Entrepreneur Adam Bradford talks about growing up with Asperger Syndrome and his journey to the top

Twenty nine-year-old Adam Bradford runs his own communications agency in the UK and UAE, won the Queen’s Young Leaders Award in 2016 and mentors young entrepreneurs across the world through his many initiatives. He also happens to have autism.

Born in Sheffield, England, Bradford struggled to fit in at school. “Autism definitely made the early years of school difficult because it was hard to cope, to be around lots of people at once and understand what was going on,” he recalls. “I didn’t make friends very easily. Things that would be easy for other students — like going into the dining hall for lunch — would be too much for me to do.”

In spite of being a bright and talented student, things got worse for Bradford in secondary school where he got bullied a lot. “I wasn’t coping very well and dealt with a lot of frustration,” he recalls. “The school recognised this and sent me for an assessment. I saw a private psychologist and that’s when I got diagnosed with autism.” At this point, he was 11 and Bradford remembers his parents as being extremely supportive and always “in his corner”.

Initially, he had no medical help or support. “Back then, there wasn’t a very good public understanding of the condition.” There was also low availability of resources and support. “We have the NHS, the public funded health service, which is overstretched. It didn’t have the resources — I think there was a three-year waiting list to be seen by somebody.” Private therapy and treatment were expensive, and not everyone could afford it. “So really, it was just self-help. I didn’t really do anything for many years,” he says.

Bradford began to read up and when he worked with the National Autistic Society on a few campaigns at age 21, he acquired a deeper understanding of the condition and how it affects people in different ways. “Later on, I found more coping mechanisms and have tried to embrace it, if possible.”

And there is quite a bit to embrace — Bradford, for instance, has a photographic memory. “Someone might have said something to me 20 years ago and I would still remember the whole conversation, word for word. Those things can be both a blessing and a curse — it’s great if you need to remember stuff but it can also be really crippling if there are things you want to forget,” he points out.

With social media, the bullying does sometimes continue online — in 2018, a few UK media outlets had reported on how Bradford, ‘a man with Asperger’s Syndrome’, claimed that he faced abuse online and was called a Nazi after a study concluded that Hans Asperger, the doctor after whom the condition was named, had links to the Nazis. The trolls even questioned his diagnosis and the existence of such a condition. “I do get trolled quite often actually and some people are still sceptical that autism even exists,” says Bradford. “I’ve hardened to it now but before, it used to affect me a lot — social media can be a very unforgiving place.”

He points out that autistic people don’t look for special treatment and that they just want to be able to fit in. “Sometimes they might be really intelligent in science or mathematics but they might find it hard to play on the swings in the playground with other children. But that’s just the way they are.”

Starting out young

At 14, a microbusiness he had set up for a school entrepreneurship competition won several awards and by 16, Bradford knew that he wanted to become an entrepreneur. At 18, he got into the Peter Jones Enterprise Academy, which he describes as his ‘training ground’ — one that prepared him for entrepreneurship which, as he puts it, is a ‘massive dive into the unknown’. It’s generally believed that people with autism can get stressed when they don’t have a plan or don’t know what’s coming next. “But by knowing about the theory of business and having had some practice, I was able to keep self- learning,” says Bradford.

• Dubai