August 1, 2022, was a momentous day for Brad Burton.
He sold his majority shareholding in 4Networking Ltd, a business he had built up over the last 16 years, in order to focus on his work as a motivational business speaker, coach, and trainer.
He also wanted to spend more time at home in Taunton with his wife Kerry, 40, and his three children, aged eight, 13, 18, and 26.
This is a wildly different life to the one Brad expected.
For a long time, Brad thought he was destined for a life cut short, made up of drugs, crime, and despair – a far cry from where he is now: successful, fulfilled, and with a loving family.
Brad’s story began in 1973, when his mother, having saved £1 a week for six months, finally left Brad’s father and moved into a women’s refuge in Salford with her six-month-old son.
Brad grew up with a lot of love from his mum, but not much else. The pair weren’t well-off and things were tough.
He left school with no qualifications, and during his early 20s became part of the rave scene, taking ecstasy at the weekends. This soon triggered an addiction to other drugs, including cocaine and speed.
Soon, he was spending £400 a week on cocaine alone.
‘It was time to start enjoying and and reconnecting with life again,’ Brad tells Metro.co.uk. ‘I was in my roaring 20s, I wanted to party.
‘I was faking fun. Trying to jumpstart my life again.’
At the age of 22, Brad says he was shot at to intimidate him into staying quiet about an accusation a family member had made of abuse. He felt that his heart stopped and that all the fun in his life had gone.
Overnight he went to live with his girlfriend and his family went into police protection. He then moved from Salford to Somerset as a result.
Why Somerset? ‘I just stuck a pin in a map,’ Brad tells Metro.co.uk.’ It could have been anywhere.
‘The pin actually stuck in Bristol but my Mum had been to Weston-super-Mare on holiday, so I moved it a little bit.’
Having lasted just two hours as a window cleaner – ‘have you ever tried carrying triple ladders on your shoulder? I think it’s fair to say window cleaning was not my calling’ – Brad lived off benefits and spent most of his time in the gym before getting a job as the manager of a local games shop.
It was then that a friend introduced him to Kerry, who became his girlfriend and later his wife.
A few years later, however, Brad lost his job due to restructuring. He was also £25,000 in debt.
‘I was spending money on all sorts of stupid stuff such as drugs, daft cars and TVs,’ Brad shares. ‘But it was all fun and games at the time.
‘I seemed to be in an impossible situation with absolutely no sensible way to pay it back.’
With only £160 of benefits coming in each month, Brad was in a desperate situation.
He walked into a dot.com job as head of marketing after being headhunted and was later promoted to become the company’s director of marketing in the summer of 2004. Although he had no qualifications, Brad says that charisma, positivity and fast thinking are qualities that don’t make it onto a CV, but are upfront and centre at an interview.
But ‘on a point of principle’, one fateful day in December 2004, Brad spectacularly resigned. The company had asked him to prepare a marketing plan. Working diligently, he spent three days on it, and was left deflated when he presented it – every single one of his ideas was slated.
After having all his ideas dismissed Brad saw red and told his employers to ‘shove the job up their arse’.
He tells us: ‘I’d had enough of the place and it was a wonderfully liberating and fulfilling experience to tell them what I thought… until of course I arrived home.’
When he got home he turned the key in the door, to be faced with Kerry, their baby son in her arms. She said: ‘You’re home early, is it to look after Ben while I do the shopping?’ Brad quips: ‘That was one way of looking at it. Another way was I’d just quit my job.’
Not holding back with her opinion on his announcement, Kerry yelled at him: ‘You’re an idiot! Why couldn’t you just have kept your mouth shut for another five days? You could have had your Christmas holiday pay and then sorted out what you wanted to do in the New Year.’ She had a point.
But Brad had visions of starting his new business in the New Year. His understanding of this was that it was ‘all private numberplates, fishtanks, spinny chairs and BMW 5 series’. He looks back at these early years slightly differently now: ‘The reality is it’s more low sales, no sales and in my case a whining wife.’
In fact, Brad was delivering pizza to keep his fledgling business afloat. While using his experience in marketing, Brad started 4Consultancy, with four elements: sales, new-media, creative and marketing. But this reality gave him material for his first book, Get Off Your Arse, published in 2009.
Brad didn’t let go of his dream of building a business. He wanted to appeal to the mainstream of networking. He felt that on one side it was all just nice and chatty but not productive and on the other was hardcore. Forceful. ‘Where’s your leads? Where’s your referrals? You have to attend, you have to bring visitors.’ So, he set out to create what was missing.
