JCIP #360 - Tom Maberly

In episode 360 of The Just Checking In Podcast we checked in with Tom Maberly.

Tom is now a decade into managing his own business, &Friends, a content studio servicing global clients with content strategy, creative, production and delivery. 

He is also CEO of a second business, Cavalry, a Contingent workforce management system, servicing marketing, creative and production agencies, and inhouse teams.

Tom founded &FRIENDS alongside two business partners, Matt and Julian. 

In 2018, Julian wanted to move his family to Australia as his wife is Australian, so Tom and Matt came together and agreed to buy his share of the business out. Matt became Head of Business development and Tom became Managing Director.

The business continued to grow fast, and their success was recognised with a holding group’s offer to buy them - they got close to a deal but pulled back.

They were then approached by an Australian based business, Cavalry freelancing, who had offices in Sydney and Singapore, about the prospect of a merger, and they agreed, with &FRIENDS acquiring Cavalry in March 2022, taking on the Cavalry proprietary tech. 

It wasn’t plain sailing after the merger and it was a big learning curve for both Tom and Matt.

Unfortunately, during this period, Matt’s mental health was also beginning to decline severely. 

Tragically, on April 16th 2023, Matt took his own life. It was a huge shock for Tom and the whole organisation. Tom as MD had to steady the ship, support his team whilst also grieving himself. 

Just two months before that, on February 16th 2023, Tom’s brother had also taken his own life.

In this episode we discuss Tom’s professional journey and the events around his brother’s and Matt’s deaths. 

We then compare the experience of the two griefs as Tom’s brother had a history of mental illness, whilst Matt didn’t. 

We talk about how he processed the two deaths and why Matt’s death, in his words, gave Tom an ‘excuse’ to take action on his mental health, where previously he felt too stigmatised to do so without it and take those first steps on the road to recovery.

As always, #itsokaytovent

TRIGGER WARNING: this podcast contains a deep discussion about grief, loss and the impact that losing a loved one to suicide can have, which some listeners may find distressing or upsetting, so please listen with caution.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:13

Hi Venters, welcome back to another episode of the Just Checking In Podcast. I'm your host, Freddie Cocker, and this podcast is brought to you by Vent, a place where everyone, but especially men and boys, can open up about their mental health issues, break down stigmas, and start conversations. In each episode, I check in with a special guest. We have a Natter and a chat about all things mental health, as well as anything and everything else they are passionate about. If it helps that person with their mental health, we discuss it. My special guest for this episode is Tom Mabely. Tom is now a decade into managing his own business and Friends, a content studio servicing global clients with content strategy, creative production and delivery. He is also a few years into managing a second business called Cavalry, which is a contingent workforce management system servicing marketing, creative and production agencies as well as in-house teams. With built-in AI-powered search, vetting and onboarding tools, Cavalry aims to make talent management and hiring seamless, connecting businesses with the right talent at the right time. Me and Tom met following my Just Checking in Pod episode with the brilliant Caroline Roothouse, talking around the subject of suicide grief. Tom founded and friends alongside two business partners called Matt and Julian. In 2018, Julian wanted to move his family to Australia as his wife is Australian, so Tom and Matt came together and agreed to buy his share of the business out. Matt became head of business development or sales, and Tom became managing director. The business continued to grow fast, and its success was recognized with a holding group's offer to buy them. They got close to a deal, but it was pulled back based on an adaptive agency model they were exploring, one which accelerated as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The idea for Tom was fundamentally about talent and the belief that specialist talent was the important piece to solve for organizations to be able to deliver against their marketing objectives. They were then approached by an Australian-based business, Cavalry Freelancing, who had offices in Sydney and Singapore, and they discussed the prospect of a merger. Tom and Matt agreed, and Anne Friends acquired Cavalry in March 2022, taking on the Cavalry proprietary tech. However, it wasn't plain sailing after the merger, and it was a big learning curve for both Tom and Matt, bringing two geographically distant and very different business models together at a challenging economic time post-pandemic. Unfortunately, during this period, Matt's mental health was also beginning to decline severely. His previous gregarious personality became more withdrawn, and eventually he had a nervous breakdown and was signed off sick from work. After a year of managing those mental health challenges and coming back to work, tragically, on April 16th, 2023, Matt took his own life. It was a huge shock for Tom and the whole organization, and Tom had to steady the ship, support his team whilst also grieving himself. Just two months before that, as well, on February 16th, 2023, Tom's brother had also taken his own life. So Tom had this double whammy of suicide grief in a very short period of time to process. In this episode, we discuss Tom's professional journey and we then talk about the events around his brother's and Matt's deaths. We compare the two griefs as Tom's brother had a history of mental illness whilst Matt didn't, how Tom processed the two deaths, why Matt's death, in his words, gave him an excuse to take action on his mental health, where previously he felt too stigmatized to do so without it, and how Tom supported his team's mental health through the grief of Matt's death too. So this is how my conversation with Tom Mabelie went. Tom, welcome to the Just Checking In Pod. Thank you so much for letting me check in with you, mate. I rarely get feedback myself after I publish pods, so I was very pleasantly surprised to receive your message on LinkedIn. And your story is another very powerful one, like Caroline's you listened to. So I'm very pleased to have you on, mate. How are you on this Easter Friday morning?

SPEAKER_00 4:28

Lovely to be here. Yeah. I mean it's luxury because always forget Easter sort of creeps up on you quite quickly and it's a day off. So very nice.

SPEAKER_01 4:35

Well, I don't want to date this pod, but we've dated it already. So here we go. We have got we have got so much to talk about across your professional mental health journey, mate. So without further delay, are you ready to start the show and talk all about it? Yeah, let's go. Let's do it. We're gonna start your podcast, Tom, by talking about your professional journey first. So take me back to the beginning and how it all started in January 2003 when you joined IMG Media as a TV producer.

SPEAKER_00 5:03

Yeah, well, actually, I didn't start as a TV producer, I started as a runner.

SPEAKER_01 5:08

Oh, of course you did. That makes more sense now. Chuck my notes in the bin.

SPEAKER_00 5:11

No, no. I mean, look, the reality of getting into that world is that, right? You start at the bottom and it was very much the case for me. Coffees and custard creams. Yeah, absolutely. And I loved it actually. It was a great setting for a first proper job, you know. It was an incredible place, place I'd always been intrigued by. I actually went there with the view to I liked the idea of being in sports journalism's potentially even sort of management side as well. So there's two sort of streams of thought as I entered that place. It's a huge setup there, and I'm sure still is. I left there over 11 years ago now, but fantastic first job, lots of young people. I was very much into my sport at the time, still am, but particularly then. And it was a really good grounding. I guess the classic phrase is where you cut your teeth, and it was interesting because I very quickly got taken into a team that allowed me to step up reasonably quickly, I guess, in the grand scheme of things and get into the production side, actually in golf. And so brilliant first job because it's young, it's it's exciting. The world is your oyster, really, when you enter a big business like that. And I ended up traveling the world for the first five, six, seven years of my career, which was brilliant fun.

SPEAKER_01 6:30

Well, you loved it there so much. You spent 13 years there. So you went from TV producer, eventually becoming a senior TV producer. So obviously, you've talked about a little bit already, but what did you love most about working there? And what were some of your favourite projects to work on, maybe outside of golf or including golf?

SPEAKER_00 6:45

Well, as I said, it was quite a young environment. It was almost like an extension of university in a way. Pretty competitive, which I thought I loved at the time. Probably on reflection I didn't like so much. It was just an exciting place, you know. Because I got taken into this particular team, it allowed me to realize lots of dreams and going to places I would never normally go to. It's places that are not necessarily on your bucket list. So travel was quite a big part of it. You're always meeting new people. Essentially, what I was doing was sports journalism, just on the TV side. So I was interviewing players, I got to meet all the big names at the time. I wasn't even really into golf, by the way, but I got quickly into it, right? People like Tiger Woods, Ernie Ells, Ratif Gusen, all the people who were at the top of the game at the time in those early 2000s. And I'd been meeting them in America, Asia, you know, I'd go to China quite a bit, Hong Kong, all these places that were far flung, exciting. In your 20s, it was a great thing to do. So it was exciting. And the sports journalism side was, you know, I studied English at university and it was something I was really excited about. What was I talking about? I was actually talking about the people, not really the sport itself. We weren't there like reporting. We weren't a sort of Sky Sports team. We were there about the people behind the sport, which was really exciting. We were talking to the fans. There was no sort of sponsor that we had to adhere to. Sometimes there was if we were doing a more commercial production, but generally we were there for the fans, which was really cool because it was all about the stories behind the players, about the families, about where they came from, the journey. And it was a really cool journalistic job in that sense.

