Building Social Chain Almost Broke Me - Dom McGregor

0:00Addiction. It's a heavy topic that most of us probably think has nothing to do with the world of startups and entrepreneurship. But the reality is, substance abuse and mental health issues are rampant among founders. The pressure to succeed, the long hours, the constant stress. It's a perfect storm that can drive even the most put together person to seek out unhealthy ways of coping. I know this firsthand because I've seen it firsthand, both in my own life and in the lives of other entrepreneurs I've known. Someone else who knows this all too well is my guest Dominic McGregor. Dom is the author of I'm Never Drinking Again, How to Stop Drinking So Much and Change Your Relationship with Alcohol.

0:44He's the co-founder of Fearless Adventures, a founder investment and support firm, and the co-founder of Social Chain, the pioneering social media marketing agency that he started with his friend Stephen Bartlett. They started the business as teenagers, growing virally on Twitter and figuring it out as they went along. Within a few short years, they had a thriving business. From the outside, it looked like the ultimate entrepreneurial success story. But behind the scenes, the pressures were mounting. Dom was working non-stop, barely sleeping, and constantly stressed about the next big client or cash flow crisis.

1:25He started drinking more and more to take the edge off, to the point where he couldn't enjoy wins with the team without alcohol. Here, Dom shares his journey from social media wunderkind to struggling with serious addiction and how he eventually managed to get sober and turn his life around. Okay, so with that, my conversation with Dom McGregor. Dom, I've known you and Stephen for a very long time, like pretty much your entire professional careers. Yeah. And when I first met you guys, I think you had just transitioned from Warp Up. and from talking about having a whole bunch of pages and you basically being the genius in Liverpool, if I'm not mistaken.

2:11Yeah, that's where you were, right? University in Edinburgh, lived in Leeds, and then we moved to Manchester. So that area. Okay, so I was wrong. Liverpool fan, Liverpool football fan. Yeah, I know. I'm not going to judge you for that, but anyway. But I just remember you telling me the stories about how you were building up these audiences on Twitter and going viral with these viral meme pages and how brilliant that seemed. And my first interaction with both of you was like, I thought I was pretty cool young guy. I was younger than all my friends starting entrepreneurship because I was 24, starting a tech company, all of this stuff.

2:46And I met you and Steve and you had an office in Hammersmith. It was quite a nice office, to be honest, as well. I know you moved to nicer and nicer offices, but that was quite a nice office. Just a couple of 19 year olds and, you know, big whiteboard behind you and getting up and showing me all the different things you can do and it was highly impressive thank you and it was quite magnetic energy and i think the two of you also like complimented each other really well especially at that time as well because um ironically out of the two of you i always felt like back then um steve was actually relatively introverted and you were quite detailed yeah you were actually like very clear like this is how we're going to do it this is what we do this is how it was um interesting like to see the dynamic um so that's my context i've got quite a lot of context like i've known you guys for as part of 10 years 10 years so for those who don't know what was social chain how did it come around yep so exactly as you said there um we were two kids in hammersmith in an office which also doubled up as our bedroom actually um you might know that we were actually sleeping there uh remember you asked me to go to bed with you and i was like I've got a hug.

3:53It's all right. I think I still have my wet hair from the shower in the morning. But yeah, so we kind of stumbled upon this growing communities online. And what was great was that we knew how to build on Twitter, on Facebook. And this is back in the glory days where we could get a page of 250 ,000 followers in one day. Imagine a brand doing that now. It doesn't happen. We sit there on social media every single day and we see people pop up and it feels like it's overnight, but it's not. It takes a lot of time and consistency. So we could launch a new page. and that's what we were doing in the student space so we are building communities that were focused around students and we had a knack for it so um we started our first business which was wallpark which is like gum tree for students and the vision was we could drive people from social media to the website and they would stick reality is they didn't stick because you know loads of our issues like in students that's why students yeah and you know but what we realized was we had a really good way of getting people's eyeballs on products so we kind of said that's probably valuable not just to us if it works for us it works for the people so then we kind of transitioned from a tech business I guess to probably what you'd call marketing consultants now so we spent a bit of time working with people who had businesses and helping them get out there so some student brands really and we never really thought that was a business but we just thought it was a great way to make some money and we ended up going and doing a bit of traveling and then one of the clients who has the office in Hammersmith said to us oh you guys are doing a really good job um can you come and like help us launch our new product um we'll fly you back from from where we were in the world at the time and and because it was a student product it was in august going live in september so it was similar to wallpark but it was an app for students and we were like okay it's worth it let's come back we do a phenomenal job there and then they offer us some investment you know alongside the investment they said you can use the office space and do you want to turn what you're doing now into a real business and we looked at each other and that whiteboard you mentioned there we spent a lot of nights brainstorming a lot of nights thinking does this make sense should we do it should we take external investment and bear in mind the offer the other opportunity was to travel the world and so what we were turning down was the freedom for hope that we could turn this into something more meaningful and we had a lot of debates around it you know steve and i kind of different different opinions at first but we decided yes let's take the investment um let's turn this into a proper business and let's go out there and try and find some clients and then you walk through the door as the client number probably proper client number two i'd say after the investors maybe you're the first external client and people like you walk through the door hearing that where the the kids who can make other kids talk about stuff and can blow things up on twitter and um that started the social chain story yeah it It was funny to be in the ground floor, but you guys, you know, very quickly, you had a very clear proposition, which was unique and unusual, right?

