How did we get there
For reasons lost to time and bad advice, it’s apparently important to have an “About Us” page. No one knows who reads them. If you are reading this, congratulations: you are now in the top 0.01% of the internet’s attention span.
Most of these pages are carefully crafted tales of personal greatness, written by the legends themselves. All about crushing it, hustling, and “maximising productivity” (whatever that means).
If I were writing a CV for some normal job, I’d just scribble a few lines—and frankly, that would be enough for me. As someone who once hired people for a living (and was, in hindsight, an idiot), I can say that most CVs are less informative than a sandwich wrapper.
So here’s ours:
We managed to survive seven years in a foreign country, having lost absolutely everything in our own. No work permits. No social safety net. Two kids. No money. Endless optimism. Still standing.
Resilient? Tick. Problem-solving? Tick. Capable of functioning under stress? Well, we didn’t kill each other, so… double tick.
Of course, the sensible people will say, “You shouldn’t get into that situation in the first place.” And they’d be right. We didn’t plan to. When we left Russia in 2012, we had a perfectly working business and a very naïve belief that life would continue behaving itself. So we moved to the French Riviera—the most absurdly expensive place this side of the Moon.
The country that gave the world Russian roulette and Russian mountains (that’s rollercoasters, not geography) does not disappoint when it comes to sudden plot twists. Overnight, everything went—poof. The savings vanished. Pride packed its bags. Sleeves were rolled. Ambitions were trampled. We got on with it.
And once you’ve hit bottom, well, at least you know the direction is up. Or sideways. Or backwards. But still—movement. More importantly, it’s a rare chance to see how life actually works. From underneath. And if you’re lucky, it knocks your overinflated head into alignment with the rest of the planet.
Oh, and right on cue, the midlife crisis showed up. Because of course, it did. Existential questions galore. Who am I? What am I doing? Do I want to become a person who owns beige linen trousers? Add in a global pandemic, a war, cancer, and other party favours, and you’ve got yourself quite the bingo card.
So yes—we’ve been through a bit. And somehow, we’re still cheerful. Sort of. And out the other end of this long, weird life wash, we’ve ended up here. Doing something we’re good at and—brace yourself—actually enjoy.
We swore never again to start anything just for the money. Yes, yes, we know—every motivational speaker ever has said, “Find what you love and turn it into a business.” Well, we did a bit of soul-searching and agreed that our true calling is lying on a floatie in a pool, sipping rosé on ice and watching the clouds. Unfortunately, nobody’s hiring for that role.
So instead, we leaned into the one thing we’ve always done absurdly well: organising journeys and looking after people. Really well. Like, frighteningly well. We’ve led such good trips for our friends, relatives, and often people we barely knew that entire groups of strangers have ended up best friends. Still sending each other Christmas cards. Still wondering how the hell they ever clicked so well.
So this is us. Doing the one thing we know how to do, in the way we think it ought to be done. And it only took ten years of chaos to let ourselves admit it.
About our team
No office. No secretaries. No staff. And may it stay that way for as long as humanly possible. We work with people. Not furniture.
Everything we do—we do ourselves. Us two. And the kids. Family business in the rawest form.
Sometimes we bring in close friends we trust with our lives. But mostly—we prefer to keep it personal. Because then, it actually is.
Our principles
In life and in work (not that they’re different), we live by a few basic principles. We try to stick to them. The kids pick them up by osmosis. At least, that’s the hope.
- Lies are exhausting. They take ages to maintain and always make you look like a plonker.
Marketing is a dark art that will destroy the planet faster than Elon Musk and a flamethrower.
Family, friends, books, art, nature, and travel are the good stuff. Everything else is usually just someone trying to sell you a face cream.
You start to die the moment you get bored with your own company.
There are far too many people “adding value” and nowhere near enough growing proper tomatoes.
Show us what you eat and how, and we’ll know whether we want to talk to you or not.
The only real conversations are honest ones. If we’re faking it, we’d rather be gardening.
We’re not proud of “unparalleled service levels” or whatever else LinkedIn says we should care about. We just do the job as best we can. And if something goes wrong, we fix it. Fast.
We’re not here to change your mind. We’re not missionaries. Though yes, if the world ran a bit more the way we like, it’d probably be less dreadful. But instead of shouting about it, we just try to make our tiny corner nicer.
If more people did that—and fewer tried to shout each other into submission—we might actually get somewhere. Or at least have better tomatoes.