As someone who is fixated on growing and motivating my team to be the best at what we do, I am always trying to understand what are the key driving points that make some people incredibly successful. I was about to start blogging about the fact that when you have a wife and children, suddenly you seem to become more successful. I first came accross this theory when Vernon Lord a then finance director at Granada jokingly commented that he disliked me, there is always a little truth in the jest. He said, “you have no wife, kids, loan repayments, school fees, ex-wives. You have nothing that ensures you have to perform.” I reminded him that I’d never missed my target and that I was… Read the Rest »
At the CBI awards at the Midland Hotel on Friday I sat and listened to a very clever man Jon Moulton put some of our country’s problems into plain and simple English. “For every £3 the government earns, they are spending £4.” So to break even they’d have to reduce spending by 28%. How can this happen? Charles Dickens famously said: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.” With all the technology at our fingertips in today’s society how can we not balance the books? Where else in the world can you get away from this sort of lack of control where you can spend more than you… Read the Rest »
How many people can say that they never make mistakes? I occasionally joke with myself saying, “with all the errors I have made over the years, by now I should technically be the smartest person in Europe.” Of course I am not and my own ability disproves my theory. You dont have to make mistakes to learn, the smartest amongst us learn very quickly to avoid pitfalls, however there is no better way to solidify in your mind, when you get that inevitable thought, “well I never want to do that again.” Yet even though it is a tried and tested method of learning and an important part of our evolution process, I know as a business person we live in fear of making mistakes,… Read the Rest »
UKFast is continually being hailed as a great company; I’d be barmy to challenge people dishing out fantastic compliments. On the outside it is easy to look a great deal more polished. But if you were to ask your clients, “honestly, hand on your heart now, just how good are we as a business?” Would every single one of them reply with absolute certainty, “your business is flawless!” Certainly not, and there starts our journey. A little like Jim Collin’s theory on ‘the Purpose.” A business needs an unattainable goal to aim at for the rest of their days (eg. Disney and Walt’s “Purpose” To Make People Happy). Just like a purpose, we need another goal, STANDARDS. We can do this easily from the comfort… Read the Rest »
“It hurts doesn’t it.” “What’s that?” I replied. “That feeling inside of you now…. it hurts doesn’t it.” It certainly did and although I smiled, I thought, I am not giving him the pleasure of saying that again. I realised why he is such a great motivator. That’s all he had to say, a simple observation, making me focus on the pain I was feeling and boy it hurt all the more. I had been warned that this is Richard Branson’s game. We were the last to leave the beach, all the others had gone back up the hill to the Great House. It was after midnight and Richard said, “Right, who’s for a game of Perudo?” If you were like me and had no… Read the Rest »
It’s another day at the office, on the outside everything looks normal, if there is such a thing at UKFast. By normal, I mean people down the corridor bouncing on trampettes, heated discussions at every pod of desks, a queue of people wanting to share their latest thoughts and innovations. I walk past someone sticking large brightly coloured letters onto the wall, spelling out our future. I love this place. I love the energy and the people. I caught her eye. She smiled, but not the usual reflex smile, but one from someone who is making a concerted effort to put on a brave face. Following me into my den, Rach put down my coffee and said, “she doesn’t want anyone to know, but she’s… Read the Rest »
I was at the rugby on Friday night and a friend asked me,”How do you combat stress?” I thanked her for considering me qualified to give her advice. As I began to explain what I do, I was reminded of several stressful eras of my life. How did I learn to overcome this negative emotion? I use a formula that works very well for me in any situation. I tackle the problem from 2 fronts. Some years ago, stress knocked me sideways and backwards at every turn. It consumed me at crucial times and spoiled a great many occasions and years of my life. I had learned to accept stress as just one of those things we all have to deal with. Shortly after I… Read the Rest »
This is a great question. So often we embark on a journey without really fully understanding where it is we want to end up and what it is we want to take from the journey. I have just had a week away from work. I’ve had a fantastic time with my family and some friends on a desert island away from the usual pressures of every day life and I have realised, I am just starting out. Everything I have done so far is merely a sequence of lessons for the journey ahead. Its a strange concept because for me there is no ultimate destination. No place to rest, no retirement, just a never ending road. So why embark on a journey like this? You might… Read the Rest »
I was at a crossroads. There are a number of different routes I could take at this point and driving on ahead seems like a potentially futile journey. It was earlier this year when I could have gone one of 2 directions. Do I carry on the potentially expensive quest of developing our business in a carbon neutral fashion? Is there a guarantee at the end of it, I will find a viable alternative? I was ready to throw in the towel, when I was challenged by one of the worlds greatest entrepreneurs. He didn’t directly challenge me, yet his words spoke volumes. I cannot give up. Here is a man who is pioneering space travel, undoubtedly one of the hardest of any of man’s… Read the Rest »
I remember at Ruthin School, we had an armory with hundreds of guns. Mainly World War II rifles, 303′s Enfield rifles, but we had a number of Bren guns too, a lethal machine gun last used in the Falklands. I was considering the army as a career choice. Every Monday we’d dress in full army uniform for school. It was called CCF (Combined Cadet Force) and is connected to some of my fondest memories running and climbing in the mountains and crawling through the mud of SENTA, an area approximately 31,000 acres (12,000 ha) of Ministry of Defence freehold land in Sennybridge, Wales. It was on one of the firing ranges at 15 years old that it was explained to me that the Bren Gun… Read the Rest »
