I Didn't Want a Better Job, I Wanted My Own Machine
Anton Kreil's third secret to financial success is to build and own your own infrastructure. I like this one because I managed to spend years doing exactly that without knowing there was a name for it.
In 2016 I was working for an oil company in South Korea. I'd already been out of Britain for ten years by then. I'd sold my flat in South London, left at 28 and spent the next decade working overseas in Spain, Saudi Arabia, Japan and South Korea. I'd built a career in oil and gas and I was making decent money. On paper everything was fine, but I was still sitting inside somebody else's machine. They owned the company, they had the clients, they signed the contracts and they owned the infrastructure. I supplied my time and knowledge and they supplied the salary. It's the standard arrangement and there's nothing particularly wrong with it. I just didn't want to do it forever.
So in 2016 I started my own GIS company. There was no team, international network or chief operating officer. There weren't 43 staff spread around the world. There was me, which is considerably less impressive on an organisational chart. Fortunately, I had something more useful than an organisational chart. I had experience, industry knowledge and relationships I'd built through years of doing the actual work.
My former employer gave me my first contract in Saudi Arabia. I did the work well and that led to another contract with another oil and gas company. I did that one well too, then more work appeared and the little machine started turning. That's basically how the company grew. There wasn't a moment where trumpets went off and somebody ran into the room carrying a giant cheque. I won work, did it properly and people gave me more work. It's not particularly sexy, but there's something I've always liked about businesses that grow because somebody does what they said they were going to do. There's enough bullshit in business already without me adding a motivational quote to the invoice.
For the first four years I didn't employ anybody. The business grew lean because it had to. I wasn't building an empire so I could photograph myself standing in the reception area. I was building something that worked. Four years after starting the company, I employed my first member of staff. That person is now my chief operating officer. I love that part of the story because it tells me more about what we've built than any company valuation does. Somebody joined when the thing was still tiny and is now helping run a company of 43 people.
Then COVID arrived, and for a lot of businesses it was like somebody throwing a wardrobe down the stairs and asking everybody underneath to continue with the meeting. For us, something different happened. We built through it. Because the company was still young, we didn't have decades of corporate furniture strapped to our ankles. We weren't carrying huge offices, enormous fixed costs and an IT system designed when fax machines were considered exciting. We built around lightweight cloud infrastructure, worked virtually and kept overheads low. Instead of constructing a company like an office block, we built something closer to a network.
That decision has stayed with us. Today there are 43 people in the company. Most are based in Seoul, which remains the centre of the business, but we've also got satellite offices in Shanghai and Tokyo. Then the map starts getting slightly ridiculous. We've got people working remotely in Russia, Vietnam, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico and the United Arab Emirates. I sometimes look at where everybody is and think this is a strange outcome for something that started with one bloke and a contract in Saudi Arabia.
But that's exactly why Kreil's idea of infrastructure makes sense to me. The company isn't an office and it isn't me. It's the system connecting all of it. People, clients, knowledge, software, contracts, relationships, cloud infrastructure and years of experience are joined together. Work can move through that system without everybody needing to sit in the same building staring at the same photocopier.
We've built a company worth millions of dollars from that, and I'm pleased about it. I'm not going to pretend the valuation means nothing while stroking my beard and talking about the richness of sunsets. Money matters and building something worth millions is better than building something worth fuck all. But the valuation isn't the most interesting thing the business has given me. The more interesting thing is what sits on top of it, which is my life.
I can live near the beach in Vietnam while the main business remains in Seoul. I can spend part of the year in Malaysia, go to Seoul when I need to and travel back to Britain to see my family. That doesn't mean I lie on a beach all day while 42 people carry me around on a sedan chair. I still work. There are clients, decisions, problems, contracts and emails. Some days the infrastructure behaves like infrastructure and other days it behaves like a shopping trolley with one fucked wheel. That's business. The difference is that I'm working on something I own.
When I was younger, I thought the important thing was earning more money. Income matters, obviously. Anybody telling you money doesn't matter has either got plenty of it or is trying to sell you something. But income disappears. You get paid, everybody arrives with their bucket and you start again next month. What I was building was something that remained.
Every client we won, every successful project, every person who joined and every system we created became another piece of the machinery. That first Saudi contract wasn't just money coming in, it helped create the opportunity for the next contract. My first employee wasn't just somebody helping with the workload, that decision eventually became part of the management structure and today that person is my COO. That's the machine getting bigger, and the important bit is that I don't have to be every moving part anymore.
If I'd built a company where everything depended on me doing every piece of work, answering every question and approving every decision, I wouldn't have built freedom. I'd have built myself a job with a more expensive letterhead. I wanted the work to leave something behind. I didn't want to spend decades carrying bricks around somebody else's building site and then walk away at the end with nothing except whatever wages I hadn't spent. I wanted some of the building, so I built my own. Not literally, obviously. I'm fucking useless with bricks.
It took years, and that's another part people don't talk about much because it's less exciting than the photograph of somebody pretending to work beside a swimming pool. Infrastructure is boring while you're building it. Roads, pipes and electrical cables aren't exciting. Nobody opens a bottle of champagne because the sewage system is working. But once the infrastructure is there, everything sitting on top of it becomes possible.
That's what happened with the company. The business came first and the flexibility came afterwards. The ability to live in Vietnam while maintaining a business in Seoul came afterwards. None of it appeared because I wrote freedom on a whiteboard and stared at it hard enough. There had to be machinery underneath it.
That's probably the biggest connection I see between Kreil's third secret and what I've done. When I left Britain in 2006 I knew I wanted a different life, but I didn't have the infrastructure to support it. I just had the instinct to leave. Ten years later I started building the machinery. I started in 2016 with one contract and no employees. Ten years later there are 43 of us spread across a fairly absurd collection of countries and the business is worth millions of dollars.
That's quite a long way from commuting into London to earn the money required to maintain a flat I hardly saw during the week. I could've spent those twenty years trying to get a better seat inside somebody else's machine. Instead I ended up building my own, and the best thing it produces isn't money. It's options, and I've become very fond of those.