I have been privileged to get to know some giants in many industries but one person I have never had the fortune to sit down with and learn from is Sir Alex Ferguson.

It’s safe to say, Sir Alex Ferguson is a great football manager and whether you are a fan of Manchester United or not, his track record speaks for itself and places him, arguably, as the greatest manger that’s ever lived. But I think that title only covers part of his qualities.

Sir Alex Ferguson is essentially a great leader. It just so happens that he chose football, or football chose him. Looking at his personality traits, I’d argue that his skills are transferable. He’s what I’d describe as a classic leader.

When you get these rare people, wherever they go, people want to follow them. Whatever walk of life, whatever industry, people gravitate towards them. Why is this? And why aren’t we producing more of these characters?

The simple truth is that great leaders have a combination of traits and if any of them are missing, they are found wanting and fall short. The biggest and rarest of the traits in this particular combination is the desire to put other people before oneself. Great leaders are conductors; they stand away from the orchestra and although they share in the music, the lead violinists and solo musicians claim the limelight.

Ferguson is one of these people. Happiest watching from the sidelines, he readily gives the credit to all the people he works with, long before he’d accept praise himself.

Why people and players gravitate to him is the interesting point and the one that holds the key to success and failure.

Great leaders expect more; they know no limits, they are unsettled, they can never rest and they transfer these attributes and standards to everyone around them. It sounds easy doesn’t it? But be warned, if you attempt to emulate a master at work without combining magnanimous traits, you will quickly find yourself unpopular and at the hands of a mutiny. There is a fine line between the pain before success and the potential downfall of a team, whether in sport or business. Real talent can be difficult to manage and I know so many business leaders who push hard but don’t have the compassion needed to balance the pain with a hug when it’s needed. Ultimately, they fail to reach their full potential and whilst they may do quite well, they never know just how well they could have done if they’d just changed a few small things.

Hearing Ferguson talk is a lesson in itself. Addressing the crowd and media after his last match at Old Trafford as manager, Ferguson immediately starts by saying “thank you,” and then congratulates the team. He doesn’t talk about himself, he talks of the memories and the future, the last minute goals, and he highlights the defeats too, stating that “they are all part of this great football club of ours.”

This is an inclusive attitude, one of sharing. Jim Collins, Stamford professor and author of “Good to Great”, describes a great leader as someone who takes full responsibility for whatever goes wrong, but when things go well, they share out the success and cite everyone else for the victory. These may sound like normal traits but actually, in the cold light of day, most people pass on the blame immediately and when great stuff happens they are quick to make people believe that they were the cause of it. It’s the natural reaction.

So, how do you manage standards when you set them at the very limits of possibility?

When hearing Manchester United players, past and present, talk about Ferguson, you quickly learn that he is a tough task master. Someone who is not afraid to speak his mind. Someone who will hold everyone around him accountable.

Praise and recognition for hard work is essential but when standards aren’t met, Ferguson’s reputation preceded him. Nicknamed the hairdryer, he wasn’t apologetic for his volatility. In fact, he went as far as saying “there’s nothing wrong with losing your temper, sometimes it’s premeditated, you have to use all the tools you have.”

The real difference in his repeated success lies a lot deeper though, and whilst everyone else in the Premiership was playing football, Ferguson had his sights on a much bigger picture. He goes on to describe:

“A football club is the infrastructure, your staff, your youth team, your school kids coming through, the reserve team, staff who can cope with that, coaches. It’s not just about the the football team. And that’s what I believe in.”

This attitude separates Ferguson from mere mortal to legend because he is building for the future long after his term. Building a legacy, all the time understanding the sheer size of his responsibilities, all the time ensuring his players and everyone involved, fans alike, understood the magnitude of their responsibility.

It’s a masterclass in leadership, a humbling experience, and I am proud to have witnessed this maestro at work in my lifetime.

If you are wanting to build a lasting business, you need to inspire people, week in week out. It’s not easy and getting this balance is the hardest part of building a business. You may even be lucky and share all the traits of a great leader but they can never be in the same proportion to someone else’s and so you never get the same leader twice. They are all wonderful personalities; the more extreme ones do actually go on to change the world.

Whatever Ferguson’s secrets, whatever his style, his contribution to Manchester as a place is unprecedented.

It was one of those uncomfortable moments that drove me to this place where I am now. Have you ever felt that no matter how hard you work, you seem to be going backwards or standing still? Last year and the run up to it felt a bit like that for me.

Stepping back to move forward

I remember reading the book “Delivering Happiness” about Zappos and how Tony Hsieh woke up one day and realised that the culture in his business had changed. It was no longer the small start up with the energy and passion that it once had. His answer was to quit, but that word is not in my vocabulary.

Everyone warned me that UKFast would change eventually because all businesses do. And whilst change is good, the thought of losing some of that dynamic spirit inherent in all great British start ups never sat well with me. But about 18 months ago, I woke up with one of those feelings. It wasn’t that something was terribly wrong, it was just the thought that if I was going to do something truly extraordinary and really change peoples lives, something had to change. “I need to adapt, everything needs to step up a gear, we need to start working smarter.” It’s a scary feeling, but it’s these uncomfortable feelings that drive and inspire us to continually improve.

I am learning that there is nowhere to hide when you are at the helm of a business because everyone turns around at some point to ask for guidance and if you are not there, steering the ship at those crucial moments, people lose faith and the business loses direction. Ever heard of the Titanic? The business world is littered with organisations that had awesome potential and leaders who thought they were invincible.

If you want to learn how to do something, go and find the best teachers. I play squash and I have a coach who is arguably the best person in the UK outside of the players with official world rankings (and he even gives them a run for their money). Choosing someone who is significantly better at something helps to stretch you where ordinarily you might cruise with a lesser opponent. It also gives you the belief when you realize that these individuals, playing at the very top of their game, are human. They might just be slightly more focussed in key areas.

Businesses are no different and if you want to get good at something, search out the best to learn from and find out the key areas where you can make the biggest impact when you make your changes.

I have been lucky enough to meet and get to know some incredible people, not least the amazing Tony Robbins, arguably my biggest influence. I am a completely different person to who I was a decade ago thanks to a few of those moments where I knew I had to make a number of those uncomfortable changes.

Jonathan Bowers and behind just as she is with me Gail Jones, UKFast cofounder

It turned out that what was needed at UKFast was more simple than I had realized. It was just a matter of establishing a structure that worked when we were small and arguably at our best, then applying a simple formula that everyone can follow so no team member or client ever feels remote. It was easy; the difficult part is that you need to find extraordinary people to help you as you can’t do it on your own.

So, last year on the advice of a great friend, I stepped back from UKFast, not out, I just elevated one of my key directors and life long friends to managing director to help ease some of the pressures of  the the everyday operation of such a rapidly-expanding business. Jonathan wasn’t expecting this challenge and I am sure he’d tell you he wasn’t ready for it either, but that same someone told me “promote someone over and above where they expect to be and you will get tremendous loyalty and they will develop far quicker and surprise you in the process.”

UKFast crew defrosting after a cold day in the mountains.

Well, true to these wise words, one year on, same place, same people, same passion, same everything really, yet something feels very different both with the business and with me too. It’s so much clearer when you come back and visit the place and people who inspired the change. You create a clear bench mark when you stop and take stock and and compare two moments in time from the same physical point.

From that tiny thought and that standstill moment, I look back on a the last 12 months with tremendous pride. It wasn’t just JB who stepped up; there are so many great people in UKFast, too many to single out individually, but suddenly from having a business that was full of great people, doing great things we now have a businesses where those same people are doing extraordinary things.

In the last 12 months we have built 2 data centres, hit £20 million in turnover, and the business has added some 50 or so people, yet we feel tighter and more close knit than ever before. But, more important than any profit margin or financial statistic, we have enhanced that dynamic spirit. We are back in business.

So somehow from stepping a little further back everyone lifts to fill the gaps each person makes as they rise to the challenge. You might think this is just a romantic notion, but I can promise you that something great is happening back in Manchester. These guys are running UKFast now. They are a new breed of entrepreneurs, they are empowering each other and they know what is needed to drive and grow UKFast to new levels. I believe in them, they are amazing.

There’s nothing quite like sitting in front of a log fire, taking a minute, taking a deep breath, taking stock of everything that’s going on in this crazy world of ours. It’s one of those moments now, looking out over the mountains of Verbier, watching the snow come down, reflecting on what is undoubtedly the most amazing part of the journey so far.

The UKFast Ski Team Verbier 2013

So, what have I learned?

Take a second to stop what you’re doing and reflect. Light a fire, get out a pen and paper and start writing your lists. Don’t stop, and dream big. Write down what you want to do and then when you have finished, write down what you need to do to achieve everything on the list. If you do this, there will be things on that piece of paper of yours that you will need to cut out and stop doing to improve. These are the painful moments, finding the sacrifices you have to make, but remember just how strong you are. Remember that everything you have around you now started as a single thought. You can achieve exactly what you set your mind on so now, quit writing, it’s time to start doing what you need to do in order to make it a reality. It’s easier than you think and you above all people know you can do it.

I have learnt that the only things that matter in life are the moments you create or share with people where you experience something special. So, whatever your aspirations are, take a moment to be a great person on your journey and I promise you it will work out.

See you at the top of Mont Fort.

Best

LJ

Stress is an important ingredient in the process of improving. Without stress, we wouldn’t develop.

That being said, it’s something I hate with a passion and avoid at all costs.

In my line of work, and due to my type of personality, stress is potentially all around me. In fact, if I didn’t have a mechanism to diffuse and distract myself from it, I wouldn’t be as far into the journey as I am now.

Firstly, you have to identify what stresses you. Stress comes from uncertainty. When you constantly know the outcome for something, it becomes boring and you switch off. In these situations, we inevitably start taking more on; we learn to juggle tasks and eventually we overstretch ourselves until suddenly we are dropping stuff and letting people down, causing pain and - guess what - getting stressed!

So the choices: Firstly, do nothing and take on less. Wrong. This will cause stress too as you need challenges. Or secondly, learn to adapt.

Ok, this all sounds really easy but with the kids arguing and your partner wanting attention, and the bills need paying – OMG, will someone just give me a minute!

There is an easier way….

I have learnt a technique so effective that I continually take on far too much in every aspect of my life yet I seem to deal with it, and when things get a little too tough, I just turn up the dial.

How do I do it?

Firstly, you need to understand how your brain works. Stress comes from your subconscious mind not letting go of a thought. It eats away in the background and wastes your quality thinking time. Furthermore, it distracts you from tackling the things that matter most.

Me & my kids playing squash (Pick opponents you’ll beat)

In a perfect world, you’d have a clear head and you’d pick off each item on your list and slowly get on top of your schedule.

With too much on your mind, you need a way of distracting your subconscious and giving yourself the necessary air to breathe and time out.

This is easier said than done when you have massive problems but, actually, this technique is easier to apply than you might realise.

There are a few stages to it depending on the severity but, essentially, you need to resort to things you do that involve you using your brain in different ways.

For example, I use squash to switch off. No matter how tough my life gets, I walk on to court; it’s a square box, it’s a safe haven. I have a coach and for that hour I am not the boss. In fact, I get beasted from one side of the court to another. By running around, you create endorphins in your brain that relax you and, by playing a game, you chase the points and the score and - guess what - you are not thinking about the list of problems awaiting you when you get outside.

And when you do get outside, whilst they haven’t gone away, it’s so much easier to start to pick off the job lists. You will have also burnt off a lot of negative energy.

On top of Snowdon in the worst weather, 3 ft of snow and we are still smiling or sort of!

If you are a keen runner, you might run with the problems bouncing around your head. The simple way to remove them is to focus on all the things in your life you are grateful for. It’s easy for me; after being resuscitated in an avalanche, I get passionate just about the air I breathe. But if you start listing your kids, your friends, your family members and all the things you have to be thankful for, you soon divert your attention. The reason being: you can only think of one emotion at a time. Whilst its difficult to conjure up “being happy” when the world is on your shoulders, everyone has things they can be grateful for. To stop the negative thoughts from creeping back in, I use a technique that I learned from Tony Robbins, where you repeat incantations, rythmical phrases that you can do in time with your exercise. “Thank you God for the air I breathe” or “All I need is within me now.”

They will not only help you to relax, they will lift your performance too.

So, whether you are running a business or a family, whether you are a mum or a lawyer, or both; in today’s busy lives, things will get on top of us. So try it.

Get to the gym, go for a run, have a game of squash, just get out of the office, or the armchair, and get some fresh air.

The most relaxed businessman I know is Sir Richard Branson, yet with all the millions of decisions and questions he must ask himself and be asked, how does he do it? Is it any coincidence that he spends a few hours of every day to himself playing sport? If he’s not playing tennis, he’s swimming around the island or racing sail boats. The competition element in exercise is a fantastic distraction.

Sir Richard Branson playing tennis on Necker. Avid sports man and successful entrepreneur

Try it and you will wake up years later feeling stronger, looking slimmer and being more in control.

Then, guess what, you need to push yourself harder again.

Just remember what Muhammad Ali said: “He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life.” Take the risks with the confidence that you are able to deal with what’s around the corner. And if you get stuck, give me a call and we can take a hike up the mountains.

Have an awesome week. LJ

Having Gail on my team gave me the courage to rent our first two man office on Fountain Street, and UKFast was formed.

They were wonderful days; wonderfully terrifying, wonderfully tough. The pain we felt back then makes us appreciate everything now, and I never forget my roots or my journey. When heading to the Midland Hotel gym or crossing town, I often go via Fountain Street and look up with pride at our little startup office.

We missed the dot com boom but, at the same time, when the bubble burst, we were unaffected as we only had a couple of clients. It seems a million miles away now.

It’s 2013, we have thousands of happy clients and an army of focussed, dedicated, happy team mates.

The gap in the middle is a blur. Gail’s much better at remembering dates and times. Maybe it’s because I am always curious to see what’s around the corner. I always have one eye on the horizon.

Venturing into the unknown is what I enjoy the most.

That being said, I am eternally grateful for the extraordinary, coordinated efforts of every person, past and present.

So, if I look back, there are a few memories that stick out. I remember Gail’s Granddad coming to see our new office and being very impressed. I was mortified when I realised he thought we had the whole building. When I explained that it was just this tiny room, I felt empty. I realised that I had my work cut out and I was a million miles from where I needed to be.

It was at this moment that I first set the goal to get a huge office, one that we’d own, and one that dwarfs our start up headquarters.

I remember talking to businesses and when they asked, “how many people in UKFast?” I’d say, “Well, in this building there are around 200.” By avoiding the question and answering another one, I didn’t have to tell an untruth. The fact that the other 198 didn’t work for UKFast at the time was irrelevant! In business, it’s important to instill confidence in your prospective client and, rightly or wrongly, people get reassured by size. I heard Simon at Techhub telling a nice story last week when we both sat on a panel together for an Insider event on growth. He said, in the earliest days, “We answered each others phones just to give the illusion of being bigger.”

It’s funny how things transpire. Now, with 200 strong, the next part of the jigsaw is just slotting into place and I’d like to say thank you to everyone at UKFast; clients, suppliers, competitors and everyone who has helped to make this possible but, most of all, to Granddad for inspiring me to step up to the plate. Against all the odds, against the mathematical statistics of even being around a decade later, let alone being profitable and strong enough to be acquiring buildings, this is the 5th office building we have bought in just a couple of years with space totalling around 80,000 sq ft.

Acquiring the latest building, No.1 Archway, was stressful and the pressure was immense; probably because I knew we’d complete a number of goals in one hit. Strategically,  it immediately gives UKFast and Manchester improved connectivity as the building bisects Telecity’s 2 main data centres that currently house the bulk of Manchester’s connectivity. Ironically, all the networks cross our car park on the route to the 2 buildings.