6:45Most people don't actually know what they're offering or they say things like client services or whatever. Whereas you guys were sort of very clear, like we can make things go viral. And if someone said that now, you'd be like, yeah, ridiculous. Yeah. But like you said, back then, there was a unique moment in time where you could mechanically engineer the stuff to be completely authentic and real. and you know and the other thing as well was you know you said you could do it and you prove time and time again you could do it and that was it was it 80 000 downloads we got yeah something like that yeah so 80 000 downloads overnight weekend over weekend yeah it was incredible i i always remember where i was i was in hoxton hotel with my business partner joel sitting there because we couldn't like i don't think we had an office so we were just rinsing out the hoxton hotel all the time in the lobby and just watching stuff actually work and you know our service went down we had to call our guy yeah like all of that and it's just it is the kind of stuff that make you know it's a startup folk story right yeah it feels great to like be part of something and have your servers go down yeah you read about servers going down i don't think it's gonna happen to you nice problem to have incredibly annoying problem um but it was it was an awesome experience and it was really great to see you guys actually explode from that point as well because you really took that opportunity and i think you know what the opportunity was when we zoom out a little bit was understanding social media and as you say it was a moment in time and um you also know that a year later the world changed and we couldn't use twitter because twitter had you know started to introduce restrictions so that moment in time was perfect but what we built in our mindset was a culture of that we understand social media so let's work with people um because we believe social media is gonna be a big thing and at the time a lot of people didn't so let's become the the go-to for social media so that took us down so many routes took us down paid social when that came about it talks around influencer marketing content creation and all that angle and i think yeah it was a fantastic piece but to your point if someone starts a social media agency now no one would care i think it's one of the most common businesses yeah it's common business it's still a problem for people you know it's still alien you still need expertise but it's not really clear what you're actually offering someone it's just words at this point yes yes Yes.

8:58So you're, you know, you've gone through this very early, very young journey and you don't have a clue. And I think the thing that obviously, again, because I've known you guys through the years and then there's also like looking back on things, you know, there's ego, there's bravado, there's success, there's all of those things. obviously always came across Steve always came across like he actually does know right as in that's his always been his thing anyway right which is like confidence just exudes confidence I actually felt like you always owned quite well this idea of like we're figuring it out as we go along yep and I felt like that was always quite a transparent part and that always felt actually like a really good co-founder relationship in terms of the attitude both as client and like imagine internally for the team as well.

9:44How do that stuff manifest inside the team whilst you're building then? So I think especially with people like you, it works because you're in the same situation. Yeah, yeah, that's true. So you understand it. And I think what I didn't appreciate was the speed it would go from working with people like yourself, where we're working with entrepreneurs who are like us. And, you know, we can spend time with entrepreneurs and you all got the same mindset and you kind of, you forgive a little bit more and, you know, you're open to trying new ideas very very quickly like realness you're like yeah oh we don't really know but we'll figure it out and you're like oh i like that about you yeah and it's you know instead of that we went very very quickly to be corporates probably in the space of 12 to 18 months of working with people like yourself who've got products who understand us around similar people to us suddenly been put in front of marketing directors and with budgets and eight other agencies and a much more professional world so um that mindset and i guess that kind of growth lag you have this was a whole new world to us you know i could we could work with other people like ourselves the entrepreneurs who look like us but we couldn't work with big corporates and especially myself anyway this is more me but you feel a lot more out of your depth when you start to work with big brands you know we had fox we had um disney we had you know it was really big companies coming to us who were all very very professional and that for me felt when we went from god this is intimidating now this is very very different to working with people who understand that we can make a couple of mistakes or you know i think you've texted me about a grammar error once on a on a post it's like these things are not held on to and forgiven but in the corporate land these things could become bigger issues so when it comes to sort of trying to scale yourself at that age how did you do it did you get advisors in did you get help um i think we probably held on to that mindset of figuring we'll figure it out too long and um we didn't surround ourselves with great people so uh not not great people but with people who had been there and done it so we had this idea and i think this was true is that social media is a young person's game you know we were 19 20 years old so going and speaking to older people who don't understand social media like what value could they bring us was kind of my mentality like they don't understand what we do so how can they help us and that was obviously very naive you know because in hindsight now it's not true so we go ridiculously insular well in hindsight humans are humans and therefore most of business is just managing humans.

12:00Exactly, exactly. And I think again, when being so young, you don't understand yourself either. So I'm a 19 year old guy, 20 year old guy. You're ego, you're be vast, you wanna be something bigger than you are. You actually think you're untouchable. You think you can figure all these things out and that if old people can do business, then you can do business because you're the young kid on the block and social media is new. So you're gonna have the answers. So I went very insular and tried to figure out a lot of problems by myself. And then what I kind of realized is that while we were, I'd say, experts and stuff on the product side of things when it came to doing the actual marketing, the ideas we were coming up with was all kind of, you know, leading the industry because that's what we did.

12:45That's only 10 % of the business. The rest of the stuff is business as usual that every single company goes through. So, you know, financing, recruitment, cash flow, all these other areas of business, which I had zero experience in. But because I assumed that I was fantastic on the 10 % of the product side of stuff, that the rest of the stuff will just happen and we'll figure it out. And that's the easy part, to be honest. The hard part is the magic secret sauce that we're putting onto campaigns. So we kind of just focused on that, really. And the whole professional business side of things, we just never even looked at or cared about.

13:19It was not something we really thought about. and i remember when we did our first investment from that from the client and they said to us oh we'll put um one of the guys who will do your accounts so a lady called called jane um she was going to do our accounts so i was like great so i think the deal was done in september as in this is people investing in social yeah yeah and then by like march next year i've not heard anything from jane and uh and then we got kind of like first we were like cash crunch period where actually we get a knock at the door and it's an old guy you know it's got a notepad and he comes in there's a 30 year old man no no no no ancient I can tell you about us hiring our first 30 year old and how that made me feel but he must have been 50s and he says I'm from HMRC and you go okay what's that not that naive but um is that one of our accounts he comes over and says um you owe your PIE you haven't paid it since you started so six months accrued of uh tax it was 75 grand and i'm sat there and he comes to me i'm like we've got a 75 grand out of the account right now the tax man's here like what do we do and um you know no one told us that after you pay the salaries in the month that you've got to then pay a separate payment to HMRC afterwards.

