As you can see from the date of the previous post (25 June 2017), I’ve taken some time off from this site.. and from everything else; and a lot has happened since 2017.
I sold my business (Vertical Leap) in the summer of 2016 to a fantastic marketing group called Sideshow. We were their second or third acquisition but they’ve been on a tear since then and it now includes nine agencies across the UK and expanding into Europe. I continued to lead the company through a transition period and exited completely in September 2018 – almost 17 years to the day from when I started it.
My plan [post-exit] was to start another company following a brief “sabbatical” from working continuously since the age of 15. We travelled a bit and I put a lot of energy into learning to play the guitar. It was glorious.. but it also became very boring.
I finally started working on a business idea that I’ve had for a few years in October 2019. I’ll write about the business more specifically in a future post, but as a platform-based business it would need the technology to underpin it. Having some time on my hands meant that I could get back into coding and build it myself. I loved every minute of it – being lost in code and building something after so many years.
We all know what happened in 2020. The pandemic hit the UK hard in March of that year and we went into a strict lockdown. It was definitely not a good time to discuss skills development with companies and so decided to mothball my plans until it was over.
I used the time during the lockdown to get myself in shape. I dropped 25 pounds and rediscovered my love/obsession with running. My wife and I kept ourselves busy with jobs around the house, long walks (when allowed) and generally just avoiding all contact with people (as instructed).
Despite the pandemic slowly dissipating in 2021 due to the availability of vaccines and then booster shots, we really didn’t fully emerge from our cocoon until late in the summer of 2021. An isolation perhaps prolonged by the loss of our beautiful dog in May that year.
Over these past four years, my life has changed and I am not sure how I feel about it.
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