We already have a list of telcos wanting to take space in the proposed DC wing of the building. The building is also large enough to take the overflow of staff that we currently have with our rapid expansion plans. So, immediately, I will be looking to rehouse some of the faster growing departments, giving us room to breathe again.

It’s been hard keeping it a secret. Nowadays, with Twitter and Facebook, and teammates with friends and families in other businesses, I have been dreading the news leaking. At the same time, it’s been hard standing up in front of my colleagues and friends at work, telling them how things were getting on with the project when, in reality, it was a deal that was constantly on and off.

It’s so important to create an environment of stability, and yet I had no idea until the very last day whether the deal was going to come off or not.

It was a complicated transaction as the building was owned by one company and the land by the council. I remember, just before Christmas, emailing Sir Howard Bernstein from Manchester Council. I was at Old Trafford, a guest of a supplier, and I was supposed to be watching a game of football. I don’t remember who won or anything about the game. I spent the entire time writing an email to Sir Howard and another to my lawyer explaining, “the deal is off!” It had just got too complicated; each of the 3 parties being perfectly reasonable but wanting something slightly different. I have to say, if it weren’t for Sir Howard’s forward thinking and help from my good friend Chris Ogelsby CEO of Bruntwood, the deal would not have happened. Chris’s experience in property negotiation, and his patience, helped me keep my eye on the bigger picture.

Now, at the cornerstone of the Science Park, and as a prominent landmark coming into the city from the airport, UKFast is in a great position to really expand properly with an increased sense of responsibility.

It was worth the wait and every ounce of stress. We got an incredible deal buying the building for £3.2 million, around half the price of its real value in my positive times.

I was a little disappointed that after years of driving past that building and dreaming of owning it, to actually do the deal and, having proudly been interviewed by the Manchester Evening News, to only get 3 sentences in the next day’s newspaper. Sadly, with redundancies being announced in their business, everyone’s focus was understandably on other things. But it’s a story that people need to hear when we are being continually told that the property market is depressed. It’s just everyone in the property market who are depressed. It’s up to us to give them a hug and start buying buildings and investing in Manchester’s future. I can’t think of a better city in the world to lay down my foundations.

And it’s not just us at UKFast in our industry and on our doorstep. Look at Melbourne Hosting, an incredible start up that, in a matter of a few years, built a business that the owner Daniel was able to sell to Scottish hosting company Iomart for around £5 million, and Scott Fletcher of ANS, which has really started to grow in recent years. There are many businesses in Manchester doing well.

The question I get asked is, ‘when will it be ready?’  My answer to this is simple: it will never be finished. As Benjamin Franklin once cleverly said:

“When you’re finished changing, you’re finished.”

I already have my eye on a plot of land for the UKFast Campus when we grow to over 1000!

It’s such an honour to be part of this global communications explosion. Just living in this era, where my 6 year old is asking for an Apple ID to download a Smurf App onto her iPad, is incredible. Who’d have thought, we have evolved this far and we still rely on the Smurfs to keep our kids entertained.

What’s really exciting is the speed of change and how it is affecting everything we do.

What was being dreamt up on TV shows decades ago is common place in our homes. Where is it going to stop? Well, the good news is that it’s not. This collaborative approach to programming and software development is what’s making the world a smaller place. This new era is simply going to speed up. But as you can see on the high street, there are always casualties.

Google quirky putting green in their offices in London

Even brands like Google are being challenged. Whilst they still own the Search Engine business, and they are clearly number 1, people are now using the internet in different ways and Google is not as useful as it was. We are spending more time on Facebook and Twitter. These brands are the new influencers and, unless Google is very careful and gets hold of the social media bug very soon with Google +, there will be a line of new upstarts appearing as quickly as Google in their wake.

Most people challenge statements like this, knowing the might of Google, but consider this: whilst the first black and white TVs were a revelation, the businesses who kept with them when the colour TV launched quickly found themselves in trouble. This is the era when a business like Google was created from a garage in San Francisco and they are almost Old School now. I have a feeling that there are going to be some pretty extraordinary businesses being created during this decade.

Whatever happens to Google, it’s irrelevant and - this is the interesting part - it’s us, the people, who will simply choose the fashion, and what we like one year will inevitably fall out of favour with the next generation. Very few businesses learn how to cross the boundaries of time and come out unscathed. Choosing the software you use is now as intricate and discerning as the clothes you wear.

In our industry, there are interesting things happening too. With the burst of cloud and the excitement this brings to the tech race, people are purchasing hardware in a different way. Consumers are less bothered by the brands they’ve relied upon for years; they just want to know that things work. Where, how and why seem to matter less.

So, what makes a brand and how do you build a super brand? That’s the billion dollar question. I don’t think you do. I think that the consumer, for the first time in history, is actually choosing the “what works and what doesn’t.”

If you create something and the market place doesn’t like it, years ago you might have had less competition and you could bury the bad news. Not now. These days, as fast as you are trying to fix your online customer service issues, every one of your competitors knows your every weakness and vulnerability. Is this good or bad?

It’s fantastic. Unless you want to bury your head in the sand, which I suppose is an option to some, I think that getting immediate feedback is the future. Whoever understands and adopts this will win in a big way. It empowers the smaller businesses who are able to react quicker and change their marketing, pricing, order processes etc. Bigger companies quite often wait until the board meeting to find out what’s been going on. This is far too late.

If you are not getting all your sales information, order details, NPS scores and customer service issues to Apps on your mobiles, someone else from another business will be finding about your organisation’s strengths and weaknesses more quickly than you are.

I love this though, as it means that we all have to step up and provide an even better service. Of course, we are going to make mistakes but even this is an opportunity. With Twitter, we can react in an instant and get problems rectified. The consumer can connect to the CEO quite literally and this is so healthy because the people at the edge of your business will always tell you honestly just how good and bad things are.

We get an overwhelming number of incredibly positive responses from our clients at UKFast and we have an active live NPS (Net Promoter Score) that recently broke into the 50′s. This sort of good news can often drown out the bad but, with social media, we get to hear everything. If something isn’t right or if a client is unhappy because they feel let down, all problems, however small, need to be addressed head on.

So, how do I see it changing?

millions of miles of cables under the floor and roads to make the internet possible

I wish I had a crystal ball in some respects and then, in others, I am quite excited that I don’t know. I have my work cut out with speeding up the internet. Buying and building datacentres is a pastime that I am enjoying, knowing that we are making Manchester and the UK stronger as an online community by the day. This is a rewarding vocation. Creating a platform that enables so many people to design the most wonderful businesses mean that such diverse, colourful, extraordinary ideas are being incubated all around us. While you are sitting here, reading, think of the thousands of people dreaming up the next big ideas. It’s inspiring.

So, when you hear someone, as inevitably you will, talking about a potential triple dip, give them a dig and remind them that it’s up to us all to collaborate, contribute and make the difference.

What’s your plan? Get in contact and share your ideas. I’d love to hear from you.

LJ
CEO
UKFast

Twitter = http://bit.ly/WqJisp

Facebook = http://on.fb.me/X0bVZN

It was my first question to Richard Branson on my very first day on Necker. “How do we maintain the passion and enthusiasm we have now as we approach and grow beyond 100 staff?” It was clearly a concern even back then, and sadly I didn’t fully take his advice until very recently.

Was he right? What do you think? Of course he was. His advice was to follow what he did with Virgin Records and all its subsidiaries. When the business gets to 100 strong, split it in half. Take all the managers and make them the directors of the next business. Then get both sides competing with each other.

So, why is it that things work better when they are smaller?

I believe it’s to do with time. Small businesses are often driven by the founder, the entrepreneur who keeps that spirit alive. As the business grows, that originator of the creativity and passion may leave or be neutralised by other more pressing commitments. As turnover increases, so do the responsibilities, and the pressure and excitement of getting a business off the ground can become daunting when replaced by the need to keep something afloat.

I know this feeling as I struggled with it at the beginning of last year. Funnily enough, it was Branson who came to my rescue once again, insisting that I put in a managing director. After discussing who was on the UKFast board of directors, Richard said, “Jonathan is your man.”

It’s easy when you know how! From my perspective, he’s a great person to listen to and emulate because he is one of the few entrepreneurs who manage to maintain that spirit, even after breaking in to the World’s Top Brands.

In a discussion with Dan Cobley, managing director of Google UK, I was surprised to learn that Google keeps a close eye on the smaller businesses that are growing at a fast rate, pushing the boundaries. Dan explained that these are the people to emulate. They are closer to their customers and they are more innovative than larger businesses.

Ironically, a lot of small businesses copy big businesses, assuming that this is a quick fix to rapid success.

There is increasing evidence to demonstrate that innovation comes from smaller businesses and gets replicated by larger firms later down the line.

Is it that there is more pressure to succeed and a greater fear of failure when you are starting out?

When you are small, you have time to experiment and you are nimble enough to back track if you do something wrong so mistakes often go unnoticed. When big businesses make mistakes, they are front page news and now, with social media, there is no place to hide. I think this is why smaller businesses get to evolve quicker and become more creative.

An example of small businesses being creative and taking advantage of social media to promote themselves is BigJigToys and their bid for the West Coast Main Line franchise. The managing director wrote to the Transport Minister, Patrick McLoughlin, to see if there was any mileage in them bidding for the West Coast Main Line. They sent one of their toy trains and some track.

Pure Genius, as the old 1980′s Guinness advert stated.

And it’s a great example of why everyone needs to engage in a social media strategy or activity. The link to the story is a Virgin url. (http://virg.in/jig ) I picked up the story from Richard Branson’s tweets and I am, in turn, promoting the story and now both businesses. I also showed Gail, my wife, the Toy Shop that they have online, and she is very keen to use it.

You never know where your next piece of business is coming from. Marketing is changing and has, most certainly, changed in the last 2 years more than I can remember in my life time.

Social media isn’t about when you start it, it’s about when you stop.

Another good example is Chard, a leading coin and bullion dealer with a strong online presence. They use competitions to generate interest in their brand; simple but engaging ideas that encourage you to interact with them. The proprietor was good enough to give me some feedback on my business after he recently visited UKFast, and his response to my blog engaged me and helped me to make a few small changes in our business which will have a massive effect over a longer time frame.

It’s businesses who don’t want to listen and who know best that are falling foul of the market place. As my friend Scott Fletcher, from successful Cloud provider ANS, said to me this week, “there is no recession.” I am inclined to agree with him. There are businesses taking advantage of the market place and there are businesses ignoring common sense who are too stuck in their ways to evolve.

Jessops is a great example of what all business owners fear. Receivership! But I was in their store last week and the week before trying to get some camera equipment. My friend and expert retailer, James Timpson of Timpsons, would have had a merry fit if his staff behaved in a similar manner to a Jessops member of staff.

Eventually, when I finally got the prices and the spec for the camera and lens that I wanted, I thought it best to check online and compare. Jessop’s online shop was over £500 out on just the camera alone.

If they were offering a Harrods style of service, which I can assure you they weren’t, then maybe, just maybe, you might justify paying slightly more. But they are not and as a result they have suffered the greatest penalty. Game over. It’s desperately sad for everyone who worked there as it was once a great small British business.

How do businesses that come from these roots stay ahead of the curve in such a demanding market place?

What can happen, when small businesses expand rapidly, is that we stop acknowledging the simple things that we do well and start to take them for granted. One day, we just stop doing them. We call it the “Doctor Who effect”(*). All too often, we change a winning formula to one that’s not quite as effective, without even knowing it. Keeping your finger on the pulse as you grow is so important. It must be the single biggest concern for every growing entrepreneur.

The answer though, is to keep your eyes open for businesses who are doing well, who are on the up. Track the likes of Branson. He is like Madonna and David Bowie who reinvent themselves each decade. What works for one generation can become quickly outdated. The Virgin brands are continuously evolving and pushing best practices. Also, track the cool brands; they become cool for a reason. All the time, I am continually learning from the businesses and people I come into contact with.

Most of all, keep the creativity flowing in your own life and don’t get too caught up in the board room. I know I’ve said it before but the best ideas really do come when you are moving or, for me, when I am completely away from the business in the mountains.

Have fun growing. Small may be beautiful, but growing is fun.

Best of British

LJ

*(Name coined by Darren Taylor, R & D Director at UKFast, for all the things that we used to do, that suddenly stop or get changed for no apparent reason other than, “oh, we don’t do it like that anymore!”)

There is something tangible that happens once you have written down your intentions. It helps all the more if you share them too, as you are forced to stick to your guns on whatever intentions you laid out. Most of all, it gives you somewhere to aim. When there are multiple people involved, it helps to focus everyone’s intentions on the path ahead.

This year’s goal is to ensure that every single person in UKFast gets to climb Snowdon in 2013. Why? Because it’s been at the heart of our culture since the day we set up UKFast. Long before we could afford the luxury of Castell Cidwm, we camped, but ultimately nothing stood in our way of spending quality time getting to know our team and them us. Where better than in the heart of the Snowdonia National Park, where your mobile phone or internet seldom works!

The achievement of climbing the highest mountain in England and Wales always makes people smile. Not always on the way up, but when they reach the summit and the endorphins kick in, you can see the euphoria in everyone. It’s the sharing of moments like this that bond us all and I love encouraging this.

Looking a bit tired and wet as the sun comes up, but smiling now!

So, to kick start the year, I invited my directors down to the Snowdon Lake House, or Castell Cidwm as it’s known locally, for a few days. They knew we’d have something unusual for them as most of them have climbed the mountain before.

We had dinner and then, as I handed out head torches to everyone, I explained that we’d be climbing Snowdon in the dark.

The itinerary was breakfast at 4am and everyone was to be ready in waterproofs to set off by 6am.

The morning went to plan and, whilst none of us got much sleep, we drove to the car park and set off in pitch black.

Climbing a mountain in the dark is precarious and preparation is key to it being a safe and fun trip. Head torches, maps, local knowledge and the right equipment are all essential.

And here is the importance of a goal. Knowing where you are all going and having a clear objective on how to get there sounds simple but when you are guiding 20 people along ridges in the rain and blistering wind, with cloud all around you, making the black of night even more treacherous, you have to measure progress constantly, counting the numbers in the party, to guarantee a successful trip.

It’s amazing how such a potentially unpopular idea, laid out as a challenge, becomes something that is incredibly exciting.

UKFast team arrive at day break first day back in work at UKFast!

The few days were a great success and everyone got to sit around the fireplace in the house and share their business and personal goals.

As an employer, it’s all too easy to think staff responsibilities stop at salary and the usual list of standard benefits. It’s too easy to exaggerate on a careers page to lure people in.

But then what?

Yes, we can attract great candidates but eventually people are going to get despondent and pick up on the fact that they have been misled.

I have met business people who genuinely believe that they really push the boat out when it comes to staff benefits, yet if you asked their teams, you’d get a completely different picture. I was at a round table event and successful business leader Rob Cotton, said, “we all do that Lawrence!” when referring to going the extra mile with employee engagement.

Whilst Rob’s track record as a businessman speaks volumes, do business owners realise the lengths some businesses are going to and just what is being done out there? It’s not just the Googles and the Facebooks who are pushing the boat out.

I know many employers who feel, “What’s the point? I already pay them to turn up!”

And turn up they will, then switch off.

I remember hearing someone talk on the subject of staff levels of engagement some time last year. It was a global poll and Britain and the US came in at around 16th and 17th, with China and India winning with 1st and 2nd places.

The first issue an employer comes across is the challenge with the tax and the fact that any form of entertainment is classed as an employee benefit so the staff member should technically pay tax.

The second sting in the tail is that the amount you pay isn’t fully tax deductible either, so you can’t put the expense against your tax bill.

So why should we do it?

Personally, I am great believer in eating and drinking with my team, whether it be at my house for round tables or just a barbecue, or even having a quick drink on a Friday after work. I think it shows that you value people’s time when you find the time outside of work to hook up.

As the business gets bigger, how do you engage larger teams? This is a challenge that we are facing, like many other businesses, as the team grew to almost 200 in 2012.

