Being in the C-suite is a high-pressure job with long hours, board responsibilities, and intense scrutiny. But what is it like to be a top executive when you’re off the clock?
Fortune’s series, The Good Life, shows how up-and-coming leaders spend their time and money outside of work.
Today, we meet Ed Fuller, the 35-year-old founder and CEO of the marketing agency, Media Bodies.
Fuller fell into the world of marketing by accident. He started at Uproot, heading up brand partnerships and celebrity endorsements—mainly, he admits, to score free tickets to summer music festivals. “I did end up getting about 50 of them,” Fuller says. “But I also had my lightbulb moment for Media Bodies.”
It wasn’t just that everyday creators were suddenly becoming influencers and moving the needle for brands. He also noticed founders were doing something else too: travelling, networking, and pursuing creative experiences under the guise of ‘work’. He wanted in.
So he used his spare time to land his own clients, and soon started side-hustling for American Express, managing its U.K. Facebook page.
Clients have ranged from football legend Thierry Henry to MrBeast and Zoe Sugg, the company claims.
“In the initial stages, I completely made it up as I went, licensing music from Warner and Universal to get tracks from the likes of Michael Buble and Jessie J to drive engagement across AMEX’s Facebook page,” he adds.
But that one client gave him the confidence—and the cash flow—to launch Media Bodies in 2013.
Since then, the company has gone from a solo operation to a 30-person team, with over 100 brands on its roster and four straight years of 100% growth. Clients have ranged from football legend Thierry Henry to MrBeast and Zoe Sugg, the company claims. Last year, it bagged the U.K. Government’s Made in the U.K., Sold to the World award which celebrates the global success of small British businesses.
Now, Fuller splits his time between London and Barcelona, leads a fully remote team, and has—full circle—built a life that includes the travel and creative freedom that first drew him to the industry.
The finances
What’s been the best investment you’ve ever bought?
I’ve invested over $100k in getting training and internal onboarding and upskilling resources from some of the best industry experts, and that has skyrocketed the company’s growth.
And the worst?
I wouldn’t say this was a bad investment, just bad timing.
I was in the process of starting up another sport-tech app business, but it was just when Media Bodies was really taking off.
Ultimately, it was a case of stretching myself too thin and risking both, so I shelved that project for some time in the future to focus on Media Bodies.
How do you commute to work?
We have a hybrid working arrangement, so some days, I simply walk one room over into my home office.
The days we go into the office, if I’m heading to the local office, I’ll walk it, or if we’re heading down to a different branch, I’ll take the train.
What personal finance advice would you give your 20-year-old self?
Get an accountant. You’ll save a lot more time and money than you will trying to figure out everything yourself.
Don’t try to start a business with just interns. Invest in surrounding yourself with knowledgeable people so you can learn to lead better.
Invest in quality. Whether it’s a tool that improves your productivity, hardware, or even material things like shoes or clothes, you’ll save so much time and money in the long run even if the costs seem steep at first.
What’s the one subscription you can’t live without?
Spotify. I’m a big music fan, and listen to a lot of podcasts for work and general self-improvement! It’s the perfect balance of something that serves my needs for business and pleasure.
Where’s your go-to wristwatch from?
Raymond Weil.
The necessities
How do you get your daily coffee fix?
I don’t drink coffee!
What about eating on the go?
I always try to eat healthy. Since we work hybrid, eating on the go isn’t often, maybe once or twice a week. And in those cases, I’ll probably get something like a salad bowl. I tend to prefer Asian food (Japanese, Vietnamese, or Thai) because they tend to have more nutritious options and I generally really enjoy the cuisine!
“Invest in quality. Whether it’s a tool that improves your productivity, hardware, or even material things like shoes or clothes, you’ll save so much time and money in the long run even if the costs seem steep at first.”Ed Fuller
Where do you buy groceries?
When in the U.K., a Sainsbury’s, or if I’m in Barcelona, Mercadona.
