Who is this guy?

In November 1947 I was about to be born at home, in Greenhill (now called Hareshaw Village), by Cleland in Scotland, in a small white cottage which still stands there.

In those days, there were hardly any hospitals which were “local”, so the midwife would come to your home for the birth. No big deal, really, or so I’m told. It was the norm back then.

But my elder brother was a difficult delivery and had died at birth, a year or two earlier, so as the big day approached, mother had second thoughts. And at the very last moment we traveled back to London ~ so the family can look after us ~ while father got on with being The Chubb Lock & Safe Company’s first General Manager, north of the border.

I loved growing up here in Scotland as a wee ‘un. Sounds corny I know, but there really were purple mountains, heather covered glens and a frozen loch you could skate on in winter. I remember them all as if it were yesterday.

Mother, unfortunately, never quite settled to the task of bringing up a family in the wilds of Scotland, and when I was eight, we all moved …darn sarf!.

I had a wonderfully happy, middle-class childhood, as I remember, growing up in Middlesex, Essex and Surrey, while father built the vaults in the Bank of England, the Moscow Narodny and attended to the security needs of the Royal Family.

But unfortunately, for me, having a highly developed sense of humour and a short attention span wasn’t a valid substitute for hard work and academic qualifications.  So as it turned out, when school was all done, I couldn’t become the architect father always hoped I would be. But I was ‘good at drawing’, so art college was the “…best thing for you, my lad”.

So off I went ~ to do art ~ be an artist!

Reigate was quite a special little art college, but very provincial, and I should have stayed, finished my course and learned all I could from Boss Poulter, Ben Manchip and several others, but I didn’t. It was the 60′s, mods and rockers, and it was all happening in London ~ I couldn’t wait to be there.

At 19 years young, what did I know?  All I knew was I wanted to start earning my living, so I dropped out of college to become a graphic designer. I decided to be a “commercial artist”, as we called them in those days.

Got my first job. Now I was paying my own way, working and going to college in the evenings, plus one day a week at Sir John Cass and, later, St. Martins School of Art, so I could finish my course and get my diploma.

Making cups of tea for everyone and his dog, learning my trade ~ whatever that was ~ and delivering art-work all around London, for a small finished art and design studio, at 94 Wigmore Street, where Carol, Ken and Eric Hill were very kind to me, and gave me a start at £5 a week.

I’d like to say “…it was a fortune, in those days”, but it wasn’t.

Never did get that diploma. What the hell. Life was great, and I was on my way to the big time.

I remember sitting cross-legged on the floor, all of us packed into a stifling hot room in the London Hilton on August 24th, 1967.

We were there to hear the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi teach us now to meditate or something, and then, out of the blue, The Beatles just walked in. This was London, in the 60′s, after all. Anything was possible. In fact, sometimes, it felt like the whole world order was changing.

For a couple of quid, at the weekend, we’d pile into the scruffy basement of Les Cousins in Greek Street and stay all night, listening to incredible folk play and sing — like Martin Carthy, Leo Kotke, Tom Rush, Stephan Grossman, Don Partridge, Bernard Coen, Jon Hendricks, John Martyn, Magna Carta, and dozens of others who would later become really big names.

And still have to be on the 7:30am train to Victoria on Monday morning. Oh the joys of commuting.

Fast forward 3 or 4 years — I’d had various jobs in design studios and advertising agencies, and by the time I was 22 I’d struck out on my own.

I was running a semi-successful print design business in the Old Kent Road, married my girlfriend and settled down.  Living in a very twee designer apartment with the obligatory Habitat furniture, on the edge of Blackheath, and a Mini-Cooper ‘S’ (no, a real Mini-Cooper) outside in the driveway, we were doing quite nicely, thank you. Or so I thought.

Over the next few years I had some really good design projects, and my work was even published in book on famous London Designers, but I never quite got used to the shallowness of the London big Ad Agency world; in the self-serving show-reel creation, at the client’s expense, and dumb ass ads which often passed for creativity (some things never change).

Almost in my 30′s now and soon, I was thinking, I would be “too old” to change. I had to try something new, and much to my wife’s surprise and disappointment, turned myself into ‘a suit’, a ‘corporate exec’, if you can imagine that.

First, in Liege and London I headed up Marketing Communications in Europe for RCA Semiconductors.

