“There are three million unemployed and one unemployable.”
That was the message I got from my school careers advisor way back in 1979 at the tender age of fifteen!
There is nothing like a little bit of motivation when you are facing your last compulsory year in education to give you the confidence of success.
I was never anything resembling an academic in my youth and I don’t believe this was anything to do with my intellectual capability, rather my supreme lack of confidence.
An Unlikely Entrepreneur
Many years later a relative of mine said to me something along the lines that nobody in the family thought you would ever get anywhere as you never stood a chance! Isn’t it lucky that I am surrounded by so much belief.
Looking back on it the statement was probably right as I was raised in England by my Welsh Grandparents and my Mother following a divorce when I was seven and that was probably the root cause of my lack of confidence as I never had a Father.
My Grandfather did his best to fill the role, but of course it wasn’t the same. He spotted my lack of natural academic ability though at an early age by telling me that I should learn music because I could at least have a career to fall back on.
Wise words from him who was a retired Army musician and then a musician on the famous cruise ship the Queen Elizabeth 1, which sank in Hong Kong Harbor, thankfully without him on board!
His suggestion was for me to learn the piano as you would have as he put it, “an orchestra in both hands” and he was right – I continued studying and playing the piano until I was sixteen, the year of his sudden death. Much later I would learn to play the drums and take up the piano once again and I do believe that music learning music brings out a certain ‘something’ within you and I am proud to say that my daughter is pursuing a career in classical singing.
I failed all of my exams at school and it took me three years at two different colleges to get the qualifications I should have had when leaving school!, one with the famous and lovely actress Elizabeth Hurley, who was at that time a Punk Rocker!
A Political Career
At least that was what I thought when I answered an advertisement in the local newspaper for part-time ‘canvassers.’
I thought that I was joining a Political Party at the grass roots level of knocking on peoples doors canvassing for support.
I suppose that you can’t really put home improvement companies in the same category and the job did pay good money, was a relatively easy one, that also taught me to develop resilience and a thick skin.
Now my entrepreneurial spirit kicked in and I soon found myself forming a company to do the same with a guy I was at college with and now we were in business!
My Mother and his parents guaranteed a loan for us and off we went, out into the great big, free world of owning your own company at the hugely experienced age of 19!
About a couple of years before and whilst at college, I took up Martial Arts as I was also bullied at school and was desperate to learn to defend myself. This now gave me the ‘platform’ of confidence that I needed in life and what I needed to start a business.
Banks And Their Money
Bankers are an audacious bunch of people and our Bank Manager was no exception – he actually wanted his money back!
The only problem was that we had spent it.
It wasn’t so much the lack of success of the business as we could sell and bring in the money, only we had some minor distractions, such as spending it on nice clothes, nightclubs and the usual thing business people do when they believe they have money.
There was another problem and that was simply that we actually had no idea as to how to run a business!
So a year later we have debts that we could not pay off and a Bank that was threatening action and it would take me three years to be able to raise the cash to pay them back and move on.
During those three years I would drift in and out of sales jobs, attending the latest sales courses only to be fired due to non performance because I simply hated the jobs and the people who were supposed to inspire me and provide leadership, which was never given.
In 1987, I would find an industry that I fell in love with immediately and that was the recruiting/staffing industry that would be my focus for most of my business life.
Hi Darling!
Were the first words that came out of the young Sales Director of what started as an all-female IT recruitment company in the City of London and she looked at me and led me into the interview room.
“So why do you want to work for us,” she asked.
“I don’t,” I replied and I am here to see what your company can offer someone who will make you a lot of money, so why don’t you start by telling me why I should work for you?”
The approach was typical of my attitude at the time and I had gone form a shy, fearful schoolboy to a young adult that had a load of confidence through my study of Martial Arts and the fact that in my mind, I was the next Rockefeller.
Unfortunately my approach was not that successful and I was told to ether answer the first question or leave and I ended up being offered the job there and then.
