It's been six weeks or so since I last wrote one of these, and they've been six of the fullest weeks I can remember. A lot of airports. A lot of planning.
That's the theme of this one, really. While much of the country has been away making the most of the summer, our teams have spent August getting ready. Mapping out the run into Christmas, tightening up processes, making sure that when the last quarter arrives we go into it at full power rather than easing into it. The visible stuff comes later. August was the groundwork.
Here's where everything stands.
William James Wealth: first milestone, second one in sight
I'll start here, because it's the newest and it's the one I'm enjoying building most.
We launched William James Wealth to bring the same standard to wealth management that we've spent fifteen years building into mortgages. Proper long-term planning, no jargon, and advisers who actually pick up the phone.
We've now passed £5 million of assets under advice with a single adviser, and on current trajectory we expect that to double to £10 million by the end of the year.
Where the growth has come from
Almost all of it has come from our existing network here in Southampton, and a large share of that from self employed people.
That group has surprised me, though looking back it shouldn't have. If you work for yourself, nobody sets up your pension for you. There's no HR department enrolling you in a scheme, no annual review someone else books in. Income is lumpy, tax planning is more complicated, and the whole thing is easy to push to next year. I've met a lot of people who have built something genuinely valuable over fifteen or twenty years and have never once had somebody sit down and map out what happens to it.
What they've told us, more or less unanimously, is that they don't want a call centre and they don't want a faceless national brand. They want to deal with someone they can actually get hold of, and they want the name above the door to be one they already know and trust.
That's the opportunity. We've been part of this city's business community for fifteen years. People know how we operate, they've seen us deliver on the mortgage side, and that trust transfers. It's a genuine advantage and one you can't manufacture quickly.
The adviser makes the business
The other half of it is David Kiss, our senior wealth manager, who is exceptionally talented.
I've sat in on enough of his conversations now to understand why the referrals keep coming. He doesn't sell. He asks better questions than people are used to being asked, he explains things properly, and clients come out of a first meeting with a clearer picture of their own finances than they walked in with. That alone is rare.
The result is that referrals have been rolling in off the back of those conversations, almost entirely unprompted. People finish a meeting with David and pass his name to someone else. That's the strongest signal you can get in this industry, and it's worth more than any marketing budget.
Why the number is the right number
I want to be straight about what £5 million is and isn't. It isn't a headline figure. It's a start.
But it's exactly the start we planned for, reached faster than the plan said, and it tells me the model works before we put money behind scaling it. Growing a wealth business properly is slow by design. You're asking somebody to trust you with the thing they've spent a lifetime building, and you earn that one conversation at a time. I'd far rather get the first fifty clients right than the first five hundred wrong.
Customer outcomes have been excellent so far, which is ultimately the only measure that matters here. Get that right and the growth takes care of itself.
If you want to see what we're building, we're sponsoring the Hampshire Business Show on 22 October at the Utilita Bowl. Tickets are free, and I'd love to say hello.
Figurati: the busiest summer we've had
Figurati has just come through its busiest summer on record, up 12.5% year on year.
I don't want to gloss over what that took. This has not been an easy market for hospitality. Inflation has been grinding away at what people have left at the end of the month, and eating out is one of the first things to feel it. Plenty of good restaurants have gone backwards this year.
Growing 12.5% into that headwind isn't luck. It's the team delivering the same standard on a wet Tuesday in August as they do on a full Saturday night. That consistency is the whole business.
Christmas bookings are moving quickly. If you're planning something, don't leave it too long.
Orange Rooms: the World Cup summer
Orange Rooms has been going since 2001, which makes it Southampton's longest running cocktail venue by some distance. Venues have opened and closed all around it. It's still here, and this summer it was rammed.
The World Cup delivered our most profitable month in a number of years. Tournament football is made for a room like ours. Big screens, a crowd that wants to be somewhere with atmosphere, and a team who know exactly how to run a busy floor. We planned hard for it and it paid off.
Nested Southampton: transactions up 50%
The property market has been anything but straightforward this year, so I'm especially pleased with this one.
Transactions at Nested Southampton are up 50% on last year. In a market where plenty of agents have gone the other way, that's a serious result, and it comes from accurate pricing, marketing that actually lands, and a team who negotiate properly on behalf of their sellers.
