Meet our Co-Founder: Josh

The Early Years

I was born in Walthamstow, East London, which builds a certain kind of resilience into you whether you ask for it or not. My parents divorced when I was six, and my dad moved to Cyprus when I was ten, so home life growing up was never exactly straightforward.

What I did have was family in abundance. I have two sisters, both far smarter and funnier than me, and we’ve stayed close through everything, all three of us now running our own ventures in one form or another. A lot of that comes down to my dad, still one of the biggest influences on who I am today, and my grandfather, a proper East London businessman through the eighties and nineties, who I suspect is where the entrepreneurial itch originally came from.

The Football Dream

Like most East London kids of my generation, football wasn’t just a hobby, it was the entire universe. I played to a decent level and eventually got to coach at my boyhood club, Leyton Orient, which was about as close to a dream come true as a teenager can get.

I’ll say it plainly rather than hide behind the usual excuses: I wasn’t good enough to make it as a professional. Injuries didn’t help, but the truth is simpler than that. I got further than most, which I’m proud of, but the gap between very good and good enough at that level is enormous, and I didn’t close it.

What football did give me, aside from a permanent soft spot for a struggling lower league club, was my first real education in how businesses actually work. I went on to run sports academies of my own, PE lessons in schools, summer camps, private academies attached to local clubs, and built them into some of the better regarded outfits in Essex & London. Coaching an eleven year old’s technique and coaching a business turned out to have more in common than I expected.

Finding Therapy

Behind the football and the family, there were harder years that led to me being homeless at seventeen, trying to figure out how to be an adult before I was remotely ready to be one. Anxiety came with that, and stress levels that, looking back, no seventeen year old should have to manage largely alone.

The NHS got me into therapy for the first time during that period, which I’m genuinely grateful for. But over the following decade, I went through roughly six different therapists, and every single time I started from zero. New therapist, same trauma, told again from scratch.

Building a Career

Eventually I knew I needed a change from the football world. It’s brutally competitive, and a falling out with a manager at the time pushed me to look elsewhere.

That’s when BusinessesForSale.com took a chance on me. No relevant degree, no conventional route in, just a self taught entrepreneurial streak from running my own academies. They saw something in that anyway, and I started in a customer service and admin role.

From there it was about a five year climb. Management noticed a knack for sales fairly quickly, which drew on exactly the same instincts I’d developed as a coach, understanding people, reading a room, knowing how to get the best out of someone. That sales run led naturally into Business Development, where I still work alongside the team today rather than purely managing from a distance. Old habits.

It was around this time that I met Alex, who my friendship with has grown and the conversations that would eventually become Soma started to take shape. Although we have completely different journeys, we have the same understanding of what good support should actually feel like.