Why Reputation Is Built When Nobody Is Watching

How a small act of kindness returned five years later through an unexpected television offer — and what it taught me about the compounding value of how we treat people.

At Easter this year, I was lying at home with a fever when my phone rang. I was burning, mildly delirious and looking like someone who had absolutely no business being seen by another human being, let alone appearing on television.

The number wasn’t saved. I answered anyway.

“Do you remember me?” I did.

What followed was one of the strangest phone calls I have received in a very long time. The person on the other end told me he was now working for a major television network in Greece. They were casting the judging panel for one of their shows, he had put my name forward, and he wanted to know whether he could pass my number to the director and producer.

There are moments when having a fever makes you question the reliability of your own brain. This was one of them.

But to tell this story properly, I have to take you back approximately five years. Long before Bungalow 28 existed, I was working on a food-delivery platform. It was one of the most demanding periods of my professional life — and, looking back, one of the most important.

Roles were fluid. Problems arrived faster than anyone could assign ownership to them, so you learnt to solve whatever happened to be in front of you. Sometimes that meant something commercial or operational. Sometimes it meant me wearing gloves, armed with a screwdriver and a towel, dismantling, cleaning and reformatting the printers we supplied to restaurants before configuring them through software on my computer.

Apparently my inner tech nerd had been waiting for precisely this opportunity.

The hours were long. The learning curve was vertical. Every time I thought I had passed one test, another seemed to appear behind it. At the time, I probably wouldn’t have described it romantically. Today, I can say with certainty that it helped make me who I am.

I learnt resilience there. I learnt to make decisions without perfect information. I learnt that “that’s not my job” is sometimes a luxury you don’t have when something simply needs to work. I learnt how businesses actually operate when you strip away titles and departments and somebody has to solve the problem. It was an education in the truest sense.

Somewhere in the middle of all of that, a university student joined our team. He was talented, kind and generous, but he was going through a difficult period. There were days when the pressure became a lot for him.

So I tried to help. “Don’t worry. We’ll figure it out.” “I’m here.” “If you need something, ask me.”

Nothing heroic. Nothing particularly memorable, as far as I was concerned.

Apparently, I was wrong.

Eventually, I left the company. I started Bungalow 28. Life moved forward and, as it tends to do, filled itself with new people, new problems and entirely different chapters. We lost touch. Five years passed.

Which brings us back to Easter 2026, my fever and the unexpected phone call.

“Five years later, your phone might ring. Or it might never ring. That isn’t why you do it. Be good to people before you know who they will become. Better still, be good to them if they never become anyone at all.”

After explaining where he was working and why he was calling, he said something I wasn’t expecting. “Back then, I was at rock bottom. You helped me. You didn’t judge me. You were there for me.”

I remembered the period. I remembered him. But I had forgotten those particular moments almost entirely.

He hadn’t.

He asked again whether he could pass my number on. I said yes. About half an hour later, my phone rang.

This time, it really was the television network.

At which point I had to accept that either this was actually happening or my fever had developed an extraordinarily detailed understanding of the Greek television industry.

We started talking about the programme. There would be a screen test. They explained what they were looking for and what the process would involve.

We’ve seen your profile. We’ve seen your photographs. You look gorgeous,” they told me, while I was lying horizontally with a fever and looking like a very distant relative of the woman they had apparently just discovered online.

Perhaps some mysteries are best preserved.

The opportunity ultimately wasn’t the right fit for me, so I declined. And yet I have thought about that phone call considerably more than I probably would have thought about appearing on the programme itself. Not because of television, but because of how it happened.

Five years earlier, we had been two people working together inside a food-delivery business. He was still at university, navigating a difficult period in his life. I was navigating one of the steepest professional learning curves of mine. Neither of us knew what came next.

He couldn’t have known that I would eventually leave and build companies of my own. I couldn’t have known that the student sitting beside me would one day be working inside a major television network — or that he would eventually be in a position to put my name into a room I wasn’t in. And when that moment came, he chose to use his position to open a door for someone else.

And I certainly wasn’t kind to him because I thought any of that might happen. That is precisely why the story has stayed with me.

We spend an extraordinary amount of time trying to predict which relationships will matter. Networking has practically become an industry. We identify the right rooms, cultivate the right contacts and calculate which introduction might lead somewhere. LinkedIn has turned professional relationships into something we can count.

There is nothing inherently wrong with any of that. Relationships matter enormously in business. But life has a habit of making a mockery of our calculations.

Sometimes the person who changes something for you isn’t the most powerful person in the room. Sometimes it is the person nobody is particularly trying to impress: the intern, the assistant, the junior employee, the person answering the phone, the person still figuring out what they want to become.

And sometimes what they remember about you has nothing to do with your title, your expertise or what you could do for them. They remember how you treated them when they had nothing to offer you.

That was the part of the conversation I couldn’t shake. I had forgotten the moments he was describing because, to me, they had been small. To him, they hadn’t been small at all.

There are things we do in our careers whose returns are easy to measure: revenue, growth, promotions, clients, deals. And then there are things that compound somewhere we cannot see: a little patience, a moment of generosity, giving somebody dignity when they’re struggling, choosing not to judge someone at a moment when doing so would have been easy.

There is no KPI for any of it.

Five years later, your phone might ring. Or it might never ring. That isn’t why you do it.

Be good to people before you know who they will become. Better still, be good to them if they never become anyone at all.