I grew up always being half decent at stuff, never excelled, never really failed, never pushed by anyone, decent rugby player, decent golfer, half-decent school results but not really an academic person, blah blah blah.Going through school I always wanted to be an architect until the fateful day of a careers fair and the advisor my parents and I spoke to said it couldn’t be a career I could follow because of my academic choices, I have since learned differently and I could have done architecture.I was now left in limbo land, not knowing what to do, all my friends had university places and me being left at home all alone so I decided to follow one of my best friends to university and do the same course - marketing and business administration at Derby.I was always a quiet kid and bullied at school, and even though I didn’t enjoy university, it did teach me some key life skills and brought me out of my shell to the social being I am today.I scraped through university, and just about made the grade, but I did graduate (🤷‍♂️). After university I was back in limbo land until one day in the local pub I was talking to a friend of my dad and brothers and he offered me a marketing job in his engineering firm.I spent the next three years travelling Europe and America until 9/11 happened and the business took a massive dip in revenue and I was made redundant.I asked around for another job and a friend of a friend introduced me to a law firm in Sheffield and that is really where my story began in the legal industry over 20 years ago…I have since worked for 4 law firms, and 4 businesses that work with law firms and learned all about sales working at Yellow Pages. I have rare experience working on both sides of the negotiation table, I have grown law firm membership panels, grown law firm departments, sat on management boards and I enjoy talking to and learning from business owners.It was at Graysons that I came up with the idea of managing client reviews, I helped them grow from under 20 reviews to over 1,000 and achieving a 4.8 rating. This in turn increased conveyancing conversions by over 30% and I thought I was on to something.I now advise legal businesses on all aspects of marketing, client review strategy and business development by helping them seek out new opportunities.I always said to my mum I would be a millionaire by 40, that time has gone. I failed on the financial aspect but massively succeeded on the family side with two brilliant kids and a beautiful wife (often wondered how I did that).Fancy a brew ☕️ drop me a line