It only lasted a year and that was not because I was fired or didn’t like the work, in fact, it was a dream compared to the other sales roles and there was a great deal of satisfaction helping people get jobs and companies to recruit talent, but I worked for a regional office and that was near to my home and now they wanted to centralize operations and that meant a commute to London, which was a nightmare so just one year later, I got a job working for similar company in my home town.
Entrepreneurial Streak Part Two
This company was a far cry from my last one, which focussed heavily on punctuality, sales and accountability – people would arrive at varying times, would have breakfast sat at their expensive desks and chairs and would generally go through the motions of what should be a high-powered and full on sales operation.
I arrived early in the morning and with another colleague who came with me from the previous job, sat at our desks and promptly got to work and the reward for our sales efforts were that we were moved to the corridor outside of the office because we were ‘too noisy.!’
I told the owner that he was losing not only opportunities, but a good deal of cash and in short, he asked me to come up with a proposal to run the operation, which I did and those staff that didn’t immediately leave because of the thought of working for me, were fired.
Back To Those Banks
At the end of my first eighteen months and with the help of another former colleague who I persuaded to join, we had reached a turnover of around £6 million and we were all looking forward to a nice sales bonus, only the owner had told me he didn’t have the money to pay us, but made us an offer to invest in the company and run it.
Unfortunately I did no due diligence and invested with a loan secured on my house. I don’t blame anyone else here but myself, because I should have done the background work and ultimately, despite a strong sales run, we ran out of cash due to debt.
When you are in your mid-twenties in the 1980’s, you simply live for the lifestyle, cars, holidays and to hell with the debt because you can always pay it back later – we had a car fleet that would be the envy of any office work parking lot, Porsche’s, BMW’s you name it and the issue was that we were in the ‘power 80’s and it was full on.
Eventually the bubble burst and we came crashing down to to once again, spending more than we had earned and this time the Bank debt was serious leaving us no option but to put the company into liquidation and for each of us personally, to come to an arrangement with our creditors – mine to the tune of £250K.
In these times you learn about the other side of the coin and that is business survival and I will say that my partner at the time was a born survivalist and during the time with him, when the other Directors had long moved on, we tried to do deal after deal to get ourselves out of the mess including owning a hotel on the seafront of the South of England and it was no ordinary hotel either having seventeen bedrooms, over I think four or five floors, no elevator, parking facilities and run by ourselves who if you wanted to apply a mathematical formula to the problem in terms of knowledge and industry experience it would be:
The square root of zero!
Another interesting business we owned for a month involved us helping my partners relative by giving him advice on his hydraulic hose distributing company not far from our hotel and after all we were the ‘business gurus’ weren’t we?
Putting to use our vast business experience we listened intently to the problem and using pure salesmanship, because in reality we wouldn’t be able to recognize a hydraulic hose if our lives depended upon it, we told him we would need to do some detailed business analysis which involved asking the sales staff what the problem was.
The reply was ‘the owner’ and we are looking to leave and set up an adhesive tape company!
“No problem at all,” came our joint reply and we will back you.
As you can imagine, our knowledge of the adhesive tape market was absolutely and mind-blowingly non-existent so we agreed on the deal, which was to invest £30k, which we didn’t have.
Still, you should never let lack of money get in the way of a deal.
We found the money through our already extended Bank overdraft and we were officially in the adhesive tape business albeit for one month.
Our ‘partners’ and quite rightly so looking back, knew that we had fulfilled our use by providing the money and promptly bought us out for exactly what we put in.
The end of this chapter of my life was that my partner and I were rescued by investors, who reduced our roles to sales people, with a small share incentive increasing through performance to a more respectable one. But it was the end of the road for myself and my partner as we were effectively competing for one role and he one the competition and I was now on my own.
I did learn one very valuable lesson during this time and I must credit my partner for this and it was a lesson in humility.
Throughout the ‘power 80’s’ success was king and I have described the lifestyle but we were famous in our own town as a successful business and we all used to go to a very large bar after work, where we would park our flashy cars right outside
Were we ‘showing off?’
