This millennial CEO grew up with a heroin addict dad. Now he’s running a multimillion-dollar agency

• This millennial founder got his start working alongside Diary of a CEO’s Steven Bartlett, before launching a rival multimillion-pound marketing agency of his own. But before his rise in the agency world, Sam Budd was grappling with the trauma of his brother’s death, battling school expulsions, and visiting his homeless father under motorway bridges. Now he tells Gen Z they can emulate his success by making the most of every single person they meet.

Money makes money. Research estimates that just 12% of CEOs come from a working-class background. And the startup world is no different: Entrepreneurs without wealth or connections face an uphill battle for funding—without the capital, connections, or safety nets their privileged peers often take for granted.

Sam Budd is an outlier. He had a rough start to life—expelled from school multiple times, with a father battling heroin addiction and an alcoholic stepdad.

“My dad was a heroin addict, and my half-brother was in foster care. It was very heartbreaking to be a part of that,” he recalls to Fortune. “As I was growing up, I had to deal with my dad being under bridges, homeless.”

While Budd was silently struggling with the chaos, his brother ended up in prison for five years after a cash machine robbery turned violent. 

“The day he came out, he overdosed on heroin with my dad and died in my dad’s arms. Three years later, my dad got stabbed and beaten up based on a drug deal issue—he ended up dying in a gutter of pneumonia.” 

Then things started turning sour at home, after his mother remarried and uprooted the family to Cornwall, England. As his own anger bubbled away, Budd recalls getting increasingly out of control and even being arrested for fighting.

“If I’m honest, I felt really isolated, I felt worthless, I hated myself,”  Budd explains. “I got kicked out. I fell out with my stepdad. He ended up drinking himself to death and dying of liver failure.”

“I was systematically imploding. I couldn’t deal with it.”

Against all odds, the 36-year-old Budd is the high-flying CEO of his own £3.8 million-a-year ($5.1 million) marketing agency, Buddy Media Group. Founded in 2020, it’s gaining some serious steam. 

While the top independent agencies in Britain have a 36% growth rate, Buddy Media is achieving nearly 100% year-on-year growth and attracting the attention of major clients with Apple, Spotify, and Procter & Gamble among its 26 accounts. 

Budd’s big break began on the beach

As the adage goes: It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. It’s why, for those from marginalised backgrounds with zero corporate connections, it can feel like they’re locked out of the working world. 

But you don’t have to be at a networking event or scrolling LinkedIn to start making connections. Budd’s big break came thanks to connecting with people in the most unlikely of places: on the beach.

At 18, he was working as a lifeguard in Cornwall, Britain’s coastal hotspot. 

Although it wasn’t his dream job or industry, he made it his mission to talk to as many people as possible and ask for their email address. “But I would actually follow up with an email and say I would love to come and do five days’ work experience with you,” he adds.

In the end, it only takes one connection to open the right door—and that’s exactly what happened to Budd.  One person he connected with was hiring for Beach Break Live, a musical festival on the beach for students. And of course, given his local knowledge of the area, Budd was the perfect fit. 

“I didn’t just apply with a CV. I told a story, and then I highlighted what value I believed I could bring.”

The role meant he had to uproot to London, but from there he saw his career take off. He impressed the co-founder, Celia Foreshew, so much that she brought him on as a founding member of her next venture Seed Marketing which was eventually acquired by another agency, Amplify, “for several millions”. That’s when he crossed paths with Diary of a CEO’s Steven Bartlett. 

“I couldn’t afford to live in London. I took the job because I knew they would put me on a platform that would get me here,” Budd explains the snowball effect Beach Break Live had on his career. 

“What did that turn into? Seed marketing agency, which sold several million and I was one of the founders. And where did that take me to? (Bartlett’s marketing agency) Social Change. And where did that take me to? Launching Buddy Media. So it’s like, you’ve just got to find a way in.”

Struggling Gen Z: Befriend your friends’ parents

Budd’s not the only person to use their first job to land a big fish. Many Gen Z grads today are successfully trying their luck with strangers to get a foot in the door of employment. 

Gen Z grad, Basant Shenouda, landed an internship at LinkedIn—where she still works years later—by using the networking platform to see which conferences recruiters were posting about. She then waitressed at those events, armed with a stack of résumés to hand to hiring managers.

Likewise, 25-year-old, Ayala Ossowski used the 20 hours a week she was working at a pizza shop in suburban Washington to try to get poached by DC’s elite. She wore a baseball cap emblazoned with her university logo on the front to every shift and launched into an elevator pitch any time a customer asked about it. After a month of pitching herself while serving pizza, Ossowski landed her first corporate job.

But you don’t have to hold off your networking journey until after you’ve landed an internship or weekend job—where you can cosy up to bosses, like-minded peers or in Budd’s case, beachgoers. The world really is your oyster.

Without even really realising it, Budd had already created a springboard for his career as a teenager by impressing his friends’ parents.

“Maybe it’s my ADHD. I feel so much, and I care so much about everything, but what it has done is I’ve been so desperate for a dad-like father, I went out and saw other people’s parents as role models,” he says. “Weirdly, it is the most critical part of how I achieve success.”

He got close to a couple of his friends’ dads, and is still in their family WhatsApp group chat today. But one in particular, Jeremy Martell, took Budd under his wing when his life was crumbling—both figuratively and literally. 

Budd lived with Martell for 6 months, gained work experience as his assistant and credits him for shaping his entrepreneurial mindset. 

It’s why, he says Gen Zers struggling to launch their careers can emulate his success if they make the most of every connection they make—even if that’s just a best friend’s dad.

“You have all of it at your fingertips if you approach it with the right way: You seek to add value of some way, and most importantly, you ask for help,” he advises.

“How many people really have the courage to say, ‘Can you help me? I would love your support. I really respect what you do and I would love to change my stars.’”

Today, Martell is on Buddy Media’s board. “And he introduced me to our other board member, who’s the ex-financial director of Procter and Gamble,” he explains. 

“All of a sudden it all starts coming together. Now I’ve got people that I can call up, because I’ve invested time over the two decades, building relationships. Because really, life is about building relationships.”

Are you a successful executive who, like Budd, had an unusual start to their career? Or maybe you’re a Gen Zer who thought out of the box to land that first interview. Fortune wants to hear from you! Email: orianna.royle@fortune.com

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com