We even had Clem Curtis and the Foundations as the band and the entire squad of Sale Sharks players, girlfriends and wives came too. Clem celebrated his 69th birthday that day and still rocked the house like he did back in the 70′s.

This years annual party is even bigger. To celebrate an amazing first half of the year and for just being in business together, we are having UKFest. Yes that is UKFest and not a typo. It stands for UKFestival. We are throwing a weekend festival for friends and family of UKFast down in Wales on the Castell Cidwm estate, and if I can convince the farmer behind to borrow his field, we can squeeze in some extra tents and portaloos and invite even more guests.

But its not just parties and nights out. Your team mates need constant training, their environment needs to be just right. People are sensitive. Quite often, new starters bring with them associations of what businesses are really like. It’s their first hand experience from a previous job and they have the association firmly set in their mind that management equals pain and inconsistency and all businesses are the same.

Sometimes you can never break that association and people go through their lives really not enjoying their job.

We are currently in the process of kitting out our office with a huge amount of greenery. It is partly to celebrate the start of a brand new business venture with a friend of mine who has been in the world of trees and horticulture for 17 years with his lovely wife Clair. It’s also a great excuse for me to have fun and reinforce that by creating a fun environment.

So once you’ve created the Best Place To Work, what then?

I am a great believer in working with people to get them to be their happiest they can possibly be. But you know what, sometimes you just cant please everyone. If you have an individual who doesn’t quite get your core values and what you really stand for, they will probably work against you. Not necessarilly deliberately, but nevertheless, by them not “buying into” your culture and philosophies, they can cause a huge amount of damage. If that person is in a senior position, you have even more trouble.

I read a book called The Extra Mile that focusses on alignment and engagement. The 2 buzz words of corporate HR.

Objective number one is go get everyone aligned with your way of thinking, then get the most engaged people into positions of seniority (as long as they fit the mould) and then work towards getting every individual engaged.

Easier said than done and it is an ongoing quest when you have hundreds of staff. But it is possible. UKFast is living proof of it and although we are more a work in progress than the finished article, we are having fun learning about each other in the process.

The same book states clearly that if you have a manager or someone in a senior position who is either disengaged, or engaged but not aligned, you are in for a rocky ride, but there’s enough to discuss on that topic to warrant a dedicated blog.

I love puzzles. Getting your team right is the ultimate puzzle. It is like doing the rubiks cube in the dark!

So do people really understand the importance of alignment and engagement? I think not. It amazes me how many office environments I see or hear about that are simply not places I’d want to work. And working from an industrial unit is not an excuse either. I went to see James Timpson’s offices in Wythenshaw. Apart from the fact James was building a swimming pool off the staff canteen area, everything about his office was simply a “Wow!” And that being said, I don’t think you could find a managing director who places people and their well being higher on the agenda. James is a credit to British business and an example to other business men and women who want to build something extraordinary. He not only followed in his father’s footsteps, he strode on ahead and paved the way for a new era of “upside down management.”

And so after my FD at UKFast put it so succinctly. “We have colourful staff, but the office is a bit grey” I thought it time to take our “fun initiative” to a new level and start living some of our values! You can always do more, and if you ask yourself that question, can I do more at every stage, you will normally get better results.

So does it pay to invest in your staff? Absolutely! Invest in the workspace, training in every aspect of people and career development. I am just beginning to see the fruits of our labour, and it is worth while. It is difficult to quantify human emotion, we all understand monetary values, but when it comes to effort and passion, we don’t have a scale to measure it. As a result, I think it falls by the wayside in order of importance in 21st century business.

With regards to the office environment, when people ask “what is the rationale behind such a beautiful office?” I simply  say, “when I come to work I want to feel a million dollars. I want my team to feel te same.”

If you have any comments or ideas on how we can continue to develop at UKFast, I’d be very glad to hear from you.

Yes people do seem slightly more cautious. But this is partly to do with the fact we were told we were heading for recession. I remember backing out of a property deal after the Nothern Rock crisis. Thank goodness Gail and I plucked up the courage and pursued the deal, it was Castell Cidwm, the UKFast training property which is now an integral part of our successful recruitment and training strategy.

