In my last newsletter, I told you my ex-husband’s incredible story of a kid who shot to fame and hit #1 in Australia’s radio ratings — then walked away from it all.

This week, we’ll pick things up at the point where I entered his life (oh god, we’re doing this), and he leapt into entrepreneurship.

Do you have your crash helmet on? 😬

Turbo meets Kristin

I was young, eager to travel, and fleeing an unhealthy relationship.

A cruise ship in Alaska seemed like the perfect place to escape.

And while I had never worked on board a cruise ship before, I spent my early childhood roaming ships as the Cruise Director’s daughter.

So after a quick phone interview, I packed my bags, and flew to Seattle to meet the GTS Celebrity Infinity.

I boarded along side guests who were setting sail on their dream vacation, and within a couple of hours, I had a mic thrown in my hand, and was on stage welcoming them.

Umm… I didn’t even know how to find my cabin yet. I thought I’d have a few days to settle in, but apparently it didn’t work that way. 

Full disclosure, I was kinda shitting myself.

But then my new boss introduced me to James Anderson:

• JAMES: So you’re a figure skater?

• ME: Yes! How did you know that? (Thinking he had seen my resume.)

• JAMES: I googled you.

Y’all — this was 2008. Googling someone wasn’t really a thing yet.

In his very first words to me, James was already ahead of the curve.

Turbo lives up to his name

James took me under his wing, and told me about his radio background as “Turbo”. 

Even though he had only been on the ship for a couple of months, he seemed to know and have the respect of everyone on board.

🍔He knew how to get “renegade room service” by dialing a specific galley phone, and waiting for a specific Filipino cook to answer.

🍺He showed me the secret trap door that led to the theater catwalk, where we’d sit and drink cans of beer high over the heads of unsuspecting guests.

📟 He demonstrated that if you needed a break, you could simply throw your pager overboard, and your boss couldn’t reach you even if they wanted to.  🤦

James showed up to all of the events I hosted, ate every meal with me, and made my new abnormal living environment feel like home.

And after a short seven days on board, during a rather rambunctious crew party, he made his move — and we became an item.

Two months later, he handed me an Alaskan blue diamond ring, and asked me to be his wife.

Within five months of meeting, I packed my bags once again, and headed to Australia to get married and start a life with James.

Turbo moves quick. 🚀😆

Now what?

The pay is shit on cruise ships.

Which I guess is fair, since they provide room, board, and world travel. 🤷

And the small amount of money we did earn went toward settling our bar tab (surprise surprise). 🍻

So we arrived in Melbourne, Australia — completely broke.

“No worries” as they say down under:

• 🙏 We crashed with James’s patient parents…

• 🎙️ “Turbo” picked up some fill-in radio shifts …

• 🗂️ I took some temp work … 

• ⏳ And we waited to receive funds from the annual billing cycle of a small regional tourism website that James had launched as a teenager.

The cash from that billing cycle would pay for an apartment, and sustain us while we both figured out what to do for full-time work.

But what happened next is something that no one could have possibly predicted. 😔

Black Saturday

A suffocating summer heatwave had taken control of the Melbourne area, and bushfires were igniting.

This wasn’t terribly unusual for this enclave of Australia, but it was the worst they had seen in a while.

Then, on February 7, 2009, a quiet country region experienced the deadliest bushfire in Australian history, forever known as Black Saturday.

Survivors describe the raging fire as “the gates of hell”, which caused:

• 173 deaths

• Over 400 injuries

• The loss of over 3,500 homes and businesses

And though we were safe in the city, the area hit the hardest was the close-knit collection of country towns where James grew up.

He was devastated, shattered, heartbroken — just grief-stricken beyond words. 

As we watched the television coverage, his community was being violently wiped off the face of the earth. He was frantically trying to touch base with his loved ones in the area.

Then, through his tears, he revealed something I hadn’t yet considered — this disaster was also going to impact us financially.

We had just moved into a city-center apartment and begun receiving the annual payments James billed to the tourism businesses who advertised on his website.

In an instant, those businesses were gone. 

And of course, we couldn’t keep the payments that had already hit our bank account for the upcoming year.

We had to put our brokenheartedness aside and figure out how to make money — fast.

Just charge it  💳

A friend of a friend was getting married, and was looking for someone to film the wedding.

When James heard about it, he said “f*ck, I’ll do it”. 