Absolutely but it was more a statement to ourselves and that we had ‘made it’!
But during our downfall, we had no option but to cancel all of our car payments (they were all financed and mine cost more than the mortgage on my apartment) and that meant they would all be repossessed. My idea was to do this quietly and just avoid the questions by quietly disappearing from the limelight, but my partner had other ideas!
He arranged for one transporter to come right outside the bar we frequented and load all of the cars on it in one hit. I was at first mortified by the thought, but I must say that it got everything over and done with and with whatever remaining credit we had on or cards, we bought champagne and toasted the handing back of the cars and everyone without exception came up to us at the bar and shook our hands telling us that they believed we would be ‘back.’
The Telecom Accident
I had now started on my own from my apartment in London and a chance call came in asking if I had any opportunities for telecommunications engineers.
“Of course,” I said and asked him what he was looking for. He sent me over his details and I saw companies I had never heard of, which intimidated me to be honest, but I now stumbled across a simple formula, which I still use and recommend to today in the field of recruitment.
Most agencies rely on calling clients to see if they have any jobs or vacancies they need to help – they then try to match these jobs with candidates that they have on their own databases and I had neither the candidates (other than this one) nor the clients, so I mapped out a strategy off the top of my head and it was basically to find out the real value that the candidate brought to the company (the outcome of his work in a monetary sense), what he or she actually wanted from a job and the type of companies that they would want to work for and why?
This gave me all of the ammunition I needed to then make an approach to the companies on the target list and I developed and refined this approach which became the hallmark of how we operated from that point on.
Going Global
I decided through my research that I needed to go global for the major opportunities and using my new approach, I eagerly contacted all of the relevant companies at the highest levels, the CEO and his team.
My strategy was to talk to their assistants and not try to push through them and it was a huge success and over the years I got to visit many countries combining business at the highest level, with international travel.
I amassed over a million air miles very quickly.
I had also decided to hire individuals from outside the industry as well as within it – creative experts, copywriting experts and a PR agency, which proved to be a huge success putting me in front of the global, influential media and they also entered me into many entrepreneurial competitions.
I was truly ‘living the life’ and enjoying it as to me it wasn’t work, it was the perfect combination of life and work.
Through this time I had invested in a few other ventures mainly to support friends and expand my interests, but I, like many of my contemporaries were so married to the industry and the success (it was high-tech and growing in our minds), that we failed to listen to the analysts that were less than bullish about the industry.
Back To The Banks Again
In 1999 – 2000, I had achieved our high point in turnover, with excellent profit margins and the next financial year saw a marked reduction, but I still believed this was a temporary setback due to the delay in launching the latest generation technology. In reality it was because of the huge financial costs. But we were however living in a fueled industry so I wasn’t overly concerned.
On year later we entered a very serious recession – my major clients had stopped paying on time and the debts were building up monumentally and our finance company were becoming nervous to say the least.
More critically, they had all stopped hiring and started to lay off up to 50% of their workforce so now from having a life of selling internationally to executive Leaders of the worlds leading technology companies, I had to perform the most important sale of my life – to my own finance company.
In response to the tough economic climate, I had to reduce my own workforce by 50% also and this was no easy task as anyone could imagine.
All of my competitors were in the same boat and there were many talks between us concerning merging with each other just to survive, but most of the time we could never get past our own egos and deals were struck, argued about and abandoned in the course of discussions and at one point I would even look at selling my company as the outlook was poor for a privately owned and funded entity!
I also did what many entrepreneurs do in times of struggle – set up other companies and I was no exception forming a software company in Texas and an outsourcing company in Mexico.
It now was about increasing my chances of success as an entrepreneur and trying to take advantage of other opportunities that are always around, even in times of deep recession.
Dealing with a Bank is no different from dealing with any company, but when you owe them a serious amount of money, you are on the back foot, a position I hadn’t been in for a long time.
Eventually we had worked out everything with the Bank and I was now about to enter a new phase of my life.