The reason for my comments are not flippant, I know a great many people have been through difficult times, my point is this. Is this a recession, or is it merely a change in the way people do business? What do I mean by this? Well, it is safe to say that people have changed the way they buy things.

When you purchase something there are 2 decisions that you make.

1/ do I want/need this product or service?

2/ where shall I buy it from

In the old days! People went to shops and bought there and then.

Then came the internet. Now people looked online, researched and then once they’d narrowed down what they wanted, they headed to the shops and bought it there.

But, then came the new era. An era of confidence where people simply go online to do research and then simply buy it without hesitation.

Well this is a massive shift. It surely makes sense that if you as a business have not embraced this you are going to be in a huge amount of trouble.

I believe the cultural shift in how we buy is SO extreme it is literally wiping businesses out who do not have a credible online presence. Look at Woolworths, they felt that the internet would not work for their business. Yet Argos who embraced it is now one of the biggest online retailers in the world.

I was at a round table this week discussing the economy and budget. I heard numerous businesses explain that they had zero growth. The same businessmen stated clearly when I asked them do they use the Internet to attract new business, “people  in our industry do not use the internet to research our product!” The irony is I have helped a few businesses in the exact same sector generate millions of pounds worth of new business, all via the internet! But how do you educate people who simply do not believe it is possible. These sort of limiting beliefs are lethal and often are the main reasons why businesses simply stop evolving.

If only I got a pound for every time I heard business people say “my customers wouldn’t use the Internet!”

Over the years, I have won a few £1 bets to people I have met at Sale Sharks who said, exactly that.

Caunce O’hara, now giants in the Insurance industry were about to spend a fortune on a website. I asked them to consider a different option. For less money I helped design and build a new system that not only worked out an accurate price for the insurance premium, it took the money and attracted new business. I won my pound.

It’s not a business model I’d advise people to follow, I am lucky enough to be able to do this as a hobby as I have a huge R&D team, I also have done this enough times to know, I’d succeed.

I have done the same in a variety of industries. Debt management, clothing & retail, one business in particular (again who said it cant be done) is now invoicing more than £1,000,000 per month from online sales!

I can guarantee these people dont think we’ve just been in a recession.

The problem is, “you don’t know what you are missing until it is too late.” It’s people’s own shortsightedness that is simply holding their businesses back, or in some cases damaging their business.

I have 15 year old kids who are customers and a great many small businesses who are doing extraordinarily well. It’s never the brands who are riding the crest of the wave, they simply think they are. A lot of the high traffic sites are below most peoples radar. The people who win, are the ones who realise that customer experience is everything, and they build a super fast and effective site and host it on a dedicated server for that added umph. Before they know it, they are getting customers from Google, and the customers are coming back in their droves because the experience is perfect.

When we explain to people that their site is slow, they don’t understand. They look at their own site and say, “it seems fast to me!” This is the biggest misconception. They are ususally viewing a cached version of their website on their own local machine. What does this mean? Well basically, your machine stores images of sites that you visit regularly. So it stands to reason that when you look at your own site, you do so though rose coloured spectacles. You are in effect getting an artificial view of how your business is really NOT performing.

On the flip side through your customers eyes, it doesn’t hide the harsh truth, that for new visitors, your site is like jelly waiting to set.

This is particularly noticeable for people who end up hosting in the US to save money. People can simply drop out of the UK arm of Google once the search engine picks up the foreign IP address. Google simply assumes that your main focuss is probably aimed at the foreign market, as your site will perform better in the country where it is hosted. Some of the largest hosting providers in the UK, host their customers in the US and Germany. Rackspace host thousands of their clients sites in the US on their Cloud environment. One and One (1&1) a German company who also own Fasthosts, who market themselves a the hosting worlds market leader , host their servers in Germany!

Personally I believe keeping it simple is the best way. Host your site as near to your customers as you can. We are lucky, by being in Manchester we couldn’t really be more central to the whole of the UK.

