Elliott Botterill sold his performance-marketing agency Botters to Entrepreneur Circle and became their Chief Marketing Officer. He wanted greater leverage, access to resources, and a more balanced lifestyle after years of scaling during COVID. He's now reviving his YouTube channel with vlogs and marketing tutorials using AI.
Chapters
Sa. Well it was. It is 107 on a Saturday morning. Helena and Leo the Chihuahua are both asleep in the flat and I am off for a quick little run, truthfully, something I never do these days. I've not been on a run in a long time but I was due a gym session today but I'm playing some golf this afternoon and therefore I don't hit the gym cuz I don't want it to affect my golf swing. So we're going to get some, get some little miles in this morning and then I've got some updates to talk you all through later on in regards to what's been going on in business, my Life, why my YouTube videos have not been coming out at the rate I wanted them to but why they are about to pick up again. But first time to warm up on East Village's finest little climbing frame. Forgot how running is. The miles have been clocked in. The run was much harder than I remembered, but it was good. And we are now off to get some coffee and little biscuit for this guy. So ladies and gentlemen, for those who don't know me, my name is Elliot and I wanted to record a little video to give a bit of an update on my situation. It's been a while since I posted on YouTube and there has been very good reason for that. And so I mean the too long didn't read is that for the last five years I've been running an agency. I've now officially sold that agency and I've joined a company called Entrepreneur Circle as their Chief Marketing officer and all my focus is now on growing that business. So that's the too long didn't read. Now I'll give you a little breakdown of the journey in detail. Explain the key things that have happened, what I've learned and I guess the rationale and reasoning behind my decision. So let's get into it. I'm currently 28, about to turn 29 literally in about a week. And when I left university, which was many years ago now, I had no idea what I wanted to do with myself. I had taken a bit of an interest in marketing. I did business management at Leeds University. It was good fun, had a very good time, but I did not really have a clue what I wanted to do myself. No real sense of purpose. And so I took a liking to marketing and thought, you know what, let's give this marketing malarkey a go. And I'm from a little place called Solihull which is just south of Birmingham and when I was at University. Pretty much all of my friends who I met there lived down in London and I had a real itch for the big city life and so I thought, okay, we'll go graduate from uni. Let's see if I can get a marketing role based down in London. And that's what I did. I managed to get a job at an agency called M and C Saatchi Performance, which were one of the largest independent advertising agencies in the whole world. And I got stuck in. I was a lowly, I think assistant biddable media executive was my official job title. My salary was £21,000 and I moved from university down to London in a little flat with a couple of my mates and it was all very exciting and I got stuck in. And what MIT Saatchi Performance did and what the Biddable Media team did was run Facebook and Google Ads. These biddable media platforms, as they were kind of once called, no one really calls them those anymore. But my job was to basically look after Facebook ads for Audible, initially the big audiobook company. Because this company, MC Saatchi, really nice model, had about 110 employees in the UK office at the time when I was there, and they only had about seven or eight clients. So every single client had about 10 or 11 staff that worked pretty much purely just on that client. And as a result it was an agency experience where we went really, really deep because we could afford to spend loads and loads of time on each individual client. And I really like that. And that's relevant for when I started my little agency journey. Now when I was there, I. I was there for about two and a half years. In the end I had a really awesome set of managers whilst I was there. Shout out to Nikki and Faye and Sanjeet and Emma and those guys if you ever watch this. But. But I was very lucky. I had some fantastic managers and I learned an absolute ton. And when it comes to learning something like Facebook ads or just like advertising in general, it was a real, I guess, privilege to be able to do it in that big agency setting because these guys, you know, audible spending millions of pounds every single month, you know, three or four million pounds a month on advertising. And so it's very high level stuff. And so that forced us and forced me to pick up this stuff very quickly, but be exposed to effective marketing at a very big scale. And I had a good time there, was working my way up the ladder, got a couple promotions, but then Covid hit, we got plunged into lockdown. I moved out of my little flat in London and went back to my mum and dad's house. And during COVID it was a bit of a seminal time for me because when I was working and living in London, I got very much stuck in what I would describe as the British kind of culture, which don't get me wrong, but we have a very serious drinking culture. And what I found was for the years of my university and also when I was at this agency, you know, every Thursday we'd go to the pub, then every Friday and Saturday we'd basically be in the pub with my mates. And it was like all we did. And as a result, you know, Sunday, really Monday and Tuesday, I was always fucking hungover. And as a result, you know, it didn't stop me from performing pretty well at my job, but it very much inhibited the level of additional discretionary effort I could deploy into my career and self development and getting better. But also just cloud