Welcome to Your Brand Amplified, the podcast where we interview marketers, publicists, and

brands to learn their stories, what makes them tick, and tips and tricks that make a difference. I'm thrilled on this episode of your brand Amplified

to have Mark Ashby who is joining me from around the world.

Mark, thank you so much for getting up right and early to be on our show.

Thanks, Anica.

A pleasure to be here.

Absolutely.

So I'd love for you to talk a little bit about,

because you've had an interesting journey

to get to your consulting firm. So please share your backstory with our

audience. Yeah, typically I've grown up in Sydney my whole life. I grew up at the

beach. So I was riding in surfboard by the time I was five years of age.

My dad was a surfer, so it was just a natural progression from where I was.

And I went through that normal sort of system through high school and the public system like in Australia.

And I was actually a tradesman when I was a young guy. I was an electrician.

And I never sort of really had that be planned where my life was going and I was traveling a lot overseas. I was surfing around the world and doing a little bit of competing and and that was my sort of life and then my father sort of pulled me aside when I was a young guy,

you know, my sort of 20s and was like, what are you doing with your life?

And yeah, so I've always had a little bit of a fascination with the military, especially the sort of specialized side of the military of the Army.

And so that's where I really, it was a big decision that changed the course of my life, I suppose.

Where I went and joined up and I said I always had that dream of maybe getting to one of the specialist units and I luckily managed to get into one of the sort of elite units in the Australian Army, a parachute unit.

And yeah, so that was what my journey went through there.

Did a couple of sort of operational tours of a place called East Timor, which was close to us.

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