One year after my company went bankrupt, a lot changed:

  • I went deaf in one ear - stress finally picked a side 👂⚡
  • I lost 25 pounds of fat, and all of my life savings (my net worth is now mostly “experience”) 📉
  • I took a bucket of psilocybin - cheaper than therapy, stronger than denial 🍄
  • I became a Christian - rock bottom has excellent conversion rates ⛪
  • I was diagnosed with PDA, on the autism spectrum 🧠
  • Somewhere along the way, I found a role I genuinely enjoy, working with great people, and a new industry where I can make a difference 🙏

And perhaps most importantly, I learned that most people don’t give a shit about entrepreneurs in crisis.

So obviously… I decided to start a charitable foundation to help them ❤️‍🔥

Just over a year ago, the company I started 22 years earlier went into administration.

Venntro Media Group began in 2003. Three founders - myself, Steve and Adam. Big ambition. No exit plan. We built something huge, with no idea how it would end.

Spoiler: not with a yacht ⛵️

What followed was the kind of slow, ugly collapse no one puts on LinkedIn - legal noise, a failed rescue attempt, and a former competitor doing their best to make sure the coffin stayed shut ⚰️

The full truth of that behaviour will come out in time. Things like that always do. I’m in no rush. That’s a story for another day 🕰️

What matters is this.

For years before the collapse, I was miserable at work - not dramatically miserable, just quietly so. The functional kind. The “I’m fine” kind. The kind that's dangerous because you keep going because you have to.

I stayed because people depended on me. Staff. Families. Partners.

So I absorbed the stress for nearly eight years.

Because founders don’t quit - they slowly disappear instead 👤

When it finally ended, it didn’t feel like failure.

It felt like being hit by a bus……and then realising you’d been standing in traffic for a very long time 🚦

And here’s the part no one tells you: when everything falls apart, most people don’t lean in - they lean away.

Not out of cruelty. Out of discomfort. Failure is contagious in polite company.

Not long before that, I was Entrepreneur of the Year. Winning awards. Standing on stages. Being held up as proof that “it can be done.” My inbox was full of founders asking for advice and mentorship.

Then the momentum stopped.

Almost overnight, the requests dried up. Conversations went quiet. Invitations disappeared. The same story became less interesting once it no longer ended with growth.

I didn’t change that much - the context did.

Suddenly, I wasn’t a success story. I was a reminder.

And reminders make people uneasy.

You learn quickly that admiration is conditional. When you’re going up, you’re inspirational. When you’re falling, you’re inconvenient.

That’s when you discover the real loneliness of failure: not the loss of money or status, but the sudden absence of voices you thought were there for you.

Losing the business stripped everything back.
The ego. The identity. The lie that endurance equals success.

Somehow - and I still don’t fully trust this - some of the best things in my life only happened because the worst thing did.

Which is why I’m doing this.

I’m setting up a charitable foundation to support entrepreneurs in crisis - the ones still showing up every day while quietly falling apart, convinced it’s a personal failure rather than a systemic one 🧱

If you’ve been there,
If you’re there now,
Or if you’ll be there one day…

👉 Like or comment.
👉 Or share - because someone in your network is currently “crushing it” while their life burns quietly off-screen 🔥

Sometimes good really does come from bad.
But first, everything has to break đź’”