14:43So all these things that we didn't ever know and probably didn't even try to know because we were, I guess, very focused on clients and winning your business and the product just never got sorted and never actually happened. So I'd say from our side, we knew what we were good at and I think we probably focused on the stuff we could do and avoided the stuff we couldn't do. But I guess what that is, that's one example of as you're scaling the company and you know what it's like these things pop up every single week and um how do i cope with it is that the truth is that there are some things you can deal with because those problems get solved but there's some problems that don't get solved so we're here scaling the business and um we're in a whole new kind of growth part of our lives you know we're suddenly having to learn and and run as quick as we can build kind of vibe and um the truth is that you don't handle it you know it becomes your responsibility when um payroll comes up on to make sure you've got enough money uh you start seeing people getting mortgages or buying cars and they're getting you know they're getting them on finance and you're like oh my god like we're responsible for making sure this person has a house and you know we can't not miss payroll and i think for us like we always we kind of got you know with a naturally service business is as you're growing the business becomes a lot more difficult to scale because talk to you about you know starting to work bigger corporates after like 12 to 18 months is that those corporates unlike you know someone like yourself have 90 day payment process terms and the contracts get bigger so you know just think about logically if you sign a couple hundred thousand pound contract with these businesses and you've got 90 day payment terms and you operate on a 50 margin you've got to pay a couple hundred thousand pounds out before you even see the money you start to win a couple of those and suddenly you've been incredibly successful because the revenue is growing but actually cash collection becomes difficult i I think this is something that non-entrepreneurs really can't get their heads around.

16:36In general, like actually the bigger your company, the more of a cash crunch you tend to have consistently. We even have it at Heights, which is crazy. It's not even a services business, but every few months you've got to do an enormous stock payment for stuff in six months. And so you build up like a big heap of cash. And then for a few months you have no cash, even though you're talking about being a growing, successful company and people can't quite put two and two together and i get it it is bizarre but actually the cash cycle payment and especially with agencies an absolute nightmare exactly so the success actually created the problems yeah because you know if we were working with clients where we could get payment up front and that kind of stuff it was much easier but we start to become you know in their world of you know procurement processes and you know six month sale cycles and all this kind of stuff and like it's the growth period there which causes most problems because you can't not deliver these things so you still have to start managing managing it and i think because it happened so quickly that's like really where like the problem started to occur for me personally because actually on on a friday you know i remember very very the exact moment you know we won amazon prime okay and i'm there like sat there on a friday the whole team celebrating because there's loads of work for it and i'm sat there thinking how the hell are we going to deliver this not just deliver it but how the hell are we gonna be able to fund this because i know amazon we've already gone through the process it's 120 day payment and from memory and probably spot on i imagine steve was out winning the new business with exceptional spiel and bravado and all of the bells and whistles and then being like right dom time for you to deliver it you're like yeah is that right that seems like the right memory yeah and yeah completely and i think i've got i've got which is a good partnership it's a great problem to her but i i you know i i don't I have the guilt that I'm not celebrating.

18:23And this is my problem because I start pliering this all on me. I think I have to shoulder all the responsibility of this. And personally, I didn't have to, but it just started to build on me. So I start to be able to not enjoy moments. And then I start thinking, okay, we have this attitude in culture where drinking is obviously part of the celebration piece. So from a young age, I think I've got a lot of analysis on this for me from my perspective and i think i never really built a healthy relationship with alcohol i don't think when i was younger at 18 19 i had an unhealthy relationship i just didn't have a healthy one so when i went out when i was 18 and there was no stress in my life it was really enjoyable you know i'd be the kind of jack the lad funny guy and nothing went wrong but as soon as you start to crank those screws up and real life stresses and real life realities come into play straight away instead of doing that your your personality being elevated for alcohol actually it becomes the depression that it is because um that weight you're putting on yourself when you start adding the alcohol in it it then starts to increase the weight because the self-doubt you already have and the kind of anxiety and you know the little voice in your head that's telling you this is going to go very badly and you can't cope and all this kind of stuff gets louder by drinking it doesn't go away and then um so in that situation how did i cope with of it, internalizing everything, and then started to look at alcohol as like a medication.

19:50So on that Friday, how do I go and celebrate with a team? Will I go and grab a couple of beers and think, okay, this will pick me up. I'll be able to enjoy it with a team. When really, I think it's like that meme where you sit in the corner, it's like, people don't know I'm freaking out right now. And that's how I felt. And that would happen weekly in different situations. Good news, bad news. It would just feel like things are building on me. um we had a legal matter with the asa um and see the cma around advertising about you know everyone knows how you got a hashtag ad in there black came for an investigation with us right so someone was investigating all the work we did on cma for 18 months yeah i mean fair enough at the end of the day looking back now makes sense it makes complete sense actually unbelievable you're able to write that for so long yeah exactly and uh so but like when we looked at that list of penalties that could happen their big thing was like making sure we didn't consciously mislead anyone so they wanted to see whether the clients we were working with were telling us not to put an ad but basically what happened was there was no rule so no one was saying anything yeah so so we had to go for that process and burden the responsibility of all our client comms or me and all that other stuff on it and then that's just another thing so you know as you're scared in the company they say the the bigger you get the more pillars and tentacles the octopus has more problems I could create and if what I didn't have at that point was a really handy way of dealing with things I would literally be a little bit like an ostrich stick my head in the sand and hope it goes away rather than actually okay let's put a real plan in place to deal with it um so I I remember you guys you know obviously we met in Hammersmith but then you moved to Manchester and I thought it was very smart because London's a very busy agency place and it's competitive and even though you guys were doing a great job you could probably do an even better job somewhere like manchester where you can own the whole city basically which is kind of what you did yeah and you know we looked at it from like a real smart business decision it's like how long can our runway last in london versus manchester you know to do the same work to do exactly the same work yeah so like salaries at that point were much more varied than they are now obviously kobe's kind of balanced them out but you're looking at 50 cheaper in manchester yeah you had a tiny slide in london yeah yeah it got so much bigger so um yeah you know we made decisions move there and i think that was the right thing for the business um but yeah it was a i think there was a time when you know we didn't want to be another shortage startup yeah and i think the again a service-based business depends on people so for us our limiting factor was people and doing the work so the more people we could get in for cheaper the better we could do the work yeah and surrounded by universities etc etc yeah but so to that point surrounded by people coming out of university going to work in a cool social media startup up in manchester with a slide and great clients and stuff it's going to be a drinking culture i mean this is the uk yeah and i think the industry also marketing and the industry yeah totally those two things colliding client servicing you know there's a there was an expectation you know someone said to us that expectation that you take a client out for a for a drink and that's how you get the contract signed you know it's not about not always about the best work you do but about the relationships because you know things are always going to change but if you've got a good relationship with a client then it will be good and how do you build a relationship with a client when you go out and and get drunk together.

