I met Mike while looking for a volunteering exchange in Phuket. Mike needed a greek translator for his website (what a chance) and he offered a beautiful apartment in his isolated oasis in south Phuket.
My first impression meeting him was strange. Wasn’t sure if liked him or disliked him, but he had a different energy that magnetized me. Have you ever been around someone and instantly know that he will affect your life?
Well, at least the setting was perfect. The 3 stores building we stayed was in the middle of the jungle with an incredible view in Phi Phi islands. Every morning there would be a race who would get first the fresh eggs from the 8 chickens. And when we needed groceries from the town, we would ride the moto with the basket attached on the side down the hills into exotic beaches.
And many nights, Mike, his brother, the Argentinian volunteers, me and my girlfriend at the time would have bbqs with plenty of chimichurri and even more laughs that I remember until this day.
He knew how to have fun, and that’s not easy. No matter if we were in a quiet shared dinner in our terrace or the most incredible party he always had what we needed and knew how to be cool. I remember challenging him in a pushups competition, drunk, five in the morning in a pool party and he replied to me that he didn’t want to embarass me in front of my girlfriend.
We worked together and it was no joke. He knows how to extract the best from you and he expects it. You get from him what you give and I find it fair. He is a real enterpeneur, even though in our days this word has almost lost its meaning.
And after knowing him more, after fun times, arguments, conflicts and conversations watching the sunrise from his deck, I knew why I felt this connection from the beginning. Because he was living his life in a way that I didn’t even know yet I want. And this lifestyle, was well curved in his manners his attitude and presence.
That’s why I knew from the beginning that Mike has a story to share with me and inspire my life. Now, he can share it with you, and you can get from it what fits in your world. This is his story.
My early years were in North Yorkshire, a market town called Bedale was the closest town, I lived in a hamlet (smaller than a village. usually 3-4 homes).
I was very much out in the sticks as English people say of country people. If you watch old British TV then you may have seen All Creatures Great and Small. it’s a series and books about a veterinarian who lived in the area. Parents divorced when I was 12, I stayed with my father, and my brother went with my mum. I was a devastated young kid at the time, but on reflection my mum did the right thing as she was trapped in a small place in Yorkshire, when she is very motivated person.
My grandfather was a dairy farmer so most weekends and school holidays I helped him for a Pound an hour. The winter months were cold and grim. I definitely got my work ethic from these experiences.
Being self sufficient has always been a thing of mine. I earned my own money and looked after myself since 13 years old really. My father was one of those people who prefer to teach a man to fish.
After she left my father my mum lived in Portugal for 5 years. I think the experience of holidaying in another country gave me my wanderlust. My brother and I used to have the best summers in Cascais, 13- 17 yo, hormones out of control, in the sun.
I left school at 16 and worked on another local farm until 18 when I went to agricultural college for 3 years.
Moving from ‘the sticks’ to my first City, York, was particularly exciting. I lived with my brother, off campus, everyone else at the college lived on the campus.
I soon realised I wasn’t really into farming and proceeded to party/ waste the tax payers money, for the next three years. Being late was once named Doing a Dennis.
I barely passed the 3 year course and only really passed because I wrote down the information on cheata sheets I stuffed into my Levi 501’s button ups with the intention of using then during the exam. in the end writing everything out in miniature writing enabled me to remember such delights as which lambs testicle to severe first and much to mine and everyone’s suprise, I passed, really very wrong that I did.
Farming was definitely a good primer for my business life. I was a liability on the farm, I have terrible eyesight and am the clunnsiest – I loved tearing around on machinery though.
When I left college I was very keen to be out of farming and took the first job offered – I was recruited by a financial advisory company – basically hard core sales – go to people’s house and hard sell them on pensions and investments by following a script.
It turns out I was good at sales though and I soon got a team together and was making good money in York.
After a couple of years of doing this I got an offer from a friend to move to London. There we started a telesales company for a financial publishing company, essentially we were chasing late payments for subscriptions that were sometimes over £2000 per annum, we received 30% of the bill if it came in. This turned out to be very lucrative and really my first business venture. We were making around £20,000 a month and working four or five full days a month.
After a while I got bored with doing the same thing everyday and so decided to move from London and I went to live in Australia for 7 years thinking I was the beeze knees in business after my experiences in London.
I had various successes and some would say failures – failures build you, successes build the bank account.
The first business in Australia was a telecoms company selling overseas calls as the Telco market in Australia wasn’t privatised and so such calls were very expensive. Through my sales skills I managed to get a contract for a large hotel company with a 4 million Aussie dollar phone bill.
This was a bit of a lesson as I was given one hotel as a trial to ensure it worked. The American company I was working with sent a technician who had no idea what he was doing. I just remember being in a PBX room surrounded by wires and seeing this contract disapear.
That was a big lesson in making sure. I was way too slack and didn’t ensure every base was covered to make this happen.