I hear horror stories all the time on this subject. One thing worse than going abroad to host, is taking it in house! The ultimate in stupidity. Let’s stick our server on the end of our broadband connection or a leased line. So what if it is 100Mb. You may as well attach it via string! Yes it might work occasionally but not enough to get noticed on the search engines. Telcos for years simply resold 100Mb lines time and time again, and guess what? They attached them to a 100Mb line. The ultimate in bottlenecking.

If you imagine the internet works on the basis of regions. You can host your store on the main high street, the Oxford Street or you could host it on a back street. Which gets more traffic? Obviously the high Street. Yet so many businesses spend 10′s of thousands of pounds on their websites, yet they think they dont need to invest in their hosting. They think they can simply stick it on some shared space, or a cheap dedicated server (down a back street). Even worse, they dont realsie why it doesn’t work properly or why they dont get awesome results.

At the same time, we come across small businesses who take our advice or dip their toe in the water with UKFast. Experience the speed of the UKFast network and then get addicted. These companies listen to their customers and upgrade every time their site slows down by a fraction. These are the businesses who are the next generation. It is not the brands you know about, these are the new kids who a carving out a new horizon. They not only get my vote, they get my help and support in every way. They are the entrepreneurs of tomorrow.

So be warned. If you have a business and you are NOT taking your online marketing seriously, or worse still you are spending the bulk of your budget on the design and leave nothing for the location of your window to the world, you will not get the results you are wanting, but you will get what you deserve.

This does sound harsh, but it is a really harsh world out there.

If you are a web developer or you run a business designing sites, if you are hosting your sites on a single server to save money or to create a revenue stream, although you may think you are doing your client a favour, you are actually suffocating their business. If you wish to try a server to see the difference, drop me an email at UKFast or post me a comment. Every business I have tried this with has increased sales. Its not  rocket science, but it will certainly pay for one!

I think it is Ken Blanchard who says “people never arrive in the same demotivated state as when they leave.” He blames the management, saying they deteriorate through poor leadership.

It happens at a time when 4 people return to the UKFast team, so out with the old, and in with the even older! The common theme being, “you don’t know what you have got until you haven’t got it anymore.” I am sure it is not the case for all of the people who leave UKFast. Businesses are always on the move. The direction and speed of all businesses differ. You have to find the one that suits you the most, the one that is going in the right direction and at the right speed and is full of like-minded people. You have to be realistic though, people join you for a certain duration, often mapped out as part of their career goals. Even the most motivated of people can leave if it is part of a wider career strategy.

So how do you keep staff?

Whether you are a seasoned entrepreneur, or one that is just starting out, I believe your business need an identity. You need Core Values. Now you can copy these from other businesses, yet a word of warning. It wont work. Many of our competitors have mysteriously adopted similar or identical core values and marketing initiatives, but unless they are genuine and come from within, you will not be able to live these values day in, day out. And when you attract people with similar values that you are professing to have, they will soon recognise a pretender and once you are found out, they leave. It also creates discord amongst your existing team who will voice cynicism, worse still you wont even know about this as it will be done behind closed doors.

You need to ask all your team for the words that they like to be associated with whilst at work. Words like Honest, Professional, Hard working, etc there are litterally hundreds of them to choose from. When we did this at UKFast we used a local PR agency with a good reputation to come in and do this. We felt it essential that we did not influence the process in any way. Mike Perls the managing director of Manchester’s MC2 helped us out in person and he decided to go through each department seperately.

The results were astounding. Mike quickly realised that every department chose the same 5 core values. He explained the rarity of such a discovery and professed “you may be on to something here!” This was back in 2003 / 2004. The prediction was right. Our core values were set, and although up to the time of the exercise we did not know what they were, ironically we were all living them. Is this an accident? I have to say yes, as I have had no formal training whatsoever to run a business and my steep leaning curve has come from getting stuck in and not being frightened of making mistakes. The irony of finding 6 departments within the business with identical values is probably down to our recruitment strategy. I think we simply employed people we felt we will all get on with. Our early strategy (although that’s a bit too posh a word for it) was people first, qualifications second. I look back with close to a decade of experience and on hindsight, it wasn’t such a bad HR strategy.

