Finding my way into a private members’ club

A six-year journey

London is one of those cities that can seem inaccessible at times.

I first started working in London when I was 19, and at the time, it felt magical.

It was 2018, and after graduating in July, I spent four long months trying to get a job, which, as an English Literature graduate with nothing much but retail and supermarket experience, was pretty tough.

In October, I was lucky enough to find a social media intern job, right in the heart of the city, in Oxford Circus.

I started my job at the end of October, so Christmas in London and the cold were setting in. Something about the cold makes the world seem serious and time seem more finite. When walking through Soho, I remember that I would look up at these buildings, at the top floors, and think – what is inside them? Who is in there? Is anyone in there?

Would this be a place I’d ever see?

Oxford Circus at night. The office was on Maddox Street in a tiny first-floor office.

From the end of October, with the cold setting in, I began the daily commute on the train from my home town of Canterbury. I would see these sights every evening when I left the office and I remember I would grab the Evening Standard from the man at the tube entrance.

Back then, before Covid, 9-5 Monday to Friday in the office was the standard, and there was no working from home. Therefore, I was commuting from Canterbury to London (2 hours there) and then from London back to Canterbury (2 hours back) every single day.

My day was essentially 5:45am to 8:30pm, five days a week. I would cycle to the train station every morning, board the 6:20am train to St Pancras, jump on the tube to Oxford Circus and be in the office by 8am. That was until my bike got stolen when I was at work (twice), so then I had to get up at 5:20am to give myself enough time to walk.

I was also being paid £950 a month and would pay £700 for the monthly train ticket. I was so embarrassed when I told people this. Especially as some people sailed into £30-40k grad jobs.

But anything was worth getting my foot in the door in the big city, and this was my path, and I held onto it.

A whirlwind of jobs

I crashed out of this job (a story for another day) and went back to working at a supermarket in Canterbury and picking up some freelance writing gigs online.

I had decided to put the big city vision on pause, and resigned to the fact that maybe this path wasn’t meant for me, or maybe I was doing it wrong. But after a few 10-hour shifts stacking crisps and cereal, I decided that I was being a wuss and started to get back into the excitement of London again. But this time I had to crack it.

Even though the job I had was stupidly hard and unrewarding, I couldn’t forget all the times around it. Those pints outside with all the lights, the tall buildings, the ocean of people and endless opportunity, jumping on and off the tube, the nights out.

After a flurry of applications, I landed a new job as a sub-editor in 2019 at a company called Stylus, based in Edgware Road.

Looking back, the timing of landing a job just before the Covid-19 pandemic was some unbelievable luck, and I held this job during lockdowns and all the way until 2021.

When London came back to life, a whirlwind of jobs came through my life as I kept chasing the next big opportunity.

• I went from Stylus to a company called Paysafe as a copywriter in 2021 (finally got to work in a skyscraper in Canary Wharf)

• In 2022, I went to Barclays as a copywriter

• In 2023, I went to Tide as an SEO copywriter

One day, I asked myself: What was I chasing?

More money, obviously.

But in other ways, I think I was chasing something else. I was chasing that feeling of having ‘made it’. That feeling of being rooted in the city at the top of the castle. That feeling of being in one of those buildings. Finding access to secret rooms that nobody else knows. Going places where nobody else had been and my peers could only imagine. Networks of people that would expand my thinking to thoughts I had never even considered.

Like a voyage across a sea.

Soon, a job wasn’t enough, and I realised the vehicle to this kind of wealth would need to be upgraded. This was when I started to look at starting a business online.

Getting into online business

I have come to realise that I am an obsessive person by nature.

This was my true motivation to start a business.

I had everything already with my job, except I had hit a dead end. Plus, I had started to realise what the true vehicle to great wealth was.

To become wealthy, you have to create a competitive moat around yourself.

This means that you have to have something other people don’t have, know something people don’t know, and have access to places people can’t get to. Then you work on putting a price tag on it in smarter and smarter ways. In my mind, this is

Unfortunately, I realised that as a marketing employee in his 20s, with no connections or money, I was going nowhere fast.

I was making a solid salary, with a bonus, but started to realise that the work I was doing was essentially pointless, and that I was building no wealth of any kind. Sure, I could save into an investment account and be rich in 40 years, but it wouldn’t make me rich in the way that I defined it.

From here, I started the pursuit of an online business, and became immediately hooked:

• I started a gaming website called Gaming Kingpin

• I started an Etsy dropshipping store

• I started this newsletter

• I started a website called Desktop Diversions

• I started looking into copywriting, agencies, and other business models

• I started trying to be a popular trader on Etoro

When I was at Barclays, I started the dropshipping store, which was a flash in the pan, until I started to work on something more sustainable, which was freelance copywriting.

This was the side hustle that started to pick up, which has now become Finnus today.

The first invitation

Everything changes when you set up as a business.

Suddenly, letters in the post start coming through about business credit cards, and HMRC starts getting on your case about random forms and payments they need.

Your mindset also starts to shift in an unbelievable way.