SPEAKER_01 8:27

Let's fast forward to Christmas 2016. You have an idea for carving out your own path and starting a business. Tell me how the idea came about for Anne Friends, the inspiration behind the name, and how it also came to be alongside your co-founders, Matt and Julian.

SPEAKER_00 8:43

Yeah, I it was a time where it was sort of a classic scenario, I guess, where you've cut your teeth, you have moved up to a degree, but it's a big place, right? And there's a ceiling. And for me, certainly, I was pretty ambitious at that time, rightly or wrongly, and I believed that you know, I wasn't ever the best producer in the world. I d I wasn't brilliant, to be honest with you, in reflection. But I had quite a decent commercial mind, I felt. I felt like business acumen was something I was decent at. I had some. And I knew that I had a bit of a ceiling where I was. And, you know, I wasn't particularly well paid. I was sort of enticed in with this dream of traveling the world and meeting superstars everywhere. Certainly on the Gulf when I worked on that, I did a bit of rugby, I did other things as well there. And so yeah, I got to that point, right? I had a young family at that point, and I knew that the ceiling was going to hold me back at that point. I didn't know how long it would take me to break through that to the sort of upper senior, senior management at that place. And so I had an opportunity with a client, somebody who I got on really well with, somebody who we'd done some great work with. And there was an opportunity that was going to sit outside of that business, and I knew that I could grab it. So actually, it was that opportunity that gave me the kick. And I thought, actually, I can take this on myself. This is something that's well within my wheelhouse. But what I didn't have, I didn't quite have the balls to do it on my own. So I didn't want to just take that client and go, actually, I can deliver this for you, but I'm going to do it on my own instead of my own business. I wanted a partner. And Matt and I had known each other for years through a mutual connection. And we'd never worked together, but whenever we'd met at parties and stuff, we talked about business work. We were in the same area. He was more in, I guess, advertising than I was. I was much more on the sports media side, producing content for fans. He was much more on the more commercial advertising FMCG style client side. But we'd talked about it and we came together at that time. Just again, it was a classic opportunity. He and his ex-business partner, Julian, who'd already been bought out their previous business, they were in another business and they were trying to get out because they hated it. They wanted to go alone again. And we just came together. I had the opportunity. Those two had a skill set that I needed, i.e., they'd already run a business, they'd already exited, and they were coming in. And so I said, Well, look, I've got this opportunity, let's go at it together. And if we're successful, let's set up together. And they were up for it. So it was a win-win for me. I felt like I was bringing the initial opportunity to table. They had a skill set that I felt that I didn't necessarily have at that point. And we came together and it was a success. You know, we won a series of adverts that were going to be on Sky Sports and MBC over in the States. And it was a real launch pad for us because it gave us sort of six months, if you like, of pre-prod, creative strategy, all the stuff that you had to do at the front, paid for to give us that launch pad. And the rest is history, really. We sort of took off from there because I had a decent network by that point. They had a very good network as well. And so we combined a really good combination of clients that we both felt that we could go and win. And yeah, we went for it, basically.

SPEAKER_01 12:10

I spoke to my former work colleague and now co-founder of Cubby, Tanika Davson, about this idea of having the idea is one thing. The reality of being a small business owner is another reality altogether, right? And you had big growth in your first year, as you said, which is credit to the three of you. What was the biggest challenge you faced early on as a co-founder within a small business within the three of you? What were some of the surprises, I guess? And what were some of the things that you didn't even perhaps see coming at all?

SPEAKER_00 12:42

Oh, there are loads. It's hard to know where to start, really. Broad brush strokes, this is a classic scenario for any small business. You're winning business, but you need to deliver that business because you haven't scaled to a point where you have the personnel to keep bringing in the uh food, if you like. And so there's that classic bit of plateau where you can't bring in enough business into the pipeline whilst you're servicing it at the same time. But we were sophisticated enough, I think, to get over that quite quickly. What we had at the time was, you know, I'll go back to when we started and why we started, it wasn't a wing and a prayer. We did have a very good idea, which was that we were targeting marketing teams directly. At that time, even then, back into 2016, the traditional agency setup was really at the forefront. So you had big ad agencies that were part of holding groups generally at that point, and weren't necessarily the most efficient models. And we just knew that we could win if we directly attached ourselves to marketing teams who needed that ability to scale a content division. Um so essentially we acted as an extension of the team. People were doing that, of course. We certainly weren't necessarily the pioneers, or no way would I say we're the first. But we had a way to talk to them that spoke their language, but also gave them an expertise they didn't necessarily have. And so we really did act as that extension of the team. And that's actually where our name and friends evolved from. We originally called Mr. White. That was how we set out. We were called Mr. White, but we were quickly finding that we were really delivering a service for marketing teams direct that allowed them to have a much more scaled, almost like an in-house content studio, just through having us as a partner and being a senior partner, but then tapping into our wider network, which we called and friends. So we sort of evolved for Mr. White and then said, Mr. White and Friends, this is our model, this is how we tap into specialists, not generalists, per job. And that was our original idea. So back to your point about I guess the teething problems, really that was it. It was how quickly can you scale without finding that you have to slow down because you're delivering all of the time. And that's a pretty classic, I mean, it crossed any industry sector, frankly, as a startup. That's an age-old problem. But we delivered quite well against that. We brought in the right people, we felt at the time. We didn't scale too fast. We very much believed in our model about bringing in specialists, not generalists, according to the need. And so, yeah, we got over that humble.

SPEAKER_01 15:13

Despite all of the stress, how much fun was that first year with the three of you?

SPEAKER_00 15:19

Great fun. It was exciting because we were quite good at selling at that time. I guess, in as far as we were confident in our idea, the way in which we were approaching people, which helps. We knew that people needed that service. It's a kind of white glove service, if you like. You go in and they knew they needed it, but didn't know how to articulate it necessarily and what it was. And we were bringing that to the table. Matt was great fun to be around at that time. He and I really, Julian was really running the business, if you like, in that sort of classic sense, setting up all our systems. He was a tech guy. Exactly. And Matt and I were really treading the pavements. We were out everywhere, we were travelling a lot to places like New York where we had a client. We were on trains, planes, automobiles literally all of the time, and we were out there going hard at it, hustling really, I guess. And it was great fun because we would go into a room and we had a bit of a double act, if you like. It sounded a bit cheesy, but Matt was very he was a real showman. He was great in a room, he filled the room, just not just his.

SPEAKER_01 16:27

He's a big lad, literally. So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:29

He was sort of it was quite funny, really. We always laughed because you know, he was six foot seven and I'm basically five foot seven, and a bit more, a little bit, but we stood out. But we had a nice combo. He was a real good showman, he was great at articulation. He was a journalist himself prior to setting up this business and wrote articles for people like The Guardian, Telegraph, etc. And he was great with words, he was a real wordsmith. And I was, I guess, a bit more of the business, you know, this is how it's going to run, this is why it's good news for you, this is why this is a good proposition. And so actually it was great fun because we knew our roles. We really settled into those roles quite quickly and started winning business, and it didn't feel easy, that's not fair, but it felt like we were onto something and we were delivering something people needed. So, and those first couple of years were definitely exciting and fun, right? Traveling around trying to win business is is good fun if you're on a little bit of a roll.

SPEAKER_01 17:27

Let's fast forward to 2018. So, Julian, one of your co-founders, like you said, wants to emigrate to Australia as his wife is Australian. You and Matt agreed to come together and buy him out. You become MD and the big boss. In air quotes, Matt becomes head of sales. So, how did you manage losing Julian and also transitioning again to this new little and large double act, but for real this time, not just in the sales room?

SPEAKER_00 17:49

It was a bit scary in as far as there was something going on really internally that was three people. I was a bit of a bridge between two guys who'd known each other for a very long time and had a quite a fractious, volatile relationship, really. They loved each other clearly, but was quite volatile, and I had to often play that peacemaker. I feel like I've sort of done that all my life in a weird way. And so I did that quite a bit, and so there was a nervousness because I would like to think I'm reasonably level-headed. Those two guys were quite volatile and annoyingly so, quite often. Brilliant, often, but also quite volatile. And so I had a few nerves, but also Matt and I had a real mutual respect, huge mutual respect. So we knew what our strengths were, what our weaknesses were too. We knew full well what they were, and we were open about that. So we leaned in, I guess. I was nervous a little bit, but we leaned in and it was the right thing to do. You know, we were still going upwards, you know, not not stratospherically, we were sort of steady curve upwards with sort of circa 30% year-on-year growth, which was pretty good in that sector at that time. And we just leaned in, you know, and I and I knew I had the capability to take a slightly different role on. What it did mean though was we started slowly drifting apart in terms of our remit, clearly, right? Slightly obvious statement, but we also stopped spending quite as much time together, treading the pavements, and it became a bit more of a I'm running this business and we we need to deliver against our objectives, our KPIs, etc., and I'm keeping us to those, as opposed to, right, let's get out there and we're selling, we're taking this business on. So it did change the relationship slightly.

