After decades working and living in inner London, our family moved to the West Country in 2022 in search of a more wholesome childhood, beach adventures, discovery of things lost, and space to do the right thing.
I loved London. It gave me my career - big brands, brilliant agencies, startups and scale-ups, and colleagues who sharpen you for life. Leaving wasn’t a rejection of any of that. It was more that, after enough years, the noise stops being background and starts being the soundtrack. Commutes that eat the day at both ends. Meetings about meetings. The constant low hum of busy that crowds out the thinking you’re actually paid for.
So we moved. And here is the part I didn’t fully expect.
Thanks to satellite broadband, modern tools, and places to wander and think, I have more time to be a better dad and better at my work.
The move wasn’t a trade-off. The things that were supposed to be the cost - distance, quiet, fewer people - turned out to be the point. Strategy is thinking, and thinking needs room. The best ideas don’t arrive in the gap between meetings; they arrive on a walk, on a beach, in the space where there’s finally nothing shouting.
In other words: what I do for brands, I ended up doing for my own life. Strip away the noise. Keep what’s true. It turns out the method works on humans too.
That’s a big part of why Crop exists. Dave made the same journey for his own reasons - he’s written about it in Designing a Different Life - and when we compared notes, the same belief was underneath both stories: businesses deserve senior thinking from people with clear heads, not layers and overheads. Two of us, out of the cities, doing the work ourselves.
The kids get the beach. Our clients get the clarity. Everybody’s in the right place.