Where do you shop for your work wardrobe?
My go-to brands for my work wardrobe are Reiss or Boggi Milano.
Are you the proud owner of any futuristic gadgets?
The closest might be an Oura ring. I got it to help track my sleep and anxiety.
It’s definitely been an interesting investment. It’s great to add perspective to how the body and mind are connected and identify personal patterns so I can make more mindful decisions and choices that are suitable specifically for my biology instead of following more generic wellness advice.
The treats
How do you unwind from the top job?
Physical movement is a must for me! Whether it’s the gym, a run, a swim, or a hike, I find staying active or just getting out in nature is a great way to unwind.
I also like to practise meditation, or watch sport and sport documentaries!
What’s the best bonus treat you’ve bought yourself?
Probably a really nice sound system for my home.
Take us on holiday with you, what’s next on your vacation list?
I travel for work quite often, so I get a little taste of different cultures and cities on and off.
But my next vacation spots are Morocco and New York later in the year.
I’m really keen to soak up the history, culture, and landscapes of both—they are guaranteed to be unique but rich experiences!
Fortune wants to hear from leaders on what their “Good Life” looks like. Get in touch: orianna.royle@fortune.com
“Christmas at Pemberly Manor” and “Romance at Reindeer Lodge” may never make it to Oscar night, but legions of fans still love these sweet-yet-predictable holiday movies — and this season, many are making pilgrimages to where their favorite scenes were filmed.
That’s because Connecticut — the location for at least 22 holiday films by Hallmark, Lifetime and others — is promoting tours of the quaint Christmas-card cities and towns featured in this booming movie market; places where a busy corporate lawyer can return home for the holidays and cross paths with a plaid shirt-clad former high school flame who now runs a Christmas tree farm. (Spoiler alert: they live happily ever after.)
“It’s exciting — just to know that something was in a movie and we actually get to see it visually,” said Abby Rumfelt of Morganton, North Carolina, after stepping off a coach bus in Wethersfield, Connecticut, at one of the stops on the holiday movie tour.
Rumfelt was among 53 people, mostly women, on a recent weeklong “Hallmark Movie Christmas Tour,” organized by Mayfield Tours from Spartanburg, South Carolina. On the bus, fans watched the matching movies as they rode from stop to stop.
To plan the tour, co-owner Debbie Mayfield used the “ Connecticut Christmas Movie Trail ” map, which was launched by the wintry New England state last year to cash in on the growing Christmas-movie craze.
Mayfield, who co-owns the company with her husband, Ken, said this was their first Christmas tour to holiday movie locations in Connecticut and other Northeastern states. It included hotel accommodations, some meals, tickets and even a stop to see the Rockettes in New York City. It sold out in two weeks.
With snow flurries in the air and Christmas songs piped from a speaker, the group stopped for lunch at Heirloom Market at Comstock Ferre, where parts of the Hallmark films “Christmas on Honeysuckle Lane” and “Rediscovering Christmas” were filmed.
Once home to America’s oldest seed company, the store is located in a historic district known for its stately 1700s and 1800s buildings. It’s an ideal setting for a holiday movie. Even the local country store has sold T-shirts featuring Hallmark’s crown logo and the phrase “I Live in a Christmas Movie. Wethersfield, CT 06109.”
“People just know about us now,” said Julia Koulouris, who co-owns the market with her husband, Spiros, crediting the movie trail in part. “And you see these things on Instagram and stuff where people are tagging it and posting it.”
Christmas movies are big business — and a big deal to fans
The concept of holiday movies dates back to 1940s, when Hollywood produced classics like “It’s A Wonderful Life,” “Miracle on 34th Street” and “Christmas in Connecticut,” which was actually shot at the Warner Bros. studios in Burbank, California.
In 2006, five years after the launch of the Hallmark Channel on TV, Hallmark “struck gold” with the romance movie “The Christmas card,” said Joanna Wilson, author of the book “Tis the Season TV: The Encyclopedia of Christmas-Themed Episodes, Specials and Made-for-TV Movies.”