Recognising his financial situation, Brad knew that his credit rating was going to be ‘torpedoed’ and accepted it.
‘A bit like drowning with gold bars, at some point you have to let go,’ he says.
Brad spoke to each of the creditors, explained that he didn’t have any money to pay them and arranged minimum monthly payments – about £10 a month each.
On February 16, 2006 Brad opened the first meeting with the words ‘welcome to the future of business networking’. A table at the back, with two men from a rival network, sniggered. But he proved his critics wrong.
Within four years he had a national network, running 5,000 events each year across the UK generating over £2 million in turnover.
In 2007 he married Kerry. Unconventional as ever and never one to miss an opportunity, they organised Wedding4Networking with what he calls the world’s biggest ‘bumf table’, where members of his network could do business at the wedding. 100 networkers attended and the event also gave Brad his first experience of working with radio and TV.
Things were on the up. After having a second child with Kerry in 2009, Brad finished paying off the debt in 2011. ‘It’s only now I realise just what an achievement that was,’ he reminisces.
With thousands of members, generating hundreds of thousands of pounds of business, 4Networking had the expected ups and downs until that unforgettable day, March 16, 2020 when people’s lives changed forever – that historic order came from the Government to ‘stay at home’.
4Networking relied on doing the exact opposite. Holding roughly 500 meetings every month in restaurants and pubs across the UK, it went to £0 income overnight. Head office premises were closed forever and thousands of small business members were unable to network and generate income. Yet again, Brad showed his resilience and fought back.
Brad steered his team into fast-tracking the network online. After stressful long days and nights, the business was back up with the first meeting held just days later on March 23, 2020. It was the first network in the UK to go online and it worked.
From £25k in debt, drugs and no future, to millionaire, Brad Burton has certainly showed his critics (and there have been many, from the early disbelievers to the trolls he wisely ignores) who the leader is.
‘The absolute first person you have to help overcome doubt, is yourself,’ he tells us. ‘You’ll never outperform your self-image.
‘With my motivational speaker hat on, this is a starting point.’
He says he had well-meaning people telling him to get a proper job and saying his plan would never work. His bank manager told him he didn’t have enough ‘working capital’.
‘I had to Google what that meant,’ he says. ‘Oh, you mean money – why do people make things more complicated than they have to be?’
He even had rival business owners doing dirty tricks to discredit him. He was called a ‘Northern monkey’ and told he wasn’t ‘professional’. But this just made him stronger.
Plus, the critics were proven wrong. Those two men who laughed at that first meeting later apologised and joined 4Networking.
‘Their opinions do not matter,’ says Brad. ‘Your own opinion matters.’
Asked what’s next for him, Brad tells Metro.co.uk that he tried retiring in 2016 when he was 42.
‘After three months of going to the gym and playing the PlayStation I realised it wasn’t as fun as I believed it would be,’ he explains. ‘We all need a purpose.’
He started with another business, this time with himself as the ‘product/service’.
Using the adversity he’d encountered to turn his life around, he forged a path as the UK’s number one motivational business speaker. Businesses such as JCB, Bentley, Costa, the NHS and Xero started to book him and Brad was back.
And he’s currently writing book number five, Lifemaker. His first for eight years.
Well-placed to give start-up and small businesses advice, Brad imparts some of his wisdom, warning: ‘It’s not going to be like those sugar-coated Instagram posts. It’s going to be tough.
‘Here’s a wake-up call… It’s probably going to take you four times longer than your business plan for the bank says it will.
‘Business is hard, anything worth going for, generally is, so get ready for the daily battle and remember certainly early on, that the best thing about being self-employed… you get to choose which 16 hours a day you work!’
Brad started his business to create a better life for his family.
‘I achieved that and now, as I near 50, it’s about making a difference, redefining cultures, enthusing people and their businesses and remaining content and comfortable,’ he tells us.
He’s adamant that we should always recognise that things happen for a reason.
‘If it wasn’t for the worst day in my life back in the 90’s, I would never have moved away, never met my wife, never started a business, never written four books and never spoken to thousands of people on stage,’ he says.
‘That’s why as difficult and challenging the last few years have been for us all, we’ve all been affected, mentally, emotionally, financially, physically and even spiritually – you have to find some positives from it, and they will exist.’
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