Me in 10 seconds

I’ve had a lot of jobs and decided I didn’t really like any of them. I’ve been a window cleaner at a Chinese restaurant, clothes smother at a sports store, shelf stacker, warehouse shelf organiser, call centre drone, door to door pot purri salesman, pub glass collector.

Me in 10 Minutes

Education

Like most millennials, I was told that university was the source of job salvation so I did 4 years and dropped out.

Sadly, I did first year in completely different subjects instead of 4 years in 1 subject so left sans degree. Specialily,

• International Business and Modern Language….que?
• Economics….supply and too demanding
• Psychology…..teachers leaving me feeling like phineas gage
• Philosophy….I flunk therefore I am….not getting a degree.

At university, I discovered my favourite place on campus – the library. Not because of all the amazing books but because they had IBM Thinkpads (you know, the one’s built like a tank with the red nipple in the middle) which you could rent for £100 a year. Absolute bargain of the century.

So I rented the tank and started trawling youtube and internet forums. It’s wasn’t long till I discovered 2 game changing websites. Chris Coyier’s CSS Tricks and Rosalind Gardener’s “Super Affiliate Handbook”.

Websites

With my new knowledge, I started building all manner of terrible websites trying to be the next Super Affiliate. A handful of site’s made really good money for a student, or should I say a person pretending to be a student. But I realised very quickly that I didn’t actually care about any of the site’s I was making or the income I was “passively” working my tits off to maintain.

I didn’t care about Avios points, hitachi wands, student survival tips, gemstones or any of the other high commission garbage I was writing about. The only thing I cared about was tinkering, reading philosophy and playing with my band. Or as the Scottish would call it ‘being a waster’.

One of the websites I built was a favour for a friends mum who owned the local travel agent in our town. Remember, physical travel agents? She was so happy with it that she gave me £500. Five hundred great British pounds. I’d have to sell 100 vibrators or 20 platinum credit cards or do 3 shifts washing glasses in Weatherspoons to command that sort of money.

Eureka Moment

That’s when I had the lightbulb moment. I’ll offer small businesses websites and online marketing services, which I later learned was referred to as SEO.

So I spent 4 years commuting to university with my rented laptop, sitting in the library all day and building websites and doing very basic online marketing.

Why did I continue going to the university if I had a business? I still lived with my parents. Who were very invested in my continued misery and insisted that university was the best thing for me. So I practiced malicious compliance, I went to the university building but didn’t take the classes, switching degrees before the exams to keep my library access going.

First job

I then got a job at an agency called WSI which I later found out was some sort of franchise ponzi scheme and then my first proper, and favourite, job with bigmouthmedia (now Publicis) in Edinburgh. This is where I learned how to be an account manager and where I discovered that there was zero difference between the work I shipped for my personal small business clients and the biggest corporations in the world. The only difference was how it was packaged and delivered.

So 3 years later, I decided to go out on my own and start my own agency.

The agency

I started out working in Codebase trading under the name We Are Discovery, sadly the domain has now been sniped by a church in the US.

When building the agency on local SEO clients I was eventually introduced to a company called Ideas Made Digital based in London. They did all manner of fancy design and build, app design, IOT, wierd experimental tech. And they had massive brands like Red Bull Racing and the Guardian and Peroni. To say I was impressed was an understatement so when the owner, whose name I will anonymise……let’s called him Mr P. Rick, offered to join forces with Discovery I was thrilled.

Some big London agency wants to join forces with little old me. This could be the start of great things. A London office. Owning an agency that works with the biggest business in the world. A dream! Or at least I thought it was a dream before the reality hit.

Discovery was a retainer business model so we had monthly payments coming in. Ideas Made charged one off fees. Year 1 I was only 20% of revenue. Year 3, I was closer to 80%. Without airing too much dirty laundry the other directors put me through forfeiture and ousted me from the business. Leaving me with nothing to show for the last 6 years of growing my agency. Ouch.

Easily one of the most painful and formative business experiences of my life. I didn’t get a business degree at uni but the school of life made my an honorary PHD over night.

So after a week of wallowing, I decided to start over again. Moved to a shared flat that only cost £500 a month, won some new clients and started working harder than I’ve ever worked in my life. We went from 3 people to 15 people in 3 years with zero investment. We were breaking records for revenue and winning huge clients from Brewdog to Just Eat to eBay. We were on the up and up. Until March 2020.