SPEAKER_01 19:40

I want to fast forward again to the COVID-19 pandemic. You want to change the business model, grow your network. How did this eventually become the eventual merger with another existing organization called Cavalry? And why did their work appeal to you and Matt to make this merger a reality?

SPEAKER_00 19:58

Yeah, we were always wanting to find the piece to scale our business in a better way. Right. So traditionally, so we were a content studio, so that means we essentially help marketing teams with their content strategy. What is their content strategy first? Why? Who are they speaking to, and how are we going to get there? How are we going to get to them? Right. And then the other part of that was how do we deliver against their all the channels and their distribution outlets with content, but leave enough money to actually get it seen, right? Which is always the key piece to any partnership. You've got to make sure there's enough money for content to actually get out there, right? It's a big mistake, I think, for a lot of businesses who sell just the content and that's it. We were always selling that strategic play. So that we were giving our marketing teams, our partners, the best outcome, which is that they have enough budget left over to get things seen and reach their audience properly. And that was all part of our content strategic work at the top, which is the biggest part of our role, really. So at that time we were looking at it, and traditionally most outfits like ours would scale a particular way. It would be building facilities in-house, it would be building studios potentially, or potentially picking up the similar team and just putting it in different markets, like maybe East Coast of America, maybe something in Asia, and trying to scale up that way. The goal there is clearly to keep as much in-house as possible, as opposed to there being supplier costs, third party costs, etc., right? That's the goal. We just felt at that time, 2018, it's sort of time, 2019, coming into the pandemic, we were talking about it a lot, going, what's the new way? You know, we'd already felt done a good job of creating this extension of marketing teams, that in house thing that is so prevalent now. We were doing that. But we felt like we didn't want to scale up that traditional way of building facilities. Don't get me wrong, it's still a really good way because it keeps a lot of money in the business. So I'm rambling now, but long story short, we said, What is that way? What is it? We said, well, we think it's talent. We believe talent is one of the biggest issues for businesses to solve across the board. That's not just in creative services and marketing services what we do. It's across the board. Talent is one of the biggest issues for big organizations to solve. Like who's the right person at the right time? Who are the specialist talent? Do we need a generalist? Do we need a specialist? When? How? How do we get them? How do we source them? And so we said, look, talent's the piece. We use talent all the time. You know, if a client wants a CGI piece, we bring in specialist talent to deliver that and we manage that operation. So talent's the piece for us. How do we make it a part of our business to allow us to scale better? And we believed we needed some technology to do that. There were some talent platforms out there that we knew of, staffing solutions. There are any number of names of different MSPs, recruitment agencies. But how could we create a technology that allowed us to not only tap into people we wanted quicker, faster, better, and more efficiently, but build talent pools around the world? We had a big client at the time, Vodafone, and we were doing, I don't know, three or four product launches a year for them. We did that for about three or four years. And we were creating content in six or seven markets for them. Why don't we build talent pools in their key markets that actually get to know the brand really well through us managing it, almost like a centralized system, but not have to pay for those people all the time, right? You don't want that overhead 365 days a year. You want to be able to tap into that talent, pick it up, put it down, only pay for what you need. That was what we were always saying at the time. Pick it up, put it down, only pay for what you need. And so we got into looking at that more closely as the pandemic hit because that almost accelerated that conversation. We started going, hang on a minute. That pandemic almost allowed us to step back a little bit and go, yeah, actually, this definitely is the thing for us. This is where we're going to go. And we said, right, let's go for it. And then the question was simply: do we build that technology ourselves? What does it look like? How much is it going to cost us to build that tech? What do we need it exactly to do? You know, is it an end-to-end sourcing, onboarding, management of talent and payment, global automated payroll? What does this system look like? And at that time, we were introduced to the cavalry team who built a system in Australia and they were trying to expand into Asia. They opened up a small office in Singapore. We got to know them pretty quickly and challenged the tech heavily and believed it was really good sort of tech, which it was designed and built really, really well. So on great foundations. And so yeah, we said, yeah, let's do it. Let's merge rather than build our own. Let's merge and acquire this proprietary tech.

SPEAKER_01 24:46

You transitioned from a fairly small business with around 20 employees to far more staff. Now you have shareholders to deal with, investors, a new board, new structure. And when we spoke off air, obviously everything like this is a challenge, right? But it sounds like Matt found the merger and transition a lot more difficult than you did, mate. Now, for the listeners, as you said, six foot seven, big man, big character to match. But he was also, as you said to me, off air more risk-averse and maybe more money conscious than you. And that was where the yin and yang comes in, right, with the both of you and why you worked really well together. So we're going to talk about this from a professional perspective first. And then in the mental health journal, we're going to talk about Matt's character and what he meant to you. So, how did you see Matt's mental health decline from that period onwards, mate?

SPEAKER_00 25:32

I would say, firstly, sorry, we weren't as big as that. We never had loads of employees. So we were more like 10 and went up to 20, 21. Oh, okay. Apologies for bad intel, maybe. Um so we've always been quite small, and that that was kind of part of our model, right? How do you scale up and down building talent pools? But yeah, so when we merged and went up to just over 20, we were clearly it was a big deal. It wasn't just the scale, it was more the and that's not very big, right? No one would say that's very big at all. But it's not just the scale, it was more the two different business models merging. And the speed of that, maybe. Yeah, yeah. That's really what it was about. It was we knew how to run our business and grow it, and we knew how to manage that very, very well after a few years, you know. And we were suddenly in this arena that was different business model, different set of people who had gotten really great with the other side of the world, which no one can underestimate for sure. And it wasn't so much that I'm totally up for loads of risk. Matt and I were actually quite similar like that. I'm also quite risk averse, but perhaps not as much as him. In fact, what was funny was Matt was brilliant, right? So Matt was a really good mind in as far as being ambitious, future thinking, you know, excited to adapt and move. He was excellent at telling the story, you know, building the narrative. And so he was a great leader in that sense. The risk-averseness came in when he didn't like the way things were going, right? And again, seems like a bit of an obvious statement. Not many people would. People do become more risk-averse if things aren't necessarily panning out exactly as they thought. But that's one thing that potentially became a bit more difficult for Matt was he was up for the risk, but didn't necessarily like that risk if it wasn't panning out exactly as he planned, right? Which doesn't, you know, there's a paradox there. It doesn't work necessarily for that mentality if things aren't panning out. And, you know, we're missing a big chunk of the story. If things were panning out, it was a great idea, it still is, right? It was purely a meeting at a time that were coming out of the pandemic. It was pretty difficult economically across the board. And we had lots of difficult decisions to make, time and time again. Decision, decision, decision, difficult decisions that were meaningful, really meaningful at the time, coming out of the pandemic.

SPEAKER_01 28:14

Matt then has a breakdown. He signed off sick from work. At that point, I imagine you naturally start to worry a bit and how you're trying to steady the ship in his absence, losing your right-hand man, a big right-hand man, shall I say? I bet he had big hands as well. Tragically, on April 16th, 2023, Matt took his own life. Take me back to your memory of that day itself, where you were when you found out, and how it impacted your mental health and obviously the mental health of your staff as well.

SPEAKER_00 28:44

Yeah, if you don't mind, I just want to go back a little bit because actually there was a year of excitement really. It wasn't as quick as we merged, and I know you're not suggesting that, but I also want to make clear, you know, almost for Matt in a way, we we had a great year of excitement and ambition and strategizing together. It was an exciting time. So it was probably a year of that as we were merging, getting it out to market in the UK, taking it across some Asia into the UK, and it was brilliant. It still is great, by the way. But it was working. We were treading the pavements again, actually, Matt and I, in it, and we're selling a new business completely, which was exciting times. When it started becoming difficult was purely the fact that the business we were taking on in Cavalry, it's a SaaS product. It's a software as a service product that has a classic hockey stick curve, a J-curve. And so the J curve is if you probably well know you've got to invest, you have a few wins, you need to keep investing in technology, and you're coming down the hockey stick, right? To then potentially scale and catapult up, right? And we were in that. We were selling well, we had some great initial advocates and early clients, and we were winning. We were coming down that hockey stick in order to build more tech and adapt the product for our needs and creative services. And we were coming down that with the view, obviously, to be going back up that hockey stick. So we were at the bottom of that J curve, really. I think that was affecting Matt. He knew full well that that was part of the plan and that was always going to be the case. And we'd strategized around that, but it was affecting him. He felt that he was concerned about the future and that whole idea of having to invest, keep building technology, keep staying ahead of the curve in order to see some upside. He started struggling with that. And you could tell he was getting more upset with it about the decision, getting more scared. And we talked about it all the time, all the time. We were great mates. And we talked about this all the time. We're business partners, but we're also great mates. He leaned on me quite a lot for that. He talked a lot about it, and he was very open to that. So when we're talking about mental health, he was very open about talking about his feelings, what he was going through. And I was there for him. We were real partners at that time, in every sense of the word. But unfortunately, he did plummet and he got to a point where he had a nervous breakdown, right? And he he felt that it wasn't obvious it was coming, but you could tell his mentality was veering towards the very negative life. And sure enough, it came around quite quickly, actually. Had a nervous breakdown and it was very obvious to me. I'd never seen it before, but it was obvious to me. You know, who's a very good-looking, gregarious guy. He wore his clothes very well, who was smart, and he came in and was not looking good at all. Almost looked gaunt in a way. He his clothes, he had a little bit of something on his clothes that he would never turn up to work, not looking, you know, sharp and immaculate. And and he broke down on my shoulder, you know, completely broke down. It was horrendous. It was a horrible horrible, horrible thing uh to witness. Obviously, I sent him home, uh, signed him off sick from work, and we went through a a long process talking to him every day, his wife, who's brilliant, and we talked and felt as though, you know, making sure that he couldn't get onto work staff. We felt like we were doing all the right things, he was seeing a doctor, but clearly that he plummeted very quickly from that nervous breakdown. And at some points we thought he was coming back to us. We really did. The signs of mental health that are difficult to necessarily decipher, right? And he obviously plummeted much, much quicker than we necessarily could totally tell. And so yeah, barely talk about it even now. He died by suicide. It would have been, what is that, four months later, from a nervous breakdown.