We settled on the idea of having regular events across the year where everyone is invited. My favourite of these involved the friends and families; simple drinks and nibbles after work with mulled mine and beers, where hundreds of people turned up and congregated to see where their kids, wives, husbands and brothers work. We brought a grand piano up to the 28th floor of City Tower and I got an old friend to play Christmas carols.

Charity events are a great way of bringing people together too. You both strengthen your business at the same time as you strengthen the community. The UKFast team (including my 2 girls) helped out at the homeless Shelter at the Cathedral over Christmas. I was moved at just how many people wanted to help and what everyone brought in for some of Manchester’s less fortunate.

It’s important to understand that I am not preaching that we are better in any way than other businesses, as I know Manchester’s business community has a strong charitable nature and this is to be encouraged. Each business has its unique points and what works for one might not work for another. However, I do believe that, if you are wanting to strengthen your team or management, these are the best ways that we have found and they continue to help us make UKFast one of the fastest growing tech companies on the internet. I think it’s been a part of why we have been successful in the Sunday Times Best Companies. It would be great to see more North West businesses in the list.

Whatever your goals for 2013, I wish you the very best.

Lawrence

Greatest friendships and fondest memories of my times in Wales

PS. If you fancy coming on one of our crazy trips, there are lots of jobs and opportunities up for grabs at the moment. Why not call our friendly recruitment team?

Tonight’s performance in the South of France against Toulon was the worst in the history of the Heineken Cup, a whopping 62 to zero annihilation.

So what went wrong and when?

It started a few years ago when I got a phone call from Charlie Hodgson. I was on holiday at the time. He’d been messed around by the management, just like so many other players and sponsors alike, over contract renewals. Sadly, in spite of the club realising the error of their ways in later months, Charlie reluctantly signed for Saracens and the club lost their greatest asset.

Charlie Hodgson the night he won player of the year for the last time at Sale Sharks

You could argue that that wasn’t the first bitter blow. St Andre leaving and the exodus of some of the greatest players in World Rugby marked the real start, but everyone I spoke to, and I am close to a number of them, expressed massive discontent in the way they were treated during the negotiations.

I, myself, had suffered after AMD failed to renew their contract for the main shirt sponsor spot. Nathan Bombrys brought a contract to my office and explained that the club was in deep trouble. I spoke at length with my wife Gail and we decided the right thing to do was help. We agreed to be the main shirt sponsor, wrote the cheque and signed the contract.

A week later, Niels De Vos ripped up the contract and refused to honour it when McAffee offerered the club the same money. He and Brian Kennedy felt that going with a bigger brand was the right thing to do, in spite of not getting a penny more. To add insult to injury, they won the premiership that year!

In spite of all the upset, we decided to stick with the club and continue to support them and, true to our ambition, when the opportunity arose a few years later, we stepped in and took the main slot again. Sadly, for a lot more than the original price we’d been promised!

I look back at those times with affection.

We had always put a huge amount of resources into the marketing of the club, lending the club our designers, but being the main sponsor justified us taking it to another level. For more than a decade, we wrote, coded and managed the Sharks website and produced the vast majority of their marketing.

But in the back-room, things were never settled. Niels left to run British Athletics and Nathan, who essentially ran the commercial show, worked with us to continue to fill the stadium.

However, with Niels gone, the CEO position kept changing hands and with that came distractions. Steve Jobs talks of “removing distractions” as an essential part of success. New people came in and each made their mark and changed the winning formula, off the pitch.

The once supersonic website that provided instant information was replaced, just like us, for a cumbersome effort that requires 5 actions to obtain simple information like match reports, and the web designers who took over the hosting removed the site from a £100,000 solution to a shared web server in the US.

Our services, which were free, were swapped for staff and suppliers who now cost the club more than £100k per year.

So what’s the outcome?

Well, the club decided to move grounds after Mick Hogan decided the reason that the ground was not full was because the stadium was old. If he’d come a year or two earlier he wouldn’t have got a ticket as we were sold out! In that same stadium.

His parting shot before he was removed as CEO was to sign a contract with Peel for the use of the City of Salford Stadium, so the once free stadium that Brian Kennedy had negotiated away from the Stockport County fans was replaced for, as I understand it, a cost of £40,000 per match.

All this and the Sharks are now down to their lowest visitor numbers I can remember.

I have learned that relationships are the only things that matter in business. Not just with clients, but with team mates to boot. I believe that people go the extra mile when you treat them genuinely, and I firmly subscribe to the lesson Branson gave me, saying, “people whither with under criticism and thrive when praised.”

It was this constant negativity towards players and people in the back office that made us pull out as a sponsor in the end. We can only be aligned with like-minded businesses and some of the stories we heard convinced us that it was time to move on. The final straw was when my eight-month pregnant wife was told by Ian Blackhurst’s security that she wasn’t allowed to use the ladies toilet she’d been using for 10 years, as he’d reserved the area for his guests.

It was game over for me at this point and with more and more players saying they were leaving, as well as Nathan Bombrys who had been instrumental in filling the stadium, it was obvious that the season ahead, the one we are in now, was going to be a troublesome one.

We were told at the beginning of the season that Steve Diamond was the answer. He now just looks like the next impending casualty.

So, with the club on the verge of bankruptcy, why doesn’t multi-millionaire Brian Kennedy reinvest and start to run it properly? The challenge here is that it’s a very different business to double-glazing, the trade Brian’s made most of his money in. It really could do with someone who understands the importance of long-term relationships.

I have contacted Brian a number of times to offer my help but he seems disinterested and, most recently, left the running of the club to Ian Blackhurst.

Brian bought the club back in 1999 for £1. But with the loss of the Edgeley Park and the tie-in to the new stadium with the associated costs, it will take someone with incredibly deep pockets and a real love of rugby to step into this game. If they were back at the old ground, hadn’t got the commitments to the new stadium and were at the beginning of  the season, I’d have thrown my hat into the ring. But with relegation more than a strong possibility, with only six points out of 10 games and six points behind the penultimate team, the question on everyone’s lips is now, “how will the Sharks avoid bankruptcy, let alone relegation?”

John Everton was amongst a few casualties this week. John is an incredible journalist and loved by all the players and officials right across the premiership.

He’s been doing the match reports, interviews and contributing to the programme for years. In spite of content being the most important thing when marketing a business online, the club chose to let him go whilst keeping the people responsible for the current marketing and decline of the number of spectators.

There are around 15 to 20,000 Sharks fans in and around Manchester and Cheshire. We are all praying for a miracle and, whilst one might come on the pitch, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results off the pitch is, as Albert Einstein described it, insanity.

http://www.lawrencejones.eu/search-marketing/2011/04/18/game-over/

” UKFast Data Centres, a division of UKFast, opens later this month making the complex the largest data centre technology park in Manchester

What started out as a dream back in 1999 is rapidly developing into reality for the team at UKFast. And there’s nothing virtual about it.

Manchester’s latest 2 data centres, owned and operated by UKFast, bring our complex up to a whopping 5.5MW – making it the largest single data centre complex in Manchester.

Two years ago, I got fed up with the lack of competition in the region, with the few data centres available changing hands regularly and falling short of the levels of service we required. The only credible option for us was to invest and build our own.

UKFast’s first data centre, a massive 2MW, was filling up so fast it was clear that we needed to take the plunge and commit to the next level. We filled it within 12 months of it becoming fully operational. Within 6 months, we were having to turn down business as we knew we couldn’t build another one quickly enough to keep up with the demand our clients required.

Whilst these new data centres dwarf other Manchester operators with more power per square foot than any other data centre provider outside of London, UKFast’s next data centre is set to break all records as we prepare to push the button on a £22 million 8MW project.

With thousands of miles of cabling, the existing £12 million investment is a major landmark moment in my life. This is, undoubtedly, our greatest achievement to date in UKFast’s timeline. What’s more exciting though, is that it has given us the appetite to venture further into this market. I see many more of these data centres all across Europe. We have 2 more planned for Manchester; one of them an underground facility where we will build offices and accommodation for the UKFast team above.

The attention to detail building data centres is imperative. Even though these cables are hidden, UKFast engineers go to incredible lengths to ensure they are laid perfectly

It’s an exciting time for everyone in our industry. As we come out of a recession, we are perfectly placed to service the power-hungry entrepreneurs of the future.

Our job at UKFast is to help people grow online and this means that we have to be 2 or 3 steps ahead of our clients’ needs, which is tough at the best of times in any business, but online it is no easy feat when you have to commit millions of pounds to create the hosting environments.

As UKFast grows, we require bigger and bigger facilities each time. This is the challenge that excites us. There is nothing quite like seeing the pavements being dug up and the construction team working around the clock, knowing that we are lighting the fibres to the future for many more successful businesses who deserve the very best connectivity.

If you want to come on a tour of our facility, I’d be very proud to show you around.

To all the companies who host with UKFast, I’d like to say thank you for making this possible. We will continue to develop the very ‘best in class’ services for you to power your brilliant online businesses well into the future.

Thank you for buying British.

Best of British

Lawrence Jones
CEO UKFast

But how is it that a smallish business like UKFast paid 300% more tax than Facebook last year? I can assure you that we don’t turnover similar amounts and their profits dwarf ours. And how is it that, if you add up all the tax that Starbucks has paid since inception 14 years ago, we have paid more at UKFast.

The reason? We love Britain. Yes, it would be nice to pay less but every penny we make goes into making the UK a stronger economy. As for everyone who doesn’t proportionally chip in, you are eroding our great nation. This isn’t a tax loophole where corporations think it is fair game to exploit. They are exploiting the people of Britain, it’s as simple as that.

Maybe we should question why we use these brands.

The government has lost its way in many areas but its single biggest failing has to be on its own Tax Planning Strategy.

Have you ever had one of those calls from the UK tax collector? If they were a business, they would not retain a single customer. If you received the same type of service from your favourite local restaurant when it was time to pay the bill, you would never, ever, ever go back.

And meanwhile, whilst the British government have been squeezing the juice out of SMEs, the larger corporations have avoided much of the pain that we have been experiencing.

This type of policy, coupled with the UK rates, scare off so many businesses from the UK, encouraging the transfer of funds and profits to carefully crafted offices in strategic tax-free locations like Switzerland, Monaco, BVI, Bermuda, Isle of Man, Jersey and Lichtenstein.

Imagine if all the businesses that once traded and declared all their profits through the UK, came back. If you had to drop the tax rate to encourage this to happen, you would make a smaller rate of tax but you would be casting that smaller percentage over a much wider net and, consequently, make significantly more revenue. When are we going to get someone commercial in the government who can help them see this?

eg. 50% of 100 =£50      but 15% of 1000 = £150

This is a volume game and, whilst the government extracts every last drop from each and every SME, if they took any more, they’d be taking the pith!

All of these tax free schemes cost money to run. We get offered them at UKFast regularly; people quote around 12 to 15% to administer, but you save millions. If the government slashed its corporation tax to 10% or 15%, people would have no reason to go elsewhere.

I personally disagree with tax avoidance schemes. I take the approach that you have to deal with the rules of the game.  Any other approach, in my opinion, is merely cheating. If the rules change then, fine, readjust but in the meantime just knuckle down and focus on running the business.

Britain is the ultimate economy from which to run a business. It has got a huge population, an established financial centre and its own currency. It’s just got some seriously large tax disadvantages.

So, with Amazon paying around 0.25% in tax and Google 1.51% (£6m from £395m ), what’s the answer?

Why wait for the government? We have no guarantee that they will ever react in time or in our favour. The answer is in our hands. After all, it’s our destiny.

If every Brit chose a local coffee shop and boycotted Starbucks, how long would it stay in business?

The power is in the hands of the consumer, more so than ever. For the first time, the consumer is really right.

Remember Ratners? Biggest jewellery chain in the UK; went bust overnight when Gerry Ratner, the founder, slated his own jewellery. What’s the difference here? Starbucks, Amazon, Google, Ebay and all the others are basically saying that they have absolutely no regard whatsoever for the British consumer or economy. Hang on guys, that’s us!

My Kindle went into the bin last week and I’ll  start using a British bookshop. The economy needs contribution to survive. Anyone taking out more than they use is starving the system and damaging it for us all.

With social media and the voice it gives to each and every one of us, this is real power, much bigger than anything the government can do.

Amazon’s Andrew Cecil might sit there smugly avoiding questions to politicians as readily as he does tax, but we can collectively wipe that smile off his face very quickly. Whilst Cecil might not be intimidated by the UK government, he knows he has to listen to the consumer.

I’ll not use Amazon or Starbucks again; they have seriously gone down in my opinion and, whilst Google has a place in everyday business, I will stop clicking on sponsored ads. And, as a business, we are investigating other areas anyway because Google is less potent these days, with more mediums popping up and providing other lead generation opportunities. Whilst Google diversified, they have become less good at what they originally became infamous for. (Sorry Dan – consumer talking)

As an owner of a business that is valued at over £100 million, I could save £30 – £40 million if I moved abroad, but I can promise the British public that I love it here. If I ever sold UKFast, nothing would prise me from my home in Wales and, whilst I am ironically registering in the BVI (British Virgin Islands) as a “Non Belonger” because we are building a second home over there, I will always be Welsh, proud to be British and happy to contribute in every way that I can with the tax the company generates from the great British businesses who kindly place their business with us.

Time to stand shoulder to shoulder, buy British wherever possible and drive this economy and Britain forward.

The economy works in the same way and, whilst it’s fantastic news that we are out of a recession, we were only technically in one because of a few industries who were dragging the balance down.

Removing the construction indsutry from the equation, for example, puts the country into a positive gold rush. So, somehow, we all need to get behind the construction industry and do what we can to kickstart this area of the economy. We can’t leave this to the government, it’s got to be rejuvenated by us.

We are completing our 3^rd data centre project, Manoc 5,6 & 7, which is a massive push for the Manchester construction equilibrium.

The new data centres have more power per square metre than any other DC in the North West; in the region of 2-3 times that of Telecity’s Joule House. The rationale is that, with high-density computing expanding at a rate of knots, we have to plan for the future. The future is highly condensed server farms powering all of the clouds necessary to keep Manchester one of the fastest-growing tech cities in Europe.

Our boost for the construction industry doesn’t stop there, as we have 4 new sites in Manchester alone that are successfully through the stages of their feasibility study. Whilst we won’t build all 4 projects at once, our last project has taken less than 11 months to acquire the freehold of the property, get planning and build 3 data centres in one park. It puts the total development in the area to more than £12 million.

The next 4 projects could total in the region of £100 million if we are to push the button on them all. Realistically, I anticipate these will be rolled out over a couple of years.

It is difficult to predict what is needed in the next stage of our development though. It seems incredible that we now are the proud owners of 4 data centres.

But if you think things have changed in the economy, I personally believe that the biggest changes are in the way we market our businesses. The customer has always been king in my book; after all, where would we be without them? However, with the immediacy of social media, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, businesses’ reputations can be left in tatters if people over-promise and under-deliver.

It’s not a bad thing either, especially for the SME (small business). With global businesses rampaging into so many IT markets to drive their businesses forward, a number of them are seeing the managed hosting, or now ‘cloud’ as it’s been rebadged, as an exciting opportunity. The problem is that the market is more established than it might at first appear, and big businesses have a track record of struggling to manage large numbers of SMEs. And, with social media being a very loud voice to amplify everyone’s experiences, there is nowhere to hide for the businesses that merely copy websites and over promise.

It’s not “all about the cloud” as I read the other day on a strapline for another new entry to the market. It’s all about the customer and, whilst our industry is beginning to boom again, we should not forget that.

One thing is for sure; whilst people might struggle to predict which vendors will win in the battle for supremacy, there is a growing need for DC space. If you are building cloud environments in people’s offices or if you are designing one for your own business, you might want to get some advice from a third party.

