The Slumdog Theory of Starting a Business

Why I quit saving the good bits for weekends

I'm 51. I've spent thirty years doing brilliant things at weekends and average things in between, and I've got a growing suspicion that I've been doing life slightly backwards.

For as long as I can remember, the best bits have been outdoors. Mountain biking, climbing, hiking, wild swimming, long-distance running, Ironman events. Never competing - always just turning up, getting dirty, getting lost. Especially getting lost. Why is it that I love getting lost?

There's something about being in the middle of nowhere or in a country where you literally cannot read the street signs - Thailand, I'm looking at you - where your phone is useless and absolutely nothing is familiar, that creates a feeling you simply cannot buy. Proper wonder. Proper aliveness. The kind you remember for years.

I've done all of it in the gaps. Weekends, annual leave, the odd holiday scraped together between everything else. And for a long time, that felt fine.

Then I turned 51, and the maths stopped adding up.

"I want to be in this world every single day. This is the most honest way I could think of to make that happen."

If I keep going the way I've been going - working to fund the occasional brilliant weekend - I'm looking at another twenty-odd years of that. And I don't mean that in a dramatic, midlife-crisis, sports-car kind of way. I just genuinely looked at the numbers and thought: no. There's a better way of doing this. One where the things I want to be doing, the conversations I want to be having, and the people I want to be around are not the reward at the end of the week. They're just Tuesday.

That's the reason I built Here Now Adventures. Not because I spotted a gap in the market. Not because I have a detailed five-year plan. Because I want to be in this world every single day, and this is the most honest way I could think of to make that happen.

Adventure Isn't What They've Been Telling You

The problem I'm trying to solve isn't a technology problem.

It's not that adventure experiences are hard to find, or that booking systems are broken, or that there isn't enough out there. The existing ecosystem is fine. The problem is what adventure has been allowed to mean - and who it's quietly told to stay away.

Somewhere along the line, "adventure" got claimed by a particular type of person. The type who runs ultramarathons before breakfast and posts about it. The type who makes you feel, just by existing, that you're not quite doing enough. The gatekeepers decided adventure meant extreme, and extreme meant exclusive, and suddenly a huge number of perfectly capable, curious, willing people decided it just wasn't for them.

I want to unpick that.

"The point isn't the difficulty rating. The point is that you went."

Here Now Adventures is built around four series - Stillness, Flow, Edge, Threshold - because that's actually what adventure looks like when you're honest about it. Sometimes adventure is a wild swim at dawn and a flask of tea. Sometimes it's three days in the mountains with your lungs on fire. Both are real. Both count. The point isn't the difficulty rating. The point is that you went. That you showed up, left your phone in the car (or the tent, or the river), and did something that reminded you you're an animal living on a planet - not a productivity metric in a Slack channel.

The Slumdog Theory

Here's the slightly uncomfortable truth I'd only tell you over a pint: I'm not a travel agent. I've never worked for a travel agent. I didn't come up through tour operations or spend a decade building adventure packages.

What I have got is thirty-odd years of doing every other relevant thing - technology, sales, marketing, running teams, building platforms. I've also spent that same thirty-odd years on the other side of it: booking group travel, organising events, dragging mates to races and expeditions and trips to places we definitely couldn't pronounce. I've been a customer, a planner, an enthusiast, and occasionally the person who got everyone lost. It is, genuinely, the strangest combination of a career and a lifestyle, and it turns out it's exactly what this needed.

There's a scene in Slumdog Millionaire where everyone thinks the main character, Jamal, is cheating because he knows all the answers. He's not cheating. He just lived a life that happened to prepare him perfectly for that exact moment. Building Here Now Adventures has felt exactly like that.

"The universe, I'm fairly certain, is tapping me on the shoulder."

The universe, I'm fairly certain, is tapping me on the shoulder. Simply because I started building this, and started talking about what I was doing, various weird things keep happening and I feel the planets are aligning. Right down to two old friends I'd lost touch with reappearing out of nowhere - one I haven't seen since I was 12 years old. And the strangest part? Both of them know my co-founders. People I'd never have connected otherwise, linked by a business that didn't exist six months ago.

Which brings me to Don and Derek.

The People Making It Real

I'm building this alongside two co-founders, Don and Derek, and we probably shouldn't work as well together as we do. We're all cut from similar cloth - people who take the work seriously but don't take themselves too seriously, who know how to treat customers properly, who've spent careers working with suppliers and clients and teams and have the scars to show for it. We fill in gaps for each other, sure, but there's a massive overlap too, and that's where the energy comes from.

We're navigating the unglamorous stuff carefully - the structure, the legal framework, the insurances - not because it's exciting, but because getting it right is what lets the actual thing, the adventures, become the priority. Everyone who books with us, and every supplier who partners with us, deserves to know they're in safe hands. So we're making sure of it.

I can't wait to share this journey with them. And one day, hopefully in the very far distant future, when we eventually hang up our mountain bikes, I'd like us all to sit around with a beer and look back with real pride on something we built together. That would do nicely.

Come and Find the Moment

While we're still building, we only have two demo adventures on the site right now - but more are coming soon, and the booking platform is close to ready. If you'd like to find out more, follow us and we'll keep you posted.

If you've ever thought "I'd love to do something like that, but I'm not sure I'm up to it" - that thought is exactly why we exist. You're up to it. You just need someone to open the door.