerging area practical and understandable. AI visibility can feel like a black box, particularly for business owners who are already managing multiple marketing channels. Our goal is to provide clear insights they can act upon, without unnecessary complexity.
I’m most proud that we’re building LLM Listed at a genuine turning point in how people discover businesses. The way consumers search and make decisions is changing rapidly, and we want to help businesses of every size avoid being left behind. Being present on Google has been essential for years; we believe being visible and accurately represented within AI recommendations will become just as important.
Risk taking is a topic that people have widely differing views on – we’d love to hear your thoughts.
I would definitely consider myself a risk-taker, although I try to distinguish between calculated risk and recklessness. For me, taking a risk doesn’t mean moving forward without fear or uncertainty; it means believing the potential opportunity is worth stepping outside what feels comfortable.
I’ve taken several significant risks throughout my career. Leaving law enforcement to pursue entrepreneurship was one. Starting and growing different businesses – knowing that each could succeed or fail—required me to repeatedly back myself and learn as I went. More recently, moving from the UK to the US, establishing a new life in Scottsdale, and launching LLM Listed meant leaving behind much of what was familiar and rebuilding both personally and professionally on a different continent.
I tend to think about risk in terms of the possible upside, the worst realistic outcome, and whether I could recover if things didn’t go to plan. It’s rarely possible to eliminate uncertainty, especially in business. At some point, you have to trust your experience, make the best decision you can with the information available, and take the leap.
Not every risk I’ve taken has worked out exactly as intended, but each one has created new opportunities, relationships, or lessons. In my experience, the bigger risk is sometimes staying comfortable for too long and wondering what might have happened if you had acted.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://llmlisted.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminharper/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@BenHarper87