Nowadays it’s cheaper, safer and quicker to entrust your data, storage and servers to professionals like Rackspace and UKFast who have done it since 1999, than trying to manage and then connect your environment to the outside world. Who has the ability to build a dedicated £10 million network going into your office? It makes sense to piggy-back on the backs of providers who have already proved the concept and built up a track record.

Whatever you are going to connect, you will always need a DC. So, with the need for a new, improved construction boost to the economy, maybe you should be building data centres too, or even easier, use one of our mini DCs – 200 racks, all fully managed with your own front door and all of the economies of scale, shared UPS and generators.

No one else is doing it; it’s a level of flexibility that’s not been around in the DC industry before. However, the market needs some new ideas, and this ‘plug and play’ approach that you have when you buy a mobile phone can now apply to something as large and as complex as a DC or, as we have named it, a DCplex.

There’s a new world out there. It’s fascinating. I have no idea where it’s going but I am fully committed and I am loving every minute of it.

If today’s news of Felix Baumgartner attempting to beat Joe Kittingers record, set in 1960, where he free falls 19.5 miles, reaching speeds of 840 mph doesn’t convince you of this, then nothing will.

When only 2 people have attempted to beat this crazy stunt and both of them died, you wonder what is going through the mind of Felix Baumgartner as he rises quickly towards space.

Felix-braumgartner throwing himself from the space pod on his record breaking trip to earth

With his close family sobbing on the ground, watching his balloon disappear, it very quickly puts this drama into perspective.

So, what makes people do these extraordinary things?

Is there a point? What is the obsession people have with driving everything faster?

It is all down to challenge; doing things that cannot be done, doing the impossible. These adventurers are the drivers that keep evolution ticking on and, without these incredibly brave people, we would never know what is actually possible.

The adventurers’ gene is in us all as children but, for most people, it reduces when we learn painful lessons; as we get wiser with age.

Broken down into its simplest form, the adventurers’ gene is purely the inability to give up.

Where certain people tire, get bored, distracted, lose focus, there are a few on the planet who, when the going gets tough, get inspired. They sink their teeth in and the idea of giving up is alien to them.

Now, you could say that this is just someone being competitive but I don’t subscribe to this. There’s a difference between wanting to win in Monopoly and dedicating the rest of your life to settling a score, proving a point or achieving the impossible.

One of our quests at UKFast is to speed up the Internet and give everyone who connects with a UKFast client the very best user experience possible.

Whilst there are no lives at stake (only livelihoods), the breakthroughs we are making are hugely rewarding, both for the UKFast Speed Team and for the clients who report massive increases in the performance of their sites. When you have something to beat, it drives you that extra bit harder and gives everyone focus and a purpose.

One man who taught me the importance of this is Sir Richard Branson. Is he an adventurer or entrepreneur?  In my opinion, he is an adventurer who uses his gifts of passion and determination to make a success in the business world. If launching a commercial spacecraft isn’t enough, the deepest dives into the darkest places on earth should give you an insight into what makes him tick. However, it is his adventurer gene that makes him a very worthy opponent no matter what he does.

It’s no surprise then to see that there aren’t a huge number of these adventurers knocking around. One of the downfalls of this type of profession is that, if it goes wrong, it is quite often your life that is at stake.  That is why we admire and look up to them.

So, well done Felix, you did it. You truly are a braver man than me.

Should I be worried that my 6 year old is already re-enacting jumping out of a space pod before bed?

Re-enacting the Felix Braumgartner free fall

This week, I got a visit from a friend, Diane Modahl. She runs a charity, Road To Gold, that helps inspire young people, often from underprivileged environments. She gives them a taste for athletics, encouraging and supporting young adults to become future champions and maybe even Olympians one day.

It’s fantastic having Diane at the helm, being the spokesperson, as she has experienced every stage of the Olympic journey in her own life and athletic career: the ups, the downs and the ups again.

So, a visit like this is always a welcome break and an opportunity to learn how she is doing and what is next on her agenda. It’s fantastic to see an Olympic athlete slide so perfectly into business. Yet, so many do. Why is this?

I am a firm believer that, in business, you need to compete in a very similar way to athletes in their approach to sport. Where an athlete needs physical and mental strength, a successful business person needs mental strength, and the best way to support this is by being at the top of your game physically. So, the two are nicely aligned.

It’s also important to consider (and this is my opinion so you might not agree with it) that business is not about making money; it’s about making a difference. Of course, money is important for paying the bills and, ultimately, remaining in business. However, the one area where people who fail go wrong is that they fail to make a big enough difference to peoples’ lives; either their staff or their customers.

If you take people for granted, you can’t expect to succeed. At some point, someone will come along with a better product and will care about your customer more than you do.

If you consider the brands that stick in your mind, they change your state when you simply look at their logo. Look at a bottle of Coca-Cola. My mouth is watering just thinking about a nice cold bottle of coke. Facebook: they are changing peoples’ lives by the minute, giving you new ways to communicate with your long-lost friends. Who can argue that Google isn’t the single biggest change to all society in the last decade? And, OK, not everyone can get to this level of influence but a business can only succeed if they help the client, customer or doner to cross that line and put their hand in their pocket.

This is something that Diane does so naturally. Is it her determination as an athlete and her ability to communicate that makes her fit in so well, as these two elements are key if you are going to compete successfully in business?

So, whilst there is no direct link between the importance of supporting grass roots charities and making your business a success, it is possible, in my opinion, to create one. Diane’s last event, held at the Hilton Hotel, Manchester, had some extraordinary athletes attending and talking so I jumped at the chance to take clients and some of my team along. It was a fabulous success and we were able to contribute towards her next generation of incredible athletes.

Whilst there is a great deal of money at the top end of the sporting tree these days, there is very little support low down, which, Diane explained, is why historically we have struggled on the international stage.

With more Olympic medals coming from the North West in the 2012 Olympics, I don’t think we should be risking the futures of our kids in this area. It makes sense to get stuck in now and build for the next one.

I remember being asked to find an athlete to help open a chain of gyms that Granada owned, back in my previous life. The client mentioned Manchester United and their close connections there. Naively, I telephoned the Stadium and asked to be put through to Alex Ferguson.

To my surprise they said, “No problem Sir, just putting you through now.” Now, this is a great demonstration of the power of a brand.

Whilst waiting for Sir Alex (then just Alex) my heart was pounding. I realised that they must have thought I was a journalist, as I had announced I was “Lawrence Jones from Granada.”

When Sir Alex came on the phone, I politely explained that I was looking for someone to help me for a press day photo shoot. I suggested David Beckham and Ryan Giggs. When he asked for my budget, I explained that the client had £20,000 (more likely £15,000).

Anyone who thinks Alex Ferguson is a tough nut needs to also remember he has a compassionate gene too, or maybe I just got him on a good day.

He said that he could potentially release them from their training schedule, but explained “I think you will struggle; they get a lot of money now-a-days. David got £250,000 for a hair commercial 2 weeks ago!”

To demonstrate the difference between the 2 sporting genres even back then, I eventually got Welshmen and hurdles winner Colin Jackson for £9,000 and I have a feeling he didn’t get very much of the fee I paid the agent.

There is a disproportionate amount of money across different sports but this presents opportunities for businesses to align themselves with local sports clubs and really make a difference on a community level. I love it that we help out our local cricket club and, whilst I should pop down there more often, it’s great to hear about the new juniors coming through the ranks. I’m always excited to hear about Naomi and brother Liam Brody’s progress when I bump into my old friend Simon. We started supporting them long before Liam was runner up in the 2011 Wimbledon Boys Finals. And, whilst it will be difficult keeping up with his sponsorship as he becomes a legend, I will be able to look on with pride knowing that we helped at the start.

And, at UKFast, we have a netball team, football teams, squash and a running club, just to name a few. We even have team members holding group weight training circuits, and I have lost count of the number who cycle to work. Sport is an important part of culture too, reminding us that challenge makes life interesting. Sport helps us to deal with failure, it encourages us to keep trying, it helps to keep us in good health. Is there a link between “the happiest days of your life are when you are young” and the amount of sport you were involved with back then?

If I was asked to list the top 3 things that help me compete in business, I’d put sport in there at number 2.

Meanwhile, in reality, how do you grow a business in 2012 when, as fast as you recruit, headhunters target your staff through linkedin and facebook? The better the business you create, the biger the target you become. I am always amazed at how quickly people can be swayed into a discussion and just how easy it is for them to forget the benefits of being part of the team you have worked tirelessly to create. And so the game begins!

Create a unique business that does not exist anywhere else. Create a culture where awesome people thrive, where people are empowered to make decisions, where people are not micromanaged and where systems are there to help and not catch you out. It’s a life long task because you can never settle. As fast as you create an amazing place, there are hundreds of other ways to improve.

I went to see Dan Cobley, the Managing Director of Google UK, recently and I was fascinated to learn some of the things they do at Google to ensure that they never rest on their laurels. And what a business! You can quickly learn why everyone enjoys working there and why they have no problems recruiting.

So, one of my jobs is to create the best place to work in our industry; not an easy task when you compete with the likes of Rackspace who have a similar ethic, and even smaller companies like Melbourne Hosting (recently acquired by Iomart) who have made huge efforts to make their office more imaginative. Why? Because it creates a fun environment and people thrive when they are relaxed.

It is important to remember that you can do all this and people will still need to check to see if the grass is greener. We did a check recently and our switchboard took over 150 calls in one week from recruiters either looking for people by name or trying to sell us their service. That’s more than 30 per day!  And this is going on in all businesses. It creates a massive distraction because, as fast as you recruit someone, when they are being told there is a better job elsewhere, intrigue can kick in.

(*) 92% of people who leave UKFast either come back or directly request to return, citing “the grass is most definitely NOT greener!” And whilst it is a fantastic testament to the team and business, I’d much rather have kept them in the beginning.

Our strategy is clear. If another business targets members of our staff, we have found that often the company doing the looking is attempting to buy ‘culture’ and leap frog the steps necessary in creating an amazing organisation, leaving themselves vulnerable. They often have big gaps in their structure and often do not have a dedicated academy, or employee benefits comparable with ours at UKFast and so they actually become a great place for us to focus our attention on our recruitment. On average, whether we lose a person or not, we will end up recruiting 2 or 3 people from the very same business. The person who has left us, tells his new colleagues what they are all missing and people follow when they return.

For me, the best way to recruit is a more natural and fair way. Referring friends and family always guarantees that we will find like-minded people who get our culture. Enthusiasm is key to growing a successful business and if your team are not overly enthusiastic, you will invariably get mediocre results.

I was interviewed on Friday by the Telegraph on the subject of employee engagement. I was in Wales, at our outward bounds training centre, preparing for 8 account managers who were coming down for the weekend. It made me realise just how much we do, but more importantly, the important role that fresh air and the challenges set in Snowdon play in our business. There is no direct link between the cutting-edge Cloud technology we manage in Manchester and the wind, rain, sweat and tears (usually of joy!) of Castell Cidwm. Yet every person loves it here and cites their time in the Snowdonian National Park as a top memory with moments that have shaped them.

But long before we could afford the luxury of our converted hotel and 1000 acre estate, we used to march up the mountains and stay in tents! Team building doesn’t have to cost a lot of money; what it does require, if you are going to be successful at it, is your time.

It’s these moments you share with your team that they will respect and cherish and the bonds you make are priceless. You can’t get this from the pub on a Friday night. You need time to listen and learn about your business and its failings along with its good points.

Recently, when a person came to me to tell me they’d turned down a better paid job at a rival Scottish hosting provider, they listed the things we’d done together and talked honestly about the relationship we’d formed. I wouldn’t have stood a chance if I’d not spent years developing him and our relationship.

Business has changed so much in 5 years that its unrecognisable from doing business a decade ago. This requires an open mind and a new degree of flexibility. Businesses who retain staff grow faster and are usually more profitable. Retraining and recruiting to fill replacements is a headache that a manager can do without when they are faced with the challenges of growing and running a department.

END

UKFast are currently recruiting for 100 jobs to take the business to 250 strong before summer 2013.

50 jobs are currently being placed as we speak across sales, account management, windows and linux hosting support and marketing and PR. If you are looking for a real challenge and youlive or want to move to Manchester, it is worth dropping us a line and sending in your CV.

 (*) this figure does not include individuals that didn’t make it through the UKFast academy, left with in the first year or simply didn’t fit in. The figure represents people who were headhunted who we’d have back tomorrow.

The Cloud has become a convenient and cool word for the internet, but it is also a buzz word for virtualisation technology. Now, whilst these two elements often meet, they both work independently of each other too. I watched a video today on cloud from one of the market leaders’ perspectives; they talk about cloud as if it’s the answer to everything. Whilst Cloud maybe everywhere, it’s most certainly not for everything or everyone.

So, when is Cloud right for your business?

Well, if you are using an iPhone and you download an app from the Cloud, this means you are downloading from the internet. Whilst the supplier maybe using virtualisation, its actually unlikely. Most apps are hosted on dedicated servers in a data centre, managed by hosting providers like a Rackspace or UKFast.

There are some elements of your business that I’d definitely NOT recommend moving to the Cloud. When speed is a key factor in the success of your operation, shared Cloud technology falls short and cannot compete with dedicated environments. So, if you are hosting an e-commerce website where speed directly affects conversion, it’s false economy to sacrifice the performance of your site under the guise of flexibility and cost.

If something is £100 per month cheaper, yet it costs you £10,000 in sales or leads, it isn’t a great business choice. Too many businesses are falling foul of technology updates that downgrade customer experience. We get an alarming number of businesses who move to UKFast after experiencing horror stories where they have been sold the dream that cloud will revolutionise your business for a fraction of the cost. Actually, their sites collapsed, leads dried up, they dropped in rankings and within months their businesses had suffered serious side affects. The only person who profits is the business that encouraged you to move from a dedicated environment to a shared one, because that’s essentially what you have done.

Another area to watch out for appears if you use Google to market your business with PPC (Pay Per Click). Google recognise speed as such an important factor in the running of your website that they give advertisers using faster technology preference with a higher Quality Score. (Quality Score is the number out of 10 that Google marks your keyword on relevance and performance.)

People are being mis-sold Cloud by thousands of new start-ups and, by saying the word Cloud, businesses and consumers alike are supposed to assume that everyone’s online infrastructure is equal. This is a massive misconception and actually couldn’t be further from the truth.

So, when is Cloud and virtualisation right for your business?

Firstly, I think you have to break down the term Cloud. There are many types and they need explaining.

Public Cloud – A shared virtualisation environment where people can spin up a VM (dedicated hosting area) usually at a fraction of the cost, but these areas are restrictive as you are one of thousands of businesses sharing the resources.

Hybrid Cloud – A Cloud environment that utilises shared infrastructure but that allows dedicated systems to work along side them.

Dedicated Cloud – An environment where you own and control all elements of your cloud. Like Rackspace, Amazon and UKFast. These don’t have to be as large as the ones above; however, a dedicated Cloud doesn’t share resources with other users or businesses so, in theory, they should be more powerful and safer. I use the phrase ‘in theory’ because, again, all things aren’t equal.

So, when do I use a Public Cloud?

Well, it’s cheap so there’s the first most obvious benefit. Often, you can spin up and down environments and even choose your billing on usage and time. These are all great factors if you are hosting the family album, although these days Facebook does a great job of this.  But I’d err on the side of caution before I’d  host anything mission critical. All of the big providers; Rackspace, Amazon and ourselves UKFast, have all suffered outages on our shared platforms. We had one recently where, whilst the system intelligently fixed itself, the VM’s were powered down. Whilst everything worked perfectly, the other volumes meant that our clients had to wait for each one to restart. While some clients were fortunate and it was only a few hours, others were not so fortunate.

At the end of the day, when you strip away all the hype associated with the Cloud, it’s shared hosting. Has the hosting industry stepped back a decade, putting profit before user experience?

When is a Hybrid Cloud right for my business?