Coming To America
I had decided that it was time to move to the USA and chose Texas, because my major telecom client had established it’s US headquarters there and my software business was based there, coupled with the fact that you could fly to Mexico City in around 2 hours from Dallas.
Arriving there in 2015, I had no idea what to expect, but would simply go about everything in my usual manner – just ‘get it done.’
Life in America was very different and not just the cultural differences, but the pace – it was a lot more laid back, at least in Texas and in comparison to London.
Within 6 months, I had a new house and a new life when out of the blue, the company was hit by two class action lawsuits. I say ‘the company,’ but these lawsuits had hit the entire industry and each and every one of our competitors. It was a battle that would last 10 years and drain the finances of the company immensely, but in true entrepreneurial fashion, I had no option but to fight it as best as I could with of course, the help of the team around me and our lawyer.
During this time we still were able to grow the business considerably and start new companies, one involving Donald Trump!
I then had to deal with another serious crash that would affect my general recruiting practice as opposed to the technology one and that was the Banking crash of 2007.
I enjoyed my time in America and also the fact that two of my children were born there, but for me there were cultural differences that I found hard to cope with. The plan was to find a place with a much more temperate climate and Costa Rica came to mind because of that and the more important reason that they had very good international schools. I took a trip down there and was ready for the move in my usual ‘get it done’ approach and then…
I received news that my Mother had taken a turn for the worse health wise and I needed to return back to the UK. In short, I came back to assess the situation and it was clear she needed specialist help and due to the long summer school holidays in Texas, I was able to bring my family back for a long stay.
My children took to the UK very easily and didn’t want to return to Texas and ended up staying here and this was now to be the new family home! I went back to Texas to finalize the shipping of our goods and then returned late in 2015 to stay for good – at least as far a ‘good’ can be termed in the life of an entrepreneur!
The Final Chapter
I was now back in the UK, adjusting to life and thinking about re-starting the UK/European arm of my staffing business, while my partner ran the US.
I took some time to settle down, enjoy Christmas and prepare for the New Year and another new start until…
One day in January of the following year, I began to feel unwell – nothing I could put my finger on and nothing that really worried me, but nevertheless i didn’t feel right. After a couple of days I spent a whole day in bed and suddenly I felt very ill, was hospitalized and nearly bled to death.
It took me a week to recover and i was subjected to rounds of tests as you would expect and I think the doctors were amazed that I went home after a week. But something was wrong and although I was on medication and at home, I was absolutely exhausted.
It took me 18 months to recover, literally laying in bed most of the time wondering whether it was going to happen to me again and the definitive cause of my problem has not been identified to this day.
What it did do for me however, was to make me re-think my whole life and my priorities.
I decided that as much as I loved the corporate jet set world, doing business and enjoying the life, I felt much more drawn to spending time talking to my children and helping them live the life of their dreams.
Laying in bed all day gives you time to reflect and dream – I started to work with my two boys by devising physical exercises for them to do that would strengthen their bodies form the inside as well as building their physiques. I also started to share my musical knowledge with my daughter in her aim to become a classical singer.
But more importantly, I shared my knowledge on how to build the correct mindset to give the the best chances of success and more importantly that critical ‘edge.’
To this day, I love nothing more than helping and motivating my children to do what they want to do and not what I want them to do.
In my opinion, too many parents live vicariously through their children and I am determined not to do that. This gave me the motivation to extend that help to others doing the same thing and soon I was doing a lot of volunteer mentoring and coaching, which motivates me immensely.
What I love about it is that I get to see and meet so many people from all walks of life and in varying businesses – from life coaches to jet engine re-sellers and everything in between!
I know one thing for certain and that is as long as I am physically and mentally able, I will always be involved in business and through my children, I will always be preparing them for and helping them overcome, the challenges they will face in life.
Over the years I have also found many hobbies and interests that have become my passions, which you can read about here on my site and they are all integral to my life. It is not uncommon to mix three or four passions into one day and also meet my business goals and objectives.
I urge you to do the same.