your judgment because all of the free time I had was spent basically getting pissed in the pub with my mates. And don't get me wrong, I have some very good memories of that. But I was stuck in that cycle. And Covid was like a circuit breaking because it meant I was out of London at home. And all of a sudden all the pubs were shut and no one was doing anything. And so for me, I took that time, I started reading a lot of books, I started, you know, exercising two times a day and the fucking weather was beautiful as well at the start of COVID which was like. And just went on this real self development kind of mode and read a lot of books. And there's one in particular, Chaos Monkeys, which is the story of a startup in Silicon Valley which eventually gets bought out by Facebook. And it really gave me that itch to want to start my own business. And having learned these skills of running ads for these ginormous companies, I thought, you know what, let's go and take these, deploy them and try and do it for myself. Because actually during COVID what I realized was that a lot of businesses certainly in the uk were very uncertain. They didn't know what the hell was going on, didn't know how long this lockdown would last. And therefore they could only afford to spend on things that they knew were going to deliver them actual customers and revenue. In return, any unnecessary spending had to become and paid advertising, the stuff that I now specialize in, it does exactly that. If you do it properly, it's entirely transparent, it's entirely measurable. You can see almost immediately whether it's generating you More money or less money. And so I thought, let's go and do this. I had a list of people in my personal network, through friends and family, etc. That I thought I could help. And so I reached out to them, started pitching them, explaining all the ways in which I could help them. And luckily three or four of them gave me a go and I managed to sign up my first few clients. And just like that, my agency was born. I call it Botters, which is my kind of childhood nickname if you will. Probably not the best name in hindsight, but it's, you know, I have a good, I quite like the name. My logic was that people buy people. And so I wanted to name my agency something to do with me because at the start she was just me. Anyway, I went with Bodice. I called us a digital growth agency because we help businesses grow digitally and we didn't just do paid advertising, we did paid advertising, landing pages and then follow up. Because fundamentally my agency solved an outcome which was more sales and customers for a business. And we couldn't just achieve that with paid ads. We needed the paid ads to send people to landing pages that actually can converted. And then similarly if we're generating leads, we needed those leads to actually have conversations and convert as well, which is where like automated email follow up and all that kind of stuff came in. And so that was what we did. And lo and behold it took off because I quickly realized in the agency space, and this was five years ago, bear in mind there are so many under qualified, just terrible agencies that honestly don't have clue what they are doing because there's no prerequisites required to start a marketing agency, there's no qualifications anyone can do it. And it's a very trendy thing. And as you know, there's all sorts of people online shilling courses on how to start an agency and most people are pretty bad when it comes to fulfilling. And so pretty much every person I knew that had a business had tried a marketing agency of source before and got burnt and had a very bad experience. And so luckily for me, I knew the craft very well and was actually very good at it. And I was able to get people the results that I promised. And as a result I became this kind of rare thing, an agency that was actually getting people results and that just caught on that wildfire. And so we just started getting referrals left, right and center. And lo and behold, after you know, two months I had to, I got a virtual assistant and. And then three months in, we Made our first hire and then it was another two months before we hired again. And then the whole thing just started to build and build and build and it was really exciting because I just liked running ads. And then all of a sudden this whole kind of business was born and started to take off and I was forced to begin to learn about managing and structuring a business and hiring people and goodness me, stories for another day. Because let me tell you, I was pretty fucking terrible at all of those things initially. It's been quite the journey. But anyway, agency grow up. And I fucking just love paid ads. Because let me tell you, when you figure out how to build a machine and you put money in one end and more money comes out the other end, that is the most addictive thing ever. And I honestly, I fucking, I just fucking love that I could spend all day building machines like that. I also like psychology of marketing and understanding people's behavior and in essence how to ethically manipulate it to persuade people to do certain things. It's just, it's just very interesting to me. So I have really enjoyed it. And so my plan with my agency, frankly was to just do it forever. And I never had any grand plans of selling it or whatever. I just thought I'd love to build a nice business. I mean, my financial goals in my first year were to make £24,000 because that was basically the salary I was on. And I figured, well, if I'm the first year of running this agency, I can do that, then I'm winning, I'm absolutely winning it. Lo and behold, we did that within about six weeks, which absolutely blew my mind and it was awesome. Now as the business grew, we grew. At our peak we were about 15 team members and then a couple of external agencies and freelancers to help us out with our service. But we had about 15 full time staff on payroll. And