Story

What Azorro is

01 / 11

What we hold to

02 / 11

Whose it is

03 / 11

How he chose

I didn't know what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to go to the very top of whatever that was.

I finished university and moved into a friend's house in the Midlands, and agreed with his dad to rent there for a year.

I had no idea what I wanted to do, so I ran a test on myself. What could I reasonably get to that would be hard enough that people would be impressed, but close enough to what I already had that it wasn't quantum mechanics?

The answer was a training contract at one of the top five law firms. I knew it was naive. That was the point.

So I worked a supermarket job, went to the gym twice a day, tried to learn Spanish, and built a LinkedIn profile for a lawyer I wasn't yet.

04 / 11

The call

Sometimes you feel compelled to drive towards a certain thing.

Then an opportunity came up in London. Six interviews in nine days, and a contract signed at the end of it.

I had just agreed to rent that room for a year. I cancelled it.

05 / 11

No address

I moved down, and I had no money.

Five days a week in the office, straight out of university, with nothing in the account. For six weeks I moved between hostels, Airbnbs and other people's sofas. One friend let me have his for a month.

The rental market wouldn't have me. Then an agent said he had one place, that eight other people were coming to see it that day, and that it would be gone by the evening. I signed without viewing it.

06 / 11

Two addresses

It was never a place I could switch my brain off in.

The office was 100 Liverpool Street. One of the fastest growing service businesses in the world, and figures being thrown around that I had never been near.

The house had a cage fence across the front and no lounge. A code lock on every door, one kitchen between us. The man in the room next to mine was seriously unwell, and gave our address out on the phone to people he was threatening.

07 / 11

What that made him

I wanted to run away from there, and run towards there.

The gap between the two did something to me. I started working all the time, and I worked harder that year than I ever have since.

I have never turned it off. It got embedded in me over those twelve months and it has not left.

08 / 11

The promise

Stick to the process, work hardest at it, and you will be successful.

There was a process. A set way of doing business development that would make me a certain amount of money if I followed it, and the only competition was who could follow it hardest.

We were not encouraged to think. We were not encouraged to be individuals. We were told to execute.

I believed it completely. I was there morning to night, weekends included, and I became obsessed with being the best at it.

09 / 11

What happened

The process didn't work.

10 / 11

So he built one that does

11 / 11