I'm Charlie. I will be the one doing your marketing.

Born in Melbourne. Spent my childhood in Colac, a small town in regional Victoria that nobody outside Australia has heard of, and where running your own thing felt like the only realistic option because there were not that many jobs going.

I went travelling at 22, mostly because I had itchy feet after COVID. Spent two months volunteering on the way out, coaching kids' soccer in Tanzania and working as a conservationist on a game reserve in South Africa. Those two trips broke my brain in a good way. I came back understanding that the world was much bigger than the one I had grown up in, and that I was not going to be the kind of person who stayed put.

So I left.

Lived in London for 18 months in Notting Hill, working as the assistant manager of a hostel. Yes, a hostel. It is the best founder training I have ever done. Try managing 80 backpackers, 14 staff, and a broken boiler at 11pm on a Saturday. Marketing clients are easy after that.

Met my partner in London. She is from Cork. We moved here together, lived a year, spent summer 2025 in Greece, and came back to Cork in October 2025. I am on a permanent visa. This is home for the foreseeable future.

I was 20 when I started my first proper business. A personal training brand in Australia called Charlie Johns Personal Training. CJPT for short.

“I launched it during the back end of COVID lockdowns. Built it from nothing to 40 sessions a week and fully booked within six months.”

Running a service business during lockdowns, in a country with some of the strictest restrictions in the world, taught me more about marketing than any course could have. When you cannot rely on foot traffic, word of mouth, or being seen in person, you have to build a system that brings people to you. That is where I figured out that I actually enjoyed the marketing more than the training.

The training itself was the easy part. The hard part was everything else. Building the website. Writing the copy. Running the social media. Spending money on ads I did not fully understand. Trying to figure out why some weeks were busy and others were dead.

That experience taught me something most marketing agencies cannot tell you honestly. What it actually feels like to be the business owner. To watch your bank balance more than your follower count. To know that an empty week is not a quarterly metric to optimise. It is rent next month.

I still run CJPT in Cork. Smaller now, a few clients I genuinely love working with one-on-one. It is a side thing, not the priority. Marketing is the main business. But the PT work keeps me close to what it feels like to be a small business owner trying to grow, and that is worth keeping.

Around late 2023 I realised something obvious in hindsight. I had been doing my own marketing for years. I was good at it. Other small business owners I knew were asking me to help with theirs. I was doing it for free or for the price of a pint, and the results were better than what most of them had been getting from paid agencies.

So in 2024 I made it the main thing. CJ Digital Marketing.

There are roughly a thousand other digital marketers in Ireland. I am not going to pretend I am the best. I am going to tell you what I actually am.

The gym. I train most days, have done since my late teens. I love watching numbers go up. Reps, weight, pages indexed, leads booked, monthly revenue. Same thing in different clothes.

Travel. I have been to more countries than I can count without thinking about it, and I am not done. If you ever need to know the best coffee in Cape Town or the worst hostel in Naples, I am your guy. (For the record, Truth Coffee. The hostel in Naples shall remain unnamed.)