This is a great question because the term hybrid refers to the allowance of other dedicated technologies plugging into shared infrastructure. This makes hybrid environments very hard to compare like for like. At UKFast, we go to huge lengths to use only the best technology and create a fair, balanced environment where the only shared part of the hybrid is the SAN and switch. By limiting numbers, we limit the risk of neighbouring sites damaging your performance; a common problem in my opinion on public and hybrid Clouds. That being said, built correctly by a company who provides full management from a team with all the necessary competencies, the hybrid Cloud can be a very powerful business tool. 9 times out of 10, done correctly, it will be more expensive than a powerful dedicated server.

So, when do I use a dedicated Cloud?

Ok, this is easy! When you have a big budget and an appetite for using the latest technologies, a dedicated cloud with your own SAN and switches is the ultimate in hosting, yet most people compromise on the SAN because it’s the most important part of the environment, on the basis that by its very nature is built for safety. WRONG! A SAN is complex and when they go wrong, complex things take time to fix. If you have a dedicated environment, do not have a single point of failure on your SAN. You will get found out.

So, when do you use a managed or dedicated server?

I’ll be honest, I may be doing myself out of huge amounts of new business; however, I cant encourage clients to jump on a band wagon just because we profit from a gold rush. And so there can be no doubt, we do sell Public Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, and Dedicated Clouds at UKFast, and yes, the Public Cloud with its economies of scales is significantly more profitable that all our other products. However, promoting this service under the banner of “Cloud” as the be all and end all, is wrong. Is it safe to say there is a link between the huge profit margins of Cloud technologies and the massive push hosting providers are making to encourage you to adopt their products?

When you are leading a market or regarded as driving innovation for more than a decade, you are in a privileged and trusted position, and people look to us for business and technology advice. If we blindly promote the most profitable service to get a quick win to suit shareholders or our bottom line, at the expense of our clients businesses, is this ethical? Not in my opinion.

Yet this is happening, and ignorance is bliss if you put profit before your clients’ needs.

So, next time you consider moving to the Cloud, and you compare 3 providers who all look identical on paper, yet one charges £150 and another £40 and another £261.36, who do you choose?

Question your needs and the needs of your clients before jumping in head first. Is speed important to what you are trying to do?

My advice is: if you can afford it, go dedicated, and if you can’t, you have to question how much money you might be losing with bouncing customers and bottlenecks.

Good luck. It’s a jungle out there.

“Many people enter politics popular, but seldom do people remain popular in politics,” explained Branson.

Whilst we both agreed that governments lack the commercial expertise that entrepreneurs have in abundance, there is a conflict between politics and business in areas where they overlap, making it almost impossible for a business owner to take on the mantle of politician.

It was a subject that I might have touched a slight nerve with, as we were quickly talking about the Northern Rock and the frustrations he encountered during the first bout with Gordon Brown.

Richard never gave up on the Northern Rock. He kept that team together and, years later, his persistence paid off. For any budding entrepreneurs out there, it’s this persistence that will make or break you. We are all defined by our ability to knuckle down and remove all distractions and keep to the matter in hand.

So, with the headlines this week that Sir Richard Branson has lost the West Coast Rail franchise, you have to assume that this is just the beginning.

It’s also an extraordinary decision from my perspective. I am someone who lives in Manchester and uses the service regularly. I am immensely proud that I am able to travel using the Virgin brand and I know that it means quality at a value we can all afford. To replace British Rail with Virgin Rail was a master plan of years gone by.

I will never forget the first time I travelled on a Virgin Train. It was a bitterly cold Manchester morning. I was greeted by the friendly Virgin smile and seeing the guards in their thick grey cashmere coats, you knew that here was a business that values its people.

This is long before I met Richard in person, when my preference for his brand was earned naturally by a succession of best practices that I encountered whichever Virgin product I touched, tasted or travelled in.

Sure enough, the trains got faster, more organised, more comfortable and more affordable at a variety of levels.

When you consider what Virgin has done to the West Cost link between London Euston and Manchester, surely there has to be some credit and loyalty attached to the Virgin bid. In any normal business, this is called goodwill and when you buy or sell a business the goodwill is actually something tangible on the balance sheet.

The frustrating thing for us folk travelling from Manchester is that it’s this goodwill we value most. No one has asked us what we want. At UKFast, we spend a significant amount of money on the Virgin Train service to London. It’s just over 2 hours and has transformed business between the 2 cities, allowing us to pop down and see journalists and business folk who are too busy to head North. I am using it on Tuesday and Thursday this week.

Yet, left to a person in government who travels by chauffeur and probably hasn’t even used the service, Transport Minister Theresa Villiers accused Sir Richard of ‘amnesia’ about the poor performance Virgin had faced in the past when talking about the bids.

I take umbrage at this. Branson gambled on the British Rail link when no one else would do so, yet even with an established business and increased usage, O’Toole Of FirstGroup implies he has some better way of running the franchise more efficiently to make £750m more than Virgin’s bid.

I am not sure which is the wilder claim; O’Toole’s naivety that he can provide a better level of engagement over Virgin, or that he can do it whilst making £750m in the process.

Not to worry though; in comes the commercial acumen of the politicians. If it all goes wrong, and it proves too much for FirstGroup, the franchisee only has to pay the fee of £265million, a mere snip of the original exaggerated bid.

The only thing wrong with Sir Richard’s bid is that he underestimated just how disconnected politicians are with commercial reality.

Surely, the penalty for failing has to be larger than the sum originally promised.

And, in spite of all the polls, the Department for Transport told Virgin Rail on Friday that, according to its own scoring mechanism, Virgin lost on customer service and price, but was ahead on “deliverability.”

But, as a businessperson, deliverability is everything. The last thing you want in any area of your company is a flakey promise or exaggerated figures, because these are the things that cause long-term, irreparable damage.

If FirstGroup is unable to deliver on its wild promise of an extra £750million, the government ends up losing at a much greater cost than the numbers being bandied around here. So, if there is a risk involved, why do it?

Isn’t it time we were able to poll public opinion using the internet to make large decisions involving millions of people?

This isn’t me being radical or anti-government, far from it. I talk from the perspective of a technology entrepreneur wondering why we are not harnessing the power of people using simple tools.

Facebook was the brainchild of someone who started rating girls at his university using a simple program and within minutes he had hundreds of thousands of hits and a problem with the Dean! It would be very easy to do the same with politicians’ ideas or even politicians!

It’s food for thought and I am sure that, in my lifetime, we will be adopting this sort of strategy as governments often follow businesses, if albeit a little slowly.

An example of a simple poll on the Virgin vs FirstGroup battle came when the public were asked can FirstGroup deliver?

An overwhelming 92.68% said FirstGroup can’t and the amount it had paid was too high. In total, 16,046 votes to date.

Is it a coincidence that the 7.32% who said “yes,” is a similar number to the employees at FirstGroup and the department of Transport added together?

Branson loses out to FirstGroup with unpopular decision by Transport Minister Theresa Villiers to award the West Coast Rail franchise to FirstGroup, yet polls put Virgin as the people’s choice.

Something feels different; there’s hope, anticipation and belief in the air. Is this the United Kingdom? No, it’s GREAT Britain.

It is a country that our ancestors left us to maintain and grow and hand on to our future generations in a better state than we found it, but in recent decades, Britain has not felt so great. We have been dominated in so many areas where we once dominated, not least of all sport.

And with politicians bickering over headline land grab, with their eyes off the real objective of getting the UK back to competing at every level, there is a small group of ambassadors coming out of nowhere, flying the flag.

There is nothing quite like patriotism to rally the country and it’s certainly done that. You’d expect a slight lift with the home advantage of having the 2012 Olympics on our doorstep, but nobody expected such a great set of results.

To watch Andy Murray destroy Roger Federer today, a task he struggled to do 28 days earlier at Wimbledon, reaffirms there is something in the air. So what is it? Is it luck? Is it teamwork? The levels of passion haven’t changed from one Olympics to the next. Each individual, past or present, puts their heart and soul on the line for their country, the greatest honour a person can have, so what is making us more successful this time?

A few years ago, in July 2010, I was fortunate enough to go to the Velodrome and cycle with some Olympic medal winners. Afterwards, we heard the team talk about their successes and failures, their training and their regime. To hear gold medalists like Rebecca Romero explain their level of focus across the 4 years running up to the Olympics makes you realise just how seriously winning athletes take their profession.  http://bit.ly/cUviLl

I left there realising that we needed to raise our game considerably.

I am a great believer in the link between business and sport and think that success is driven from the same obsession, passion and focus. But are we taking our businesses seriously enough?

We are very fortunate and incredibly proud to host the British Cycling team at UKFast. They are an organisation made up of extraordinary people who are so focussed on the success of the riders. It doesn’t matter where in the team you work, whether the kitchen, the admin staff, or out on the track, the ultimate goal is the riders winning. This may seem obvious, but when you hear what lengths they all go to, I promise you it puts normal businesses to shame.

And the result of all this extra effort and focus? World beaters. Beacons of hope to other Olympians and children watching the games.

I love it that my children are growing up around this time of the 2012 Olympics. How many kids are watching their parents shouting passionately at the TV, willing every breath and sharing in the pain of those who fall short?

The Olympics may be a tiny window in our lives but the results are history in the making and they show the whole world that Britain is competing again. The victories are not short lived either; long after the Olympics have finished, when your kids go back to school, teachers, parents and kids will be talking about it – a whole new breed of heros to chase and emulate.

It’s now these truly awesome stories, and the sharing of these positive emotions, that dominate the airwaves, knocking the doom and gloom preachers from their pulpits.

So, now it’s just down to us as parents, business leaders and colleagues. Isn’t it time we started buying British and focussing on making Britain a stronger economy?

If you are a business owner and you are wanting to get inspired, like I did back in 2010, then I don’t care if you are one of my competitors or someone I have yet to meet; if you are wanting to build yourself a stronger business and an even Greater Britain, then we have something in common and I might just have the thing for you.

A while ago, we got involved with Diane Modahl (4 times Olympian and Commonwealth Gold medallist) by helping her with her charity DMSF (Diane Modahl Sports Foundation) to raise vital funds to help inspire and support disadvantaged young athletes and Olympic hopefuls. I have about 10 tickets left for a dinner on Tuesday night where we are going to watch the Olympics and listen to some of the greats talk about their experiences. The night is called Road to Gold and, if you want the answers to why Britain is doing so much better in this Olympics and you want the skills to improve your business, this is where to find the answers.

There are a number of the world’s sporting talents attending including boxing gold medallist Audley Harrison, Brian Whittle (4x400m European Champion) and Yvonne McGregor MBE (Sydney Olympic Games medallist track and road cyclist).

If I don’t see you there, I hope to hear about the differences you are making one of these days.

Lawrence Jones CEO UKFast cycling at Manchester’s Veledrome

It’s easy to get overwhelmed in situations where you are trying to achieve more than looks humanly possible. Yet, there are people who manage it. Branson describes how he does it very calmly, saying, “it’s the people around you that make all this possible.” And Tony Robbins. Whilst I have never heard him utter the same words, I have met his people, and I have become great freinds with Richard, his top telesales trainer and manager. Richard describes his recruitment policy as “we look for skills in people you cannot teach.” It’s a great way of looking at it and, actually, what he is saying is the people thing again. Jonathan Bowers, my Managing Director, commented recently that if we employ weak managers we find ourselves making more work for ourselves.

So, what’s the secret? How do we run a business that one day becomes a phenomenon? How do we guarantee that, when everyone else gets distracted, we remain focussed on the journey ahead?

Well, I am still looking for the answer to that one. And, actually, the harder I work, the more I realise that the outcome doesn’t matter as much as I might have thought. Don’t worry, I am not going soft on you.

As I have never been to business school or had higher education like an alarming number of entrepreneurs, I like to read business books and autobiographies. I am in the middle of reading Steve Job’s book. It’s the second time, but I want to make sure I didn’t miss anything first time around. He was a funny one; he only employed exceptional talent yet he seemed to spend a great deal of time berating them with his famous one liner, “this is shit!” But if you read between the lines and look at the things he doesn’t tell you, you can see the A players he hung out with, worked with, competed with. Bill Gates was his biggest adversary, yet they worked with each other from a very early age. It’s clear they both drove each other hard and, at times, mad.

I can’t help thinking there was more to Jobs than the book unveils. We’ll never know, unless someone closer writes another one.

So, with the business back in the UK at full speed ahead, I find myself on a terrace, overlooking the most beautiful view of Cap Ferrat in the South Of France, far from the madding crowd. It’s a great place to unwind; fresh food, fresh air and the bright lights of the Med. Picasso chose this area to paint because the light is so incredible and lasts for so long. If you want to get creative, where better than at the the home of an artistic revolution? And what better time to be in France than around Bastille Day? An occasion steeped in history which marks a cultural change, born out of determination and passion, driven by fear and anger, but guided by unyielding focus.

This is why I am here. My calm before our storm, getting ready for the next stage in our journey. If you want to revolutionise something, you can’t do it sitting down and just hoping you might make an impression. You have to go out there and do something radical. All the great business people I have been fortunate enough to meet are all very different. They have styles of their own that make them unique, but they are all resolute in their task. You can’t copy someone’s style and expect that it will make you successful. You can get some quick wins, especially now with online marketing, and although Steve Jobs highlights Picasso’s quote, “good artists copy, great artists steal”, I don’t subscribe to that.

People who steal eventually get found out and there’s nothing more rewarding than being genuine.

I think the great artists of the past are seldom appreciated whilst working away on their vision. In fact, they often get a huge amount of opposition from people who see them as a threat. Business is no different from art or politics in this vein. But isn’t this what drives them to new heights? I believe it’s this that actually makes them great.

When I reflect on what we have been doing at UKFast, I realise that there is so much more I could and should have done. And, whilst I don’t subscribe to some of Job’s tactics, I am definitely writing my Jobs’ List.

The obvious motivating character is Tony Robbins. At 6ft 7inches, he is a giant of a man and his personality is in equal proportion to his size. Tony is someone who will punch the air, shout loudly and you can imagine him picking up a sword and charging into the mist.

At the same time, he is no ordinary motivator as he doesn’t just posses this one skill. Tony is blessed with the ability to listen and has the articulation and power of understanding of a man who has lived for a thousand years.

But who or what inspired Tony? Well, to get great or master something you have to obsess about it, and Tony talks of the 1000’s of books he’s read and the seminars and tapes he’s listened to.

But it’s a chap called Earl Nightingale who I believe inspired Tony more than any other single person. Whilst Earl’s ideas and talks  follow very different styles, they follow too similar a pattern not to be related.

I went to a business dinner where we listened to a Harvard Professor Shawn Anchor talking about a similar subject. His material was literally lifted from Earl’s work and he sounded like a Tony clone, but without the same degree of passion. His talk lacked congruency.

In the Q&A session afterwards, I put up my hand. I am not someone who’d normally ask a question but I couldn’t help myself. Here is a man, taking other peoples’ ideas and, whilst there is nothing wrong with this, I didn’t feel it was right for him to pass them off as his own.

Funnily enough, when I asked “had Earl Nightingale influenced any of his work?” he denied knowing or ever hearing about the man. I pressed him further and explained who Nightingale is and how he influenced Robbins. In a panic, the speaker locked up and denied even hearing or knowing any of Tony Robbin’s work.

Now if you are a motivational speaker, and you are American and you own a TV, or a radio, it is impossible to have missed the 10 million or so “infomercials” of Tony Robbins’ Hour Of Power. He quite literally saturated the market.

I explained that Earl Nightingale, inspired after being on a vessel in Pearl Harbour where over 2000 fellow sailors died, went on to be a radio host who sold more than a million records of the spoken word. He’d have been top of the charts if this was in music terms.

It’s probably likely that the near death experience and the sheer horror of that day, lived with Earl and drove him every day.