it was a really kind of nice level, to be honest, because again, for me, my passion, rightfully or wrongly, has always been actually doing marketing and doing, doing paydance rather than actually like the business building stuff of hiring and building teams and all of the more traditional kind of CEO stuff. And so we always had very controlled growth. And if we looked at the growth of my agency revenue for the last five years, it is just this extremely steady incline up. There were no real peaks and pits, it was just very, very steady because we never really cranked the growth. I was always, my belief with the agency was that if we above everything just deliver an amazing service, then we'll always have a Great business. Because if we're getting people the results that we promised, they'll be happy and they'll stay with us, they'll pay us their big retainers, but also they'll tell other people and we'll have a great reputation and we'll have a waiting list of people who want to work with us. So I put all of my effort and all of my team's effort into delivering great results. And we actually never really tried to push building our own crazy client acquisition systems and all that kind of stuff. And that kind of worked for us, to be honest, which is a very different way people approach the business. But I just figured, look, if we just fucking do a great job, then we will just always have a good business. And that is very true. So we grew and grew and grew. At our peak, we were doing about 120 ish thousand pounds per month through the agency, which was awesome. And again, that was always, always very consistent. But then things started to change in my mind about two years ago when artificial intelligence really burst onto the scene. And so AI, I've got all sorts of videos talking about AI. We use AI a lot and I'm a big fan of AI and you know, I did a speech to a bunch of agency owners at a very fancy venue in London a few months ago talking about how we were looking at using AI in our business to completely radicalize the whole agency model. Because artificial intelligence is a very powerful force of leverage. It's a way in which we can get more out of what we're doing without really any incremental resource. And from an agency perspective, I thought it was had a chance to completely change the game because actually, you know, the agency model, the real downside of an agency model is that you need more people as you scale it because you can only serve so many customers. So therefore, if you want to grow the number of customers, you have to grow the number of people on the team. Whereas if we use AI all of a sudden, actually the same group of staff can now look after 2 times, 3 times, 4 times the amount of customers. And you've got the same cost base and so every inch incremental customer that you're able to bring on for that same cost base basically is like all profit. It all flows to the bottom line. So you can take it agency and actually turn it ridiculously profitable if you can deliver these efficiency gains by arming your people with AI. And so I was very excited about all that and we started to do that and we integrated AI a lot and it really did radicalize the way we did a lot of stuff and it was awesome. However, the niggling fact that AI was hearing on the scene continued to kind of not affect me, but it played on my mind for many, many months. Because actually, you know, I kept thinking with artificial intelligence, with the Internet, with social media, and the level of attention and awareness that you can now get through posting content online and pushing content for other people, it felt like we'd entered this new era, this new age economy, this kind of age of infinite leverage where, you know, anyone in the world can get access to almost any piece of information instantly thanks to artificial intelligence, got all these social media platforms. Yet the agency model where we hire a bunch of people to deliver this service is very old school. It's very like non leveraged because even if we're arming those people with, with a bunch of AI, fundamentally we're still relying on the people. And this started to irk me. I was like, I want to have something, a business that I can go out there and deploy all of this epic marketing stuff that I know and do and actually sell loads of units of it and not have to worry about endlessly hiring in order to capture what they fulfill them. And that just started to irk me. It felt like I was hanging onto this very old school business model as we passed into this new age economy. And so I thought and thought and thought about this. And so the first thing I then did was think, okay, well one of the most scalable things you can do is sell a kind of digital product. And so I had an idea to go, okay, instead of our done for you agency service where we charge a flat retainer, let's dip our toes in the water here. Because at the time I just finished doing an eight week series of workshops with a client based out of the US and I was teaching their community of holistic health nutritionists kind of like our eight steps to building a profitable client acquisition engine. From understanding your numbers and economics, to your ideal customer, to your actual offer, to building out your landing pages and your ads. And we went through the whole thing. And so I basically had created the foundations of a program that taught people our particular methodology and way of building these growth engines, or marketing funnels, whatever you want to call them. And so I was like, okay, let's take this, let's repackage it up and let's see if we can sell our very own kind of first digital product. And so we called it the Hypergrowth accelerator. And we pitched it very Much as a kind of done with you experience because whilst a big part of it was delivered through, it was a school platform. And we have a lot of content that obviously explains what's going on. But then we