SPEAKER_01 32:59

On the day itself, you said to me that you're told the news and you just couldn't face even going into the office because you're in shock, you're trying to process what's happened, and you take this walk around Shoreditch, right, next to your office for two hours, just trying to get your head together, try and figure out what you're gonna say to your staff, all of that stuff. I imagine that was just so many emotions going through your mind. Who's the Tom we meet at that moment in time?

SPEAKER_00 33:25

Oh gosh, it was just uh a such a strange feeling. It was. I've just come off the tube, it would have been eight in the morning. We had an office in Old Street at the time, so right in the heart of the shortage, came out of the old street tube and had a text from my wife saying, Have you heard or something to that effect? And I said, What? And Matt's wife, Maria, had called my wife Becca, to tell her the news. And so I was just walking into the office, as I said, eight in the morning, picked up the phone to ring my wife, and she told me, and my jaw just dropped. It was a moment that I will never forget. It was an incredible shock. Because although we knew that he was in a bad place, as I said, it wasn't that clear, certainly wasn't something that we could imagine. Um yeah, so George Ort really, it was a it was a incredible shock to me thinking about Matt and who he was. And I just didn't know what to do because I couldn't bring myself to go straight into the office and and talk to the team. I was walking around Shoreditch for hours, it felt. It would have been a couple of hours trying to work out how or what was happening, honestly. It was very tough. Rang a couple of friends who I knew would listen as we spoke and then had to go in and and face uh the team, which was I say face, I mean they're just brilliant. And I decided to tell people individually as opposed to the whole group in one. Again, it was just a decision I made at the time, rightly or wrongly. And it it was long conversations with everybody until we talked about it as a group, because it's not a conversation you can have quickly, and it sounds ridiculous, but even that first day was incredibly draining because it was long conversations with people.

SPEAKER_01 35:37

Bad news repetition.

SPEAKER_00 35:39

Yes, exactly. And but everyone was brilliant, of course. When I said brilliant, we were there for each other. You know, we're a very tight, well-bonded team. One thing we did that was extraordinary when you look back on it, and I almost embarrassed to say, but I I guess I can't not say it, is we were working. We were still working, you know, that day. It's almost feel embarrassed to to talk about it and almost hate it, but we were pitched that afternoon. We were in a full-on pitch that afternoon for a big job. And at that time we needed that job. You know, it was very much an important pitch for us as a business at that time. But it feels crazy that we were doing that. We were getting on a Zoom call with America, the team in New York, and just pitching as though nothing had happened that day. So not many people really know that, and it feels very odd. But we were full on. We were in the middle of three or four big jobs, we were full on as a business, which is quite scary to think when you reflect. At the time it felt we're carrying on, we're working, people were leaning into it almost without full distraction, which is odd and doesn't feel right at all. And I realized that hopefully quickly enough, and we brought in some people to talk to the team about grief about suicide shortly afterwards. And then actually we met Amelia Wright in the Suicide and Co.

SPEAKER_01 37:17

team, big friend of the pod, amazing woman.

SPEAKER_00 37:19

Yeah, and she's great, and her business is great, or the charity is great rather. She spoke to the team over a big lunch meeting we had so she could explain what Suicide Co. does. We brought in some care coins into the business, which which are set up by a business called Red Umbrella, which allowed people to anonymously take care coins and get counselling if they wanted counselling. It was a facility that we brought in relatively quickly, I guess. I mean, I can't remember the timeline, honestly. It was such a whirlwind around that time. But there's some good and there's some bad, I guess. I reflect on it thinking, what the hell were we doing? Working. We were properly working that day and days after. Crazy, horrendous. And just just the thought of Matt being how brilliant he was and who he was to us and to the whole business. He was just a friend, a real character, real character that people loved. So it was very, very sad.

SPEAKER_01 38:19

I think we can only do our best with the information we have and the knowledge that we have at the time, right, mate. And the fact that you brought in Amelia, you brought in Red Umbrella, I think is testament to you and great testament to you. And I think not a lot of other organizations would have done that, to be honest. So I I don't think you should be too harsh on yourself for the support you gave your staff. You said to me that your mantra through this grief period was just put one foot in front of the other, right? And you brilliantly said to me off air as well, there's no rule book on how to deal with suicide grief as an organization. So you're you're literally improvising in many instances as you're going. So how did you move forward, not on, after Matt's death? And also, how did you keep his memory alive and remove that stigma and shame in the workplace as well from people talking about him?

SPEAKER_00 39:07

Yeah, some good and some bad again, probably. We I did firmly believe in one foot in front of the other because cheesy as it sounds, it's the way to keep some balance in your own life, right? And everyone was busy, right? I had a young family, we were busy with the business, there was lots going on. So that balance is important. As you just said, and we spoke offline, there is no right or wrong, in my view. People have to manage their own grief and how they're going to deal with it. And certainly we were one foot in front of the other, was a thing for me, okay, what is it? What am I doing? Okay, okay, yeah, that is what's happening in my life, and that's what I'm going to do. But in the business, we did some good and bad things really. We did we talk about it enough really as a group? Probably not. Some people would talk about it, some people wouldn't.

SPEAKER_01 40:04

And that's fine.

SPEAKER_00 40:08

There was no sort of forcing people into conversation necessarily. We did not talk about Matt, but I think in reflection, there was probably a time where we didn't that much. We talk about him a lot more now, in in much more in a sense of, oh, he would have loved that job, knowing that we're doing this job for this kind. Do you remember that time when we did that? There's lots of that. But in the immediate aftermath, maybe not enough. But what is enough? I don't know. I think in reality, we everyone dealt with it in their own way, and we tried to support each other, and those those who wanted the support needed the support. It's very hard to reflect on it any other way, to say, no, we should have done that, or we didn't do enough of that, or yes, we did do that well. It's um yeah, personality types, it's being there for one another, if they need it, want it, want to talk about it. I think one thing is that I'm very open to talking about stuff which I probably wasn't necessarily before. So I've learned to be much better at that. And probably as a result of that time, that period in my life, which was very recent, this was 2023. I would hope that everybody would feel comfortable, certainly in our business, to be able to open up at any point, at any time about anything. And I guess I would just say there's some been some great bits of that, and there's been maybe a little bit of bad, you know. Did we work too hard? Were we doing too much? Were we not taking a bit of a pause at that time enough? Who knows?

SPEAKER_01 41:46

Grief doesn't have a time limit on it, mate. And one of the stigmas and challenges of actually helping people with grief is that a lot of people think, well, they put a ticking time clock on someone's grief and then they expect them to be okay after this arbitrary time limit, right? But that's not the case. We know that's not the case. Things can get better, but time doesn't heal. It only changes our perception of the grief, which is what I always say on this podcast. What got you through that period from your perspective, mate?

