Most of the time, the about page on a website reads like a Disney film, the “rags to riches”, “victim to hero” tale. I wanted to be raw and real about my journey because more people are experiencing their own.
Developing an online business is more important than ever, and as you read through this page, I hope you’ll understand why my passion and purpose is helping everyone become enlightened entrepreneurs.
The year was 1998, I was a Police Officer and I was on the phone with an estate agent.
I was about to submit my first offer on a buy-to-let house. The house was on the market for £25,995 and my offer was £17K.
The Estate Agent laughed down the phone at my offer, but 30 minutes later, the vendor agreed to £17,500.
That was day #1 in the property business.
It was an exciting time, but it was apparent that I had no clue what I was doing…
The first property took 11 months to renovate, with many phone calls to Dad.
Just before the property was finished, I looked at a second house, which was a large terraced house on sale for £18,000. I offered £10,000, and we settled on £11k. Not a bad start.
That’s how the next few years went, buying and selling property on the side while still working as a Police Officer.
After 18 months of buying the first house, I had a few houses on the go, deals in the pipeline, two new villas in Florida and a six-figure income.
I was in the Police station talking to an Inspector when my mobile phone rang. It was an enquiry from someone about booking the villa. My Inspector insisted I take the call, but it was at that point that I knew I had to make a decision.
Juggling calls, renovations and property deals while working full-time was becoming too much, and I decided to go part-time, then eventually resign from my Police career.
Some people said I was being ambitious, leaving a good career, but it would be 25 years later that I really learned what was going on…
It was the Florida business that made me look deeper into marketing. In 1999, a friend built my first website, taking the business online.
This meant I no longer had to print out villa brochures, spend a fortune on ink, stamps and stationery because we were online.
The trading year of 2001 was slow, and September 11th 2001, gave me my first real lesson in business.
All my guests cancelled their holidays and over the next 18 months, I realised that I had financially overleveraged myself with the villa business.
A huge lesson for me at the time was that, despite knowing that success starts outside your comfort zone, you should ALWAYS listen to your gut instinct in business, and I knew that taking on Florida made us vulnerable. I would only learn years later that my decision-making had little to do with business and more to do with childhood trauma.
The other thing I was dealing with was losing my mum to cancer a year earlier, aged 52. I remember someone telling me that you either build your business mad or excited, and I was raging mad and made some reckless nieve decisions at that time.
So with no bookings and huge overheads, I did what I could to ride things out by trying to quickly expand my other business, but things came crashing down quickly, and I ended up on my own, divorced and estranged from my son, living in one of my rental properties, the previous tenant had flooded.
Sometimes in life, you descend into a long, never-ending hole of loss, death and destruction and climbing out seems impossible.
If that’s where you are right now, let me tell you I know how it feels. Let me tell you the effort to climb back is worth it for reasons I’ll explain later.
It would be great to say that I found online marketing and a year later I turned everything around, but that’s not how things happened.
After losing everything, I became more cautious and more cynical about success and life in general, costing me another marriage.
Yes, I built online businesses, and yes, I had some financial success, but I’d developed a self-destruct mechanism that kept me trapped. I would build businesses, then unconsciously sabotage them, develop relationships and sabotage them; the cycle went on…
It wasn’t until I met Jules, my partner and earth angel, that things started to change.
Of all the things I’d gone through, confronting one’s demons and dealing with them can be the most painful process of all, and the most rewarding if you put the work in.
The biggest challenge I found is accepting that adult trauma is formed in childhood, something I hold dear to my memory, and something which I spoke about in Episode 10 of my Podcast.
Jules is a qualified therapist in several modalities and identified my behaviour patterns and tells. One thing I learned is that when your partner’s a therapist, trying to win an argument will leave you with grazed knuckles as you drag them on the floor.
Like so many men, I thought I had my head together; the reality – I was living in survival mode, led by ego, which caused us many painful breakups and make-ups along the way.
The difference that made all the difference for me was NLP. Getting help from a Master NLP practitioner started the healing journey.
The healing journey can be a roller coaster, battling your ego and established beliefs. It takes time, but with work, you start to heal.
Slowly, my decision-making and behaviour patterns began to change, and certain realities became apparent.
The reality was that all the bad things that happened in my life were my fault, and while I had the power to damage things in the past, I had the power to change things in the future.
Here’s what I want you to take away from this.
You can create the online business of your dreams; it’s all real if you want it, it’s there…
But if you’re in survival mode, if you’re unknowingly battling trauma, none of it will make you happy. You’ll end up chasing one program after the next, chasing hope.
If you relate to anything on my page and want to get in touch, contact me. I’m always happy to jump on a Zoom call.
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