built it out so we have loads of AI prompts that actually help you produce and execute every single step. Because obviously the number one challenge with any kind of info is that people can shoot but don't actually execute. And we wanted to tackle that by number one giving you prompts to do the execution. But then number two actually you join a private Slack and you have a one on one with me and I kind of hold you accountable and we'd work through building your growth engine in steps as well. And so we built that offer and we priced it, it was a 9K offer. And we went out to my email list which is only about three and a half thousand people and we sent some emails and lo and behold we sold quite a lot of them. We sold about 3:30. And so all of a sudden, you know, in a relatively short period of time we were able to bank several hundred grand from this product which was basically entirely margin at this point because we ran no ads, it was all from my newsletter. And the fulfillment of it was much easier because now actually it was literally just me giving people some feedback and helping them through this program. And so I was like, damn, that is fucking awesome. And was my first kind of taste of moving away from this agency model. And so then we get to kind of the end of 2024 on this story. So we've had that success with the Hypergrowth accelerator and I am in Las Vegas with my brother and my father who both run a company called Entrepreneur Circle. And so Entrepreneur Circle, very big business. It's an eight figure business based in Solihull and they help small businesses grow through providing all sorts of tools, training, coaching, marketing events, all sorts of kind of education based stuff. Very cool business. And we were out there because we both signed up for one of Alex or Modi's workshops over@acquisition.com hq and we went and had a good time. And so my father, he founded the business and he's been the kind of CEO if you will, for many, many years. Grown it to the point where it is now, where as I said, it's an eight figure business. 60, 69 full time team members. And my brother, he's been in the business for over 10 years. He started as a lowly intern and has worked his way up and just before Christmas he got promoted to the managing director Whereas previously he was the head of marketing, but now he was the managing director and all was well and good. And so whilst we were there at this workshop, my brother actually brought up the fact that they now faced a bit of a marketing constraint in their business because he was head of marketing and his kind of second in command called Claire, she was also from Maternity League, which was, you know, very good for her. But there was this huge marketing gap now in the Entrepreneur Circle business and they have very big plans on a massive, steep growth trajectory. And they floated the idea, we're going to have to build this resource somehow. What if we were to acquire your agency and bring in you and your team who have been running our ads for the last five years, effectively as our new in house marketing team, so that we can not only fill that constraint, but actually supercharge it and build out this business so have a humongous marketing division so that we can grow and spread our message. And I thought that was very interesting. And so the conversation didn't go very far. It was a very short conversation. I said, yeah, open to a conversation there. And we kind of parted them. Then it was Christmas, we came back, nothing happened for many, many weeks. And then in February, I went up to visit Entrepreneur Circle with a few of my team members for one of our quarterly reviews that we would do with all of our clients. And whilst I was there, after the meeting, I went for a walk with the managing director, Cameron, and that was when he brought it up again, the idea of potentially acquiring the agency. And so again, we began to have a conversation walking around the business park at the time. And I agreed it was something I was open to exploring. And so what then kind of followed was many, many Sundays spent on Zoom with Cameron in intense negotiations. You know, I had all of my terms for what would make an acceptable acquisition. And fundamentally we needed to produce a model of the business that would be able to deliver on them. And that obviously had to fit all of their terms as well, and it all had to be perfectly aligned. And so we had quite a lot of back and forth on Zoom. And then eventually we agreed to do it. We agreed the heads of terms, and so we agreed the heads of terms. And so officially, on the 1st of April, Entrepreneur Circle acquired botters. And the purpose of the acquisition was not to necessarily acquire the revenue stream of the agency, but instead to acquire the resource. And now myself and all of my team members that came across are focused on growing Entrepreneur's Circle and we're in essence, their in house marketing team. So it was pretty crazy, to be honest. It was a pretty intense experience. As with any acquisition, you know, we did lose a couple of key people that we wanted to keep. But the big change in direction and especially location. My agency was based out of a nice little office in London and we moved up to Solihull where the Entrepreneur Circle office is. Obviously we lost a few people, so that was a shame. But we obviously did expect it. The whole process was, it was fine, it was a bit stressful. I very mistakenly had three back to back trips in April after I announced it to my team. And so that was the period where we were doing all of the contract switching. And so there was lots of back and forth there and that was quite stressful to be away for. In hindsight, that was a big mistake on my part. Should have done at a time where I was actually there, so I could have been on the ground and controlled the conversations and been there with everyone. But rest assured, we got through it. And yeah, it's been