SPEAKER_00 42:17

Family and friends, you know, knowing that I had a good support network for sure was a huge, huge deal. I felt in a place that there was some solidity, huge solidity in my life. You know, I had a brilliant, amazing wife and Becca, who's an amazing person and great doer and and makes things happen generally. Two kids who were excellent, just lovely, good support. Big deal, right? That's a huge deal to know that they're there. Friends, of course, you know, all the classic things, right? The knowing who to talk to at a time that you need to talk to somebody and knowing those the people that will listen will will not just sort of say, you'll be all right. It's much more than that. Knowing that there's a support network is a huge thing, right? And I'm very lucky to have that. And something 100% it can't be underestimated. So I feel very lucky in that sense. But yeah, I think that I probably didn't take sort of time off, so to speak, to really sit with it. One thing I did that I needed was I needed the work in a way. I needed to be sort of stuck into stuff. But again, on reflection, it didn't necessarily allow me to grieve brilliantly in the first instance. So I think there was probably a bit of baggage there that I had to sit with. But look, I guess still always is still grieving. I still am, in a way. Again, it's not a necessarily a bad thing. There are certain times where I really feel it and sometimes I don't. I had a double whammy, and I'm sure we'll go on to talk about that. So it was a real moment in my life that was hang on a minute, what's going on? What am I doing? How am I dealing with this? Am I dealing with this? So I was thinking about it a lot, a lot, a lot, right? But it's the support network that gets you through a lot. And then it's really, I guess there's a lot of introspection as well. Introspection is something I never really had done. And actually, that was probably a problem for me in the past. And I feel like I've got a lot better at that through reading podcasts, thinking about more than just your sort of day-to-day, and definitely doing that introspection, which has helped me as well and helped me with my grief. You know, one thing I did when my brother died of suicide. Sorry, I you emptied this out, but as I'm going to go into it, that he died by suicide just two months before, which is almost a crazy thing to say, but that had happened. And I spent a couple of days, I took a couple of days off work, and I just looked at pictures, I looked at things that my brother had part of his life, messages from his mates, things in history of my brother Guy's life that really did help actually. Part of that process in that real immediate aftermath was I needed to think about him as a person throughout his life. I needed to think about him as a kid almost, as a teenager. He was older than me, and I looked up to my brother very much. So I needed to look at all those moments of his life and pictures, as I said, messages from friends to learn a bit more about him, and that really helped in that grieving process with Guy, certainly. I didn't have that with Matt. It was a very different process, actually, with Matt.

SPEAKER_01 45:52

We're going to talk about Matt and Guy in a bit more detail in a very short amount of time, mate. But I want to reflect on your professional journey here before we move on. So, first of all, what's been your proudest achievement on this journey so far?

SPEAKER_00 46:06

Well, professionally, I feel great about the business that we've built and are still charging with. It's a reflection of for me, certainly I feel there's been a certain amount of resilience that is any business, there'll be ups and downs. There are lots of ups and downs in the journey of running a business. And it's been a decade now since we started it. And there's huge pride in that. You know, building a team around the business that are fantastic people who support one another, have each other's backs. That's a huge amount of pride in that. I love that. It's family, it's an extension of family, real family. And it's something that I feel really passionate about. It's almost my favorite part of the job in a way. And Matt would be really proud of that too. And that's what I love to reflect on is thinking about Matt as a personality and the type of person he was, bringing people in, gregarious character. He would love the state of the business right now, because it's great, it's fun, people are having fun, everyone's working hard, everyone's got each other's back. So the reflection on my journey, I'm talking about this sort of now, but there's a long journey to get there. And there's been some great stuff and there's been some bad stuff. And I really look at that now. Maybe I wouldn't have done even five years ago, ten years ago, certainly, in a much more philosophical way, which is there are going to be loads of ups and downs. The downs aren't terrible, terrible. They might seem at the time, but you need to have them to really push on and create that resilience and enjoy the successes. You need those, and you're gonna have them. Everyone's gonna have them. So I think that's some sense of personal pride is that we've managed that absolute roller coaster of emotions and the journey that um even just as an employee working through that for many, many years, and then running a business for the last 10 years, there's so much more that you continue to learn, you continue to learn all the time, learning every single day, and that's the bit I really love. So yeah, I reflect on it with huge pride quite often. In terms of the mental health piece, there's a lot that all of us can learn, and I've learned loads since I guess since 2023, when two huge tragedies hit my world. And I'm still learning very much on that side too, right? I'm learning the business side every day, on the mental health side, learning so much every day, all the time. And I consume a lot of content around it, hopefully not to the point where too much. I've got a real feeling that it's not a good thing to just always be within content that is trying to reflect on anything, frankly, right? Too much of anything. There's got to be a balance. But uh I I've learned a lot and I feel like I'm becoming a probably a more rounded person as a result of it, actually. So with tragedy, there has been an allowance for me to learn a bit more about myself for sure.

SPEAKER_01 49:12

Well, you've answered my next and final question, which is about what has this journey taught you about yourself. So I'll ask a different question this time, which is what goals and ambitions have you got going forward for cavalry?

SPEAKER_00 49:25

Huge ambition still. The two businesses are separate and one. So, and friends, our content studio, we still work with a really interesting portfolio of clients that keeps us busy. And the cavalry side of the business is similar. It's essentially our and friends business runs the engine is cavalry. Cavalry is the engine of our friends business, and cavalry and itself for for other agencies and SMEs globally can be the same and is the same to many of them. So it's huge ambition for both businesses and the group as an entity. It's definitely not all plane sailing, what is, and so we're tempering it quite often. We're saying, okay, we'll be ready to adapt. So we really believe in making sure that we're agile enough to be able to adapt quickly. We always are, you know, with the technology that we're building within Cavalry, we're adapting all the time. So huge goals and ambition. It's an exciting time, right? It's definitely been a tough time economically, but it's an exciting time for our business. We're in a place that we haven't over-leveraged, you know. Again, I reflect on this when I think about Matt, and I think he'd be really proud, actually, of where we're at and what we're doing because and and I think about him in those terms a lot, by the way, right? I think about him a lot when I actually reflect on the business. I think about him all the time. And he definitely would be proud. And we've got great support. We've got a great support network in a group of really great investors who are not all uh scary on our backs all the time. They're just good people with solid grounding and great advice. So yeah, huge ambition. And with a team like that behind me, where I feel supported in that investment group, it's exciting for sure. I love this journey. I love this about business because, as I said earlier, I'm learning all the time. And as it's as cheesy as it sounds, that's part of the excitement for me. Not just, am I going to reach that next goal? Am I going to reach that next goal? It's actually the day-to-day, the in-it, the roller coaster ride, that plethora of different problems to solve that turn up each year. I love that part of it. That's what gets me out of bed for sure.

SPEAKER_01 51:40

We've talked about your professional journey, all the incredible work you're doing at An Friends and Cavalry. Let's go deeper and talk about your own mental health journey, Tom. So I ask all my special guests on this topic, this question first, to me back to early life, teenagers, and looking back, were there any early mental health experiences? If any, who's the Tom we meet here?

SPEAKER_00 52:00

Yeah, a great childhood. I'm one of five kids. It was always interesting. I'm middle child, always interesting in as far as there's clearly a lot going on. It was great. There were no early signs, certainly for me, of any mental health struggles. I was a typical kid growing up in the 80s who was just outside all the time, very much into my sport. I played everything really. I did just tons and tons of sport. So I didn't have a lot of time, certainly in my early years, to do much else apart from sport and sleep and eat. I mean, it sounds ridiculous, but that was me for sure. Obviously, teenage comes around and I get into other stuff and potentially doing a bit less sport. But no, all good. I had a really, really good group of friends, and there was definitely nothing that I ever felt that was problematic, actually. I felt very lucky in that sense. I guess at the time I didn't know any different. But yeah, I guess at the end of school years, I was starting to, you know, I guess there were sort of anxieties that were potentially building that I didn't really realise at that time. Essentially, my childhood and those teenage years were I was very lucky, it was very loving household. We were doing a lot of stuff, as I said, as a family, but also me individually, and very nature of sport, you're all with people almost all the time. I didn't just do individual sports, it was mostly team sports, particularly as I got older because I wanted to be with my mates. So I felt very lucky in that sense. It was always with a big group of mates. I always had a good close of type group friends wherever I was, really. So yeah, I I I sort of felt very good. What I look back on now is there was definitely stuff going on that I didn't realise at the time. You know, my older brother guy was probably more problematic as a teenager, and I just looked up to him massively. He was a really interesting character, very brilliant musician, artist. I guess he was non-conformist in every sense of the word, in a way. He had a again a big group of mates who looked up to him in a way because he was always that guy. He was always at the record store getting the best records. He was a good DJ. He was that guy that people went, Oh yeah, you know, what you're sampling that music to that. And he was just a teenager in the 80s, you know, who was really interesting character. But certainly we didn't have that much of a relationship at that time because he was just much cooler than I was, basically. I was off always playing sport with my mates, and he was maybe DJing at the party or doing very different things, actually. So we didn't have that much of a relationship, really, apart from me looking up to him. Sadly, actually, on reflection. He was five years older, so you can imagine it's it's very different.

SPEAKER_01 54:42

That's me and my brother. Yeah, it's a different relationship, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 54:45

Yeah, it's a different relationship. But it's interesting, very interesting upbringing, again on reflection. Time you you don't know any different.

