From a teenager's fascination to Berkshire Hathaway: why I built Pikul

Every agency website says "we combine creativity with technology". I want to tell you what that actually means in my case, because the combination was set long before the agency existed.

Communication first, camera later

As a teenager I was fascinated by two things that did not obviously belong together: how people communicate, and technology. The first fascination took me deep into psychology and self-development years before it was fashionable. I studied NLP, sat in Tony Robbins' audience, and later trained with Richard Bandler, the co-creator of NLP himself. I wanted to understand why some messages move people and others evaporate.

The second fascination was simpler: I loved the internet, loved technology, loved making things.

At nineteen I bought my first camera, and the two fascinations merged. Photography, then video, turned out to be applied psychology: attention, emotion, story, trust, all of it running through a lens.

From "can you film that for me?" to an agency

After moving to London I picked up my first DSLR and could not put it down. People saw what I made and asked if I could do the same for them. Then they asked what I charged. My first paid work arrived before I had a business plan, which I have since learned is how most honest businesses start.

Freelance turned into an agency. The agency turned into fifteen years of creating content: films, photography, campaigns, for dozens and dozens of businesses across hundreds of projects.

The Gary Vee chapter

I did not get introduced to Gary Vaynerchuk's world. I hustled my way in, which felt appropriate, given the man's entire philosophy. The work went well enough that it grew into a real relationship: videos across multiple countries in Europe, and the kind of reputation that opens doors you cannot knock on directly.

The timing mattered. VaynerMedia had just opened its first international office, in London, and Gary needed people on the ground who could capture compelling social content across Europe. For over three years we created and delivered exactly that for team GaryVee: fast, evergreen, talked-about pieces built for social-first distribution, filmed wherever that week's work happened to be.

Filming DailyVee in London is the piece people still ask me about. But the real value of those years was the education. That operation treated attention as a craft with rules: ship quickly, document rather than stage, respect the platform you are publishing on, and never confuse polish with impact. I have carried all of it into every project since; years later it became the 1-Day Content System, the one-day content model we now run for clients.

The Warren Buffett full circle

Here is my favourite part of the whole story. At fifteen and sixteen, deep in those self-development and financial intelligence books, one name sat at the very top of the mountain: Warren Buffett. I remember looking at him thinking he was operating on a different planet from a Polish teenager with a stack of borrowed books.

Twenty years later, my agency was creating marketing content for Berkshire Hathaway in London. The teenager with the books would not have believed it. Honestly, the adult holding the camera barely did. It remains the achievement I am proudest of, not because of the logo, but because of the distance travelled between those two moments.

The work itself was several days deep inside their world. Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices approached us ahead of their visit to London, part of the international expansion of their global real-estate franchise network. We joined their meetings, spent time with the executive team, led by Chairman Gino Blefari, and captured everything on camera, video and photography both. Then we produced the official launch film, working through multiple edits and variations until we had a cut we were genuinely proud to put our name to. Berkshire Hathaway went on to distribute it across their worldwide partner network.

That reputation led on to Direct Line, one of the UK's biggest insurers, and to hundreds of projects with businesses of every size, including seats in boardrooms as part of several startups.

Direct Line, Eaton, London Real: the craft of the complex

Direct Line asked us to rethink their internal marketing: a series of videos explaining their products and services in an engaging, educational way. We blended footage of real people with animation, and worked closely with their creative and compliance departments so every idea stayed on-brand and above board. The reception was strong enough that they extended the campaign. That project taught me something I still use weekly: regulated, complex information can be made simple and relatable without losing control of it.

Eaton, the global power management company, needed a film explaining a medium-voltage transformer, a product whose inner workings you cannot point a camera at. We blended live filming with 3D animation to bring it to life, and after the first film they asked us for a second. Le Cordon Bleu brought a different world again. And Brian Rose at London Real wanted social-first video documenting his path as an entrepreneur and broadcaster; the first film landed well enough that one piece became an ongoing run. Some of that work is on the case studies page.

Different industries, same job underneath: take something complicated, or invisible, or easy to ignore, and make people care enough to act. That is the job I have been doing since the first camera.

The lesson fifteen years of boardrooms taught me

Sitting with all those businesses, one pattern kept repeating. Beyond the mission statements, what every company needs is simple: to grow, it needs money. The money comes from clients. Clients come from leads, converted the right way. And leads come from attention, which in the 2020s means online attention, almost entirely.

For fifteen years I built the first link: attention-grabbing content. And over those years I watched, project after project, what happened to the attention we earned. Businesses would pay handsomely for it, receive the enquiries, and then reply to them the next afternoon. The most expensive link in the chain was being snapped for free.

I would watch it happen in real time. A campaign would go live, the enquiries would arrive in the evening, and the reply would go out the following afternoon: polite, well written, and far too late. Nobody in the building treated it as a marketing problem, and it never appeared on a marketing report. But it quietly decided the return on everything above it. I have since written the whole chain up properly in Attention in, booked clients out: the only growth system that matters.

Why Pikul AI exists

That is the missing piece I have added. Pikul today does what it always did, content and marketing that earn attention, plus the part I watched leak for a decade and a half: converting the lead fast, before it goes cold. Pikul AI is a text receptionist, trained on your business, that answers WhatsApp, SMS, web chat, Instagram and Facebook DMs in seconds - and email too -, around the clock, qualifies each enquiry and books it straight into the calendar. Speed to lead, done properly. Our AI receptionist page has the detail, and the full picture is on the services page.

It is the same fascination I had at fifteen, wearing new tools: communication and psychology on one side, technology on the other, and the space between a message sent and a message answered, where all the money quietly changes hands.

Live today, on Harley Street

This is not a concept. Pikul AI is live today with a London foot and ankle surgical clinic on Harley Street, sitting behind the marketing we built for them: website, content, Meta and Google ads, and an AI receptionist with automations, so patient enquiries are answered and followed up around the clock. And because it is a clinic, the guardrails matter as much as the speed. The AI captures, qualifies and routes enquiries only. It never gives medical advice, and anything sensitive is handed straight to a human.

That build is the whole story in miniature: the content and campaigns earn the attention, and the system underneath makes sure none of it leaks away at nine in the evening when nobody is at the desk.

The rest of the picture

Outside work I chase hard things on purpose. I have climbed for years, including a week living in tents at four and a half thousand metres in the Monte Rosa massif, reaching five summits, the highest at 4,554 metres. I signed up for my first triathlon before I could swim, learned to swim as an adult because the entry was already paid, and have since finished the Bolton half Ironman. I am a lucky husband to an amazingly supportive wife and dad to a seven-year-old boy who is the best motivation there is.

If any of this resonates, the door is open: message the site, try the demo, or just call me. I still answer the interesting conversations myself.

Since I first wrote this story, the lesson has finished becoming a business. Pikul now builds four connected systems - capture, convert, rebook, grow - so the attention side I spent fifteen years on and the answering side I built the AI for finally run as one machine: the full picture is on the services page. And this autumn the engine goes self-serve too, on the Pikul platform, for owners who want the same receptionist in their own hands.

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