He had learned how to operate a camera during his time in the U.S. — and how hard could it be to film a wedding?

There was just one problem — he didn’t have a camera.

Or audio equipment.

Or editing equipment.

Minor details.

So with balls the size of cantaloupes, James swiped his credit card to the tune of nearly $30k to buy state-of-the-art production equipment. 😳

And he gave his infant videography business the perfect name:

Turbo Productions 🚀

Turbo’s back, baby!

James and I filmed that first wedding together, getting heaps of footage from different venue angles, and with different people, so it appeared to be different events.

Without overtly lying, our sleek website implied that we had several successful weddings under our belt. 

Between that, and James’s lingering fame from his radio days, the calendar started filling up with weddings to film. 🙏

Meanwhile, I landed an incredibly serendipitous job launching the largest ice sports center in the Southern Hemisphere (another story for another time). 

My steady income could cover our living expenses, enabling us to re-invest early profits from Turbo Productions to expand our market share and deliver the highest quality product.

This meant James was constantly upgrading to the newest and most advanced technology, and able to onboard a top-notch team.

Soon, Turbo Productions was not only in-demand in Australia — James was getting flown to exotic places like…

• Bali 🛩️

• Fiji 🛩️

• New Zealand 🛩️

• And even as far away as Europe 🛩️🤯

And I was often able to join him.

Life was amazing.

On the outside…

The crash

We got married young.

We got married quick.

We got married because we were in love and wanted to, ya know, live in the same country. 🤷

And while we worked extremely well professionally, our relationship wasn’t the marriage I wanted.

Thus began a drawn-out and heart wrenching separation, culminating with me moving back to New York, agreeing to give our marriage one last try, James giving up everything and moving to New York to be with me, and eventually realizing that it was time to officially end things.

That’s obviously the short version, but it’s the only version you’re going to get.

Turbo’s reinvention

James was broken. He flew back to Australia and moved in with his parents at the age of 30.

Luckily, he was able to book weddings pretty quickly to get back on his feet — but there’s nothing more painful than filming happy weddings after your own marriage has just imploded. 🤦

So, as he did when the bushfires destroyed his first business, he put his brokenheartedness aside and got to work.

Weddings are just events — why couldn’t he film other types of events?

James began cold-emailing hundreds of event companies.

He got one reply. It was from one of the biggest conference companies in Australia.

And they booked him. 👊

Like with the wedding business, James was 100% committed to delivering the absolute best product, which included same day turnaroundon conference clips — that’s the Turbo guarantee. 🚀

As word spread, his event video services exploded. He further expanded into live streaming, virtual tours, and even got his drone license. 

Faced with the challenge of finding enough quality freelancers, he launched Shootzu — a marketplace for media companies to connect with freelancers.

And he rebranded Turbo Productions toTurbo 360— an all-inclusive digital media production company.

Aaaand, then COVID hit. F*ck.

Overnight, the events industry shuttered.

But James is nothing if not nimble. He pivoted to real estate, leveraging his virtual tour capabilities.

Australia was one of the most locked-down countries in the world, but people still needed to buy and sell houses. 

His inbox was suddenly flooded with requests from real estate companies, so James was grinding away while his event industry colleagues sat at home and watched their shrinking bank accounts.

And as events and weddings slowly came back with tight attendance restrictions, everyone turned to Turbo for his high-quality live streaming capabilities. ✌️

James isn’t special…

James screwed off in high school and never went to college…

👉 Yet he owns an incredibly successful business.

James never took a class to learn about technology…

👉 Yet he adopts emerging technology dramatically quicker than any of his competitors.

James wasn’t trained in performance or public speaking…

👉 Yet his radio show was #1 in the ratings.

James was a country kid who had no connections, no money, no experience, and no leg up except for a pair of loving parents who believed in him (the value of which is not lost on me).

James works f*cking hard. 

Every skill he has is self-taught, and every advantage he’s gained through his network has been based on building authentic relationships.

And I’m thrilled to tell you that James got the happy ending he deserves. These days, he’s a loving husband to his wife, Laura, and devoted dad to his two incredible kids, Scarlett and Sebastian.

Hey — we can’t all marry our soulmates the first time around. 

Sometimes we have to marry our soul-helpers — partners who help us grow into the person worthy of our soulmate.

Thank you, James, for being the best soul-helper I could have ever hoped for. ❤️

Cheers! 🍻

-Kristin :-)

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