Nathan Ellingham — Service Company Creator: I paid £5k to a company that was only months old

I found them through ads and the pitch was very slick — build a service company, they hold your hand the whole way. I paid just under £5,000 before I did any real checking, which I regret every day. Afterwards I looked up the company properly. It had only been incorporated a few months earlier, and the company number on the advert I'd seen didn't match what was actually registered. I also found dissolved companies connected to the people involved, which nobody had mentioned at any point during the sales calls. The mentorship itself was thin. Group calls that mostly repeated the same basics, templates I could have found free, and long gaps where nobody replied to me. When I asked about a refund I got a lot of talk about commitment and mindset and no actual answer. My advice: before you hand over five grand to anyone, spend ten minutes on Companies House. It would have saved me a year's worth of stress.