Less than three months ago, David Duguid was stuffing envelopes for the Conservative party in the run-up to the council elections.
Then Theresa May called a snap UK contest and the new Banff and Buchan MP began a journey that would dramatically change his life.
Within a week he had been approached about standing as a candidate and was quickly selected.
Despite being a Tory target seat, it looked like an uphill struggle given Eilidh Whiteford’s more than 14,000 majority.
But the 46-year-old, who grew up on a farm near Turriff, triumphed as part of the Tory surge in the north-east and is now starting work at Westminster.
Brexit proved a key issue in Banff and Buchan, where support for leaving the EU is high, particularly among coastal communities.
And after the Tories failed to secure a majority nationally, the father-of-two admits there has been some concern in the constituency they are not going to be able to deliver.
But he insists his campaign priorities are not threatened by the overall result and believes the wider commitments made – especially the type of Brexit his constituents voted for – can and will be achieved.
He told the Press and Journal: “Every senior politician I have spoken to, one of the first things they have said is ‘we know that the Common Fisheries Policy is a big issue in your part of the world and we are committed to coming out of it, we are committed to coming out of the EU’.
“I would be less confident if people avoided the subject, but it’s the first thing everyone talks to me about.
“There’s an appreciation that in any future election if any of us Scottish MPs don’t deliver on what we campaigned for, then the SNP is not going away any time soon.
“At the end of the day, it’s the constituents that voted for us. They are the ones who will not vote for us if we don’t get it right.”
Mr Duguid has spent his career in the oil and gas sector, working in the UK and abroad, including Azerbaijan where he met his now wife Rose.
He has no background in politics, but says he has always been interested and became more so around the time of the independence referendum when he decided people like him needed to step up and “not be ashamed to be of a less populist view”.
Describing the experience of winning, he says he had never understood why people stood up at the Oscars and similar occasions and talked about feeling ‘humbled’ until a celebratory event in his constituency at the weekend surrounded by his family and other supporters.
He added: “I have got to do the job in a way that makes me worthy of their expectations.”