23:00That was like the one-on-one of client services for most industries, to be honest. We look at it now from like other big companies, they're trying to transition into how to actually build relationships without going down the boozer. So yeah, that was exactly it. So for me, like, yeah, you know, everything was centered around alcohol. It was like entertaining clients with alcohol, celebrating with the team with alcohol, weekends just being with my friends with alcohol. So it couldn't escape it. and it was everywhere and it felt normal. It felt like in the UK that the thing you do after a day of work is you go and have a drink.

23:35It just felt like part of life and that's exactly what as a 20, you know, coming up to like 20 years old now is what you'd enjoy doing because you meet people and, you know, you'd soften yourself. So from a cultural perspective, having a young team and being surrounded by people our age, that's what was normal. You know, there's no one really questions a bunch of 20-year-olds now going out together because that's it's exactly part of life so i remember you know i this identify misremembering so tell me but i don't particularly remember steve drinking that much i don't really feel like he enjoyed it that much so i remember going for drinks with you guys and like he was just sort of maybe one but often not yep so just never really like was what not one of those people that particularly enjoyed us just didn't do it yeah and like say everyone everyone's everyone different barometers but i would like from being 18 i was always someone who'd go out and wouldn't miss a night out so for me i'd you know played a lot of sports or football you know football and booze and watching it was always there so what happened is you know when we talk about some of the pressures that are being built these and their inability to cope with the pressures with the other part of it is that i find the emotional outlet in alcohol and at first like it's it's very innocent you know it's probably drinking too much on a thursday night and being hung over on a friday and what happens is the bigger those problems but like weigh on you the more you need to drink to forget So ultimately it's a numbness, you know, it's a coping strategy.

24:57And nothing good comes from drinking a lot. And what actually happens is you create more problems for yourself. So while the problems at the moment are potentially in my mind and issues, then they start to come into the real world. So, you know, I remember one night getting really drunk on a Thursday on an opening of a new bar, going home by myself in a taxi, falling down the street, breaking my ankle, and like having to crawl down like into my bed and i woke up the next day at like 11 o 'clock for some reason my alarm didn't go off my ankle swore then i got calls from from steve because a client's come in who i was supposed to meet and i have to go to hospital and i'm like this is a friday i've got responsibilities and like this is having a real life impact on like me and there's a couple more situations where i ended up hurting myself you know that one in point and um the drinking gets more regular but actually what it goes from being it goes from being that friday where i'm trying to have a drink with the team to enjoy myself.

25:53So actually Friday night, four o 'clock, I'm going home. I'm looking at myself in a dark room where this massive cinema room and I'm just drinking all weekend. And I remember my 23rd birthday where we went out on the Saturday and I ended up just like getting absolutely, like absolutely ridiculously drunk and um probably slept for like two three hours and then the birthday my birthday was on sunday and all my friends had planned a dinner for my birthday and i decided i didn't want to go out of anyone i just wanted to sit in the dark room drink a couple of bottles of wine so all my mates ended up going out for my birthday for a dinner with for my birthday and i'm sat in this like cinema room just like combination of like getting a bit hungover and actually just topping up and keeping balance and like of numbness so um but it comes more frequent so it started to turn into to Wednesdays, started to turn into Tuesdays.

26:50Every single day then became about me drinking. And I have this thing where I call them glass bottoms. Yeah, so like a glass ceiling, you break through a glass ceiling, wow, wow, life becomes amazing. But you break through a glass bottom and your life gets worse. So that day when I, on my 24th birthday, was like a glass bottom. And I'm like, okay, I need to do something about it. I need to change my life. And you start to internalize things. And actually, you know, you start questioning every single part of your life. if you start questioning whether the business is causing you too much stress and whether you're better off leaving the business because it's creating all this anxiety that you can't cope with.

27:24And as I said previously, those thoughts that you have in your mind, the doubts, the kind of lack of self-confidence that you, you know, might be quiet little voices every now and again become loud and they become your own thoughts. So like, you know, I had a period of time where like, literally happiness left me. I couldn't find happiness. I couldn't find anything to be happy about. and um so much like so much onto me and then i start thinking okay i don't really want to be here anymore and the first like i said the first i don't really want to be here anymore is like i don't want to be in this office i can't solve it i don't want to be here i don't want to be all these people you know it's all horrible and then the i don't want to be here came about life okay it came like i can't cope with this voice in my mind which is constantly criticizing me i can't cope with the like tighter wave of emotions and problems going at me and like i just want to run away so it kind of started with running away okay it's like leave the business web and then i don't know i don't know what triggered it but for some reason i've started to build this emotional connection with trains where because i was getting the train to london i guess i always would say that was stress and anxiety like okay i'm going to london oh shit okay and then because of the drink because of the kind of anxiety and kind of things i've done i started to think one day i'll just jump in on the train and like every problem will go away then and that's how I was thinking is like, oh, that'll get rid of all the problems.

28:45So I was constantly trying to chase this way of like getting rid of problems and because I didn't have the capability to solve them. And then, so this is all bubbling within me. How old are you at this point? 23. So I'm not talking to anyone about this. This is just how I'm feeling. Like Steve and I, you know, it started to like, not that we, not that we had, like things were sort of a bit more serious. You know, we got hacked, cashflow, dealing with people problems. life was just getting so so much more difficult so my personal life has had to put on weight face goes horrible i'm like i'm like that alcohol now owns me and now i am now like slave to it so i basically end up having like a what i call like my rock bottom now yeah where um so i started seeing this girl who worked in the business um and she worked at social yeah and then so we um had a you know a bit of thing going on and then um i got ridiculously drunk one that's the last time i drank really drunk at the race at the races in chester and ended up um saying some really horrible things to one of the guys in the team um as well as in front of this girl i've started to see texting another girl like i'm being very arrogant who the hell are you kind of thing so now i'm actually really bringing in my problems into the business so um the guy who i spoke to was about to go head out to the us to open the us office so he was like a key player and i was you know stuff i said to him like i can't even repeat on camera like horribly derogative degrading to him as a person and then obviously to this girl i did the same stuff and i woke up the next morning and steve obviously from professional sense heard all this stuff you know what i did beforehand was able to like keep it personal so like none of this stuff impacted the business too much it was me like i say in a dark room rather than the business.

