Zack Young full statement

Zack Young Full Statement First of all, thank you for the email and giving me the opportunity to help better educate people about my experience in Big Brother. It’s been […]


Zack Young Full Statement

First of all, thank you for the email and giving me the opportunity to help better educate people about my experience in Big Brother. It’s been  an amazing, but equally difficult few years and overall adapting and evolving through this process has made me a much stronger person.

Big Brother Celebrity Hijack was scouted for and after appearing in EN magazine and talking at the Enterprise UK Conference I was asked to meet  with Endemol regarding a documentary they had planned about successful young people. Skipping through almost 6 months of meetings, it was only at the end when I was given details about the show being a Big Brother special.

Although I would never have stood in line to audition for such a  show, I was hooked after the contact time with the producers and the potential it held for my career. Prior to Big Brother I ran a web hosting & design agency which had a regular team of 8-12 people all employed on freelance contracts but based in our Liverpool office. During the extensive vetting process Endemol met various clients, visited our offices and spent some time seeing how we do business – they  also had exposure to our accounts.

I started testing my waters in business young and through my youth I wanted to find the key to success – from using various online forums and  seeking advice from startup consultancies when I was about 16/17 I was emulating a much larger setup – we found such a setup helped add credibility when securing new clients. You have to consider I’m 23 now and I look young, so if you imagine a client meeting a 16/17 year old it  wasn’t easy displaying credibility without a strong structure. Thankfully, having such a setup helped secure new business and by the time I was 18/19 the company had stretched to multiple servers and we were serving some multi-national companies with their complex web hosting needs.

Big Brother was an amazing experience but equally came with complications – on my exit there was several articles floating around the press about my lack of credibility as a business person, our groomed  figures and our lack of an office. Working with my agent and publicity we released several responses regarding how the company had formed, explained the figures we released and had a statement from Parr Street Studios about our tenancy. In my VT for the show, I was asked to speak about figures but the producers of the show had cut around what I had said so it sounded somewhat strange. Having approximately 200,000 clients and making £200,000 per annum – how was each client only paying £1? Well, as we offered many free services this was why the figures sounded odd in the context they had been presented. In addition, we had two large resellers who provided web services to over 40,000
people. Therefore, these ultimately were considered as end users of our network.

After the show I had an amazing time traveling around the country with the Skins cast for their party tour, opening new venues, doing various PA’s and meeting some fantastic contacts. At the same time, my business evolved in a new direction – since my new interest was personal development I decided to sell our clients to another provider and move into consultancy/ digital marketing – the financial opportunities from the outputs of Big Brother allowed me to follow a new pathway. Realising  my Big Brother experience was an expiring chapter in my life I decided to change my name by deed poll to make this official. It helped rebuild the credibility I had lost from negative press, but at the same time help me move on with my life without a shadow of fame – I found making new genuine friends difficult for the immediate period after as it seemed many were chasing fame but with a new name this helped disconnect  me from the show when I wanted to move on.

Being at the University of Southampton has been an interesting new chapter for me and since I’m always keen to try new things and explore new avenues I have tried to get involved with the University as much as possible. Being elected onto the Montefiore JCR was a good first step, then I decided to go for a Student Trustee position when I seen the elections advertised. I think my general life experience, my extended network of contacts and my pure drive and ambition would be an asset to SUSU.

Many Thanks,
Zack Young