Brad Burton is a professional speaker, entrepreneur, and small business expert.
It wasn't always like this, he was born in Salford, Manchester and was brought up singlehandedly by his mother after his father left the family home at a very young age.
During his school life, Brad was the class clown, leaving with no qualifications. After school, Brad joined a YTS (Youth Training Scheme) working on a computer support desk for a company in Salford and then he secured what was, at the time, his dream job working in a computer games shop in The Arndale Centre in Manchester.
As luck would have it, through the shop he met people connected with the games industry and talked himself into getting a job as a games reviewer on a magazine, appearing over 50 times on TV in the early 90's on gaming shows on Channel 4 and Sky One.
Unfortunately In 1995, things took a turn for the worst, and 2 bullets shot through his bedroom window
meant that his Salford home could no longer be home. The next day Brad fled to Somerset.
Depressed, he ended up spending years on benefits and dabbled with drugs, before getting a job and going on to meet a local girl whom he later married and began to turn his life around.
After a career in marketing, Brad made the decision to do something different and set up his own business. With £25,000 in personal debt, he worked weekends delivering pizza’s to keep his business afloat.
He came up with a different and more disruptive concepts of business networking, 4Networking. His vision was to provide a fresh way for small businesses to do business which involved community, support, fun, accountability and which was modern, colourful, outspoken, forward-thinking and internet ready.
Brad created a culture and ethos of business networking that was 50% social, 50% business and it worked a treat and still does to this day!
That was twelve years ago and 4Networking now has groups across the UK, with more than 5,000 events taking place every year. Brad stepped away from the daily running of 4Networking ten years ago, in favour of bringing in a high-level management team, however as the founder of the company Brad is still very much the key decision maker in the direction of the business.
Brad is also the author of four best-selling business and is the highest rated & reviewed 5* Amazon business author.
An entertaining, humorous, thought provoking, high energy, motivational speaker, you'll find out, that winning at life, is a whole lot more important than coming first in business. Brad now trains others to become masters of their own stories at his Bradcamp, runs a personal development programme Now What?
"Beneath the bluff exterior of the self-styled 'bloke from Manchester' in a shrewd business brain" - THE TIMES
"Brad has this sometimes brutal ability to refocus your head on what's important in life and in business" - GARY TURNER - MANAGING DIRECTOR OF XERO
"Brad's a spectacularly direct, honest and inspirational author for today's rapidly changing business world. A true national treasure" - SCOTT MARTIN - FOUNDER OF COSTA