
Home Again
Q4 ’24 Letter // BY Cornelius
Dearest Reader,
It’s hard to believe 2024 has come to a close. Q4 was everything I needed it to be.
We signed new partners and nailed our final retreat of the year. A new gym, sauna, and workspace opened in our building. And I received some fantastic gifts and upgrades, including a new pickleball paddle and wardrobe for yours truly.
However, the highlight was spending Christmas back home in London with my family. It was my in-laws’ first-ever trip to Old Blighty and my first time back for the holidays since 2021. Honestly, it felt like we’d all lived a few lifetimes since then.
Everything’s changed, and nothing’s changed—that sort of vibe, IYKWIM.

Where it all began. Muswell Hill, N10.
After a pretty intense year, 10 days at home was just what the doctor ordered.
London’s one of the few places where I still feel like I can truly switch off.
I credit that to being back around my family, living out of my childhood home, and the 6 hour time difference. This trip reminded me how much I love Christmas in the UK and how messed up my last one was due to the 2021 Omicron scare.
Say what you want about the Brits, but our Christmas traditions are second to none. It’s the holiday we get right. From Christmas crackers and Boxing Day races to a cheeky 2-hour trip to the pub on Christmas Day for a pint. Every moment feels uniquely ours. Add the pantomimes, flaming Christmas puddings, iconic TV specials like Doctor Who, Gavin & Stacey, and the chocolate — it’s a dream.

Boxing Day. King George VI at Kempton.
I’ve long said that Christmas in America often feels like just a day, whereas in the UK, it’s a proper week plus holiday celebration. I feel fortunate to experience the best of both worlds—Thanksgiving in the USA and Christmas in the UK.
That said, this Christmas had a distinctly American twist. After 11 years of living here and officially having an American side of the family, perhaps that’s no surprise.
Case in point: Night #1 at home started with me staying up until 4:30 AM to watch Notre Dame beat Indiana in the first round of the CFP Playoff.
Thank you, jet lag.
Notre Dame’s season has been nothing short of a revelation, and this game was its crown jewel. Watching it with my dad and brother in the wee hours of the morning was an unforgettable experience.
It’s crazy and exciting to see college football making its way across the pond and entering the UK sporting consciousness. It’s been a long time coming.
College football is America’s best export. Period.
In my humble opinion, College Football is America’s best export.
As an avid sports fan, I’ve long said I find the regular-season NFL, NBA, and MLB boring. This is one of my most unpopular views—certainly not one to bring up at a wedding. However, I think people might just be starting to change their tune this season. The NBA, for instance, has become pretty indefensible. Viewership and ratings are down, the quality and intensity of regular season play are lacklustre, and stadiums feel more like places to be seen (Rashford) than true sports venues.
I enjoy the NFL Playoffs and the Superbowl. However, pound-for-pound, the lineup of fall CFB games (let alone the CFP playoffs) is far superior. CFB takes place on a better day of the week (Saturday vs Sunday) and includes schools, teams and players you can relate to. Professional sports have a horrible case of primadonna syndrome. NIL’s totally reinvigorated college sports, too. Players stay longer. The jerseys are better. Helmets are cooler. Stadiums are electric and better to visit. Few pro stadiums can even come close to the intensity of the 12th-man at Kyle Field.
Are my dad, brother, and I staying up until 4 AM to watch anything besides the first-ever College Football playoff game? The answer is probably no.
It’s crazy that we could even watch the game live on Sky alongside Notre Dame’s new season-long documentary Here Come The Irish. It is a reminder of the power of distribution in a world that yearns for every drop of our attention daily.

Shaken, not stirred. Dukes London.
London is far from a perfect city. It’s not working for young people, and is finally feeling the true cost of Brexit in the price and quality of its goods, labour, and services. However, it’s still a special place to call home and spend Christmas.
Where else can you enjoy spectacular meals at Westerns Laundry, Noble Rot and The Wolseley, sip on a delicious Vesper martini at a 007 popup and stumble upon literary treasures at the country’s oldest and royal’s official bookstore circa 1797?
Anyway, that’s enough about me. Onto business.

Stripe Press. Hatchards, London.
Advise.
Q4 is always a critical time for our advisory arm.
It’s a period of clarity and reflection driven by the necessity and intensity of organizational year-end planning. This is when budgets, headcounts, promotions and strategic initiatives are locked in for the following year. You have to nail it.
For us, it’s the time to promote the frameworks, methods, and ideas that we believe create real value in the knowledge economy for individuals and their teams.
Our partners rely on us to distil an entire year’s worth of work into actionable reviews for their executive teams and recommend systems that can be easily implemented to improve performance, culture, and morale. You don’t need me to tell you just how much content this space has—it’s noisy, to say the least.
Our value is helping our partners discern the signal from the noise by “stacking” multiple frameworks into a bespoke system that enables them to work clean.
It is one thing to stack Amazon’s infamous Weekly Business Review (WBR) with Tony Schwartz’s Energy Audit and Noah Kagan’s T3B3. However, it is another to do so in a way that is low-lift, high-value, and exciting to execute.
That’s the magic touch required to design operating systems that work and what’s required to make abstract dreams, goals and ideas consistently actionable.