As an 11 year old business we still recruit on a very similar basis. I am not interested in CV’s or stories of someone being the best sales person in their last job. With the right attitude and values I believe I can turn anyone into an even better one. Qualifications can often be camouflage for some absolutely awful candidates.

This is why our training centre in Wales is so important to us; Castell Cidwm. If you can get through there and you are still smiling, you’ll fit in.

So how do you identify your own core values?

I’d recommend what we did at UKFast back in the early years and split up your business into teams, keep the departments together if you like and ask everyone to write down 10 values that they hold dear. I’d then encourage them to discuss them as a group and get them down to a maximum of 7. Once they have argued which ones they want. I’d make them re-do this until they come back with 4 or 5.

A business should not have too many values. It simply becomes to complicated to manage if it does. After all, you can only feel one emotion at a time. You cant feel happy and sad, frustrated and angry, bored and vexed. We are quite simple folk at the end of the day (especially us Welsh), so simplify the values as much as possible.

It is unlikely that you will get the same result we got back in 2003 and you definitely wont get the identical list of values we chose either. I have done this now with many businesses and I have never had the same result twice. What does this tell you? Never, Never copy someone else’s. By copying others, you do yourself and your business a disservice and furthermore you waste a great opportunity to unite a team.

Now that you have your core values in place and everyone is in agreement you need to invest in your staff. (Part 2)

hedge your desk

Greenest office in the UK! UKFast

The event I was kindly invited along to started with a training session racing around the Velodrome. I was fortunate to get some one to one training with one of the Olympic team. I was keen to pay attention as I quickly learned that a break in concentration could prove disastrous. The bikes have no breaks and if you stopped peddling for any reason you were in danger of being catapulted across the track; which was incredibly steep on the corners.

Being in a room with the North West’s finest entrepreneurs is an interesting place. There is a huge amount of testosterone pumping around everyones veins and the bravado was evident amongst the friendly competitors. But once on the track, it was head down and down to business. It was clear why these business people at the top of their game. They all take competing very seriously in whatever they do.

It is also immediately evident that there is little or no difference between the winning attitude of the highly motivated business people and the Olympians and although we all got beaten, roll back the clock a few years and give us some proper training and I reckon there’d have been a few contenders in the room. My attitude was such that I thought OK, I am going to give these guys a run for their money. I was absolutely convinced that I could win. Of course I got battered, but at least my attitude shone through and it made me compete to my highest possible standard.

After a lovely dinner where we ate the food the cyclists eat on a daily basis, we were treated to what in my opinion was the best part of the night. Rebecca Romero and Sarah Storey sat down and were interviewed. They talked of the Olympic challenges and the drive that got them to the highest point in their sport. Rebecca is an interesting phenomena as she has achieved one of the rarities of Gold medals in different disciplines. She started in rowing and then transferred to cycling. With in 6 months she was hitting the speeds expected from the Olympic cyclists.

Sarah a para olympian has won medals in every games since 1992. She talked openly about her challenges. Having only one hand there were people throughout her life that treated her differently. What was lovely top see is just how that motivated her and drove her even harder. She explained how she was inspired at the age of 6 years old watching the Olympics on a tiny TV and saying, that that is what she wanted to do.

Goal setting! You can’t beat it, or her in this case.

During the questions and answers it was interesting to hear their reactions and opinions.

When asked;

Silver medal, winner or loser? Both firmly stated without even a second to think… ‘Loser!”

What do you think of skiing and snowboarding that are adapting some of  their races and styles to introduce bigger sponsorship?

Again both passionately said, “what is more exciting than 2 people competing head to head? The sport does not need to reinvent itself and we do not want any more money. We simply just want to compete.”

It was blindingly obvious that the attitude that these 2 Olympians have is identical to that of the entrepreneurs in the audience. The belief that you require to get to the top of your game is identical whatever you want to achieve. Although the goals maybe very different, the hard work that is involved in reaching the top of any industry requires stamina and determination. When the vast majority give up, there a few people who kick into another level. These are the natural born winners, although actually I don’t think they are born, more socially conditioned. Something in each of these successful business people and athletes lives inspired them to want to go to these extraordinary lengths.

