The Day I Won the Biggest Award of My Career and Felt Absolutely Nothing

One afternoon in 2022, I walked into the bar and the team were laughing and cheering about something. I asked what was going on. They told me we'd been invited to the UK Top 50 Cocktail Bar Awards in London. That we'd find out our placement on the list at the event.

I felt nothing.

I acknowledged the news. Said something like that's great. Told them to figure out between themselves who was going. And then I didn't think about it again for months.

That moment, that absence of feeling at the arrival of one of the biggest things that had ever happened to my business, is what this is really about. Because it tells you everything about where I was. And it tells me everything about why so many founders won't have been able to feel their own wins for a long time.

The Plaque That Arrived in a Fog

A few weeks later the staff who had gone to the awards came back. They were carrying our Top 50 plaque. They were excited, full of stories, animated in a way I hadn't seen them in months. They told me we'd come in at number 42. They talked about the calibre of the bars on the list. Names anyone in the industry would recognise. The guests, the food, the drinks, how the whole night had felt close to magical.

And that's when it landed. Not the achievement. The realisation about where I was.

I had been so consumed by the business's problems that I hadn't even noticed a genuine win arrive. A team I had built had done something most people in this industry would consider a career highlight. And I hadn't let myself see it. Hadn't let myself feel it. Hadn't celebrated it for a single second.

I was devastated. Not by the news. By what the news revealed about where I was.

Sitting Behind a Car

To understand why the win couldn't land I need to tell you what was happening underneath.

It was 2022. Covid was still going strong. The rules were changing weekly. The customer behaviour that used to be predictable, the busy Friday between seven and nine, the bank holidays, none of it held any more.

I was taking on whatever I could myself to save money. I hadn't slept properly in months. My identity had become so fused with the brand that I couldn't tell where I ended and Ojo Rojo began. I was anxious. I was angry. I was self medicating most evenings to switch my brain off. My leadership was suffering. My relationships were suffering. My health was suffering.

There was a day during that period when I had to leave a shift halfway through, walk out the back of the building, and sit behind a car so that nobody could see me having a panic attack.

The owner of an award winning venue. Halfway through a service. Sitting behind a car so his own team couldn't see him in crisis.

That was where I was when the news of the Top 50 invitation arrived. That was why I felt nothing. There was nowhere in me for the win to land.

The First Real Sign

Looking back, the moment that plaque came through the door is the first thing I can point to in the long slow journey out of burnout.

Not a turning point. Not a dramatic decision. Just the first time the gap between what I was achieving and what I was able to feel became visible to me. And once it was visible I couldn't unsee it.

The work didn't happen overnight. The years that followed held many more moments like that one. Smaller ones, mostly. But each one was a reminder that something in me had to change. That the version of me that had built this couldn't be the version of me that kept building it. That I needed to learn how to be present again for the life I was supposedly living.

That work eventually became the framework I now use with founders. The morning routine. The non negotiables. The structure around energy and rhythm and self awareness. None of it happened immediately. But it all started with the quiet, devastating recognition that a Top 50 placement had arrived and I hadn't been able to receive it.

A Year Later

Fast forward to 2023. I'm standing in a basement style room in London. Two hundred people from venues across the country are around me. The presenter has started counting down a list from fifty.

What strikes me most, even now, isn't the competition. It's the support. Every bar in that room is rooting for every other bar. When a name gets called, the whole room loses its mind for people they've maybe never met. There's a kind of love in that room that's hard to explain unless you've felt it.

The countdown reaches 35. I'm smiling so hard my face hurts. We've done it. We've made it past the previous year's placement. From here on, whatever happens, we're already where we hoped to be.

Then he keeps counting. 25. The disbelief on Gemma's face matches the disbelief in my chest. 17. 15.

Ojo Rojo, Bournemouth.

The hugs first. Then the laughter. Then the noise of two hundred people screaming on our behalf, a wall of sound that wrapped around us and didn't let go. I have never in my life felt prouder of what a team of people had built together.

And the strangest part was where my mind went next. Because nine years before that night I was lying in a bunk bed in Mexico, scribbling notes in the dark about a half formed idea for a mezcal cocktail bar in Bournemouth. If you had told that version of me he would one day be standing in a room in London being told he'd built one of the fifteen best cocktail bars in the country, he would never have believed you.

That's what celebrating actually feels like when you can feel it. Not just the win in front of you. The whole journey arriving at once.

What Was Different

The difference between those two years wasn't the size of the achievement. A Top 50 placement at 42 is extraordinary. It was already something to celebrate. The problem wasn't the win. The problem was me.

By 2023 something had shifted. Not dramatically. Slowly and quietly through the work of starting to look inward. Of beginning to build rhythm in the week. Of paying attention to where my energy was going. The full framework wasn't in place yet. But enough had changed that when the moment arrived, there was a person there to receive it.

That's what celebrating the small wins is actually about.

It isn't about gratitude practices. It isn't about positive thinking. It's about whether there's a version of you available to feel the good things when they arrive. Because the good things are arriving in your business right now. Wins are happening. Achievements are being made. Moments of meaning and recognition are passing through. The question isn't whether they're there. The question is whether you can feel them.

If you can't, that's not a failure of the wins. It's a sign of what needs to change in the person receiving them.

The mechanism that lets you receive the good things in your life is the same mechanism that lets you lead with energy and stay connected to the people around you. When it's broken, everything is harder. When it works, even the small wins start landing properly.

But only if you're there to feel it.