the exciting start of a new chapter. And so not only did it can't come at a right time, but I guess the question is, okay, why did I do this? Why, if I was running this agency and growing this agency and having success, why would I want to all of a sudden sell the agency and kind of switch into working with Entrepreneur Circle now? That is the very big question. And so fundamentally, there's quite a few reasons, quite a few reasons that made this align to me and, you know, me and my partner Helena, this was one of the biggest decisions that we've ever made because we built our life down here in London and now we're in essence moving back to Solihull and building our life there. And so we put a lot, a lot, a lot of thought into it. And so here's kind of some of the main reasons. Number one, was moving to a business with significantly higher leverage. Because the agency model, as I said, is fantastic. I love it, but not very high leverage. I don't get my thrills from necessarily building and hiring massive teams. And so the idea of achieving a lot of my financial goals through the vehicle of an agency was not really a journey I wanted to go on. I wanted to go on a journey that involves significantly more leverage. And online education and community is a big high leverage area that I'm very bought into. And therefore I felt like that was a smart opportunity vehicle switch. Because sometimes, you know, you gotta check yourself, you gotta think, okay, what is it I want to achieve? What are my actual goals? And then is this thing I'm currently doing the right vehicle to get me to those goals because for a lot of people, and I still work with those businesses and some people, people's businesses are just very bad vehicles. And so for me, I saw this as a prime vehicle switch. Now one of the other reasons is, you know, I had some success with my initial kind of E learning online education company. Like I said, we did that launch and sold 30 odd units and brought in a big dump of cash and that was great. But we were still quite under resourced and whilst we could have put a lot of time into growing that and so on and so forth, actually joining Entrepreneur circle, there's like 69 team members and lots of resource and big marketing budget and all of a sudden we can use that resource and deploy it and build that thing much better, much quicker, much smoother. So it was a way in which we could kind of fast track a lot of time, effort and energy and use all the, that fantastic resource. Thirdly, a big one was the people. So as I said, Entrepreneur Circle, 69 staff members, I believe, and a lot of really flipping smart people. Really, really smart people. And so the idea of being able to surround myself with all of these very smart people and collaborate with them and work with them was very exciting because again, you know, who you spend time with matters. And when you spend pretty much all your time working like I do, you want to work with fucking switched on people. And so that was very attractive to me. They just bought this ginormous 5 million pound office in Solihull right next to the Gymshark offices. It's absolutely outrageous. It's fucking massive. It is unbelievably cool and I was very excited to get in and work from there. There's no, no two ways about it. I thought that would be very, very cool. Another big reason for me was legacy because like I said, Entrepreneur Circle, whilst this big business, whilst they were just one of my clients, I have a family investment there. You know, my father founded the business, my brother is the managing director and you know, especially as my, as my father, you know, matures through his age, even though he's got plenty, plenty of years there, the idea of being able to come in, have a big impact and fundamentally kind of cement the legacy of the business was also were a big driver for me as well. You know, I'm not going to pretend that it wasn't. That was something that I feel very aligned with and very inspired by. That brings me on to the other one which is actually like the mission of Entrepreneur Circle because, you know, one thing about the UK is that it is pretty poor from an entrepreneurial standpoint. So what I mean by that is the general attitude towards entrepreneurs is not particularly good and the government, you know, not exactly doing a bunch of things to facilitate entrepreneurship and make entrepreneurship, you know, what it could be in this country. I mean, you've all seen the videos of people moving to Dubai and talking about all the different reasons they should live somewhere else. And that's totally fine, I get that now. I definitely do feel a sense of debt to the uk, this country that has given me all of this opportunity in my life and so I definitely don't want to see it go down the path. And Entrepreneur Circle, you know, it has thousands of members within its core kind of business. And especially with buying this ginormous new hq, it's really planting a flag in UK businesses and UK entrepreneurship and it's properly having a real meaningful impact. Because the whole reason I started my agency was like, during COVID all these businesses were getting absolutely fucked and they didn't know what to do. And I had a skill set that could help them and not only did I enjoy doing that and getting the results, but it's really, really meaningful work. When you work with actual cool businesses doing meaningful things and you help them get customers, which is just like the hardest thing when it comes to running a business, I think that's very meaningful anyway. And so to do that at scale, share all this knowledge and help other businesses grow and have a massive impact on the UK economy in general is something I'm all in for. I think that is a wicked mission. Not only that, back to the whole new age economy, the age of infinite leverage. Entrepreneur Circle ticks a bunch of boxes for me because number one, they have a whole software called