You have essentially ripped the guardrails off your life. No longer are you protected by a salary and stability, but neither are you limited by a boss or a company.

Probably for the first time in my life, I was actually free to do what I wanted.

This does a lot for the mind, and you start thinking about all the things you could do. This was when I started becoming more of a content creator, uploading my first YouTube video in May 2024, which is something I never thought I would have the confidence to do.

Opportunities to random events and calls began to come through.

One day on LinkedIn, I received this message:

I am very much the type of person to shoot first and ask questions later.

I could not be certain if this was some kind of mistake, or whether they had actually looked at my profile and considered that I might be the type of person to join a members’ club.

Long story short, I bought an outfit specifically for it, showed up on the day, tried not to look too out of place, and clearly made a good impression, as they let me in.

Becoming part of Home Grown

The first day I went in early January, I sat in a corner and spoke to nobody.

I just went to assess the layout, see what would happen if I went in, and find all the exits. I also had no idea what I was meant to be doing.

Imposter syndrome was bouncing off the walls inside me. That first day at school feeling never goes away (and in many ways, due to the age gap, people probably did think it was my first day at school).

But I always stick to the mantra of walking in like you own the place. I imagine I am the benevolent owner, and these are my guests.

Remember, everyone else is nervous.

After a few months, I had been to a few events, met some people whom I made friends with, and realised that lots of other people were new and had no idea what they were doing. I have come to realise this is the reality for most businesses/events/careers.

Now I feel very comfortable there, all the staff are very nice and relaxed, and lots of other members have been very welcoming.

The highlight was the other week when I managed to get one of their signature blue notebooks to add to my collection.

A beautiful notebook, courtesy of Matthew

Attending Meet the Members

Home Grown hosts frequent events called ‘Meet the Members’.

Meet the Members is a self-explanatory networking event. You enter a room by the bar upstairs, where there are a bunch of people who attend the club, and you start networking.

I’ve been to a few of these events now. There was a time last year when I went to several random business networking events in London, so my social anxiety for these events is almost non-existent now.

The event I went to last week on Wednesday had free alcohol for the first hour, after that they tried to pump the brakes a little by making it paid.

I met a variety of people that evening.

I saw James and Tony, two guys I’ve met before who both have a wealth of experience in marketing, and have also given me great advice.

I met a collection of new people too, a guy running a telecoms company, a guy who had just exited a car parts business, a girl starting a payments company, and a guy running the European arm of a communications business.

When the night was drawing to a close, the girl asked me and a bunch of others: “Do you want to go to Home House?”

She was a member there and was taking guests over for a drink and to view the place.

Home House is the original members’ club. It was constructed inside a house built in 1777, and handed down throughout the years to various people, before becoming a members’ club in 1998.

Home Grown exists as a business club spin-off, although it is quickly becoming a competitor in itself, and I learned about Home House’s existence only after I joined.

Walking over to Home House

Home House is just a short walk from Home Grown, potentially just a five-minute walk down one street.

I was aware of Home House’s existence from the website. Home House is known for its extravagant staircase with a nice aerial view, which I finally got to see with my own eyes.

In a place like this, you simply find a sofa and waiters begin to hover around you, making sure you have everything you need.

We had the good fortune of finding a wonderful waiter, who gave us free drinks.

As the others were talking, there was an offer to get a tour of the place, which the others weren’t too interested in, but I took up the offer.

The waiter gave me a private tour of the place, even in the parts that were closed that evening, and told me about his ambitions to leave in January and take a trip to Thailand before starting his business. We bonded more with each other, and the house was merely the backdrop.

When I came back, a jazz band was there to play for everyone.

I was told there is a man who goes there every night, and sometimes spends £1,000 in a single night on booze.

When he brought me back to the main room, I saw a lone old man passed out on the sofa, and I wondered if he was the guy.

I found a good seat and sat back to watch the jazz band play.

Finally inside

I was finally here. Inside one of those buildings that I never knew I could see. It seems like I worked for six years to sit in a chair in a specific part of the city.

I thought back to where I was six years ago, with a supermarket manager having a go at me in the back because I was stacking crisps too slowly. And walking up and down the bike shed after a day in London, feeling that sinking feeling after realising my second bike had been stolen.

My dream is to one day have a place like this for myself. Maybe not the whole place, but just one room like it. At least somewhere far away from any pain of long commutes, horrible bosses, colleagues, and stolen bikes.

I reminded myself of the delusions I had six years ago.

The delusions that I could have my own business and that I could be in a members’ club and be on the top floor of a Georgian townhouse building in Soho.

It made me realise that all the delusions I have now could also happen.

But these delusions get harder to keep a hold of. The world fights so hard to make them seem impossible. I remembered that fire that I had six years ago that made me get on a bike at 6 am in the dark, excited to just see London.

I have been feeling lost this year, and wondered if we all get a limited amount of fire from the day we are born, and I simply burned through mine.

Yet sitting in that chair gave me a flicker. Writing this has reminded me that the vision never left. For me, this is just the beginning. Brick by brick, I am getting there.