Marvin grew up an orphan, raised by his mom and grandma. When he was eighteen, he met someone in a network marketing business, and they brainwashed him. Or rather, they reinforced in him a belief that took the form of everything else he'd do. You can achieve anything you set your mind to. He believed it. And when a problem came to him later, instead of asking "why can't I," he learned to ask "how can I." The brain returns an answer to the right question.
He went into telesales, learned to sell. Then one day he walked into a friend's office being run by a drug addict and thought, I could do this better. He started a publishing company with five hundred pounds borrowed on a credit card. Eighteen months later he had sixty staff across three offices in Manchester. He bought himself a Porsche 911, a speedster. Then the cash flow caught him. He was paying staff in cash every Friday while waiting ninety to one hundred twenty days for invoices to come in. The business looked easy until it wasn't.
Mindset and belief
When I asked what made him succeed, he said it was obsession and belief. He believed he could do it. And when a problem came, he asked how to solve it rather than listing reasons why he couldn't. The rest was systems and processes and recruitment funnels. But it all came down to mindset. He told me he's spent decades feeding himself positivity. Anthony Robbins, audio books, seminars. He reads The Magic of Thinking Big. He feeds his mind so that when he needs to call on the mindset, it's there. He curates his social media. He avoids anything outside his sphere of control because stress is wasted energy.
From collapse to purpose
The first company eventually failed. He lost the house, the car, the fiancée. He got to the point where he wouldn't open the curtains or the post. His mum suggested he apply for a reality TV show where participants would vote on the direction of his life. From ten thousand applicants, he got on. It was a turning point. He moved to South Africa, worked in a call center in Durban. He was finally in a majority brown country where he felt he belonged. One day he saw children begging for food. He gave them chips and they ran to share with other kids. That hit him. He realized the opportunities he'd had just because of where he was born. Healthcare. Education. The ability to read books and get brainwashed by Anthony Robbins. Those children would become farmers, have lots of children, and the cycle would repeat.
He decided to plant a billion trees. It took a few iterations to find product-market fit, but eventually restaurants became his channel. He partnered with a company that powers restaurant point-of-sale systems. Diners could fund a tree when they paid their bill. At his peak, he was planting ninety-nine thousand trees a month. Then COVID hit and restaurants shut down. He exited the business, sold his shares. It took sixteen months to recover. Now he's started a venture studio investing in content creators, helping people build products that benefit their brand and their users. It's not as transformative as planting trees, but he has purpose again.