Back in London, after my talk, I was lucky enough to have very friendly questions in the Q and A session. Someone asked me about what drove me, describing my energy levels as “infectious.” I explained about my avalanche accident back in 2001 and how that, as with Earl’s, this kind of experience makes you focus on the importance of time. It sounds corny out of context, but essentially I try and cram as many experiences into life as is humanly possible.

So many people I know, especially some of the successful business folk, completely miss the picture and have disconnects with their family and children. Yes, business is important and I love it, but it’s people and relationships that make the world go around.

During my talk, I’d described motivation as “inspiring people to get more out of a given time than they’d ordinarily do.” It’s the link with time that is key if you are going to be a great motivator or get motivated yourself. We can all complete tasks, but if you can do 50 in the same time it takes someone else to do 5, you are going to be 10 times more effective.

Someone else pressed me further on my energy levels and asked how they achieve this focus without having to experience a similar near death experience. It’s a million-dollar question and one I have pondered often.  It got me thinking.

It just so happened it turned out to be one of those days.

Isn’t it amazing how life keeps you levelled? One minute you are up and the next you are fighting tears from your eyes. I was about to have one of those days.

Exactly to the day, 6 years ago our second daughter Poppy was born and we moved into a new house. At the crack of dawn, I left Gail and our new-born baby in hospital to go and organise the removal men. I wanted everything spotless and in place in our new home for the moment she arrived.

I picked Gail up from hospital, I had our two mums mucking in and organising back at the new house. By the time Gail and Poppy arrived it looked fantastic.

Gail simply said, “Where are Indie and Lara?”

We’d been to choose a couple of Boxer puppies 2 weeks before Poppy was born. We couldn’t pick them up though as we still lived in our flat in town. Gail looked shocked that I’d compromise my original plan to pick up the dogs the moment we’d moved in, just because we’d had a baby on the same day!

So, off I went with my tail between my legs to pick them up.

As I wasn’t allowed to call my first daughter Indie (Anna) Jones for obvious reasons, I saved the name for my first dog who over the next 6 years became my closest companion.

It’s ironic that on Poppies 6^th birthday, the anniversary of the day we moved in and picked up Indie and Lara, he chose to pass away peacefully. I’d been lying underneath the oak tree in our garden with my head on his neck looking up at the sky through the branches. We spent many an hour both outside and in front of the open fire in Wales in this position.

We dug Indie’s grave in the gounds of Castell Cidwm by the side of our lake Llyn Cwellyn. It is a most beautiful place.

We buried him with a pair of my walking boots, a UKFast beanie hat, a Bolivar cigar and laid a map of his favourite mountain range over the blanket we wrapped him in.

I lit a cigar and sat with him in the beautiful rain coming down over the lake shrouded in mist as the sun came down and the sky darkened. I will never forget that moment; it’s one I will treasure. Thank you Joe.

You don’t have to nearly die to appreciate life, you merely have to value the people around you and remember that nothing lasts forever.

Recently, I keep bumping into Fred Done from BetFred.  I was lucky enough to be invited to a dinner party where he and his brother Peter talked openly about their challenges and their story. There is nothing more entertaining than hearing how the underdog can prevail against all odds and, as Fred put it, “against the establishment.” It’s such a British story, because there aren’t many places where you can go from rags to riches in one lifetime quite like you can in Britain.

It’s wonderful seeing a 70 year old man demonstrate the passion and energy you’d normally attribute to a teenager. It is no coincidence that Fred’s energy and his success are linked.

I was keen to learn more about Peter’s business, Peninsula, It’s less high profile but, in a sector thats not particularly buoyant and during an economic downturn, they reached £100m turnover in the time it’s taken us at UKFast to reach £20m.

Here is an opportunity to learn, I thought to myself as I listened to Fred and Peter talk about their journey.

I always travel with a little black notebook in my pocket. I got it out and started scribbling. It’s a great discipline because it helps me to recount a story more accurately and, whilst scribbling, my own ideas start flooding in.

It’s interesting how similar traits appear in successful businesses. I am learning that there are certain things that, if you do them, translate across all sectors and, whilst they don’t guarantee success, they certainly help you on the way up and on the way down. It amazes me how complicated people make business by being overly tough on their suppliers and their team around them.

The thing that strikes me most about Fred and his brother Peter is that they are both very open and very giving, both of their ideas but also to their staff. By caring about their team, they have managed to build a loyal following who collectively embody the values of the founders, ensurung that, as all their business interests grow, the culture remains potent and never dilutes.

This is not an easy thing to manage. Many cultures start to crumble when they grow too large. It will be interesting to see if he is able to convert the Tote, an ex government dusty establishment, into the vibrant colourful operation that he prides himself on. If I was a betting man, my money is on Fred, his personality is big enough to carry it off.

So, a week or so later at an awards dinner run by EY (Ernst & Young) Entrepreneur of the Year, I bumped in to Fred in the corridor. I stopped to talk with him and thank him for inspirational words from the dinner I’d attended. I joked with him that we’d deployed one of his tactics that he and his brother discussed a few weeks earlier. “You’ll be in a lot of trouble if it doesn’t work out Fred.” I joked.

We talked for sometime before returning to our tables.

I realised if he was up for the award, I didn’t stand a chance. I had been nominated for this particular award once before in 2008 and, whilst the business was booming, I hadn’t, in my opinion, had a long enough track record to prove myself a success. Anyone can do well for a short period but the true measure of an entrepreneur is tested over time. Whilst we have done well and produced profits for 13 consecutive years, my money was on Fred at this point for obvious reasons, in the same way that if Branson had entered the competition. Fred, I am sure, would concede second place.

Sure enough, Fred won both his category and the main prize. It’s great to see that nice things can happen to nice people.

It’s a lesson for all us business folk. Investing in our teams is the single most important part of what we do. If you are not a business person, give your boss a nudge and tell them there is always a better way! Its worked for Fred and Peter and its working for us at UKFast. There are more and more businesses deploying more positive signs of management, but we are still someway off changing the whole of Britain.

People often assume that you have to be cut throat to succeed in business. Actually, the opposite is true in my experience. And, whilst being ruthless can help rocket you to the top, it doesn’t help you much when you are there, if everyone around you, including people on your team resent you or your ethics. I see so many people who have reached a level, fail to enjoy what they have and hold themselves back because they are not happy within themselves. Success is not success if you are unable to share it.

These days, I am concentrating on expanding the business, focussing on R&D, energy and momentum, whilst JB deals with keeping the cogs moving together. We are very lucky to have an excellent management team to support us, and although none of us are the finished article, we have a passionate bunch of professional, dynamic individuals, who all want to make a difference.

I have learned from stepping back that I can’t grow a business to its full potential if too many people rely on me. I often ask friends who run very successful businesses, all turning over considerably more than UKFast, “what is your secret ingredient?” The answer is almost always the same: “I surround myself with a great team.” The business owners who put themselves at the top of the “what’s great about your company” list and assume they are the reason, are delusional. We can all run businesses that do well, the real challenge is how you sustain growth year on year, decade after decade, guaranteeing security for your team and developing at the same time. The business graveyard is littered with big hitters who took their eye off the ball.

If the trick to longevity is finding and investing in great people, what constitutes a great person and where are they hiding?

It’s a good thing to create a blue print or clear picture of what you are looking for, so that your team can continue the recruitment process, spotting all the things in others that you valued in them. So, often a candidate looks great on paper, and they tell you everything you want to hear, but are you asking the right questions?

There’s nothing complicated or overtly sophisticated about the UKFast blue print, we just attract people who are fun, passionate and supportive. When you have these ingredients, it is worth treating them as a long term investment. It’s funny that on a balance sheet, we list all the depreciating equipment, assets and cash, but we don’t make much of the people. As it’s the people that make the difference in a business, it’s the wrong way around in my opinion.

Once you have amazing individuals, it’s worth working hard to keep them. They are hard enough to find and even harder to replace as experience counts, so never underestimate the value of not having to train and recruit replacements.

When new recruits start and they see team mates who have been with the company 10 years, who are engaged and passionate about every part of their role. This is incredibly motivating.

Motivating people is my favourite pastime. You can have the greatest people in the world but if you don’t inspire them or create an inspirational environment, people wither.

I remember taking 8 kids straight from school on a government scheme. I remember the lady handing them over. “I am eternally grateful” she said with a worried look on her face, “but do you know what you are doing?” It was 13 years ago, when we sold mobile phones, and if I am honest, I had no idea! Their job was going to be connecting phones to the Orange network. They were scruffy and hunched in hoodies when they first arrived, and hated everyone in a suit. Over the months that followed, we got to know each other, both in and outside work, playing 5 aside and working with the wider team, and we began to notice potential.

One day, I sent a message to 2 of them to meet me at the front door. They arrived thinking that they were in trouble. “Come on chaps, this is a day that you and I are going to remember for a long time.”

I walked them to Slaters Menswear, had them measured for suits, and whilst the suits were being altered I took them to an old friend Nicky who cut my hair when I first arrived in Manchester, for a quick short, back and sides. Everyone was getting excited; the hairdresser, Alfie the tailer, the boys.

They walked back carrying their old clothes in their bags, along with spare shirts and ties, whilst I coached them on how to handle the pressure of their new roles. They walked into the building and the receptionist did a triple take.

I remember pausing before opening the door to a then embryonic UKFast, gripping their arms. “Shoulders back, stand tall, deep breath, you look amazing, you are the future, now go and make a difference.”

They walked into a room of momenarily stunned people before everyone started to stand up, applauding.

To this day, I employ at least 10 of the 20 or so people in that office that day.  Sadly, Barry and Joe aren’t amongst their names, but we all remember them and we will never forget that day. And whilst you could argue that the few hundred pounds and the time we took doing that was wasted, we inadvertently touched a group of people who decide to stay with UKFast because we are people who invest in others.

It’s also a great reminder for me that life is about levels, and wherever you are, whatever the level, there is another one above us that we need to strive for.

It’s lovely being back involved and thank you to everyone who emailed or elbowed me (or both) for temporarily stopping my blog. I am continuing because you inspired me.

Thank you.

Loz

I suppose it’s safe to agree with this, although I believe an entrepreneur is the person who initiates the venture, taking on all the risk from the outset. It is a very different person who takes the business to the next level. Often, entrepreneurs find this element challenging and employ an operator, a CEO or managing director. I’d describe these people as businessmen or women. I am not one of these people. My natural instinct is that I am more suited to accepting the whole challenge and taking ownership of every part. I am having to learn the other skills and surround myself with great operators as our business expands. I believe a successful business needs a balance of the two.

From my perspective, I ventured into running my own businesses as it seemed the natural thing to do. I didn’t work for someone else and dream of one day being a businessman; I simply went to the bank to set up a business account. I didn’t know any better.

I got a rather blank look and they told me I’d need a “letterhead.” I asked what one of those was and I promtly returned a few days later with a business name, letterheads and business cards.

If only the next stage was as simple. I think it’s much harder for people in full time employment to give up everything they have and risk it all for a crazy notion that, you are told, is statistically unlikely to work!

So, I had my letterheads. What next? I needed something to sell. Well, I could play the piano so this seemed as good a place to start as any.

The problem with setting up in business at 17 years of age is that it’s very difficult for people to take you seriously. I remember being told by an agent who took a contract off me for the Midland Hotel, “You are the worst piano player in Manchester, and you will never make it as a businessman.” It was tough enough to lose the income that fuelled my entire life without having my nose rubbed in it.

This drove me hard in those days to better myself and whilst I see the same person every now and then still tinkling the ivories, I feel no animosity. I lost the contract because of my own failings, not because he won it. If I’d have been doing the job correctly, it would have not been under threat. These are painful lessons to learn when your mortgage repayments and dinners count on you keeping your contracts.

There are a number of people throughout my business career and life who have helped me raise my game, often by being unkind or a bit too honest!

So often you hear successful people explain that at school a teacher said something along the lines of, “you will never amount to anything.” I have a few teachers who would probably be a little shocked to hear that I am doing OK, but it was probably my father whose classic, “you wouldn’t be able to hold down a job as a bin man” showed a complete lack of faith in me. This must have had a profound effect on me, although I can’t pin point any one incident that triggered it. He was relentless with his forthright belief that I would fail.

I will never understand this. I don’t resent him for it, far from it, we are good friends nowadays and he jokes that this is probably why I am successful. I’d agree that it might have helped my determination.  I remember that, whilst holding down my first job at 15 in a screen printing factory, he was so embarrassed to introduce me to his boss who was picking him up that he locked me in the garden and, when I knocked on the window, he refused to open the door, explaining to Geoff, “just ignore him, he’s the gardener.”

It backfired as I sprinted down the garden, scaled a 20ft wall and jumped out into the road as Geoff pulled up alongside me in his brand new Jag.

“Isn’t that your gardener, Ken? We should give him a lift.”

I played along with my father’s ruse and got a lift to the roundabout on the outskirts of Denbigh, whilst my father went purple in the passenger seat. I learnt from Geoff that really successful people take people at face value. Weighing someone up and changing your behaviour due to someone’s appearance is a bad practice.

That was a great summer and I got a taste of standing on my own two feet.

I arrived at the screen printers, Humphries Signs, to find a pile of ‘for sale’ boards piled up to the top of the factory roof. My job was to throw them in the skip.

After a few days, one of the 2 brothers who owned the business had a rant at me for spreading mess around the car park. Whilst I was supposed to keep the perfect ones, I had realised that the For Sale signs all came in varying conditions, but even the worst had elements that could be reused. So, I stock piled them and stripped them accordingly and started reorganising the factory to place all the elements in order of assembly. About 6 weeks later, the same brother was furious when a lorry load of materials was sent back, as we had no use for it. We had inadvertently saved the company thousands by recycling.

I remember just before leaving for Manchester,  Mr Humphries was keen to get me back, and offered me the job for the summer again. I turned up and turned around when I saw the same pile had regrown back again. Whilst I love a challenge, I knew I needed new lessons.

In that way, I haven’t changed. I have a tendency to look for new exciting challenges all the time. I think this helps to keep us fresh and on our toes. Keeping our eyes and ears open are important traits of being successful in every walk of life. Being a great listener and knowing when to take action are key when you are considering your direction or strategy.

I am still learning in all aspects of my development. There is no one area that I feel I have mastered and I suppose that’s why I still love coming into UKFast every day.

I blogged last year about the Times’ paywall and how it affected the sheer numbers of people that were suddenly banned from reading the articles published on thetimes.co.uk website. I was amongst hundreds of thousands who never returned. Convinced that the “content is more important than the delivery”, the leaders at The Times insisted that all readers need to be paying a fee for the news it provides. Overnight, the readership was slashed to a fraction of its original traffic.

And whilst it never worked and the traffic levels today still pale into insignificance compared to what they used to be, the management at The Times now find it hard to open up the news to everyone again as it will appear as though they failed. So, they are damned if they do, they are damned if they don’t. It’s easier to hide the numbers. However, this strategy can’t last forever as businesses that advertise on the site will eventually realise that their advertising is less effective than other sites they advertise with. That is both the beauty and the beast of advertising on such a transparent medium as the net. There’s no brand building, it’s relevant visitors and conversions that count.

So, where have all the readers gone? Do they not get the news anymore?

The answer is simple; they just moved to one of the abundance of free alternatives.  And the argument that “people will always pay for quality” clearly doesn’t stack up when there are credible alternatives available like the BBC and a myriad of Apps for free.

I had a meeting with the owner of EN magazine Martin Regan, who has taken the other route and chosen to discontinue a really great publication EN Magazine in favour of a website version. Whilst I can’t help feeling a little nostalgic, I think he is wise. What was interesting though was that, during our conversation, we spoke of the importance of well-written content and the challenges in today’s fast-paced news environment to provide original content, especially as the demand for a paid magazine which fuels the reporters is in decline.

So, how do you create the balance?