30:34But this time it kind of really stepped into the line of business. And so I met Steve on a Saturday, on the Sunday, sorry, after this. And like Steve talks about in his book and he was like, he was getting ready for water, like to like give me hell. Like, you know, if it went the other way, I was leaving the business. That was what was going to happen, you know, probably hand me up my shares and nothing would be gone. That's probably where it would have gone if we went on the other route. But he walked in and I just broke down. I said to him, something's wrong with me. I don't know what it is.

31:02and i i started crying i said i just don't know what why i'm acting like this i don't know why i'm doing it like i'm not in control of anything and i need help and like his demeanor switched right away you know it went from kind of arguments like not like he was going to like you know to like the friend i needed in that moment and like i mean at that point you've been through stuff for four years yeah oh yeah yeah yeah so i didn't you know i need and like i needed a hug i need someone to tell me everything's gonna be all right and um it we talked a lot then about how we're both feeling you know he opened up to me and then we put a plan together for like what i could do and like what i needed to do and you know part of that was going to see someone about what's going on find out you know it was very difficult to like at 23 years old to talk to someone else about your feelings you know guys find out how difficult to talk anyway so like you know you're young men and you're like, well, it's all weird.

31:54So you open up and then, and yeah, I broke down. And I broke down and I said, look, what happened yesterday, it's not me, you know? And I think the biggest thing for me was like, I could hurt myself, but hurting other people felt like it was the end of the line. You know, the guy who I was horrible about, has been one of my best friends at Social Shame for years. The girl I was seeing, I really liked. And I nearly ruined the relationship with both those people. so I couldn't deal with hurting other people. It's a bit like human rights isn't it like yours end where they start encroaching on someone else's?

32:27Yeah. It's the same thing with like hurt you can hurt yourself. Yeah. If you start to hurt other people then it's a real good opportunity to reflect on that. Exactly and and so that was like my rock bottom so I'm there and I'm um I don't know what the answer is at that point you know I think that even you know a lot of things I talked about was about drinking but at that point I didn't blame the alcohol. Alcohol just brought out this horrible thing of me so that was a sunday the monday i went to go and see a therapist for the first time to just download on them how i'm feeling talks about everything and then they effectively said you're dealing with imposter syndrome because you're a 23 year old guy running this business you've got anxiety about the future and it's leading to paralysis you know fight flight or freeze i've never heard that expression before but i was a freezer so So I just didn't do anything.

33:16Ended up being procrastination. And you've got like bottom line depression because of those two things. You might go down that route, but like depression isn't your main cause. It's caused by those two things. So we put a plan together to address those two things. And the thing he said was like, okay, if you stop drinking, you'll be able to address those problems. And if you address those problems, you'll be able to address the problems at work. So I was like, okay, this sounds good theory. Sounds great. um but what i kind of made to everyone was a promise that i can't let my personal drinking impact the business and cause the damage it's causing because things were caught on camera and the team a lot of the team who were also out there they saw this stuff and i lost all respect from the team over this period of time not just from that one day but over the period of time the team didn't respect me i was a liability i was a drunk i was a buffoon that's how people looked at me so i'm at the rock bottom personally in my life you know i've got this girl who i'm seeing who doesn't want anything to do with me because she's just seen how i am i've like hanging on by a thread to the business i've got no respect within the company i've got to do something about that you know and again the the mindset in my mind is like run away and hide or really let's try and solve it you know let's try and overcome all those things and hindsight looks at me then the easy thing to do is run away.

34:38The harder thing to do is stay there and prove it and prove that you are a good person, prove that that's not who you are. And I think I was driven so much by how bad I could have been and how bad I was to show people that that's not who I am. And I think that was one of the biggest driving factors is that that's not who I am. I want to, I am a nice, I think I am touched wood. I'm a nice person, respectful person. I get on with people. And like how far it took me away from who I really was was a very far we actually created like a persona and it was drunk dom drunk dom would do one thing sober dom would do another thing and drunk dom was this horrible person and like the two people were so different and that i was everyone knew me as drunk dom and i wanted people to know the real me i mean the ego is a very fragile thing right and so at this point um you know yours is choosing to protect itself with alcohol and sort of numbing yourself to some of the confrontation of your situation.