On top of that, we've been nominated for Local Community Champion. That one means a lot. Southampton is where I grew up and where I've chosen to build, and being recognised for what we put back into the city matters more to me than most things we could win.
Pagaro: boots on the ground in Spain
Pagaro is the one most people here won't know yet.
We co-founded it in Madrid to bring genuinely modern card processing to growing businesses. Latest generation terminals, dual 4G and Wi-Fi, faster transactions, next day settlement. Unglamorous, until you're the business owner waiting days to get paid.
This quarter we took on our first two employees in Spain, which is a real moment for any venture. It's the point where it stops being an idea you're running remotely and becomes a business with people in it.
The early results have been better than I hoped. We're delivering meaningful savings for the merchants we've onboarded, and just as valuable, they've fed back ideas that have genuinely shaped the product. Some of the best thinking has come straight from the people using it.
Building in a second country teaches you a lot. Different regulation, different pace, different assumptions about how business gets done. It's made me sharper about the UK operations too.
What's coming
A few things are taking shape that I'm not ready to say much about yet.
A lettings business, which we're aiming to launch in October. It's the natural companion to what we've built at Nested and something clients have been asking us for.
A venture in consumer electricals, starting with power banks. Different sector, same principle. A category where the standard is lower than it should be.
A clothing and sporting brand. This one has been in my head for a while and it's finally moving.
And there are a handful of investments I'm looking at in the market, which I'll talk about when there's something to talk about.
If you've followed how I build, you'll recognise the pattern. Find an industry where the standard is lower than it should be, then raise it.
On a personal note rather than a business one, my own crypto portfolio has had a strong run this year. I get asked about it fairly often, so for the avoidance of doubt: it's deliberately boring. Balanced, weighted to the more established coins, and I don't speculate. I'm not day trading it and I'm not chasing anything. I treat it the way I'd want anyone to treat a long term position. Decide what you're comfortable holding, then leave it alone. It's worked well precisely because I've done very little to it.
Where I've been
Travel has been, frankly, ridiculous.
Since the last update: Las Vegas and Louisiana. France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Belgium and Holland. Cyprus. And Johannesburg and Cape Town, which I'd been meaning to get to for years and which more than lived up to it.
I've never been able to separate travel from work. Some of the best ideas I've had have come from sitting in a restaurant in a city I don't know, watching someone do it differently to how we do it, and then wondering why we don't.
The one I'll remember, though, had nothing to do with business. I took William and my stepson Mikey to Tenerife for a week. Water parks, activities, no laptop. It was the best week of my year. I'd been away far too much, and getting that time back with them reset something.
There's more to come. Shelby and I will be in Bali, Thailand and the Philippines, plus Amsterdam, Louisiana and LA, with a FIFA closing celebration in there too. All of it going up on Travel with Schu.
The other side of it
I'm not going to write this update as though it's all been good news, because it hasn't.
This summer I lost my friend Ryan Keary. He was a close friend, a business associate, and in a lot of ways a mentor to me. It was sudden, and I'm still trying to make sense of it.
I don't have anything neat to say about it. What I've tried to do is hold on to the good of who he was, and carry forward some of what he stood for. He was generous with his time and his advice in a way that isn't especially common, and I've thought about that a lot since.
It has made me look hard at how I'm living. I've been working on drinking less. A bit of hypnotherapy, some meditation, and mostly just breaking habits that had become automatic. It's early, but it's going in the right direction and I feel better for it.
There's a bigger change coming too. Shelby returns to the US permanently in January, and we're working out where she'll be based and how often I'll be out there. It's a lot to plan. But if this summer has taught me anything, it's that you organise your life around the people who matter, not the other way round.
Life is more fragile than we act like it is. Take the trip. Make the call. Have the conversation.
Looking ahead
Q3 finishes strong across the board and I'm looking forward to Q4 more than any quarter in a while.
The hospitality diary is genuinely exciting. The Southampton Boat Show, then Oktoberfest, Halloween and the full run into Christmas and New Year. William James should double. The lettings business launches. Pagaro keeps building. Nested carries its momentum through.
August was for planning. Everything from here is execution.
As always, none of it happens without the people I work alongside every day. And the same two things drive me now as they did fifteen years ago. Build businesses that raise the standard in their industry, and put something back into the city I grew up in.
Right, back to it.
Chris