They say an entrepreneur has to be on their arse 3 times before they ‘make it’, Australia was one of those times. I came upon hard times and couldn’t feed myself at one point.
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and I kept on going, long story short I found a mentor and a financier who backed me. In 1996 we started Going Up Advertising – we contracted all the five star hotels to show advertising in their lifts and highly trafficked areas.
Whilst creating this business I built my first and last website myself and that opened up a whole lot of possibilities.
I realised I wasn’t good enough to code myself so found myself a great coder – my first significant hire, based on the premise that I should find people to do things who are way better at it than me.
So my biggest achievement financially and as far as building something was totaltravel.com. I spent the next 7 years building it to be the number 4 travel site in Australia – Qantas and Virgin were 1 and 2, an Expedia equivalent number 3. We were receiving around 200,000 users a day at the highest point. It was a wild ride in SEO in those days as Google worked out it search algorithm, you could easily gain or lose 59% of your traffic in one update.
We sold Totaltravel in 2009 but I had left a year before due to a change in the goal of the website – I wanted to be the Google of travel, the other guys wanted to start making money. They were right.
While waiting for the travel site to sell, I started looking for other opportunities and that’s when I decided to start FanChants.com. I learned business through reading books about tech companies and biographies of business people I felt a connection with. One of those was Richard Branson’s book. He said something that definitely resonated with me, specifically that he only works on projects that are fundamentally fun to work on. I was very much into travel and I love football so this seemed a great idea.
So I bought a campervan and decided to go and record every teams football songs sung by the fans. We spent 3 years living in a campervan, covering over 200,000 Kms, visiting nearly 350 European cities. We then went to South America and recorded the songs for those teams. I guess this was the first time I was really a digital nomad although I did a round the world trip for 4 months in 2006 with only my Blackberry, but it worked and was the real start of my digital nomad adventures.
Fast forward to today and we have 2 million streams on Spotify per month, this month we were streamed 109 million times on TikTok and we are the go to place for sports audio for film and TV, working with everyone from Amazon and Netflix, to BBC and NBC and everyone in between. We receive new songs via our network of FanCaptains who go to the games for their teams and record the songs for us.
Additional to FanChants I also run a gaming DAO in Thailand. I love new tech and the crypto markets and environment remind me very much if the internet circa 1999-2002 in particular as everyone is being told it’s a scam by mainstream media, regulation is coming and will kill crypto and the markets are ridiculously volatile.
How did you manage to turn your passion, football, into a successful business and travel the world at the same time?
Read books! I went from agriculture to business via reading books on businesses I was interested in – I read every dot Com story there was at the timer- Netscape, eBay, Amazon, Google and the rest’s stpories. My favourite isn’t a tech book but is still an amazing bible for any business person – Beyond the Golden Arches. As previously mentioned it was the Richard Branson book that sent me down this path.
How do you manage to be so multitasking and efficient on many things at the same time?
Pretty simple really. I make sure that nearly everything I do is what I want to do and enjoyable/ fun. Then you want to do it, not “I have to do it”. It’s sounds simple and it probably isn’t as easy as that, but that’s the principles I guide myself by. It doesn’t always work and there are times where you have to grind out the work, but even then, if you see the big picture, have a plan, then execution becomes easier. I think you also have to experience the hard times so you remember those mistakes that got you there and avoid them in the future.
Some memorable moments from travel life.
For me nothing beats the freedom of a camper van. park and sleep where you want, go where you want. My three years tearing around Europe with a women I loved was 3 of my best years. We never paid to be on a campsite so we always free parked wherever we went. If we were in a city we would either find a beach to park up on or find a river – nearly all have, follow the River until an appropriate parking spot for the night was found. We would invariably wake up to a million dollar view.
I would recommend van life to anyone.
Looking back, do you think that this nomadic lifestyle was valuable for you, or would you change it if you could do it all over?
Travel is education. If I had a kid of 16 and they were unsure what their vocation in life was I would send them off travelling to find about about themselves.
I thought about this question long and hard but I really don’t think I would change a thing. Australia was the toughest time but really that’s the time when I earned my entrepreneur stripes.
What fulfills you in the type of life that you have right now?
Creating digital products that people want and creating my jungle garden in Phuket. I have an amazing plot of land in a very quiet part of Phuket, it’s a wildlife oasis. On reflection I think this is the first time I have settled in my life. I definitely feel at home here.
What advice would you give to people that feel lost in life?
To be honest the first thing that comes to mind is travel. You find the real you, it’s an education and things happen, when you travel. If nothing is happening where you are, raise some dollar and get a flight to somewhere cheap to live, warm, has great food and you fancy getting to know the place. That’s a great start. Educate yourself on a side of business that you think you would like and become an expert. The internet allows people to make livings by focussing on niches these days. What I mean is instead of being a marketing person, become a PR specialist for hairdressers, for example. Pick niches where it’s possible to really excel.
The main thing for an entrepreneur is to start looking for opportunities as you travel through life then having the nuts to believe in yourself and take it on.