Well, there are news websites out there with incredibly successful models. “The Register” for example is a tech publication that boasts more than six million unique users worldwide. Approximately 1.5 million of these are in the UK and 3 million in the US, with a further 0.5 million in Canada and Australia. They turn over a good few million and they are growing. Why is no one copying this model?

Their journalists write articles relating to technical subjects and consequently attract readers interested in the same. This is a match made in heaven for advertisers selling similar products and services. As a business owner, I am much more interested in relevant sites. However, I am well aware that it’s a numbers game, so the sites with the largest traffic win my business. This is why Google and Facebook do so well. They create sites with millions of users that are free to use, and charge hefty sums to those wanting to advertise on them. Why suffocate a site with a paywall?

Yet, when talking with Martin he said something I have heard a number of times from other journalists and people in the press. “It’s the content that’s important and not the delivery. People will seek out great content.”

It is something that all journalists pride themselves on, the quality of their work, and why not? I am a writer of music and I take great pride in every composition I have made, so I understand the passion behind what he says. However, it hit me like a thunderbolt when I realised that within that statement lies the answer.

Why have so many people in the press got it wrong when it comes to online delivery? Rupert Murdoch spent billions acquiring popular websites with large volumes of traffic, yet never managed to amalgamate them. So many people have failed, yet when you look at their business pedigree it just doesn’t make sense, especially when you consider that the newspaper men built the modern world as we know it. They were the pioneers of their generation and they controlled the Western World with their print.

Yet how can these same people say that “delivery is not important.” They have clearly forgotten the hundreds of millions of pounds invested in the News industry, the sophistication of the printing presses and the “delivery” of newspapers to every door across the globe. How much thought went into the creation and continual improvement of that empire? A colossal amount; so much so it doesn’t bear thinking about.

I rented the old Express building when we first set up UKFast and the sheer size of the buildings and the printing presses with their miles of snaking production lines is imprinted on my brain for ever. Yet how much time and effort went into understanding the delivery of the internet? The same as they have invested into their industry? I am confident when I say that, from my experience of discussing the internet with a number of proprietors of well known publications, they didn’t do anything like the same amount of work.

The fact that a number of owners handed off the website part of their business to IT managers because their understanding of  the internet was better only compounded the problem. Their focus was not on the user (like the journalist honing his craft) - they are focussed on cost savings and efficiency and convenience.

And isn’t an online newspaper a creative outlet, just like a paper version? Doesn’t it, therefore, require a creative approach?

So, the delivery and user experience tended to take a back seat and all the focus remained on the front edge, creating the articles and managing the news, whilst the news grinds to a halt online, if you can even find it!

Sadly though, users visiting websites are less than forgiving and they simply vote with their mouse, clicking somewhere else where they can get everything that little bit faster, slicker, easier.

So, if you are reading this and you own a newspaper or a website that is trying to attract interested readers - because, after all, isn’t that what we are all trying to do – take a lead from Facebook, Google, Twitter and some of the other successful giants of the web. They invest as much in the infrastructure as they do in the content and the running of the business.

If you view the internet as a way to make money without the overheads of a shop or a traditional business, it is likely you will either become unstuck or, at best, never fulfil your real potential.

Do yourself and your customers a favour and come and get a dedicated server or cloud platform from UKFast. I have yet to see someone regret buying a faster and more efficient delivery mechanism.

Is it the economy? Is it the climate?

Well, the environment is obviously going to have an effect on potential performance but it’s not the cause. It’s human error that usually delivers the killer blow. Ironically, the economic environment suffers due to human error too.

If it’s raining outside and you go out in your underwear, you are going to catch a cold.

If you stay out, ill-equipped for the elements, then more serious things will happen.

This is exactly what happens in business. Common sense plays a big part.

If you go on a spending spree when your bank account is looking full but you have bills around the corner, then the enjoyment of feeling flush is going to be short lived.

As a business owner in a previous life, I fell foul of this many a time. It’s easy to get caught out.

I like Bill Gates’ discipline when he set up Microsoft and refused to take on some big hitting executives before he had enough money in the account to run the entire business for a year if they had no income coming in whatsoever. Whilst we are not quite there, we could do about 8 months comfortably at UKFast.

How many businesses that went to the wall might have been saved if that had been the objective from the proprietors from the outset? Probably a great many.

No matter how tempting it is, we have a philosophy at UKFast that if it doesn’t help produce a better result, you just don’t purchase it.

You can take this too far, as I was reminded by a member of my team when she caught me putting some stationery items back in a local store recently.

“What are you doing?” She looked perplexed as she asked me the question.

“I don’t really need these things… Besides, we can get them cheaper online.”

She promptly took back everything that I’d hung back on the racks and marched me to the counter.

So, I learnt you can take things too far. However, this is the result of years of restraint. After years of getting myself financially tied in knots, I learned that it is easier to go without.

So, is the answer to buy everything as cheaply as possible and don’t spend a penny unless you have to?

I could argue both sides of this coin.

I love Benjamin Franklin’s saying, “a penny saved is a penny earned.”

You never get that penny back; it’s gone for good. So, before you spend that hard earned cash, imagine what life would look like if you went without. Imagine if every penny you had spent was given back to you. I bet it would be a sizeable amount.

On the flip side, there is a massive danger that if you are too frugal you will miss the whole picture, which is common too.

Whilst you might find me trying to save money on random things, you will see me invest massively in my office surroundings and fun events and benefits for the team at work. Why? I suppose it’s because I learnt that I can’t do it without them and that they put up a much better fight for me when they know they are genuinely valued.

If there is one area to spend in business, no matter how hard times can be, it has to be on your team, and it’s not money you need to be spending.

My greatest ever moment in business was when my longstanding friend and colleague Richard Salisbury calmly and sincerely asked me, “Lawrence, can I work for you for the rest of my life?”

Richard Salisbury at Snowdon LakeHouse

It’s bonds like this that make everything we do worthwhile. You can’t do it with money either. So the argument, “we can’t afford big parties and nights out for our staff,” often falls on deaf ears with me. UKFast used to be a tiny organisation and Richard was there back when there were just 4 of us in a tiny office. I remember his first day vividly. We were in one of Tom Bloxham’s buildings Ducie House. Rich being head of design (a design team then of 1) needed an Apple Mac. When I heard that my father-in-law, John Everton, had a prehistoric green screen floppy disk original dinosaur Mac in his attic, I quickly commandeered it and set the thing up ready for our new employee.

Rich, being extraordinarily polite, took about 20 minutes of crawling around on his hands and knees and looking behind the monitor before he turned to tell us that he didn’t think this computer was going to cut it. Of course the 3 of us were crying with laughter by then.

I remember some great weekend camping trips, including one with Rich when we headed to the clouds of Snowdon to set the world to rights.

You don’t have to spend a fortune but you do have to spend quality time with your crew if you want a quality connection with your team mates.

Is UKFast a better place for the quality connections we all create together? Yes. How much better, and which parts can you quantify as a direct result of these connections?

Great question (from an accountant or the Inland Revenue). However, whilst it’s difficult to apportion the exact amount of success to the fun and peculiar things we might do for the team, no one can argue with a strong balance sheet and a profitable company.

I think Einstein sums it up beautifully when he says,

“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”

It might have been something about not wanting to give up; everyone had tried so hard to get this far and I was determined to help them to the top. I have climbed Snowdon hundreds of times and I have never seen the ground ice over to such extent where even the gravel was an ice rink the moment we stepped on to the mountain. We’d made it two thirds of the way up, having to stay on the grass at all times. When the grass ran out, we dug our feet into the snow. We’d done the hard climb and just across the ridge was the prize, that feeling of achievement that is worth all the effort. I love leading groups to the top of the mountains. Sharing the experience leaves lasting memories and creates great bonds between everyone involved.

I’d gone ahead early on to check the path, leaving 2 experienced leaders Joe and JB at the point and rear of the group. The ground was difficult but passable.

For the final stage of the climb, I took 3 close colleagues and my 2 dogs Indie and Lara, and headed up what we call the zig zags.

The cloud was coming in and by the time we reached the top it was difficult to assess whether it was just markedly colder, which I’d expect as you reach the ridge because you are more exposed, or whether the weather was actually changing.

It turned out that the weather was actually changing and, as I dug my fingers into the snow in front of me, I realised that the mountain was icing over.

I took the immediate decision to turn back. There were no objections. It was clear that I was not the only one who had sensed the danger. Behind me, the track was icing too, the beautiful snow was rapidly becoming treacherous. Only minutes earlier we’d been smiling and joking, and now we were on a ledge in shocking weather with certain death to our left if we lost our footing.

I only had one thing on my mind: get everyone to safety as quickly as possible.

Every footstep was pronounced and deliberate and was preceded by me checking with my hands to help keep my balance.

It was game over for the day as far as the mountain was concerned. However, the lucky new recruits who had battled so hard were treated to a dunk in the glacial waters of our lake (Llyn Cwellyn) at the house in a game of raft-building.

You can tell a lot about a person in these conditions. Within minutes, you know every aspect of their personality. The weather is so extreme that people can’t keep up a pretence for any length of time.

Lawrence Jones and his team having Fun on Snowdon

I found out a great deal about my 3 colleagues as well, who thought I knew very well. Apart from the fact that they are a little daft following me on to the ridge without questioning my decision to tackle the mountain in these elements, I realised that they are fiercely loyal and incredibly brave. I have taken hundreds of people across the same mountain ridge and, even in the most perfect weather conditions, have had to hold the hands of grown men.

I also realised that somewhere along the way, since getting to know these 3, they have not only developed massively as individuals but at some point I have also earned their trust, and that is priceless.

I was questioned at the bottom by someone hoping to join the senior management team. She’d come on the trip so we could learn a little bit more about each other. I wanted to see her outside the safety of the office where anyone can function and put up a pretence and I wanted her to learn something about our culture, people and processes.

“Is this not an expensive way to find new people?” I was asked. Well, it is if you have a crystal ball and you only pick winners every time you recruit. However, life rarely works like that. At least it hasn’t in my experience. The Snowdonia National Park is our crystal ball and if you calculate every penny that makes up all the details of the trip and the money it costs to run the estate then yes, as a straight forward cost, it’s extravagant.

It doesn’t guarantee that you will pick out the people who are wrong for the business but, if you look at the ones we’ve not recruited and calculate their impact if they’d stayed or joined, it actually looks like a really sound investment. We must have saved millions. Not only that, the experience people have with each other is priceless. We’ve all shared tremendous memories at The Snowdon Lakehouse and, just like the weather and scenery, each trip and group is very different.

I also like the fact that even if it doesn’t work out, they leave knowing we have had a real go at helping them settle in and whilst it didn’t work out for them, they have an understanding of UKFast and all we are trying to do.

It’s amazing that 12 years later we are still hiring on the same principals and whilst the methods of measuring and assessing have evolved, fundamentally we are looking for like minded people.

I learnt a bit about myself too that day. If I’d been on my own or with JB or Joe, I’d have more than likely carried on. Male bravado is a terrible thing and I have been on the receiving end of a number of tumbles falling for this one. I must be growing up. It felt good to have other people in my care that I was responsible for and whilst we didn’t reach the summit this time, we had a great fun and we get to tackle it next week (with crampons).

In a funny sort of way, not making the summit is quite nice too as it reminds me that nothing in life can be taken for granted, especially the individuals in the team I was leading that day. The only thing you can take for a given is that we will try again and again and we will keep climbing mountains, because walking on the flat is just too easy!

It was a creative place for me and whilst it was mid holidays and the majority of students were on vacation, I really got a sense that I was in a special place. I had a great summer and made some lifelong friends and although I considered moving there, I was fundamentally a musician and back then, wild horses would have not dragged me from my vocation.

I never realised just how important Palo Alto was going to be in the technical revolution that followed. With Stanford University on its doorstep too, the area is steeped in history. In the same way people look upon Manchester as a central point for the Industrial Revolution, Palo Alto and Silicon Valley have to carry similar weight.

Since then, we’ve seen meteoric rises from a number of the world’s largest technical giants; Apple, Cisco, eBay, Google, who all house their head offices there.

One of the most recent of the dominant players is Facebook who moved to Palo Alto in 2003. They have had an interesting rise to fame and good fortune, although the fortune is a little more recent.

With traffic volumes exceeding Google, Facebook has more than 830 million users and, as a result, has to be the world’s most high profile website.

In recent years, it has entered everyone’s homes and hearts, linking families, businesses, long lost relatives, school mates. It has done the impossible. It is doing the unimaginable. It crosses borders as easily as water and it knows no boundaries. There is no culture that has rejected it. It works in every language. Fundamentally, it feeds the needs of all humans, whatever creed or continent.

The billion dollar question is: how far can it go?

There is no point trying to work out how Mark Zuckerberg created such a masterpiece as I doubt he really knows. There was evidently a gap in our social lives that none of us knew about and Facebook filled it. What Zuckerberg has done extraordinarily well is exploit that gap and give us exactly what was needed.

So, with talks of the Facebook IPO, is it worth the $100 billion that they are hoping to raise? It sounds like a lot of money and with economies all over the world facing tougher times around the corner, it seems crazy that a website that allows us to communicate with each other can be worth so much.

Yet, if you put it into perspective, $100 billion is only 27 times the annual revenue of $3.71billion. When Apple went public in 1980 it was valued at $1.19 billion 25 times its earnings. It is moderate in comparison to Google who went for 218 times earning back in 2004. Yet Google delivered and in the last 8 years it has changed the face of advertising. Facebook would have to be the world’s first $700 billion dollar company to replicate Google’s rise.

When you consider the fact that Facebook grew 88% last year, it is a tempting gamble, yet a great many brokers are warning against investing in the rising giant. Personally, I can see it going for a great deal more than 27 times even though the market currently dictates around 12 times. There is an emotional attachment that people have with the site and that sometimes carries a great deal of weight, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the initial entering is particularly high.

If you scrape away all the hype though and compare it to Apple who grew profit 85% to $25.92 billion, Apple trades at a modest 13 times its price to earnings.

If you apply the Facebook multiple, UKFast would be valued at almost $1.0 billion.  ($939 million to be exact.)

Maybe I should have stayed in Palo Alto after all, especially when you apply the Google multiple. UKFast would be worth $7.5838 billion. Now even my wife couldn’t spend that much.

Whatever the outcome, you have to hand it to Zuckerberg; he’s done well. And in spite of a great many people all professing to have either come up with the idea or influenced it, he has hung on to the lion’s share, getting credible people in around him who have track records in designing large scale corporates, enabling him to remain creative.

This is the thing I admire the most in any business. It’s the first thing that suffers usually. Demands on the entrepreneur dictate new pressures and larger responsibilities as businesses sky rocket, so much so that they often suck the life and fun out of most founders. Yet in spite of this and some pretty stupid gaffs, Zuckerberg enters the Silicon Valley Hall of Fame as one of the youngest internet billionaires.

On the subject of gaffs, Zuckerberg paid David Chloe, a graffiti artist who decorated a wall of his first office in Palo Alto, shares instead of a few thousand dollars. Those shares are now worth an estimated $200,000,000.

Ironically, the fee for the picture David Chloe painted is more than the cost of the building that they left. I am not sure I’d want to paper over that mistake.

So, as Facebook move to Menlo Park Campus to their new HQ, I can’t help thinking of the neglected piano. I do hope that, with all that money sloshing around, someone takes the trouble to give her a tune and a tinkle every now and again.

We have our work cut for us if we want to keep up this momentum though, as it is technically harder to increase percentage growth year on year whilst growing organically. It’s the first thing analysts question, “how do you intend on maintaining this trajectory?” The simple answer is that you don’t unless each year you increase every area in identical proportion to your turnover. It’s very difficult to achieve this organically because with growth comes cash flow difficulties and a plethora of challenges. Also, in an economy such as ours, I believe it’s more prudent to follow common sense; build at the speed you feel most comfortable at.

