The founder of 4Networking lost a £2 million business in an afternoon, then spent four years being smeared online by a woman he had met for 30 seconds.
In an unflinching conversation with Richard Alvin, he describes the four seconds that nearly ended it all, and the platform failures he now wants the next Secretary of State to put right.
There is a moment, about twenty minutes into our conversation, when Brad Burton goes very still. We are talking about the period in 2022 when his business had collapsed, his stalker was posting fifteen lies a day across LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and X, and the platforms were responding to his complaints with cut-and-paste boilerplate. He is sitting at his desk in Somerset, the same desk he sat at then.
“Four seconds,” he says. “For four seconds, I thought I can’t do this anymore.” He pauses. “Luckily those four seconds happened when I was sat at my desk, as in another setting the outcome might have been different, either way it motivated me to go to the doctors and get some antidepressants. Hadn’t done them for 25 years. That just shows you how severe this was.”
It is a remark, delivered in the matter-of-fact Salford cadence familiar to anyone who has ever booked Burton for a keynote, that reframes the whole interview. Britain’s self-styled “number one motivational speaker”, the man who built 4Networking from a £25,000 debt and a pile of pizza delivery sheets in 2006 into the country’s largest face-to-face business network — was, on his own admission, four seconds from a very different ending.
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