A couple of years later we moved to Frankfurt where I ran European Advertising for the chemical giant, Du Pont.

Now I was working for, rubbing shoulders with and learning from dozens of top American executives from big multinational companies — out in the BIG world! I hadn’t exactly arrived yet, but the journey was just starting to be fun, and I had found my niche.

Running European advertising for the world’s largest printing plate manufacturer, its not hard to imagine why I was head-hunted to run international sales and marketing for Mark Andy, the world’s largest flexo printing press manufacturer, based in St Louis, Missouri, in the good old U-S of A.

So in 1979 off we went to America. New job, new house, new pick-up truck, new motorbike, new dog, a ride on lawnmower and snow-blower, and the best present of all, No 1 son was born — so you get the picture.  Life was wonderful. I was living the American dream.

I made a decent living, a VERY decent living. Held senior management positions and status; saw the world from the inside of club-class expense account, and even learned to play golf. Travelled all over Asia, China, South America, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, selling all kinds of stuff, together with my clubs and my American Express Platinum card. In fact I very soon lost count of the countries we hadn’t been together.

In 1983 I made a very important decision, although I didn’t know how important at the time. I bought myself my first computer – an Osborne Portable.  It had 64k of memory, one 180k floppy disk, CPM operating system and weighed about twice as much as a sewing machine, which it resembled quite closely in more ways than one. My fascination with computers and the digital media world started right about then.

And just when my sales were going through the roof and, coincidentally, I was getting my swing into a groove, Mark Andy decided I should go back to Europe and open their new “European Operations Center in Switzerland, or Belgium or Holland or some place like that — “…you choose”.

Uh uh, not me!  Sorry, my family and my life’s here now.

So with a three friends I’d met at the health club, together we decided to open, as it turned out to be, the first of four “Lifestyle Computer” stores in and around Saint Louis. And in 1984 I got one of the first Apple Macs and my life long addiction to computers and all things digital started to kick in!

Now fast forward 4 years, I’m Lifestyle’s Marketing VP, we are Apple’s #2 dealer in Missouri and selling $6 Million a year in Apple Macs and IBM PCs.  Not bad for a guy who until recently hadn’t even seen a computer, never mind sold one!

Eventually, my visa expired and the gum-shoes caught up with me, so we moved back to live in UK, to Bournemouth actually, and I got a job, first as Commercial Director for Olivetti’s new ComputerAge Europe franchise, then European Sales & Marketing Director for ConTel Business Systems.  After that I ran International Sales for 4-Sight/WamNet! for a while, before being hired away by their German competition, Hermstedt GmbH, to run worldwide sales and marketing.

My career as a “corporate high flyer” in the  computer industry meant I flew eight times round the globe in one year, and over the next few years, had apartments in Paris, Stuttgart, London, Heidelberg and Boston. Sometimes I’d leave Germany and drive though the night to get home at 5am in the morning — just to be with the family — but often it was hard to know where home was any more.

I have been building and managing major international businesses for nearly 40 years now. Along the way, I have seen two recessions (now my third), one burst dot com bubble, business model shifts, doom and gloom predictions come and go. And the companies I have worked for? They have all thrived.

In the late 90s, I was working for Hermstedt GmbH and they’d just given me a job as President of their US operation. The company saw me as a “safe pair of hands”, I think, so I was always the one they dispatched to sort out ailing subsidiaries and errant managers around the world. I found out one day some employees called me the ‘Angel of Death’, behind my back. They knew when I came to town, somebody’s job wasn’t safe, maybe theirs. I had a track-record and they knew I would take the difficult decisions. I would be the one to lop off heads, if they needed to go.

I kept telling myself “…you’ve just got to live with it… it’s for the best… for the ones that remain… it’s what they’re paying you for.” But doing the right thing in business, sometimes the shitty stuff other folk can’t or won’t do, makes you more enemies than friends. And that didn’t sit well with me.

I’d presided over too many firings, plant closures and redundancies. I’d reconstructed one too many fiefdoms managers had cobbled together with company money and other people’s lives, just to make themselves feel important.

I didn’t want to do it anymore. I had started out as ‘a creative’, then ‘a suit’, then ‘a salesman’, now I was a ‘company doctor’. I felt like the real me had died along the way, and needed, somehow, to be brought back to life. To get back to my roots. But being a buttoned up, professional, self sufficient kind a guy, who always had to be right, and in charge, there was nobody I could really talk to.