35:36How do you guys deal with it at social chain though, culturally, right? So did you have feedback processes in place? You said everyone on the team, you know, lost respect for you, et cetera, et cetera. And how much of that's fact? How much of it is like post-rationalization narrative? How did you win it back? I suppose, like what were the actual practical steps? yeah i guess i'm asking because not everyone's going to have your extreme yep story but i think a lot of founders would definitely relate to the idea of i've made a mistake or i've done something and i've lost the respect of my colleagues and i deserve that yep i've certainly been responsible for that in the past and i've deserved it and it's cringe but you can basically hide behind that fact or you can confront it and try and make it better and turn it around so how did you guys go about that yeah and i think you know to be clear this is it was me more than steve you know this isn't steve losing his respect this is me losing my respect so that's what i mean yeah like in inside yeah yeah yeah it's let's look at how you can overcome any situation when you go wrong firstly what you do hold your hands up apologize okay so i've got to stand up in front of people and this is this i think for me this is the big saving grace is that from day one i was always publicly open about stopping drinking i never tried to hide it i never said well my it's right i always said okay i'm gonna stop alcohol it started for three months then it went to six but i stood in front of the team and say i'm stopping drinking and everyone knew about it and so this is like your actions louder than words kind of vibe you know so all these things that have happened and all the things i'm going to say great people and when i said that no one believed me because it's low trust environment so really people don't trust me so i'm sat there thinking i have to show people and because of the incident that happened with someone on the team i know they hate i know i've broken trust i know i've broken respect so it's fact so i now need to build that back by sticking to what i say so if i say and this is probably a moral problem with me right across the work across the work as well is i'd say something i want to live on it so i did i had a yes yes yes yes man kind of vibe so i would be low trust in a professional environment so if i say something i need to start delivering on it and that like was my whole life you know alcoholics are liars we get we became i became the master of hiding things from the master of lying you know avoidance and lying so that's the character and personality i character professionally so i've actually have to i'm thinking of myself i now have to prove to my team that i'm trustworthy and reliable so therefore every time i say something i need to deliver it and that's what i had to do and then i didn't get it perfect you know something still fell away but if i'm going to say something to the team i need to do it i need to stick to it i need to stick to that like that and the biggest thing i can do to kind of build that back is to stick to that trust point and stick to that point where i'm not telling them i'm not going to drink and what happens is not in the first three months not in the next six months you know because you're going for it and you're starting to build back you know you basically your confidence is completely broken you've got to build yourself up again but what happens a year in from this period is that people start to look at you and go he's actually done it he's actually stuck to his word personally drinking i'm seeing improvements in the work massively and then what the big thing for me was is that because we've come from a culture of being young a lot of people sit there and think i couldn't stop drinking i couldn't do that he's actually stopped drinking and he's coming out to christmas parties and being around us and and his i guess you know the personal growth of like me physically as an individual you know i went from being overweight to i'm fat and you know looking old to a year later running the marathon so you You start to see the personal growth as well.

39:15And you go, actually, this guy's starting to get his shit together. And little did they know about the heroin and cocaine habit. Yeah, don't tell people that. Don't need to. You don't. But what it comes back is to create trust. It's to create trust and dependency. And as a leader, you need to have people underneath. You need to be able to give to people that level of trust and that if you say something, you're going to follow through with it. So I went from being like a liar. I won't call myself a liar, a yes man, to actually growing as an individual. and being able to handle myself and also handle the team and act as a you know a leader an example of of how things can change and i think because you go from rock bottom to like a place people never expected you to get to i i believe and you know speaking to people afterwards is that you know maybe the respect never came back to the full level because you can't some things it can't be unsaid yeah and you can't take away what happened but when new people came into the business and they heard dom doesn't drink and this is what he's doing i think that's interesting exactly yeah so um you're 23 24 at this period yep right so about 24 you run the the marathon it's a big big moment for you i suppose like but yeah it's a huge accomplishment anyway i mean i haven't run a marathon so congrats um and you know you talk a lot about coping but the business is still growing yep and obviously social chain is growing and you know you did this merger with uh the german company talk to me about that then so from that period to like a merger an exit and what your coping strategies were at the time because these are new new things yep but you don't have your crutch yeah i think um to come back to like what ultimately was happening to me it was like you know i my anxiety i was creating myself was making me freeze so i was just i felt myself I was just procrastinating at times, you know, when I should be doing this, I've got a whole list of things I need to be doing, but I'm not addressing it because I'm like sat there thinking about, I'm not either drunk or I'm thinking about myself.

41:11So like my efficiency was like so low. And I think what kind of the trigger of the conversation Steve and I had about how we're coping in life and in business led us to like having, you know, the strongest founder relationship about what we need to do next to improve it for ourselves. And I think that was the trigger to go out there and build a management team because we can't do all this stuff with ourselves you know we're young kids so um that was a wake-up call for us personally to go out there and build a team of people around us who are experts because um they're going to help us solve out these problems so um not only am i in myself like removing anxiety and the problems so i can actually address issues so all of my big things were there was like someone would tell me something that i need doing and i'd be like yeah yeah so i would never take it in i never listen to people i never write it down i never say okay this needs to be done by this time and this date and then And part of me stopping drinking was, okay, the easiest way for you to not build up an anxious life is to actually get things done and look at how you can manage your workflow, look at how you can manage your calendar management.

42:12So part of the next kind of six to nine months after that was getting that sorted. So, you know, we even like, we had an open floor office, you know, you came to it, people could just walk up to your desk and say things to you and say, I need this doing, can you help me? And like stopping that, you know, we moved our desks away from people to be able to like have space to be able to tackle things. So there were so many little things that happened. And what effectively built was like a much better way of us all working, the team, the business working, the business growing. So we ended up growing quicker.

42:44And the two things are not linked. I'm not here saying me going sober was the kind of thing that triggered the business going on. But we were on that growth clip anyway. And we brought in a management team. Yeah, you just weren't fucking up anymore. Yeah, exactly. You weren't ruining it. You were taking away the negatives I was taking on the business and just positives. Yeah. so we opened up in the US we opened up in Germany we grew the business we brought a management team and it's a service business so the more people you have the better people you have the better work you do the more contracts you win so we grew that business that way and then one of our later stage investors was a German individual who taught us the merger did the merger and then the business starts growing you know you go from a point where you're running the business the business is running you so you'll run the business and um i think then we um we were just kind of always thinking the social media thing was going to be a short-term thing so we were trying to always go as fast as we can and um we never had a period of reflection or stopping until covid happened so for the next four guess three to four years the business was just going as normal bau we were flying winning contracts it's great and then covid happened and then we um you know from my perspective started to think about what i really want and what i enjoyed it's the first time i could stop you know even when i was on holiday i was on my phone and we having things and you know 25 26 so much young so energy it was always it was great and then yeah when was the merger was like 2018 2019 2019 october 2019 so incredible timing incredible timing and and how was that deal structured in terms of who had that ultimate responsibility as in was this uh like additional pressure or was it pressure off um a bit of both you know the business has gotten bigger and we'd had more more areas of the company because we've kind of brought in other parts of business so um that but also then you crystallize and you share it into a public company so the actual future of like realization is kind of gone yeah so both a little bit um but again the timing could be better but the timing also could be worse is because it fundamentally you know six months later one part of our business was an events company of the group and that's gone you know so you've got different panics and um yeah so it couldn't have been better but also it could have been worse you know i think it was um a catalyst for our for our for it a lot and right it's interesting because uh you know if you just focus on social media see ifs and buts but uh that obviously goes gangbusters during covid yep but then you've thrown your eggs into multiple baskets to split the risk yeah and events goes into absolutely nothing and so you've got that kind of like net net kind of in the same spot yeah exponential and zero is still back here exactly yeah so but what happened i guess in that time is that um steve and i spent a lot of time together you know even when covid happened people were working from home we were living together at that point no we weren't together but steve steve was in steve came back from the us um so we were just we found ourselves just in rooms together for the first kind of two weeks was quite crisis management command center going over what the hell's happening.

