we build attention. then we build a business on it.

I was running hotels for a living. Took my first holiday in two and a half years (India, with my wife) and the owners started emailing, essentially abusing me, telling me I should be at work. The hotel was fine. It had just had its best January on record: more profit in one month than the place had booked in revenue any previous year. That was the moment I knew I had to do something for myself.

I didn't come from social media. I came from hospitality. But I had taught myself LinkedIn. We moved back to New Zealand and I started building a brand on it. Five or six coffees a day, four or five networking events a night, six days a week, October 2019 onwards. Six months later, March 2020, the pandemic shut everything down. People started messaging asking if I could help them on LinkedIn the way I'd helped myself. I started charging.

That became the whole philosophy: what we do for clients, we have already proven on ourselves first. A year in we were seven staff. A few years in, fourteen. We jumped onto TikTok and hit 300k in three months. A year later, 700k on TikTok, 300k on Instagram. We added podcasts and YouTube and kept building audiences in public. Then we sold that exact playbook to brands. Today our own channels run a combined 1.4 million followers, and growing.

Alongside the agency, the brand side took off, webinars, workshops, installations, coaching, and now sits almost as big as the client business. None of which gets built without the team. Every hire we have ever made was the best person we could find for the seat, and the culture is the thing I'm proudest of. The work is downstream of that.