Visuals that speak 1,000 words.
One persistent theme in our conversations of late is navigating the return-to-office (RTO) challenge. Mandates from leading organizations like JPMC, Amazon, and the WaPo feel like they’re becoming daily occurrences. How should you respond?
The real challenge — and $1B question — isn’t how or when to bring people back to the office but why they’ll want to stay there long term. It’s about creating compelling reasons for your people to want to exist in the physical spaces you own.
We’ve spent the last six years perfecting the art of delivering high-impact physical experiences that advance personal and professional goals. 27 retreats and 100s of dinners, tastings, live podcasts and talks later means we have a long track record of curating intimate, inspiring, and productive spaces people pay to be in.
Thus, we think we’re well-positioned to help you curate the spaces and places your people would happily get paid to be in.
RTO is about creating spaces that make your people’s physical presence feel essential to upward mobility and career development. It’s that simple, and that difficult.
The “pitch” must go beyond better access to information. What people want and need are deeper connections, new relationships and a true sense of belonging.
As we look ahead to 2025, I’m eager to help organizations deliver on the latter by curating spaces that 1) people would pay to be in (let alone get paid) and 2) that drive the long-term development and loyalty all executives so desperately seek.

A festive walk down Oak St. Chicago, IL.
Analyze.
This past quarter, we partnered with an 11-unit hospitality group featured in the Michelin Guide. It felt like a pivotal milestone. To date, we’ve worked with a few independent and multi-unit operators. Yet working with a group of this size, stature, and growth is a totally different ball game. It’s honestly been fantastic.
This experience has helped me realize that the best way to scale is to build liquidity city-by-city, like Uber did. Our drivers and riders are hospitality groups and their guests. Building track record in one city allows us to create density, relevance, and proof of concept before scaling outward. It’s a strategy rooted in extreme focus.
I also feel like we’ve found our ideal customer profile (ICP). Our offering shines with hospitality groups offering private events, loyalty programs, and reservations simultaneously. These groups have the infrastructure, resources, and human capital to implement our recommendations, which is what ROI ultimately requires.
Chicago is the perfect beachhead for this strategy. With its vibrant dining culture, diverse set of larger operators (~20), and reputation as one of the top food cities in the world, it provides the perfect environment to refine our model. It’s also home.
A place where true hospitality still matters as much for the guest as the group.

View from the villa. Montage, Laguna Beach.
Convene.
We ended the year with a bang, curating our 27th retreat since 2019 in November at the stunning Montage Laguna Beach. It was by far and away our best yet.
The villa was spectacular, the conversations seamless, and the activities perfectly sequenced. Nothing gets people going like a pickleball tournament. I love curating extraordinary spaces for extraordinary people. This past retreat embodied the magic that comes from putting the right people in the right place at the right time.
Thank you to Nike, and Leuchtturm1917 for the gorgeous gifts.
Looking ahead, the question for me is: where do I take this model next?
We’ve perfected the art of the retreat and proved the economic, social, and cultural value of the two-night, three-day experience. In short, we’ve found MED.
I sense it’s time to expand these retreats into hospitality, travel, and media, the sectors where our holding company operates. The key is finding the right host. From there, the formula is simple: great people, place, and purpose.
For the right person, the ROI of two impeccably curated retreats per year is undeniable. You guarantee that you’ll be deeply embedded in your network, learning new and relevant things, and likely being exposed to top talent to hire while maximizing your own brand (reach + reputation) in an inspiring locale.
I see so many other brands, businesses, and individuals settling for the classic one-day event or workshop. My message is: think bigger. We can help you curate experiences that truly resonate, stand out and endure over time.
If you’re not committed to doing that, what’s the point?
The world doesn’t need any more bang-average events (trust me).

The most stunning venue. Laguna Beach, CA.
Curate.
After our brand refresh last quarter, I felt it was time for a new tagline.
I settled on “Modern-Day Hold Co.”
In large part, it’s because if I take a step back, that’s what we’re really doing: bringing brands, businesses, and individuals into the modern-day.
Yes, we advise, we convene, curate and analyze. That’s very much the “what” of our Everyday business. However, the “why” is a bit deeper.
It’s typically the gap between where a brand, business or individual is operating today (olden-day) and how they want/wish/should be operating tomorrow (modern-day) based on all the tools, technology and trends available to them.
In my mind, it’s a forever business because that gap will always exist. Said differently, the future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.
My latest curation.
Last but not least, here’s my 2024 Spotify Wrapped.
It felt like the most fitting way to cap my first year of sharing my music taste with the world. I’ll let you come to your own conclusions. All I’ll say is I shared a different top artist with each of my three siblings, which I thought was pretty cool.
My wife and I also had an excellent record store haul to end the year, bringing some gems into our small but mighty collection. We added Acid Rap, Chance the Rapper’s second mixtape; KIDS, Mac Miller’s breakout mixtape; Continuum, John Mayer’s third studio album; and Oracular Spectacular, MGMT’s debut album.
I also managed to source The Kooks’ 15th-anniversary reissue of Inside In, Inside Out. That was a unique find at a great price point. They were the first band I ever saw live at the Roundhouse in ’08. It’s an album I very much grew up on. And they did something I hadn’t seen before, recording an alternate take on the B-side for every song on the A Side. It certainly made for one of the best days of the quarter.
Vinyl makes you feel music differently. It demands a deeper type of attention.

Vinyl kids poster. I’ll wait.
Q1
Looking ahead to next quarter, I’m excited about what the new year will bring.
All I want to do is to keep doing what I’m doing at higher and higher levels.
I’ll be publishing a full annual review, too. So be on the lookout for that.
It’ll be a much deeper dive into how I’m really thinking about 2025.
As always, if you’d like to follow along, please drop your email here for updates or reach out directly if you’d like to get involved in the world we’re building.
I’m always on the lookout for innovative and ambitious partners.
Here’s to Q1 — CGM.
Never Miss A Letter
A quarterly reflection from our founder.