“Hallmark saw those high ratings and then started creating that format and that formula with the tropes and it now has become their dominant formula that they create for their Christmas TV romances,” she said.
The holiday movie industry, estimated to generate hundreds of millions of dollars a year, has expanded beyond Hallmark and Lifetime. Today, a mix of cable and broadcast networks, streaming platforms, and direct-to-video producers release roughly 100 new films annually, Wilson said. The genre has also diversified, with characters from a wider range of racial and ethnic backgrounds as well as LGBTQ+ storylines.
The formula, however, remains the same. And fans still have an appetite for a G-rated love story.
“They want to see people coming together. They want to see these romances. It’s a part of the hope of the season,” she said. “Who doesn’t love love? And it always has a predictable, happy ending.”
Hazel Duncan, 83, of Forest City, North Carolina, said she and her husband of 65 years, Owen, like to watch the movies together year-round because they’re sweet and family-friendly. They also take her back to their early years as a young couple, when life felt simpler.
“We hold hands sometimes,” she said. “It’s kind of sweet. We’ve got two recliners back in a bedroom that’s real small and we’ve got the TV there. And we close the doors off and it’s just our time together in the evening.”
Falling in love again… with a state
Connecticut’s chief marketing officer, Anthony M. Anthony, said the Christmas Movie Trail is part of a multipronged rebranding effort launched in 2023 that promotes the state not just as a tourist destination, but also as a place to work and live.
“So what better way to highlight our communities as a place to call home than them being sets of movies?” he said.
However, there continues to be debate at the state Capitol over whether to eliminate or cap film industry tax credits — which could threaten how many more of these movies will be made locally.
Christina Nieves and her husband of 30 years, Raul, already live in Connecticut and have been tackling the trail “little by little.”
It’s been a chance, she said, to explore new places in the state, like the Bushnell Park Carousel in Hartford, where a scene from “Ghost of Christmas Always” was filmed.
It also inspired Nieves to convince her husband — not quite the movie fan she is — to join her at a tree-lighting and Christmas parade in their hometown of Windsor Locks.
“I said, listen, let me just milk this Hallmark thing as long as I can, OK?” she said.
Alphabet Inc. is set to book another sizable paper gain after SpaceX completes a tender offer that effectively values the closely held company at about $800 billion.
SpaceX’s insider share sale was priced at $421 a share, Bloomberg reported Friday, which would mark a sharp jump in valuation from earlier secondary transactions. That is likely to lift the carrying value of Google’s long-standing investment in Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite company.
Alphabet, Google’s parent, has been an investor in SpaceX since at least 2015, when it joined Fidelity Investments in a $1 billion funding round for a combined stake of about 10% at the time, Bloomberg has reported.
A representative for Google declined to comment, citing their policy of not disclosing or commenting on individual private holdings.
A similar revaluation boosted Alphabet’s earnings earlier this year. In April, the company disclosed an $8 billion unrealized gain tied to its investment in a private company — widely understood to be SpaceX — after a tender offer late last year valued the company at about $350 billion. That gain helped lift Alphabet’s net income for the March quarter above Wall Street expectations.
While Alphabet does not name individual private holdings in its financial filings, changes in SpaceX’s valuation have previously flowed through earnings as “unrealized gains on non-marketable equity securities.”
With SpaceX’s latest tender implying a much higher valuation, investors will be watching Alphabet’s next earnings report for signs of another accounting boost.
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Twelve people have been killed in Australia’s worst terrorist attack, as gunmen opened fire on Jewish people who had gathered to celebrate the first day of Hanukkah at Sydney’s iconic Bondi Beach on Sunday evening.
The shooting was a “targeted attack” on the Jewish community, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said at a late-night press conference. He described the incident as an “act of evil anti-Semitism, terrorism that has struck the heart of our nation,” and flagged an uncompromising crackdown on anti-Semitism.