So what are you going to be if you never grow up? That’s the million dollar question…. quite literally! Choose, take aim and go get it. And don’t stop no matter who tells you you cant do it. Normally if someone tells you something cant be done, it is usually from talking from experience, their own experience. Do not let other people’s limiting beliefs limit your own.

And most of all, no silver medals. Aim high and win.

Why does one of the shortest words start the longest conversations?

On Friday one of the girls from our recruitment division MySort.co.uk came to me and asked “do you have 5 minutes to see a prospective new recruit for the sales department?”

I am always keen to get feedback and develop the business and where better than from an fresh pair of eyes. I followed Abbey into my wife’s office where Tom sat, looking relaxed, sitting back and at home. After talking with him for a few minutes, I asked him “do you have any questions for me?”

“You clearly put a huge amount of effort into making this a great place to work, from your website you look like you really value people much more than other businesses I’ve come across since moving to the UK 7 years ago….. why?”

“This is indeed true,” I replied. “we sleep a third of our lives, we have a third to ourselves and we work the rest. As I do not want to waste a minute of my life I am focussed to ensuring that I enjoy every second whilst I am wide awake. This means the time at work is just as precious as the time I spend outside of work.

I therefore concentrate my efforts into making my work environment as stimulating as possible. To guarantee this I need to make sure everyone around me is stimulated and performing at their very best too, so a large part of my energy goes on ensuring the team is as focussed as me. The end result is that if you come to work here at UKFast or any of our companies, you are going to have fun. A BIG part of that is you are going to develop quickly.” I paused for thought and then asked him a question.

“Are you ready for such a journey?”

” YES PLEASE.” Tom said eagerly. “I can see that everyone here loves their job. You can feel the energy as soon as you walk through the door.”

I got up and shook his hand saying, “I am sure you are going to be very happy here.”

I left the office knowing that I have a very excited new recruit who is going to really enjoy his new job. Is that not stimulating enough to inspire me to be an entrepreneur? It amazes me that most business people just don’t get that people are the most important ingredient to a successful business. There is a saying, behind every successful businessman there is a great woman. Isn’t that the truth! But the same applies to businesses as a whole. Behind the scenes of every business are hundreds if not thousands of great people.

I see businesses starting to struggle as they get bigger. When businesses are small they have personality. The smaller group the bigger the personality. As the business grows the personality is watered down. The founders of the business usually get further from the coal face, middle management is put in place and then the whole thing collapses as it grows. To save the business from absolute failure and total melt down from over expanding, the businesses usually shrink back to the size of when they were more successful. This is one of the reasons so few businesses fail to get past the million pound turnover mark.

I like Richard Branson’s philosophy, something he said is, “business has to give people enriching rewarding lives or it’s simply not worth doing.”

And there you have it. Master that and you have the secret of a successful business, and as we are all stimulated by different things, what works for one business may not work for another and so the challenge begins.

But that is what gets me out of bed early every morning to improve the puzzle I started 11 years ago. I’ll let you know if I ever find the answer

I have a theory and I am in good company with some other wiser folk than me with this one too. The theory is this. In order to reach a great height in whatever you do, you have to set it in your sights as a target. You have to know where you are going. That sounds like common sense but so many people fail to grasp this one before they set out on their journey. You have to define the success you want or else you do not know when you have arrived at your destination. When I set a goal, I literally map out every single aspect of what I am wanting to achieve.

OK, so you have set your sights on something exciting, something that is now going to drive you forward. Well, welcome to the easy part, it might not feel like the easy part, but believe me it is. At this point in your journey you are under very little pressure, with maybe a few of the driving factors that got you off the couch in the first instance, a wife, the bailiffs, the annoying relative you wanted to prove wrong, a family you want to support. But essentially you are embarking on the exciting journey and everything is new and you are busy. And busy is key. Whilst you are occupied with very little time to sit back and over analyse you are far more likely to be successful.