SPEAKER_01 54:54

What are your favourite memories of him and your time together as adults then? Because I imagine you weren't spending too much time together as kids because you were the little brother and he was the big brother. But maybe as adults, when you started to mature a little bit, the age gap doesn't feel as pronounced, maybe.

SPEAKER_00 55:08

Well, so yeah, definitely. We went to lots of parties together when I left university and then moved up to London. We probably spent more time then, actually. So I guess I would have been 21, he would have been 26, so around that time, basically early 20s, mid-20s. That's probably when we spent most of the time. I often used to get him to, if I had a party, he would DJ at the party, and that was great. He knew all of my set of mates very well. So yeah, we had a good relationship then. But uh, we never lived together or anything like that. It was definitely a different relationship.

SPEAKER_01 55:45

Like you said, your brother had a history of mental illness or mental health challenges even as early as teenagehood. So when did you first realize the perhaps full extent of it and maybe start to support him or support your family members in a way that was different to when you were a child and just superheroing him, shall we say?

SPEAKER_00 56:08

It's hard to tell when or if he always struggled with his mental health. I'm not sure he definitely did. Look, it's really hard, isn't it, to know fully. He certainly suffered in his later years, but in those sort of teenage, early 20s, not sure really. I don't know that he definitely did. You know, he had a huge set of friends, he was interesting, doing lots of pretty interesting stuff, really, certainly from a music and arts perspective. He wasn't necessarily happy, happy. Guy definitely suffered from depression. I never have, I'm very lucky touch with not saying I don't think anybody can ever rest on their horizons or think they're absolutely fine. I certainly could, but I hadn't, so I didn't really understand that really with Guy. But Guy definitely suffered from depression. But when it started, I'm not sure. I think he was a bit sad and angry that he felt as though he was being left behind all the time. He didn't have huge ambition to be anything or be anybody, particularly he quite rightly in a way, he was himself, but didn't necessarily fit into a conformist society, you know.

SPEAKER_01 57:17

You spoke earlier about when you found out that your brother had died and this double whammy, so to speak, of losing your brother, guy, and then losing Matt. So, as you spoke about earlier as well, after your brother's death, you were collating all of these collages, pictures, photos, conversations. Tell me about your emotions there. Did you feel a sense of I should have done this earlier? Did you feel a sense of this is helping me grieve in the right way? What was your mindset there, mate?

SPEAKER_00 57:50

Well, it was very much sadness, actually, of I guess it was helping me grieve, definitely. Even that immediate aftermath. It wasn't particularly long. I probably spent a day, a couple of days speaking to some of his old friends on the phone as well. So it definitely helped with that initial part of the grieving process for me. But it was really tinged with sadness that I guess I just didn't know him that well. I was sad that I hadn't necessarily got to a place where we had a really tight relationship as brothers. It was definitely tinged with that element of sadness that we hadn't necessarily broken that barrier of being kids and got to a place where we totally understood each other more deeply and had a different type of relationship. So it was definitely tinged with that sadness. But part of that, I guess maybe this is me just telling this to myself, so it helps me grieve as well. But I I I guess part of that was because he wasn't that well in those later years, you know. Something I was touching on earlier. It's very hard to pinpoint when the mental health struggles turn into something more difficult and more problematic. And he, yes, he'd always suffered from depression for a long time, but really what was happening in his later years was he was, you know, he'd taken some drugs that we believed, and certainly he believed as well, because we did talk about it before he died. He'd taken some acid at a party that had given him a full psychosis, essentially. He was he was at the time writing down beliefs or notes uh that he was being hunted and to be killed, you know, by Oh, wow, that level psychosis. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 59:31

Yeah, for full psychosis.

SPEAKER_00 59:32

So although he had in his maybe twenties, I don't know when started, but some mental health struggles, certainly with depression for sure. You know, Guy was a real lefty who kind of hated all out capitalism but also wanted 20 quid in his pocket. You know, he's that type of guy, right? Who struggled with the fact that and it's very true this, by the way, that the arts are very under-supported and that he was struggling really, despite his talents. He had huge talents. And I mean he never whined about that, but you could tell there were things that he were eating them up quite slowly and surely. And he was pissed off, depressed, upset quite a lot of the time about that stuff, right? And that turned into other things, in my view, right? And this is just an opinion, but it turned into other things, like it led to a place where I think he got to this dark place and full psychosis. When I look at that and my grieving process, I was almost talking to myself, going, well, he wasn't in the right place, he wasn't in a place where you could connect for many years in in his leading up to his death, he wasn't really in a great place. So it was always going to be difficult that connection anyway, actually. And certainly psychosis, having learned more about it since and at the time that he was going through it, is is a horrendous thing. So dangerous, man. Incredibly difficult, incredibly difficult thing to live with, deal with the people around him having to deal with. And certainly to live with. Again, it maybe helps a little bit with the grieving process. It was very different scenario with Matt, right? So so with Guy, it's not like he'd always suffered from mental health issues his whole life, not at all. He was a really great personality character, interesting person, really interesting person, real cool guy, right? Everyone described him as just a really cool guy, right? But it wasn't so shocking because of what he'd been going through those latter years, and again, of course, the psychosis, it wasn't as shocking to me what he had done, and the aftermath was therefore more about sadness, about that relationship. The grieving was very different. I understood it, I could understand where he had got to, and I could accept that in a way. So it did help with the grieving process in that sense. But with Matt, it was very different because Matt I had a clearly a very different relationship with. He plummeted so quickly, it was far more shocking in a way. It was a very different emotion. And so in February, literally February the 16th, 2023, my brother had died of suicide, and and I learned that from his ex-girlfriend who called me in tears at the scene. I was in the Isle of Wight, it was a hell of a whirlwind of a time, it was shocking and and horrendous. Literally two months later to the day, hearing on the phone, same news, but to a person that was a very different relationship with, it was a complete and utter different emotion. It was a different emotion. It was a complete and utter shock that was jaw-dropping. I think that's really important to talk about. You know, when I talk to people about mental health and what I describe often as mental fitness, how to look after your mental fitness and these things, every issue is different. Every issue is different, and every death by suicide is completely and utterly different often with people going through different stuff. It's not just somebody having depression and they go, Oh, that's it, I'm out. There are so many different variations and nuances, and no one can suggest there's a pin that pinpointed to something in itself.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:46

I want to talk about Matt the person now before we talk about your recovery from all of this, mate, because you've spoken so much about Matt already, but what made him special to you?

SPEAKER_00 1:03:59

He was very exciting as a person. We complimented each other very well. He was much more gregarious, much more of a showman than me, which I loved, right? He's great to be around. And we really respected each other. I know I respected him, and I know he respected me. There was that mutual respect that was a great thing to have. And so for me, he was somebody who was intriguing in his ways, deeply annoying in many, many ways as well, right? Somebody who's that gregarious and I guess I didn't want to say maverick, quite maverick. The other side is sometimes fucking annoying, even very annoying his personality as well. You know, he made it very known when he was not very happy and would be deeply hard to manage. He was he was a very hard person to be around sometimes as well, and on the bad side, but he was sort of right up there with his chest out, being like, take on the absolute world some days, and then some days he'd be right down there. And there's something in that, right? That personality type, which is exciting, but also very difficult, right? Very difficult sometimes. We'd have clashes. He was a friend, he was a mate. We did a lot of stuff together in building that business, and it's a huge bond you have there. We had a lot of fun. It was some fun, funny, interesting moments traveling around the country or the world. So he was yeah, he was a he was a mate. He was a mate who I thought was brilliant at what he did.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:30

When it comes to recovery, the most interesting part of our conversation off airmate was around this discussion. And you said it was only because of Matt's death that you took positive action to address your previous mental health struggles. And in your words, it was the excuse you almost needed. What did you mean by that?

