The strangest kind of good week

This week has reminded me of something I've been avoiding writing about for a while.

When the conflict picked up again on Monday and the schools closed, I went into the same drill we've done before. Reorganise the diary, reprioritise the day, cover the kids, keep the business moving. None of that is new to anyone reading this, and many of you will have your own version of it from your own life. What did surprise me was how quickly the exhaustion arrived this time. By Wednesday I was already running on the kind of edge I'd usually only feel by the end of a long quarter, and that was before I'd stopped to look properly at what we had actually shipped during the week.

Because the strange thing is, the work this week has been some of the best we've done in months. Last 2 months have probably been the best RedHolt has done in a few years being totally honest, but its been hard. I'd be lying to say it hadnt been.

We finished a framework agreement we'd been negotiating since the back end of last year, the kind of contract that takes months of patience and a steady tone to get over the line. The Marketing Think Tank went LIVE on LinkedIn for the very first time, drawing more than seventy registrations before we'd even gone on air, and the conversation from the panel was the kind you remember for a while afterwards. A new senior MD officially started in our commercial team on Friday, bringing with him an industry network that I think most of you would recognise instantly within media and broadcast. We shipped 6 thirty-five-page Career Blueprints to people who need it, with a podcast walkthrough as a companion. Multiple candidate processes moved forward, and three of them feel close to becoming offers.

And the new RedHolt website went live.

That last one I'm properly proud of, in the quiet way you only feel when you've been sitting on something for a long time and finally see it stand on its own. The site is a real reflection of who we are now, where we've come from over the last few years, and where we're heading next. It offers all the value we represent when it comes to the wider value of the OTTRED Community, not just recruitment.

OTTRED Alliances

One thing I haven't written about publicly until now is OTTRED Alliances, which has quietly become the most exciting thing we've built in 2026.

The idea came out of a problem I kept hearing about from operators all over our community. A lot of companies in the media and media tech world want to generate reach in markets or in domains of professional expertise where they can't justify the headcount, and the traditional answer to that is to either hire someone you can't afford or to do nothing at all. Neither response is a good one, and over time it leaves a layer of opportunity sitting on the table that nobody is touching.

What we've started doing is different. We're mobilising small teams of OTTRED local members, people who already know the market, already have the relationships, and already operate in the right rooms, and we're wrapping them in a structured commercial framework that lets them go and represent a platform or a vendor properly in their region.

The vendor gets the reach they couldn't otherwise afford. The members get tangible commercial value out of the relationships and the time they were investing into the community anyway. Both sides win. The work is shared.

The first one we've stood up is in South East Asia, taking a platform into the region through telco partnerships. We mobilised a team of six local members, drafted back-to-back contracts with the platform provider, and inside the last three weeks the team has developed a rich and healthy pipeline and held a number of face-to-face meetings that simply could not have happened without people on the ground.

It's still early. The model is in beta and we're still learning what to standardise and what to leave flexible. But the core principle is exactly what OTTRED was built on, relationships matter, and watching those relationships translate into real commercial activity for the platform and for our members is one of the more rewarding things I've watched unfold this year.

Alliances will be one of the three strategic pillars for each of the new regional Managing Directors as they come on board, including the one who started this Friday. I'll be writing about it in much more depth as 2026 unfolds.

Now the part I've been avoiding.

The reality of a week like this is that Amanda and I run a life that's already operating at capacity. Four boys, two businesses, a community of thousands, two phones each, and a diary that runs across three time zones before most people start lunch. Most of the time it works, and we've built it to a point where the rhythm is its own kind of stability. What it doesn't have, and I think this is the bit I've only just allowed myself to articulate and recognise, is a buffer.

When something else needs accommodating (like schools closing) we have very few spare hours to absorb it. We have to take time away from somewhere else, and the somewhere else is inevitably part of the ecosystem of stability and balance that we have learnt to perfect. The work. Our health. Time with each other. None of those things mind being briefly displaced for a day or two, but when it happens for a week the cost compounds quickly, and we have really felt it due to the consequences caused by the regional conflict over the last few months.

I've been writing this newsletter for a few weeks now and I'm saying this because it's true, and because I think a lot of people who are building businesses around families are quietly carrying the same thing without naming it.

This isn't a complaint. It's me being openly honest about the realisation. Better to recognise it than deny it, right?

We've built a life that's so full of things we want, there's very little room left for the things we can't predict. I don't yet know what we do with that observation. Maybe nothing changes, and we accept it as the price of building something that moves as organically and with as much momentum as OTTRED does. Or, maybe something does need to change, and the next year be about deliberately reintroducing slack into a system that has run without it for too long.

Either way, I felt it this week more clearly than I have in a long time. Maybe I'm just getting old enough to see how much recognising things like this really matter and calling it out.

My week in statistics

A snapshot from where I'm sitting on Friday afternoon:

5️⃣ school days lost to closures

🤝 11 candidate interviews coordinated across 4 European clients

✍️ 2 significant contracts signed and finalised

🏆 1 long-running framework agreement, finally over the line

📺 1 first-ever LIVE LinkedIn webinar, with 70+ registrations before air

📘 6 Career Blueprints shipped, 35 pages, with a full audio companion

🤝 6 OTTRED local members mobilised in our first Alliance pilot in South East Asia

🌍 7 cities I took calls into without leaving Dubai

📈 47,254 LinkedIn impressions from the prior 7 days

🚀 1 brand new RedHolt website

4️⃣ boys at home, full time

💙 1 wife holding the whole thing together with me

A pretty full picture for one week.

Three things to take away

If I had to pull three threads from this week for you, these would be them.

The first is that same product, new buyer is the most useful frame I've come across for what's happening in media tech right now. We talked about it on the Marketing Think Tank LIVE this week and it took the room's energy from the very first minute. If you sell into this industry and your conversation hasn't really changed in three years, it's a frame worth sitting with for an hour or two. Here is the link to the Linkedin LIVE that our OTTRED Marketing Think Tank Leaders hosted yesterday evening (https://www.linkedin.com/events/7456913369573371904?viewAsMember=true)

The second is that the new RedHolt website is up. Go and have a look when you get a moment. It tells you who we are now in a way the old site was no longer able to, and it gives a much clearer picture of what we offer beyond pure search. Please let me know what you think (www.redholt.net)

Take time for the things that matter. When people think of money being the most important thing that exists, my counterargument is always that time is way more important with it. What you do with your time after recognising its importance is the thing that makes the difference.

That's it for this week.

If your week has looked anything like ours, kids at home, schedules in pieces, business still moving, I see you. Have a great weekend if you're getting one. 💙

Chris