I’m Angus Fraser, and I’m 71 years old, which is probably worth saying straight away, because everything else about what I do here follows on from that.

My working life started a long way from any of this. I trained in Hotel & Catering Management, & spent my corporate years in sales & marketing in the hospitality industry, latterly in senior & board positions with an international contract catering & services provider, which took me around Europe & the USA. In 2004, that career took me to Dubai, for what I assumed would be my last corporate role. Within the first year, I was made redundant — my third redundancy, as it happened, though I didn’t know at the time it would be the one that changed the direction of everything that came after.

I stayed on in Dubai for six years rather than come straight home, finding sponsors along the way so I could keep working legally, freelancing on marketing & PR projects. It was during that period that I was introduced to internet marketing & the early days of social media, including working alongside a mentor & helping out at some of the “Pitch Fest” events run for the local population by visiting gurus — pioneering stuff, looking back on it now. I returned to the UK in 2010, & registered Angus Fraser Marketing Ltd the same year.

I took early retirement at 55, with a final salary pension, & started running a cheese stall at local Farmers Markets. I still do it now, though less often than I used to, & it remains important to me — the weekly face-to-face connection with traders & customers, the income, & the link back to the hospitality world I trained in all those years ago.

Then Covid came along, Zoom became the way everyone communicated, & the idea of earning online returned as a real possibility rather than something I’d dabbled with in Dubai years before. I joined Nick James’s APM & Private Coaching programme once in-person training opened up again, alongside Zoe Cairns & her ZC Social Media Growth Academy, & AI was becoming part of the conversation around the same time.

Earlier this year, I paid a leading super affiliate a fixed fee to promote to his list across six emails, around the relaunch of Nick’s Internet Marketing Newsletter Monthly PLR, with bonuses I created & branded myself. It was my first large campaign, & I finished third on the WarriorPlus leaderboard, picking up 30 new subscribers along the way — a genuinely exciting thing to be part of, & a good result. But it also taught me something that mattered more than the leaderboard position: I need my own buyers list, one I can follow up with & build a relationship with directly, rather than relying on someone else’s.

I run Angus Fraser Publishing, Angus Fraser Marketing, & more recently Angus Fraser Online, all built around supporting people in a similar position to my own — over 55, thinking hard about pensions that don’t stretch as far as they used to, healthcare costs, & whether it’s too late to try something new. I don’t think it is, & I don’t think you need to be technical, or good at selling, or willing to spend your day on the phone or in Facebook groups, to build something that works for you. I know because I’m building mine the same way, one step at a time, alongside a cheese stall & a life I’m not in any hurry to walk away from.

If any of that sounds like where you are, you’re exactly who I’m writing for.