That being said, we are on a massive recruitment drive, although I am not sure where we are going to house everyone yet as we are bursting not just with energy on the 28th floor but at the seams too.

But under the skin of UKFast we are having fun and that’s important. Breaking down our larger goals into a myriad of challenges for smaller teams to tackle is the new game. I would be kidding myself if I thought I could influence every team member as well as the direct line managers can, who work directly for and on behalf of their team mates. My job is to motivate the managers and trust that they are able to pass on the message with passion and without dilution.

It’s part of the process of learning to manage a much larger business. It’s sad in a lot of respects as I have thoroughly enjoyed the responsibilities of leading from the front and battling with my mates, for all of whom I’d swim the channel as they would in return, (with the possible exception of Rich, who’s not a great swimmer!) Over the last 12 years, a great many of them have become close friends and I love being a part of their growth outside of work too as they settle down and start having kids. But it’s time for these friends of mine to wear my shoes and develop new skills of their own, managing and developing their teams.

If I look at this pragmatically, there are similarities to the old days when there were just 20 or so of us. If you total up all our managers and team leaders, we are in a similar place. The only difference is that, unless I want to continue to slow down the growth of UKFast, I have to let nature take its course. I can’t be sitting next to every person, coaching them individually!

So, have I officially stepped back? I have done so before at my peril and watched managers with pedigrees and so called proven track records steer us off course. On previous occasions, I have had to step back in to pick up the pieces. It’s costly when you get it wrong. You not only slow down growth, you also lose great people who get disheartened in the process.

Yet, this time, I am confident that we have the right people in place and whilst I don’t think any of us are the finished article yet, their appetite makes them the right people for the job. I have spent a number of years preparing for this and working tirelessly on the culture of the business, ensuring that I invest all my time and energy in the right people.

It comes at an interesting time too, as my own family is also growing. My wife Gail gave birth to our newest baby last Friday at 2.26am. Not many people can work with their spouse but we have had an incredible innings and I have enjoyed working with her and building this great organisation together. So, in a funny way I know that I have lost her too at this crucial time. Mind you, don’t for a minute underestimate my wife. At ten minutes past midnight, I was reminding Gail that I had a sales meeting starting in just over 7 hours. And whilst I was slightly late for the meeting and a little shell shocked and emotional on arrival, my wife too arrived at work carrying our baby less than 9 hours after giving birth. If you thought Thatcher was tough, you have no idea. It’s this sort of commitment that makes UKFast special.

So, whilst Gail is doing her mum stuff, you can rest assured that I wont be allowed to and she will continue to motivate and inspire me and the troops from a different angle. But this time is going to be different for her too.

After the birth of our first daughter, she lay on a play mat whilst Gail (with support from June and Paula) entered every transaction of every customer into our new accounting system that we’d designed and built. It took months. The impact of our second daughter followed a similar suit as the business had grown to new levels with new extraordinary challenges that required endless hours of commitment. So, this time, I can say with certainty that Gail’s officially on maternity leave and I am going to see to it that she enjoys every moment.

Luckily, we have been planning this for some time and we have put in place a team that, whilst they cant replace Gail, can support me and my managers to the highest levels.

So, it is undoubtedly the birth of a new era, and a very interesting one too. Wish us luck!

Best of British

Lawrence

Latest arrival to the growing team at UKFast

Trying to find like-minded people is essential. It’s not a case of just employing a recruitment agency and hoping for the best. Our culture is so defined that the wrong people don’t fit in and do more damage than good. Most don’t hang around even if they get through the process. It is essential to ensure that we don’t waste other people’s time and our own.

I remember Tony Robbins’ sales trainer and great friend telling me ,“I look for people who have the skills that I cannot teach.” I was curious to know what he meant. Essentially, he looked for people with great values who’d been brought up very well. Once he had them in his midst, he’d train them and take the time to teach them his skills.

“They are worth the investment of time and energy,” he’d say. “We turn down lots of people who are well qualified but who just don’t fit with our values.”

Now this is something I understand, when it’s put in plain and simple English.

We have 6 core values in UKFast. Every time we recruit outside of these, if we stumble upon a technical genius or someone who appears to have all the skills we require, we get caught out. One of our values is “supportive,” and this cancels out so many other people who may be very attractive to other businesses. If they are not supportive, they won’t fit in at UKFast whichever department they are heading for. I believe we dont put enough stock on the skills that aren’t easily measured or taught as lessons in schools. If you have a rocket scientist who’d help revolutionise your business on paper, it’s worth considering his impact at all the other levels.

This reminds me of a certain technical genius, who I stumbled upon on the Internet a few years back. I could see this person’s passion; he was just 18 and he had been supporting a US hosting company from his bedroom as his part time job. He had all the technical skills (and more) that we could ever hope for.

We got him in for an interview, did a psychometric profile, and I, being an impulsive man, admired his resolve and fought to get him on to the team.

The problem I had was that the test came back with a note, “Call Alan.” Alan is our psychometric tester and every now and then, if someone stands out, he’ll ask for a face-to-face chat. When we spoke, I knew he’d got this profile wrong. He described the chap as a “Jack the lad” and someone who’d disrupt the status quo for a variety of reasons. I explained that he was just 18 and had hidden behind his fringe for the best part of the interview. Oh, and his Dad came along too because he was that shy. Alan warned me and explained that his values were so far removed from ours as a group of individuals.

Sadly, it turned out that Alan was right and whilst I never like to give up on anyone, when you have colleagues coming up to you from every department constantly complaining that he was just spoiling the environment making everyone’s life a misery, we decided he’d be happier elsewhere.

It’s a shame because he is someone I’d admired and associated with so many qualities. However, there were some fundamental big differences and Alan was right; he was happier elsewhere and he finally found his home with another hosting provider where I am confident he is helping them to make a big difference.

I suppose the moral of the story is that even when you think someone will help you make the boat go faster, just make sure that they are steering in the same direction as you.

All too often, I find that people think it’s acceptable to “sledge”. This is an Australian Cricketing term but a good description of someone who sits bickering and being cynical of every step that the management might be making. Some people just can’t see the good in anything. If you have people in your business like this or you recognise this amongst colleagues, make it your duty to help them find new challenges in their lives. Often, they are bored or just don’t fit in. But they can leave and make a massive contribution and thoroughly enjoy their careers elsewhere if they find a team of people more in tune with their way of thinking.

It’s not that one type of person is better than another; every business needs a wide variety of personalities. However, “values” need to be aligned if you are going to do something extraordinary and break records.

So, if you know anyone who you think is a great person, family member, friend or acquaintance, and you think they look like the sort of person who likes to go out of their way for others, then let them know we are recruiting and we value this quality above all else. I’ll discuss the other 5 core values at a later date as they all figure in the genetic makeup of a UKFast team member.

I find it fascinating that people can view the same thing from completely different perspectives and say, with absolute certainty, that they see total opposites.

You can look at a picture and see the most magical inspiration before your eyes, and yet someone else might not give it a second glance.

The same applies to everything we do and experience in our lives. What might inspire one person, just doesn’t make sense to another.

So, what drives this difference in opinions and views?

I heard a great analogy that the brain, like a computer, is a processor. However, unlike a computer, it can only focus on one thing at a time. If you try it, you really can only give one thing your full attention. And whilst you can perform functions that you have rehearsed over and over again, like walking, cooking, and exercising, when you turn your attention to something important, you will struggle if you add something else to the mix.

Tony Robbins talks of only being able to feel one emotion at the same time and I totally agree with this concept too.

Understanding this philosophy, or restriction, that we all have has actually helped me enormously. Previously, when I have tried to tackle everything that needs sorting in my life, I inevitably became overwhelmed and very little got done. In fact, sometimes the list is so large that it is easier not to tackle anything and to find something easier to fill your time with.

We have a rule at UKFast which is that we never show all of our plans to people. When we only had 4 people in the business (sorry Rich and Neil), Gail and I would write enormous lists of everything that we needed and wanted to achieve. And whilst we got incredibly excited by this, our 2 new team members actually became demotivated by the sheer volume of what lay ahead of them.

Can you imagine walking or running across America? Or climbing Everest? Or rowing across the Atlantic in a tiny boat (which my good friend Dan Innes did)? The thought is almost too daunting but if you cut it up into smaller journeys, States, weeks, days, hours, and then break each one of those into separate challenges, everything becomes a lot easier to tackle.

So, what did we do at UKFast? Well, we wrote some software and whilst Gail and I could offload thousands of jobs and ideas, we’d only let a maximum of the next 4 tasks be visible to anyone in the team. A remarkable thing happened; productivity sped up and the same 2 people became more engaged and not only tackled more but achieved the work of 5 people. Both Richard and Neil still work for UKFast. They have joined the 10 year club and both got a cheque for £10,000 for putting up with me for a decade!

More seriously though, I couldn’t do what I do without support from individuals like these guys. Yet, if we’d not learnt this really important lesson, the same two people might be very different.

So, in a world of a thousand decisions and with enormous pressures at every turn, how do some people manage to remain positive? How come some people just seem to be luckier than others?

In a meeting the other day, a friend pointed out a quote from Steve Redgrave’s book. Everything they did prior to winning the Gold medal was benchmarked against the question, “will it make the boat go faster?”

I could have done with this clarity as a very small business person running MDC as my first 10 years in business were incredibly stressful. They were great fun too, but it was like a game of snakes and ladders. I’d go from strength to strength then hit a major issue, usually in the form of cash flow.

I hadn’t had a day off or a holiday in nearly 10 years and my uncle Anthony (who was doing my accounts) told me I was busy going nowhere. He was right of course and although the advice hurt, I took the holidays I needed and suddenly I had new goals to focus my attention on. My boat started to go a little faster, I was just going in circles!

Going back to the brain being a single processor philosophy, I learnt early on in life that you can convince yourself of anything. Even when it is bitterly cold, if you say, out loud and with conviction, “I love this weather” then pretty soon you’ll be noticing the colours in the mist or rain and the biting wind just won’t feel so bad. I applied this philosophy to many things but it took a while for me to translate this skill into business and personal life. However, it can be done and actually is done by thousands of business people and atheletes across the globe. You are probably doing it already in areas of your life without realising it.

If you focus on all the problems you may encounter whilst trying to hit your sales target or grow your business, you can guarantee you are going to make it significantly harder on yourself than if you were to focus on the end result of picking up the trophy or celebrating the success that may lie ahead.

Now, some people may argue that you need to be realistic and you have to plan to avoid pitfalls. Personally, I believe that this is procrastination and if we all did this, we’d not evolve as humans; we’d simply sit at home stressing about the next episode of Coronation Street.

If you feel cold, focus on something else and the cold will go away. If you feel sad, find something you can be grateful for and do your best to focus on that instead. Whatever you focus on, you will feel.

Do you focus on the economy, and should you? Well, yes, if you are an economist or the Prime Minister. Otherwise, you should have enough on your plate. I remember one of the nuns at Brigedene Convent saying, “Lord grant me strength to change the things I can and the courage to accept the things I can’t and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Now, whether you are a religious person or not, this is great common sense. We are too wrapped up in the news because it is so accessible; it is in front of us in our homes, in our ears in the car, and it is the topic of conversation on everyone’s lips. It’s boring and really if we didn’t know any better you might be better off. Focus on what you can change and hope for the best that everyone else is as focussed as you on their roles.

I am not advocating ignoring warning signs and throwing caution to the wind with everything you do. I just mean don’t let it consume you like so many people seem to allow.

If you get the balance right, it should, in theory, give you more time to focus on the important things. Improving your own lives. Quality time with your friends and family. It’s funny how it always seems to boil down to this.

He explained that happiness is something that comes from within. It depends entirely on your internal state and the lens that you look at life through. So, if you’re unhappy, you will probably see the bad in everything. If you’re immensely positive and happy then you’re bound to approach life with a spring in your step and see the good in everything.

Let’s face it, there is good in everything and everyone. Sometimes you just have to look a little harder.

I have met many people who assume that money is the “be all and end all.” But money doesn’t bring happiness. People bring happiness; family and friends and the things you do with them. The more you give, listen and contribute, the happier you seem to be.

If you are lacking in any of these areas then they are the places to invest more time and energy. I am not the finished article by a long shot but I am aware of where I need to spend more time so there is hope for me yet!

I delivered a talk recently to my sales team and account managers. I was trying to get their attention and help them to start the year off with their best foot forward. All too often, people take too long to brush off the winter blues after Christmas and New Year’s excesses.

I asked them what makes people successful? And why are some people more successful than others? Whilst there are no hard and fast metrics to measure this principal, I have learnt that people who take their time more seriously than others inevitably cram more into their days and eventually, over a long period of time, the small steps they make each day mount up to be a big journey. I mentioned something similar in last week’s blog.

To put it into perspective, I got people to focus on the end of that journey. What’s the final destination? And what will your last words be when you are on your deathbed?

It is a great question and, as I have been there, I am able to give an accurate depiction of what you are bound to say.

It was only 11 years ago but I remember every second as though it were my last, probably because, at the time, they were.

Deep under the snow, I had the life squeezed out of me.

My last breaths were hard and fast. I remember the heat from my mouth as I suffocated and whilst all this was going on, my mind was busy at work.

And what goes through your head when you are alone underground, cemented in an early grave, very much alive, even if it is only for a few more minutes?

I can tell you with certainty, when it’s your turn (and, sadly, your turn will come), you won’t be thinking of the money you have or haven’t made. You will be thinking of one thing; relationships.

It’s people and relationships that are the only things of value. Nothing else matters.

I spent my last few minutes feeling massive regret and I can promise you I will never be in that position again. I will live trying and I will die trying.

There is nothing in my mind more important than this.

It’s difficult for me to explain to you just how valuable your last few minutes on the planet are. They mean everything, but I am not eloquent enough to put it into words. I do believe that if you knew now what I have learnt, you might approach your life slightly differently.

The best way to try and understand the emotion is if you put yourself in a position where you find out you are never going to see someone you love dearly again. It is sprung on you; they are emigrating and you have one last day with them.

What do you do?

Well, I know what I’d do. I’d change whatever plans I had for that day and dedicate every last minute to being with that person, making it as memorable and magical as possible.

However you look at this, the actual parting when they leave is going to hurt.

Imagine not having a full day, only having a few minutes to come to terms with the fact you are not going to see them again, only this time they aren’t there with you; you are alone. It’s fair to say this is much tougher.

This is bad enough, but imagine not just that one person, but every great person you’ve ever had the pleasure to spend a minute with in your amazing life, a life that 5 minutes ago you took for granted.

And whilst they can’t hear your goodbyes, they can’t see your tears, you will crave their breath on your neck or the touch on your skin.

Take a minute and think about it. It puts a lot into perspective when you simplify everything to just raw emotion. Trust me, there is nothing more important in any of our lives.

The feeling I had that day is not a feeling I’d wish on anyone. It is far too extreme to have to deal with on a daily basis, but occasionally I go there to reflect, usually around now! Each time I visit, I get a little more. There is more to discover, but it’s just too painful to immerse myself completely and I am not ready to completely share the whole experience just yet. One day maybe. The bit just below the surface can only be described as an avalanche of emotion; quite ironic under the circumstances and the snow.

It’s an intense place and it’s a time that, when it comes again, I am ready for and it’s not the cold, dark, lonely place I remember all too vividly.

So, with that in mind, ask yourself if you are investing in your friends and family enough? I know I’m not. When was the last time you really showed someone how you feel? And, even if that was 10 minutes ago, do you do it enough?

And when you tackle your day or week ahead, what if you were to get up a few hours earlier, to guarantee an extra few hours? Even if you did this 6 days a week, you’d give yourself an extra 624 hours, but of working hours, that’s like adding 78 days to your year.

So, why lie in bed when you can start the day off in the gym or with a brisk walk in the fresh air and squeeze that extra little bit out of life.

Anyway, most importantly, enjoy the week ahead and make a difference to your own life by making a difference to others.