The South Korean Government (although they didn’t know it when they offered me the job), came to my rescue. They invited me to be the first non-Korean employee and Commercial Director at iPark London, to help them set up a technology incubator and bring South Korean high-tech companies to Europe.

I was to teach them what to look for in European partners, how to build local organisations, create and manage their new distribution channels. In fact, how to do all the things they must do to win friends and influence Western companies to buy into South Korean technologies, services and products. Now, I wasn’t deconstructing, I was constructing businesses, the right way. It was heavy going, and a big culture shock (for them, mostly), but I loved every minute. And I got to sleep in my own bed almost every night. Woohoo!

But that job didn’t last long. Or rather it did, and I didn’t. I had a heart attack on a jet-way at Heathrow one morning — I thought it was just indigestion — then again in the office later that evening, only this time it knocked me down and was playing for keeps. Fortunately, I was just round the corner from Hammersmith Hospital, and I ended up spending months in various hospitals and recuperating at home. Never would work for the South Korean Government again. But I survived.

That’s when I learned heart attacks either kill you or warn you. And I had been warned. But early retirement be damned! I needed something, some job — perhaps a little less stressful — an interest or hobby I could do every day, to stop my mind from going the same way as my waistline. Maybe even a business to keep the wolf from the door one day. OK, I was no longer young and innocent, but I felt I needed to do something positive, constructive and maybe even to give back to society. The question was, give back what?

It was right about then I fell in love again. My “mid-life crisis”, as my wife called her. She was my first Harley Davidson and I christened her “Fat Girl”. A beautiful, one owner FLSTF, immaculate when she came to live with us, only 11 years young, she had stayed all her days in the South of France, being secretly admired in a Chateau by some rich guy who played with her once a year, and rode her the few kilometres down to the beach.

Just as I was starting — or so I thought — to get my life back together, my illness, lack of direction, the many years being apart and my new girlfriend, all chose this moment in my life to take their toll on my marriage. And as it turned out the Fat Girl would put up with my lack of employment, new-found freedom and ‘bad-boy’ image, longer than my long-suffering wife would.

So there I was, one bright sunny morning in Bournemouth, in poor health, no job, no wife and no prospects, with an 11 year old mistress in the garage.

Life just doesn’t get much better than that. Except on a good day.

Fortunately, I have always had the ability to see the future as an opportunity. So although everything in my life had changed now, I was busy reinventing myself. Mostly living a digital lifestyle, contacting old friends, old colleagues and old flames, I didn’t know it at the time but I was on my way to becoming an Internet Marketing guru.

My salvation turned out to be Search Engine Marketing and Optimisation, a job I worked out I could do from anywhere in the world, and which drew on my many years of computer know-how plus a sales and marketing background.

And although I’m not yet where I want to be — a small office in the grounds of my own Chateau — I can say confidently, instead of looking at which new Jaguar I’m going to buy next, now I’m dreaming of moving to the South of France with my best buddy and partner, Allana, and having my two sons come out there to visit and experience a different way of life, and a new me.

In the last 10 years I have grown slowly to where I am today, but I can tell you that along the way I found my freedom (and I’m not just talking about money). I keep chasing independence, leadership, simplicity, change and common-sense, every day of my life. I am not looking to grow my business bigger. But I am always looking to grow it better and smarter.

And I try to un-teach the cult of celebrity in the people I mentor, and everything they learned in the past about marketing the old way. What matters now is purpose, values and principles — not fame and money – but how to blend them with Social Marketing, is neither self-evident, nor easy. Being popular for 15 minutes, is one thing. Being well liked and respected for all the right reasons, is quite another. And generally lasts a wee bit longer.

I have a creative mind, and these days it tends to focus on social causes and what I can do to help put right society’s ills, rather than just how to sell more stuff and make more money. And though the red hot passion has gone out of the relationship, Fat Girl has stayed with me through everything – although lately, this damn Scottish weather has put a bit of a damper on the romance.

Still crazy about jazz, especially famous jazz trios. Irish folk music and country music from the Dixie Chicks, Gilbert & Sullivan and Puccini arias too. Very eclectic. And music is almost always playing in the office — way too loud!

You can do that when you’re your own boss.