From toddler to strategic brand specialist, the creative life of Adam.
Unlike most three-year-old children, Adam Thorp’s passion for all things creative started with a professional focus, sitting under his father’s drawing board playing with Pantone Markers, Letraset and SprayMount.
Moving into teenage years, as we find with so many entrepreneurs, Adam struggled with the regime of school. His natural appetite to challenge and alternate ways of doing things was regularly mistaken for rebellion.
He started his first small business at the age of 22 but not knowing anything about business it failed, forcing him into employment in a design agency. Quickly rising to head designer Adam still felt governed, his creativity and vision stifled.
He left the comfortable position and formed a partnership to hone his business acumen and fulfil his creative vision. Growing the business and an enviable client list, he eventually sold his shares to partners, releasing him once again to follow an increasing interest in the true meaning of brand.
Fifteen years later Adam’s passion evolved from the world of design and advertising into the understanding of true brand and the way it can positively affect business at a much deeper level. Adam is now increasingly comfortable with the title ‘Brand Specialist’ his agency providing all the support services needed to fill gaps clients have in the implementation of anything Business, Brand and Marketing.
In the last decade, Adam has been through some tough personal times but is proud of the way he has managed to keep a balance, focus and the business going. Overall he puts this down to resilience and surrounding himself with great people.
While going through this mire, he used the tools and strategies he created to help other business owners on himself. Gaining clarity of where he wanted to be, he found that his 5-year plan wasn’t congruent with what he was allowing into his life; and for the past two years has made substantial and strategic changes which is creating echoing results.
The long-term goal for Adam is to create a suite of ROI focused products and services that any business, irrelevant of size or sector, can tap into to help them turn their business into a brand. He loves the world of brand, marketing and business as he finds joy in helping other entrepreneurs achieve their goals.
He feels his biggest challenge at the moment is time. As a single Dad of three young children, he refuses to fail as a father; while balancing his passionate desire to push the business forward, he rarely has time for himself. The time he does find, he spends with the others he loves and watches lots of films and challenging documentaries which is where he finds vast amounts of creative and intellectual inspiration.
One of the time bug-bares he has is the one that the government puts on small business to seemingly do their administration for them. “When paying employees, we have to collect and pay tax, national insurance, more recently pension contributions, report on all this and send on to HMRC”. He feels that if this burden were removed, business owners would have more time to grow and run their company. However, one of his consulting mantras is, “Learn to embrace what you can’t change”.
Adam is very clear on the difference having TI Accountancy onboard to manage his bookkeeping makes. He said it feels like an enormous weight has been lifted. Having someone that asked the right questions from the outset, that was unable to unpick the mess from the lack of passion and implementation he had for the paperwork has done wonders for his mindset while also recouping precious time. He says this additional chargeable time makes the TI Accountancy service free.
Historically he has had people in-house doing bookkeeping but always felt uncomfortable with members of his team knowing too much. After using TI Accountancy, he said, however big the business grows, he will never bring it back in-house. Giving TI Accountancy his bookkeeping was one of the smartest things he did in 2018!!
