Before I Could Build A Business, I Had To Rebuild Myself
At the back end of 2018, my life changed completely. I split up with my long-term partner, someone I had left my previous life behind and relocated for. When the relationship ended, I was asked to move out of her house quickly. I later discovered that she had been having an affair.
Suddenly, I had nowhere to go and nowhere to live.
For a short period, I lived out of my car. I showered at lorry blocks and worked from motorway cafés, using their internet so I could continue doing my job.
Eventually, I managed to negotiate a deal with a hotel and stayed there for more than a month while I searched for somewhere permanent to live.
In the end, I found a home in a small place called Holmes Chapel in Cheshire. It was incredibly quiet and, at that point in my life, it was exactly what I needed.
I couldn’t have known it then, but it would turn out to be the perfect place for what was about to come.
I had been at the property for around three months and, by that point, I was very low. I had never been particularly good at being alone, so everything that had happened hit me incredibly hard.
Then COVID came, and suddenly I was stuck. I had no friends nearby, no familiar faces around me and nowhere to go. It was just me.
Looking back, I believe that period of my life was always meant to happen. Even before COVID, I had reached an extremely low point, but something changed in me. I experienced what I have always described as a reset.
Through research since then, I have seen people describe similar experiences as a spiritual awakening. Perhaps that’s what it was. I don’t really know. What I do know is that, for me, it was absolutely a reset.
COVID became one of the hardest periods of my life, but strangely, it also gave me something I desperately needed: space.
For perhaps the first time, there was nowhere to run, nothing to distract me and nobody else to rely on. I had time to look at myself, understand who I had become and decide who I wanted to be.
I began meditating a lot. At one point, while I was still working full-time, I was meditating for around five hours a day, usually during my lunch break and again at night. I genuinely enjoyed it, and meditation is something I still use today.
Throughout all of this, I was still working for Smurfit Westrock. Looking back now, I sometimes wonder how I managed to keep everything going. Perhaps I was stronger than I thought I was.
As I began rebuilding myself, parts of the old me started coming to the surface. There were things about myself that I didn’t like and knew I needed to let go of.
That part was hard — very hard. If I’m honest, some of it is something I still struggle with today. There are still ghosts from my past that occasionally haunt me.
But I built myself a routine. I rode my bike, trained on the punch bag, ate healthily, worked and meditated. That routine helped push me through one of the most difficult periods of my life.
Before I ever started building websites, products or businesses, I had already started the most important rebuilding project of my life: myself.
The Sunday Drive That Started Everything
On Sundays, I would often go for a drive. I don’t really know why, but I’ve always been able to think more clearly when I’m driving. Some of my best ideas have come to me behind the wheel, which can be a pain because I normally have to find somewhere to pull over and write them down.
One Sunday in 2021, I went for one of those drives.
Out of nowhere, I had a thought.
There was no great business plan behind it. The idea simply appeared.
I had attempted business before, selling cosmetics. I had actually made money from it, but I’d spent the money rather than building something sustainable. This time, I started wondering whether I could do it differently.
Could I build something around what I already knew?
At the time, my ideas centred around two areas: business development and personal development.
I pulled the car over and started writing. I filled pages with ideas, then went home and carried on. I wrote for hours.
At around 10pm, I finally stopped, put all the notes into a drawer in my office and went to bed.
The following morning, I didn’t think about them.
The notes stayed in that drawer until I eventually came across them again while cleaning my office.
I remembered the day I’d written them and started reading.
This time, something was different.
I was stronger. I had begun reshaping myself. I still wasn’t the person I am today, but I was certainly no longer the person I had been.
I was also still working for Smurfit Westrock and doing very well professionally.
Finding those notes made me curious again. I started researching the subjects I’d written about. I didn’t make more notes this time. I simply watched YouTube videos and absorbed as much information as I could.
Within about a week, I had another idea.
I would build my own Shopify store and return to selling cosmetics, something I’d done successfully before. I thought I could make some money from it and see where it went.
And my ambitions were enormous.
Looking back, they were far bigger than the business model I was actually building could ever realistically support.
The Shopify store led me into dropshipping. I began putting other companies’ products onto my website. Then I found a company that could pack and fulfil products for me.
But there was a problem.
I didn’t have the capital required to take the idea where I wanted it to go.
That realisation hit me like a ton of bricks.
I was on annual leave from work at the time, and for almost an entire week I stayed in bed. I wouldn’t describe it as depression, but I was incredibly low. I slept, thought, slept again and thought some more.
By Thursday, something shifted.
I got out of bed and started writing again.
I needed to work out another route.
Eventually, I came up with three possibilities. I could start a business-development coaching business. I could move into property. Or I could build something around personal development.
Looking back now, I’m not sure it would have mattered which one I chose.
The business I eventually built didn’t begin with a perfect plan. It began with an idea on a Sunday drive, a pile of handwritten notes and the willingness to keep searching for another route whenever one closed.
I Thought I Was Building A Business. I Was Building Skills.
I bought two books. One was Wealth Through Property by Paul Smith. The other was Rapid Digital Assets by John Thornhill. In the end, I chose John Thornhill’s route.
I read the book in a day and then purchased his course, which was designed to teach people, day by day, how to build digital assets.
It was a 60-day programme. Every day, I was given another task. It taught me the basics of building websites, membership sites and digital products.