Genie AI, which again is about as high leverage business unit as you can get. So if I can love that. But number two, again, in this age of digitization, I think we're going to see an increasing premium on in person experiences. And by having this huge hq, by having a business centered around community as AI and digitization continues, I think we are about as shielded as we can possibly get. Because not only are we embracing AI and what we do and have literally an AI powered software that we sell to people, people to enable our members to benefit from AI, but we are centered around the community and we have a massive HQ and we put on all these events throughout the year where we bring everyone together in real life and I Can only see that getting more and more important as time goes on. So I feel very secure and that aligns with all of my internal theses about the economy and all that stuff as we move forward. Of course, you know, I'm not gonna lie, the deal was a good deal. It was a very good deal. So I'm not going to go into the details of what exactly the deal was. But of course that the deal was good and so happy days. That was obviously a big reason as well. I wanted to leave London. So I'm in London at the moment. I'm in Stratford, which holds a special place in my heart because I've been a stranger Stratford for the last, yeah, basically four years. And I'm able to live in Lang. Probably one of the nicest flats in London. It's on the 38th floor of the Stratford Hotel. I'm on the winter terrace garden. Now you can see the entire view of London. It's fucking awesome and I absolutely love it here. However, London is hectic and London is also, I don't want to say it's dangerous, even though it kind of is. The amount of flipping bone rubbings I have seen. It's happened in front of me six, seven times. And my girlfriend, it's happened to her twice, nearly three times. And so that's annoying because I don't feel that safe around here. But worse, you know, not about me. So I will do some Muay Thai training and you know, make myself able to defend. However, you know, my girlfriend, we got a little tiny Chihuahua as well. I feel uneasy when they are out and about and I'm not there because of all the stuff I have seen them witness over my time and so that sucks since I want to get out for that reason also it's just fucking busy. And whilst I live in a absolutely outrageously nice flat, we still don't have a garden. And I would love to have a garden and I would love to have some peace because if there's one thing I have learned over the last five years of basically being caffeinated, nicotinated and just like overstimulated, consuming content and working 24, 7 is like peace is the ultimate goal. Peace of mind is so beautiful and I want to, you know, I feel like I've had an amazing time in the city. I love London. I recommend if all young people get yourself into London. It's fast paced, opportunities are everywhere. It forces you to grow and develop and like do stuff. So no better place to be for anyone in the uk. I think Starting a business when you're quite young. But for me, for now, I'm entering the next phase of my life. I want to build a really amazing life with my beautiful girlfriend and my little Chihuahua and get a few more chihuahuas and get some epic kids on the way and want some space and some peace of mind, want to be able to relax, want to lower my cortisol levels and have a good time. So that's another big reason as well. This was an opportunity for us to basically get that done and begin our process of moving out of London. So there we have it. That's a whistle stop journey. Whistle stop tour, I should say of the journey so far. This was pretty unscripted, as you can tell. I just sat down and recorded, recorded this. What's next is that you are going to see some pretty epic stuff because one of the beautiful things about this is that my time now is spent doing what I am best at and fucking love. And that is marketing, hardcore performance marketing. And so I would bring this YouTube back with a combination of some vlogging bits to show you the behind the scenes of what's going on, especially in the whole new exciting world of the entrepreneur circle. But also lots of tactical performance marketing videos, how we can embrace the age of AI and actually win in the current economy that sits there. All of the crazy stuff we're now exploring. There'll be some sales in there as well. And I can't wait. I'm feeling good. I'm feeling very good. It's taken me a long time to make this video because I actually this whole acquisition and it was a real big identity change for me because for five years I've been running this agency called Bonners and that has just been like my sole purpose. And I have basically done nothing else other than work and grow that agency. And I sacrificed a lot of hanging out with friends and lost touch with many friends and all sorts of things in aid of that journey. And so when it kind of came to an end, whilst it was exciting, it was actually like so stressful and I think I experienced burnout for the first time. And it was tough. It was tough. It took me a good few months to get back to feeling myself. And I think a big part of that when I reflected on it was this kind of identity change because my whole identity was wrapped up in this business that was as Butters and now Butters kind of no longer exists in that form and it has been bought and we are now part of this other thing. And yeah, that was pretty. Pretty interesting to digest whilst I knew it was the right decision. Yeah, it took a while to. To get there and also to feel comfortable talking about it. But here we are. Onwards and upwards. It's quarter to eight now on a Saturday night. I've been out playing some golf today with my good friend Mr. Tom Burnham. And I'm gonna go relax now. Stay tuned for more good stuff. Peace and love, everybody. There is Helena and Leo. That's our flat. Hello. What a cutie.