SPEAKER_00 1:05:48

Yeah, it's interesting, and it's definitely true. It felt like unfortunately, the stigma around mental health issues is still very prevalent. And I'm not embarrassed to say actually, but I was definitely in that place of keep calm and carry on style, you know, like it's you go again and deal with life's up and downs and you're cool, just get on with it type mindset. And I believe wholeheartedly that it's actually unfortunate to say this, but that sort of gave me that excuse in a way. It gave me that shove to say, no, you're not actually all right. You've got issues that you're not dealing with. Things like certain anxieties that I didn't necessarily know about in my twenties. I d I g I guess you sort of some people I certainly did kind of floated through my twenties, slightly, you know, parting a bit too much, probably not trying to hide or or create armour necessarily, but kind of getting through it, maybe a bit pissed here and there, lots of parties, lots of going out, you know, still playing sport, and kind of get through your twenties. And, you know, started a young family when I was quite young, really, relatively in my early 30s. That takes a lot of your time and your mental space. And it unfortunately or fortunately, whichever way you want to look at this, it's often when you get to I call myself middle-aged really, you get to an age where you can maybe do a bit more introspection and and and look at things. And yes, I would look back and go, actually, no, you I wasn't all right. You know, there were moments I had where I had certain anxieties that led to a panic attack that I didn't even know was one at the time. Didn't even know in my mid-30s that I was having that. I literally didn't know what it was. And you sort of just carry on, or I did anyway, and sort of put it to one side, carry on. And so with what happened there, it kind of gave me that nudge, it gave me that excuse. An excuse that I use that pointedly because it sounds crazy to say that in a world that, yeah, we all talk more and people are more exposed to resources that can help them with their mental health. So why do you need an excuse? But it felt at the time that it was for me, it really felt like, okay, well, if I've just gone through these traumas, of course I can go and get some help. I'm not too embarrassed, a bit embarrassed to say that. That's what I needed. It gave me that nudge to go, hang on a minute. Number one, let's look into what's going on. What do you feel about this? What's going on in suicide prevention, what's happening out there, what's out there. And I did a lot of that work at that time immediately to speaking to people, going, How can I help? But really, it wasn't just altruistic, it was for me too, right? I wanted to know what was out there. How can I give back and help and work in this prevention area for sure, right? But also, what can I do for me to say you need to be talking more properly and more openly about yourself, you know, looking more deeply at yourself. And that was quite unquote an excuse for me to get into that.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:50

Let's reflect now on your mental health, Jenny, mate. So in recent years, I've changed my question that I'm gonna ask now from closure to peace as my knowledge about grief has evolved. So, when, if you have yet found peace with Matt and your brother's deaths?

SPEAKER_00 1:09:09

Oh, hard question to answer that. I feel at peace in as far as I've reflected on it a lot. You know, I've written things down about relationships with each individual, for example, and my relationship and the thoughts about them. And I feel at peace. With Matt, I often told myself, and I truly believe it, I still do believe it, but I know that it was part of my grieving process. I would say I was always there for him, and and I know I was because particularly in the period up to when he had his nervous breakdown, he was going through a lot in his head. We would talk for hours often, talk for hours about his feeling about risk and scared and what's he lost and what's what's good and what's bad, and we'd go around in circles quite often. And I know that I was there for him there. And so I told myself that a lot, but also uh because that helped me with my grieving process in a way. But it didn't necessarily equal leaving me at peace, if that makes sense. That was sort of part of my okay, well, we did that, we talked about a lot of things, this happened, that what could more of could I have done? It's part of that grieving process for sure, but it didn't necessarily add up to I'm at peace with it. And so I'm still going through that, I think. I feel at peace, but I I I would also feel that I'm still going through it. You know, I'm still thinking about it a lot. Not every day necessarily, but at certain moments, and I think what if, of course. So I'm sorry, but it's a hard one to be definitive on, you know, and and Guy, I've talked mostly about Matt there, but with Guy, yeah, it's it's still more tinged with sadness, really, that I didn't quite get to a place where I had a relationship that could talk more deeply about stuff with him. I'm not gonna use the word regret, but it's more a tinge of sadness, really.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:58

If Matt or Guy were listening to this podcast, mate, I'm sure they are somewhere. What do you think you would say to them and what do you think they'd say to you?

SPEAKER_00 1:11:10

With Guy, it would be just it would be you're a brilliant, talented, credible person that sadly you just didn't know it necessarily or believe it. And that's I wish I'd got that through to you. Uh I'd love to have got closer to him to be able to sort of really help him along that part of his journey that I think he was struggling with. And that let's get closer, be a bit more open about that. Let's get to know each other better, let's get closer, let's really understand each other and not just go to the pub and have a pint and and not really actually talk, but talk, talk. Love to be able to do that. With Matt, yeah, I I'd love to in a way just keep telling him about the good things we're doing. He was in it and he was so brilliant at it, and he'd love it. And just that he was somebody who was well respected, who was a really great wordsmith, somebody who could tell a brilliant story, such a skill set that can't be underestimated. It was such a talent to be able to build a narrative and be able to structure that in a way that was so compelling, and he was excellent at that. That I miss that, you know, that I missed that part of him being part of the group because that was the excitement being around him. But that, you know, again, I guess that I'm sorry that we couldn't quite get there in the end for him. Again, he did great things. He did really, really good things that were exciting and interesting and thought-provoking and leading, you know. He he was definitely a good leader in that sense.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:52

Got two final questions before we move on to our quick fire mental health chat. Similar question as the first topic, first of all. What has this mental health journey taught you about yourself?

SPEAKER_00 1:13:01

Lots, actually, that I was probably putting up too much armor, that there were things that I wasn't being honest with myself about, for sure. That's been the biggest thing for me is actually looking at myself properly and saying, hang on a minute, that's not right. That's not good what you're doing there. And you know, unfortunately, you get to an age and you realise how many barriers you have been putting up. Loads of barriers that meant that I was probably not very approachable in a way, or very great as a friend necessarily. Certainly in my, I'd say, mid-20s to early 30s, there was probably a period where I realized that I was again, unfortunately, it's just reflection, really, but this mental health journey that I've been on the last three or four years has let me look at that and go, yeah, you were definitely putting up barriers all over the place, going into things with your superficial sort of armory on, or armour on rather, that wasn't good for your mental health and it hasn't been long term because it makes me now realize that I was very, very close as well to a place that was you can call burnout, you can call nervous breakdown, similar territory. I was at that place 100%. And again, you can only really tell that when you reflect on where you were after the fact. And so I've learned loads about myself and how to be a bit more real with myself and looking more introspectively for sure.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:28

And as a final question, if you could go back and talk to the Tom who was just starting out at IMG making the teas and custard creams as a runner, the Tom who was about to embark on this new adventure with and friends with Matt and Julian, or the Tom who was in the depths of that double whammy suicide grief for his brother and his close friend Matt, what would you say to him, knowing what you do now, if anything at all?

SPEAKER_00 1:14:53

I would only really say lean into it. And again, quite philosophical, but certainly I now believe that absolutely everyone will go through these journeys of ups and downs throughout their life, right? There are ups and downs for everybody, right? It's how you what are you learning from it? How do you put that into practice? How do you lean into that so you believe that it's going to teach you something about yourself? That's really what I'd be saying. I'd be saying there's going to be more of you internally, mentally. Well, what is it teaching you? What are you learning? What is this meant that you have become and lean into that because it's slight tangent, but I look at this stuff and I think about my kids all of the time. As I started this, I might call a mental health journey of of introspection and looking into things about myself and other people and trying to create a more rounded understanding of what people go through, I've been through, etc. And I think about my kids all of the time with this. You know, they're teenagers now, and it's almost like a a mission of mine that not just my my own kids, but very much my own kids, but any kids and all people that they are able to be more introspective, understand themselves much earlier. Why are we waiting until a middle age? That's just me, I guess, but lots of people. Why does it come so late for you to really dig into your true self and who you can be and who you are and what you're learning along the way? So I think about them a lot when it comes to mental health. And I think about what we're doing as a society to make things better for the next generation so that people can talk more openly. There's a lot of open talk people say these days, but really there's a lot of superficial open talk, right? I mean it's a lot better, don't get me wrong. It's far better than 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago. Of course it is. We're scratching the surface. We still need to go much, much deeper for people to really get to a place where you don't want to have people to get to a nervous breakdown before they can start learning about themselves, right? And reflect on stuff and dig into stuff to make them more rounded individuals. So I have gone on a tangent. I'm sorry, I often do that. But I would say that lean in. Life's a journey, it's a roller coaster, and everything doesn't necessarily go your way, you'll be learn from it and it'll teach you something more about yourself. And I've certainly realized that now.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:28

We've come to our final topic on this conversation, Tom, and it's one I try and have with every special guest if we have time. It is a general Natter and quickfire chat about our mental health. So, firstly, how is your mental health out of 10?

SPEAKER_00 1:17:42

I am a 8.3 high number. And I love this out of 10, by the way. I am a talk club captain. Talk club is a good one. That's where I got it from. Yeah, it's Ben Akers and Co. who are brilliant. Actually, sorry, this is quickfire, isn't it? I'm making it a long fire. But he was really great with me when I first learned of well, actually, it was in the aftermath of Matt's death. But the talk club group were really important for me. And that's why I did talk club captain's training, and I love that question. So some quite high numbers for me, it's easy holidays. I've dated that now, but day off, kids seem happy, everybody's cool, and I've got my health and I've had a nice run, so I feel high.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:23

What age were you when you became self-aware of your mental health for the first time and you realised that the feelings you were having weren't physical and they were actually in your mind?