It took me closer to 90 days to complete because I was still working full-time and doing everything else at night.
When I look at what I built then compared with what I can build today, it was incredibly basic.
But that doesn’t matter.
I started with courses and e-books. When ChatGPT arrived in 2022, I began using it from the start.
The business gradually evolved into a business-development website offering coaching through three different service programmes.
To make those programmes work, I had to build increasingly complicated funnel systems.
I didn’t realise it at the time, but I was teaching myself.
Looking back, I don’t believe those early business ideas would ever have become successful businesses.
But perhaps they weren’t supposed to.
Their purpose was to train me.
I was learning marketing. I was learning how websites worked. I was learning funnels, digital products, systems and technology. I already understood sales and business development, but now I was adding an entirely different set of skills.
Most days I was working around 18 hours.
And I wasn’t earning anything from it.
I continued like that all the way into 2024.
At the time, I thought I was building a business.
For years I believed I was failing to build the business I wanted. What I couldn’t see was that every website, funnel, course, mistake and rebuild was giving me the skills I would eventually need.
Then I Lost Almost Everything
In January 2024, I left Smurfit Westrock and joined Logson Group in a more senior role with more money, but also considerably more pressure.
Looking back, I regret that decision enormously.
The job itself wasn’t the problem. I performed well. But the relationship with the Sales Director simply didn’t work.
His management style felt like something from another era, and we were never going to work well together.
Eventually, I decided to move on.
When I left around June or July 2024, I began working full-time on my own projects. I had some money behind me and still believed this was the point where everything I’d been building would finally start generating an income.
Then, in August, everything disappeared.
They took control of my mobile phone and gained access to my computer.
I was devastated.
I lost my YouTube channel and effectively lost almost everything I had spent years building.
What remained was little more than a shell.
That was incredibly difficult to take.
I no longer had a job, and suddenly I didn’t have the business I’d been relying on either. Once again, I found myself with very little to focus on.
It became another difficult period.
In October 2024, I managed to get temporary work with Royal Mail, which carried me through until December, when I started another full-time role.
But something else happened towards the end of October.
I found another book.
It was The 1-Page Marketing Plan by Allan Dib.
I read it once.
Then I read it again.
On my third read, I started making notes.
It was exactly what I’d done back in 2021.
And this time, another idea began to form.
By this point, I was no longer the person who had started experimenting with Shopify in 2021.
I understood marketing. I had taught myself an enormous amount about the digital world. I already knew how to sell and how to solve commercial problems.
And now I knew how to build systems.
Losing almost everything I’d built felt devastating at the time. But once again, being forced backwards eventually pushed me towards a completely different way of thinking.
The Idea Finally Became A Research-Led Business
This time I didn’t rush into building another product. I planned.
For around four or five months, I worked through the idea before rebuilding.
What I eventually created appeared to the outside world to be a marketing agency.
But that wasn’t how I saw it.
To me, it was a research-led business.
I had already decided that I would start the agency, operate inside the industry, collect the information I needed and then close it once I had enough data.
And that is exactly what I did.
Over the following six months, I interviewed more than 50 white-label businesses, qualified more than 200 businesses, followed and qualified more than 65 agencies, attended networking events and spoke directly with people about their experiences.
I collected an enormous amount of data.
But I wasn’t only researching.
At the same time, I began building systemised operations designed to solve the problems I was seeing repeatedly inside the industry.
I didn’t fully understand where all of it was leading yet.
But those systems would eventually become the foundations for the operating systems I would build for the marketing industry.
Without knowing it at the time, the journey that had started with a Sunday drive, handwritten notes and an idea to start a business was finally beginning to make sense.
Starting Again At 45 Was Never Really About Starting A Business
When I look back at the journey from those first ideas in 2021 to where I am today, I see it very differently from how I experienced it at the time.
At the time, I thought I was trying to build a successful business.
Every new idea felt as though it might be the one. The Shopify store, digital products, courses, coaching programmes and all the different versions of the business felt like individual attempts to find something that worked.
When they didn’t become what I imagined, I sometimes saw that as failure.
I don’t see it that way anymore.
Each one taught me something.
Every website taught me more about building. Every funnel taught me more about systems. Every piece of content taught me more about marketing. Every failed idea taught me more about business.
And every difficult period forced me to become more resilient.
None of it happened quickly.
There were years when I worked extraordinary hours without earning anything from what I was building. There were times when I genuinely questioned whether any of it would ever lead anywhere.
Then there were moments when everything disappeared and I had to begin again.
But each time I started again, I wasn’t really starting from zero.
I was starting again with more knowledge, more experience and more understanding than I’d had before.
That’s probably the biggest lesson I would give anyone thinking about starting a business later in life.
Age doesn’t mean you’re starting late.
You aren’t beginning with nothing.
You are bringing every job you’ve had, every mistake you’ve made, every difficult period you’ve survived, every person you’ve learned from and every skill you’ve developed with you.
When I started again at 45, I couldn’t code. I didn’t understand digital marketing. I couldn’t build software. I didn’t understand funnels or digital assets, and I certainly didn’t know where the journey was going to take me.
What I did have was thirty years of business experience, an ability to sell, an ability to understand problems and a willingness to learn.
Everything else came afterwards.
Starting again at 45 wasn’t the moment I suddenly became an entrepreneur. It was the moment I gave myself permission to start learning what I would need to become one.