“We will eradicate it,” he said.
Australia’s Jewish population was estimated to be 116,967 in 2021, one of the world’s 10 largest. Bondi, in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, is among key Jewish communities in the nation.
One of the gunmen is dead and a second is in a critical condition in the hospital, New South Wales Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon told reporters at a media conference, where he designated the incident as a terrorist attack. At least 29 people, including two police officers, were injured and taken to hospitals across Sydney, he added.
The incident is Australia’s deadliest mass-shooting since a lone gunman killed 35 people at Port Arthur in Tasmania on April 28, 1996.
“There are nights that tear at our nation’s soul,” Albanese said. “In this moment of darkness, we must be each other’s light.”
The gunmen opened fire just after 6:45 p.m. local time as more than 1,000 people attended the Chanukah by the Sea event on a warm summer evening.
One of the victims said he only arrived in Australia in recent days from Israel, where he had lived for 13 years, to help the Jewish community in Sydney cope with anti-Semitic incidents. Speaking with Channel Nine television, his face bloodied and head swathed in bandages, he said the community would pull even closer together in the wake of the shootings.
The Australian Broadcasting Corp. showed footage of two black-clad gunmen firing on people from a footbridge near the beach. In another unconfirmed clip, a bystander is shown tackling and disarming one of the gunmen — actions that New South Wales Premier Chris Minns described as genuinely heroic, saying the intervention likely saved many lives.
An improvised explosive device was found in a car linked to the dead offender, Police Commissioner Lanyon said. Police are also investigating whether there was a third offender, he said.
Mike Burgess, director-general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, said the national terror level rating remains at “probable” despite Sunday’s incident.
Israeli Foreign Affairs Minister Gideon Sa’ar said the shootings “are the results of the anti-Semitic rampage in the streets of Australia over the past two years,” adding that “the Australian government, which received countless warning signs, must come to its senses!”
Speaking at an event recognizing the extraordinary achievements of immigrants to Israel at the President’s Residence in Jerusalem, Israeli President Isaac Herzog said the shooting was a “cruel attack on Jews who went to light the first candle of Chanukah on Bondi Beach.”
Several synagogues in Australia, along with Jewish businesses and homeowners, have been targeted following the outbreak of the conflict in Gaza triggered by Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
In October last year, two masked men torched Lewis’ Continental Kitchen in Bondi after dousing it with accelerant. The following month, assailants sprayed anti-Israel graffiti and set a vehicle alight in Woollahra — a suburb with a large Jewish community — damaging more than 10 cars and several buildings.
Last December, offenders broke into the Adass Israel Synagogue in Ripponlea, Victoria, and spread accelerant in what police described as a probable terrorist attack. Days later, another graffiti-and-arson attack targeted a street in Woollahra that perpetrators selected because it was considered a Jewish area.
Around the same time, about 20 members of a neo-Nazi group gathered outside a Melbourne government building with a banner reading “Jews hate freedom.”
This year, Albanese said Australia uncovered intelligence that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps directed at least two of last year’s arson attacks — including the Bondi restaurant and Melbourne synagogue incidents — prompting Canberra to expel Iran’s ambassador, its first such move since World War II.
Gun Crimes
The Bondi attack has refocused attention on gaps in Australia’s gun-control framework, a system often cited internationally as a model. However, it’s still marked by uneven implementation.
A January report from the Australia Institute found that all states and territories fell short on core benchmarks for effective oversight, including transparent data reporting and limits on how many firearms an individual can legally own.
The Australia Institute report also showed how concentrated gun ownership has become: the average license holder owns more than four firearms, and two residents in suburban Sydney hold upward of 300 each.
Using scorecards to rank jurisdictions on measures such as ownership caps and data availability, the Institute assessed New South Wales — home to Sydney — as the strongest performer on transparency, even as broader national shortcomings persist.
Politics8 years ago