45:51But the rest of the time was like dealing with the business and our own kind of time together and reflection on what we want to do next and what we want to do full stop. I think going back to where we were in that point of life, you probably think what happens if the world ends? What happens if we never get open? You know, what happens if the world never opens up again? What's going to happen? And we're sat in there and there's office. No one else is there. Like there's one place in Manchester, which has got Deliveroo, which is open so like we're getting that food every single day and just talking about the world you know i think covid that first period made you really reflect so off the back of that um knew it was time to leave i think i personally i was waiting for the the moment where things felt like the future was secure like maybe the merger and the rolling enough shares and seeing it crystallize for one point to then jump because i still don't think i dealt with the fact that the problems it was i still thought the business was causing me problems so as long as like it was a little bit stockholm syndrome and i was still there working on the business there was still like my anxiety and stress i just could cope with it so i i in my mind i was like i'm ready to go so i remember him actually messaging me about this being like we're leaving um just before you did maybe a month or so before obviously it's confidential etc but like we're leaving so i'm trying to like track this back so you know he'd up but in his circumstance i suppose he'd already started the podcast must have been a few episodes in maybe 20 30 episodes in or something like that at that point um and so i suppose i guess this is projecting i'm asking you but it's easier when you're thinking about what to do next i mean i certainly in this space right i have three different businesses and so there's always this sort of like transition out of one you've got more time than the other you know we talked about boredom earlier like i i wouldn't know what that looks like and i haven't given myself the chance ever really to actually figure out what that looks like and imagine it might even be blissful but there's also the safety net yeah i'll be transitioning out of one thing at least you've still got this other thing you didn't have that so you exactly what you just said there about it being blissful was how i was thinking right i said i need peace i was craving the silence still yeah of nothingness because i kind of again coming into something from i went from university to running the business in the space of six months and i'd never had a moment of peace you know my whatsapps were always going i had this idea you know i always wanted to go and do a tibetan silent retreat because i think i was craving silence and peace that's what i was that's what i thought i was craving so my idea at leaving was i'm gonna do nothing i want to period time to do nothing i don't want to be bothered by people i need silence that's why that's why i why i wanted to leave and i lasted three weeks you lasted three weeks of silence three weeks of silence yeah the first week is people messaging you of all kind of things congratulations and you're like just zip emoji yeah yeah uh but i looked at whatsapp before we put did the announcement to the team and then the top 20 people in my whatsapp i counted it down 19 of them were related social chain so the other 20 people that messaged me the messaged me last 19 and so on my mom so yeah um and then at the end at the start of week free there's no messages coming free i realized my entire life identity was a business no one's messaging me about it and i'm feeling useless i'm feeling ridiculously useless and i'm like looking at my dog thinking no i could take you for another walk i'm like actually i'm gonna teach you how to roll over today and i big day yeah yeah and so um actually the chaos and the challenge was what i wanted and what i lived for rather than the silence actually the silence and purposelessness wasn't enjoyable um so at that point i was like okay i'm not just gonna do nothing i need to think about what's next i need to be working on something because the silence that I was craving and when I was at social chain and when I was drinking it was never silence I wanted it was actually control of I want to be doing something and being useful but actually be in control of it rather than it being in control of me so I can't be doing nothing I have to do something but whatever I do next has to be built in a different way that I'm in control and it's never going to overbear and overpower me at this point you still have your shares in the company right so you haven't been able to exit i'm gone i've gone at that point personally oh so you've got your shares out yeah okay fine so when my business partner joel and i when i mean obviously gravel had a different fate so gravel failed but we still had that period as you do as co-founders of like what's next yeah what are you interested in what am i interested in you know you're so used to doing something as a pair a shared brain that you suddenly have this moment of being like we could go a separate way and think independently but we should also discuss together what the thing is our approaches we did uh i actually said i didn't think i was going to do something new with him because i wasn't sure what i wanted to do and i felt maybe the way that you're feeling i'm projecting but i felt like you know i was bringing down the relationship and like all this stuff i was just a bit low yeah so i was a bit like i don't want to bring you down it was just a bit like sounds to me like we've just got plenty to talk about let's just get therapy and get it all out and yeah so we did that and then we ended up actually starting heights afterwards together after a period of exploring whether we go our separate ways or start again i think that's probably quite a common thing with co-founders do you do the do you just do you go again together yeah go your separate ways you find new partners and there is a really right way to answer that it's a weird thing so what was your approach i think what we probably spent was that time with lockdown just talking about what we want to do what life is and all that kind of stuff and I was very open about wanting time off and peace and um but that only lasted three weeks yeah I know I know and then um there's a couple of things that that really interested me at that point um I had ambition to go into politics still do I wanted to explore I remember this yeah so you know I think starting a business at 19 you're like outlook on life's very different than you at 27 and I think definitely both of us definitely me wanted to find out about myself you know we fell into a business we do i love social media no i hate it now maybe because it's stockholm syndrome a little bit but like i i felt like i needed to find out about myself i feel like i needed to you know find out what i enjoy what i want to do you know and then i think get on get an understanding what that looks like so you know we talked about things and uh we talked about ideas and concepts and i think what we both were probably in a point was because things had been so intense that we just wanted to decompress and that decompression um during covid when you're or lockdown in your own houses and then in different environments.

