“I don't take life too seriously, I know what I like and what I need to make me happy. Genuine interests in many subjects, mainly business.”
I left school and joined the police after a short wait while working in some small local businesses. I got married and had kids very young, in a rush to be a grown up. By 23 I had two kids, a wife and a mortgage, along with a secure job doing what I'd always wanted to do - policing. But I was miserable. Marriage wasn't what I'd thought, the job wasn't treating me with the love I felt for it, and I found parenting far harder than I'd expected.
In 2014, after 18 months of horrendous mental health issues and even more horrendous domestic issues, I left the police to set up a gardening business, an industry I knew nothing about, in Worthing, a town I'd never been to. After four years of that, and at the beginning of a messy divorce I was approached by a former police colleague about setting up a security company. He'd been co-running one for a couple of years but wasn't happy with the set up and was looking at an exit strategy. I was in a new phase of life, new girlfriend, brighter outlook etc, I sold the gardening business (in a twelve day rush) and we incorporated a security company which went from strength to strength and in 2020 during the pandemic we expanded to a group of companies, now offering cleaning, medical support and a small arm of property ownership.
I sold this business in 2022 and embarked on a very short period of conventional employment, during which I had an enormous mental breakdown and have spent two years reassessing and rebuilding myself through various methods, and have recently begun to consult for businesses around the UK, supporting them to overcome their plateaus and achieve ultimate scalability.
I have a great passion for business - not necessarily ownership, and not necessarily big business. Small and local business interests me just as much as behemoths, purely because of the story of how they got there. A fairly common question I get asked is 'whats the next business?', and my standard answer tends to be along the lines of, 'whatever gets me excited enough!'.
I know that my wants and needs aren't conventional, and I've learned to be ok with that, mostly. I feel that my story of starting out by doing what I thought others wanted of me, but now doing what I want for myself will hopefully be helpful or at least thought provoking for other people with similar thoughts about where they are and where they want to be.