SPEAKER_00 1:18:33

Truly, only in my late 30s, probably.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:36

There's no right or wrong age, mate, definitely not. Was it a eureka moment or was it a gradual process? Gradual process. Can you remember the first or the most important conversation you ever had with someone about your mental health? So who was it with? What did you say? And how do you look back on it? Did it feel like the stereotypical weight had been lifted, or on the other, something quite easy, natural, and normal to do?

SPEAKER_00 1:19:02

I don't even know, really. This is a hard question to answer. It really was actually probably only in the aftermath, which is much more recent. So the talk club group, yeah, I might have to come back to that. There must have been another moment before, but really that's the only time I really probably talked.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:20

What things do you find in life, mate, that trigger your mental health, if any? So it could be things people say to you, could be a sound, a smell, a taste, a particular social environment, or have you not figured all of them out yet?

SPEAKER_00 1:19:33

It's funny because actually in later life, I wouldn't have said this 10, 15 years ago, but social sometimes now triggers an anxiety in a weird way. So it's, you know, I love social environments and party or or even in the business sense, networking. I I love that environment in a way. But in later life, I've felt that it'll do both things. Sometimes I'll love it, and sometimes it'll drive a huge anxiety where I'm not maybe feeling that good in myself at the moment, and it might trigger a, oh, I'm not up to this. Whereas I think in my earlier years I would never have done that.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:10

Conversely, what positive tools do you use to improve your mental health or help you feel better? Which ones have worked for you, and maybe which ones that you've tried but haven't worked?

SPEAKER_00 1:20:21

I guess as I got older and I started being much more aware of my mental fitness, you know, my mental health and how to support it. I've really worked hard at this. So running is an obvious thing. I do a lot more running than I ever used to, so I could think more and be with myself and be more comfortable about that, rather than just always doing stuff and trying to avoid some truths, probably. So that's one thing. I I think about my sleep in a way that is not just more sleep, but just how I get up in the morning. So having a good sleep and then thinking about I do some sort of breathing routines quite often. I'll often do attempts at meditation. I can't necessarily meditate, unfortunately, and I need to work at that, but I do exercises that allow me to get into a slightly different headspace that's really useful for my mental fitness. And I do a lot more of you know, gratitudes, writing things down. I don't actually stick to a journal, which I berate myself about often, but I do sometimes do it and it does help me, right? Writing things down, how am I feeling, you know, what what are my thought processes, what am I grateful for? So I do a lot more of that sort of stuff, and I and it really helps my mental fitness for sure. I also do talk club. So either as a talk club captain or most usually going to a talk club that I've come to really love and really good people there that I love talking openly with. And that's probably the most formal thing that I do is that talk club.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:45

What is the best book, or as I call it, mental health Bible you've read for your mental health? Now it can be self-help or mental health related, but it doesn't have to be. It can be fiction, anything you want.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:59

There is, I can't tell you the author, but there's a book about I might have to come back to this one. There's a book about literally about grief that I read that I really felt was useful. There was a book that oh my god, not David Niven, because he's the old 1920s acting. John Niven, the actor. John Niven, who wrote about Brother Dying, and there were parallels between their relationship and my relationship, my brother. That was a really interesting and thought-provoking book for me. But actually, there's no real one book, honestly. I found Matthew Haig's book about depression interesting.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:36

Reasons to stay alive, yeah, yeah. It was one of the first I ever read.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:39

Really interesting book that allowed me to try and understand depression a bit more. A guy obviously had suffered from for many years. Because it's so hard for somebody outside looking in to try and understand that feeling of depression. I think he was the first person I've ever read on that subject matter that really brought things to life in a way to really try and interpret things better.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:59

Yeah, I give it to everyone who's like wanting to really start. I guess like a starter for 10, basically, that book, which is great.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:05

Yeah. Fantastic read, it really is. But really, aside from literature in that sense, I've done a lot of podcast listening and that's been really great for me. I've loved and really enjoyed Feel Better, Live More with Dr. Rongan Chasidji, which was in the aftermath of those deaths, was actually a really interesting podcast for me because there were lots of subjects that I hadn't really delved into properly and some good takeaways for me. That was an important podcast for me that I really digested a lot of. I've now found that you've got to go away from those things and then come back in and dip in and out, actually. So, yeah, a few things there.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:39

We spoke about putting one foot in front of the other earlier in the pod, mate. So now in 2026, if there was a mantra that in life that summed up your mental health, what would it be and why?

SPEAKER_00 1:23:53

Just accept that there will be ups and downs throughout. There is no one silver bullet or fix-all solve that you've got to continue to work on your mental fitness. That is the end. Full stop. Continue to work on your mental fitness and realise that you're not trying to fix anything per se to go away forever. I would say on that that clearly there's different levels of mental health, and there are certain things that people will need to fix or want to fix. But generally, day-to-day, a mental fitness for me is managing it and realizing that you've got to keep thinking about it actually, and keep being grateful about things and keep maybe doing a run, and things don't necessarily just go away and accept that. And that's the biggest matter is just accept it. Think about your mental fitness and don't just sort of stop if you're being eight out of ten for a month. It doesn't mean you're going to be that next month.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:50

One size fits one, not one size fits all, as my previous guest Mel Bradley says, that holds very much true for all the guests I interview. I've got two questions left, mate. The first one is what do you love about yourself?

SPEAKER_00 1:25:02

Horrible question. But for me, resilience and and by the way, that word probably sounds different to so many different people, right? But for me, the resilience in my mind is thinking about my mental fitness and working that sort of stuff and being able to pass that on to people in my own way, hopefully not in a prophetic, annoying way, but in a way that definitely brings people in. And I I love that. I love that. I do it with my friends, best friends. So, you know, believing that I'm on a journey and create having having created that resilience around that sort of aspect of my life.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:43

And as a final question, you can answer it any way you want. What more do you think we have to do to ensure men from all backgrounds, all social classes, all walks of life feel comfortable and safe in opening up about their mental health issues or just their general mental health or mental fitness, if most importantly they want to do it?

SPEAKER_00 1:26:01

Yeah, and they have to want to do it, right? Like anything, alcoholism, you have to want to get better. That's for sure what I've learned. Look, it's the obvious thing that everyone needs to keep talking, for sure, and that we continue pursuing that rhetoric that talking is good. Just the very fact of being able to talk about something you're feeling, truly feeling, is an amazing starting point. And could be the be-all or end all, by the way, just being able to talk and having somebody listen. So that is just saying to everybody we must continue on that train of thought, believing that talking is going to open up this world of mental fitness for so many more people than we could ever imagine. I would say, and I would temper that with we haven't necessarily gone past just scratching the surface. And I think a lot of people, and this is a bit of a sweeping generalism, I'm sorry, but I think a lot of people probably say, Yeah, but we talk more, so it's all cool. There's a talking and there's a talking, right? There's a talk.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:56

You've got to walk the walk.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:57

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You've got to walk the walk. But also the talking of going, I don't like the sort of celebrityizing a bit. Not that celebrities suffer from of course they can, you know. But there's a little bit too much, maybe I think of oh, yeah, I get bipolar. Oh yeah, Stephen Fry suffers from bipolar. Oh, yeah, I get that, yeah, I understand that, or or sort of put it in this compartment and you go, Yeah, I understand that, because people have talked about it. But you've got to go deeper than that. There's got to be more than that. There's talking, and then there's sort of understanding the depths and darkness and the the ugly side. The ugly side, right? People can talk about just oh, we're we're much all better off as a nation for talking and a world for talking. But you've got to get in, walk the walk, understand that there's darkness as well, right? It's not just fluffy. The talking is so important, we've just got to keep at it and get deeper and get people to understand that there are nuances. There are a lot of people putting labels and stuff these days, rightly or wrongly, there's great things to that, and there's also bad things to that, but there's some nuances that people need to understand that everyone generally will have a variation or a nuance on something. And so we need to understand each other and believe and listen. That's all.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:10

Well, that's a great way to end it. Tom, thank you so much for coming on the Just Checking In podcast and talking to me, brother.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:16

Thanks, Freddie. It was great to chat to you. Thanks for having me on.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:23

Well, that's all we've got time for on this episode of the Just Checking In pod. A big thank you to Tom for being my special guest, for letting me check in with him, and for telling me all about the life and death of his brother Guy and his close friend and former business partner, Matt. As always, thank you to all the vendors who've tuned into this episode. Remember, if you've liked what you've heard, please give it a share on social media by tagging us at VentsHelp UK. Tell your friends, family, or work colleagues about us and spread the word via word of mouth. If you're feeling generous, write us a review and give us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you like what we're doing and want to support us further, go to patreon.com slash venthelpuk or make a one-off donation to our PayPal. All of those links are on our link tree. That's linktr.ee slash vent helpuk. We hope to check in with you again very soon. And remember, guys, it is always okay to venture.