52:38Maybe if we exited earlier on and we were together all the time, something might've happened together. But I think what happened is we decompressed in our own circumstances and you put out different things and different thoughts at that point. So from my perspective, yeah, I think I had to learn. I wanted to learn about myself a little bit because I'd never known anything other than social chain and work. I never, I changed the person so much, but I never thought about it. so yeah i think i i kind of saw that as a good time to do that how long did that process take so after the three weeks like i'd like sit on a beach and i was like okay this is terrible i need to do something about it i think there was like a six month of panic and i definitely like made not bad decisions at that point but interesting decisions this is not like you know i consulted at a foxy 100 company which i really enjoyed steve did the same thing with christian angama right he went to work for christian and wanted he you know basically let's see what it's like yeah you know yeah it's quite a normal thing to do like just to try like i'm not my own boss what is it like to work for someone else um did some time consulting and then you know then i think i stumbled upon the fact like what i actually enjoy did a bit of angel investing you know we could i could talk about the emptiness of angel investing for a long time and you know you you put money into a founder and then they say thank you you're here from them for another four weeks and then you just added to an email and it felt empty a little bit for me.

54:03So I tried all these things and then... That's interesting though, isn't it? Because that's sort of more about what your expectations are going in. Yeah, yeah. So it's funny because I do angel investing and I hope for exactly... Not exactly what you're saying, of course, but I'm operational in a business. I don't want to be constantly speaking to my angel investments. I want to be giving them my money and then being like, I trust you. Yeah. And if it goes well, it goes well. And if it doesn't, it doesn't. and don't just totally ghost me but but you've had the pitch so everyone's like oh i want you in because you know this and you know that yeah but i mean but that's the thing i don't want that i i'll give you anything but time but i'm i got all i've got at that point well it's time yeah i've got time so i'm like give me a ring you know yeah i'll be useful i understand that so i you know i must have did 10 or so angel investments and like there was this you know it's a sales process it's the point of sale they're really involved they're really kind of great and then you find out the money and then you're like oh i can help you with something you know pick up the phone and call me so i found that very empty but i think the the birth of the new business fearless was born from from all that area of consulting being a bit empty because you can't really have any control of what goes you tell them and you advise them and they've got a team and you work with them an angel investment being a little bit empty because you're giving them money but you know you think you could give more time because you know having a background in marketing that fearless was born out of like an angel investor who has more influence and control so blend investing and an agency together and that's kind of what fearless is investing companies with capital but also we've got a team of people who can work on the marketing which is effectively my what i was out there thinking about in lockdown is like oh i should do those two things together is that sort of like a micro private equity but with a marketing focus rather than an operational focus yeah i guess marketing recruitment finance so the kind of three areas which i think are commodities in business yeah so you can commoditize those with central teams um but then also kind of looking at it from my own personal perspective is that if i had the right support around me when i was that age would i turn to alcohol or would i turn to someone around me who could help me so i think it's been built on an altruistic mindset of like i want to help founders you know i want to help founders not go through what i went through i want to help them you know thrive without having to literally break and that's how i felt i felt like you know like those glow sticks used to be when you're a kid when you snap them they shine i had to be snapped and i think that people don't actually have to be snapped to shine so like wanting to work with entrepreneurs was like probably a reflection of like seeing people where i was and being like okay if i spend my time investing supporting and helping entrepreneurs scale accompanies um that's what i would want when i was that point what's been the most frustrating experience then building fearless um all of it all of it yeah god um do you have a partner yeah we've got two partners in the business right okay so yeah talk to me about how you structured it then so you've left social chain you've had your time you've tried government you tried some consulting yep uh how do you go and find new business partners for this you have to go and raise a fund so what's your process how long does it all take so um i got in touch with my first partner a guy called david noones um so he's local to me they're on the corner uh he was social change biggest client i thought it was me at one point yeah yeah yeah one point smallest client so he was yeah yeah most difficult client yeah right exactly biggest diva yeah so david um sold his business to imperial brands right um and he became social chain client so during like 2018 we did a lot of work with him so he was spent all time with him and he's around the corner and he left imperial probably a month before i left social chain so in that kind of period we spent a bit of time talking um and it was when you could go for walks with people so we'd go for walks and you know we'd find some time he introduced me to charlie who's the other partner whose background's in corporate finance.

57:44And we just kind of, he left his business in September. So I left in August, David left in July, Charlie left in September. So by like the January period of time, when I'm doing the consulting stuff, like we're just talking because we're all bored as hell. And we're like, let's do something. So we look to try and find something to do. And we can't kind of combine like Charlie's background in corporate finance, my background in scaling companies, and David's background in scaling companies and said, okay why don't we come together and instead of just taking like a percentage fee on helping a company sell let's combine the angel investing we're doing and actually have more involvement in the business so we we did a danger investment together um and we both all looked at it so we did that deal together and then we started to look at deals together about companies which are looking for investment and looking for help growing and then one of the businesses said look i'm I really want to bring you on.

58:39I don't need cash because the business is doing really, really well, but I need expertise. Can you help me build a marketing team out? And then that was kind of the aha moment where we went, okay, because we had a couple of similar conversations, I guess. We said, okay, if we centralize some of these core services and then take equity and deliver services for your businesses, that feels like something that could be sustainable. So that's what we did. So then we went out, raised balance sheet capital from other investors, other people, high net worth, friends and family, to go out there and do five or six deals to be able to show that people are interested in cash, but also the wraparound support services to help them grow.

59:20Because it does feel like a difficult pitch. As in... For a second time founder, for a first time founder, it's a very compelling pitch. Well, so, okay, that's interesting. You have more insight than I do. I was going to say the opposite on the basis of, so when I was building Gravel, we had Ford Partners. They had a very similar model. A venture capital fund. They also had lots of services. Their team were actually pretty good. But there's something about being the know-it-all startup entrepreneur as you were, as I was. There's a youthfulness to the hubris. Your knowledge and actual wisdom scale is completely inverted.