From burnout to breakthrough: The story behind the prizes

Blog #7
This is the story of how one question turned burnout into the biggest idea we’ve ever had, helping rediscover my love for what I do along the way!

Intro

Last summer, I quietly fell out of love with events.

It wasn’t dramatic. No meltdown. No crisis. After the chaos of our first proper season, I couldn’t even look at an event plan without feeling drained. Instead, I spent the summer thinking about the bigger picture. What is this all for? What am I actually trying to create? Where is this headed?

Then, on a random morning in November, a simple question changed everything, and helped me rediscover my love for what I do - through the idea that became our prizes for the upcoming year.

In this blog, I’ll discuss why we’re doing it and how I came to make this decision from both a business & personal perspective.

Falling out of love with Events

The idea for these prizes came from a simple truth: after last summer, I’d completely lost the enjoyment of organising events.

Events management isn’t something that comes naturally to me. I had no background in it before starting this venture, and last summer exposed every gap in my experience. The stress and chaos created a mental block around any event-related matter.

The best way I can describe it is this: imagine spending two months writing a 5,000‑word essay, only for the file to corrupt a few days before it’s due. That’s kind of how I felt, mentally, over the summer.

Eventually, I clicked back into the flow. But as I worked through the day‑to‑day tasks, something was missing.

Excitement.

The Question That Changed Everything

One morning, pacing around the kitchen, fuelled by Seth Godin’s Purple Cow and Jesse Cole’s philosophy of building fans for life, a single question hit me:

”What would be the dream experience for a group of friends who love playing cricket together?”

Not a good experience.
Not a well-run event.
A genuine dream experience.

One of the many inspirations behind how I had the idea in the first place!

It seems obvious in hindsight - almost embarrassing that we hadn’t asked it from the start.

The more I worked through what a dream experience would be, the greater my excitement and the wider my imagination.

The ideas started flying.

What if we sent a team on tour to Holland?
What if we sent ten teams?
What if their friends came too?
Imagine a few hundred people in Holland for three nights, how fun would that be?
What if the winner of that went to Africa?

The idea snowballed quickly.

And yes, this is a fairly accurate insight into my typical stream of consciousness!

A quick fag‑packet calculation later, and I realised it might actually be possible. More importantly, I realised something else:

I was excited again.

What kind of business do we want to be?

Images like this are my favourite! I will always remember that it was off my bowling that the 6 was hit that prompted this celebration…!

This rabbit hole brought to the surface a far broader question I’d been asking over the summer. It felt like one of those pivotal business moments which put into action the summer of thinking.

I don’t want to build something people just “kind of like”. I would like to build something people love. Something they get behind. A movement that normalises groups of friends playing cricket together as a social activity.

I see our prizes as a way to inspire action. The enjoyment that I know social cricket provides can then do the rest.

The pitch on which I got a first baller against the worst side I’ve ever played against. I have not lived it down.

When it came to deciding who would win the prizes, rewarding only the winners of the cricket tournament felt too obvious and, honestly, not aligned with what we stand for. So while performance still matters, the reward system is weighted far more towards teams that truly buy into social cricket; organising matches against friends, touring other universities, running nets, curry nights, socials, mini‑tournaments, and whatever original ideas they come up with.

The really important part I stressed to the captains when meeting them was that these were all things that my friends and I did whilst at university.

Reflections

Working through what the dream experience could be has completely shifted the mindset and direction of the company. It’s made me think more deeply about how we can create great stories for as many groups of friends as possible.

It’s also given the business a clearer purpose. I originally gave myself one year after graduating to see if I might be onto something, with no clear plan beyond this. However, as I’ve started thinking more long‑term, these prizes feel like a genuine eureka moment.

Now every decision runs through one filter:

Could this create a great story for a group of friends?

And that shift has brought back my enjoyment of running an events business.
We’re already seeing teams set up Instagram accounts, organise matches, plan tours - it’s exactly what I hoped these prizes would spark. Knowing that we’re going to create great stories for many groups of friends
has really helped bring the excitement back.