I’d sooner work 7 days a week 18 hours a day and make lots of mistakes than take my time over something and dissect every decision. It’s the mistakes that make you a better person and businessman; if you learn from them.

So here you are flat out, obsessed with everything you are doing and so focused on the goal that you almost forget it. I think this is a healthy discipline. I am not someone who believes you have to have a photo of your goal and look at it every day. I revisit my goals just for an update 2 or 3 times a year. I am always amazed at how many I can tick off!

Then suddenly, at one of these points when you check up on your progress, you realise you have hit your goal that you had set years earlier. You are happy, still busy, still excited, but you have achieved something.

Firstly you deserve a pat on the back. The hardest part of this is that there are very few people who will understand what you have had to go through to reach the heights you are at and the sacrifices you have made. I am lucky, Gail my wife is my business partner and a best friend all rolled into one. When we set goals we also set rewards for whenever they are met. This way we are reminded forever by linking great memories to all the hard work and achievements. No one wants to remember the hardship and certainly you will be viewed as a real bore if you keep telling everyone how hard you work or all the problems you continually face.

It is at this stage where most people go wrong. How many times do you hear of someone who has made it, then lost it? Yet come back and done it again! It’s quite a common story. Once you have hit your goal and had your celebration you need to refocus. You have to sit down and set new targets that are equally as challenging as the very first one. Why? Because if you don’t, you will simply take your eye off the ball and start to relax, then fester.

In a lot of peoples cases, that celebration I mentioned, does not stop and it continues for years until people realise this is simply not a fulfilling lifestyle. So many successful people I know end up drinking, gambling or womanising or in some cases all three. They are simply looking for the buzz they used to get in work. My advice is get back to it, and pronto!

I am often told how successful I am and people very kindly congratulate me and say “well done, you really look like a person who deserves it.” I am always flattered and if I am honest slightly uncomfortable with a sense of embarrassment. The thing is, for me I am not the finished article. My success is relative. I have set my goals on much larger sights and this is not to be clever or outdo someone, it is simply because if I don’t, I am in danger of not taking my own advice and living by the values that I know are incredibly important. I have to keep developing. this way, however painful, is the only way I know. I am therefore a man on a continual journey where retirement equals death.

It is far easier for some people to have a lie in on a Sunday morning, but for me, if I am awake, I have to start the day and really give it my best shot. This morning I had a run around our lake in Wales, Llyn Cwellyn. It is beautiful and it is just a long enough distance to stretch me. In fact this morning it felt tough and I pushed myself slightly harder, knowing that it is good for me in the “long run” – pun intended. I’d also started the day with a drink of apple juice that seemed well past it’s sell by date! Leaving a warm bed and a snug cottage for the cold wind and hardship is not everyone’s cup of tea, but for me it is an essential part of my goals which I set years ago as a kid. Never to lose my youthful spirit and this requires me to keep youthful energy which means I have to remain a fit as a teenager. Now there’s a goal you can never settle back and congratulate yourself with, it is litterally and ongoing tread mill. but the rewards associated with being fit and healthy massively outweigh the negatives. In my book, I’d sooner be running in the rain with the wind in my hair, thinking about all the great things I have in my life. My wife, Gail, my children, my friends and family. It is a great time to say thank you. I am not sure who to, but yet I find myself always saying thank you. I take nothing for granted and I am busy reinventing myself.

I always admire Madonna. She is from my era, and yet she unlike most popstars, has been successful in every area of the pop industry. She continues to do it where others fail. It is safe to say, she keeps herself incredibly fit, which helps her to maintain a youthful spirit and I’d also bet money on the fact she sets incredibly challenging goals to reach. Who wants to maintain the Status Quo, God forbid you might end up like them!

So when you are setting your goals, and when you are on your journey, just remember to combine a bit of exercise and treat your body to some of the fresh air and fast pumping blood that it thrives on. In turn, your body will reward you with the stamina required for being super successful. And when you hit that goal, because I know you will, have the next set ready.

The body acts as a thermostat. It kicks itself into action when things get bad. Hence the saying “When the going gets tough.” But just like a thermostat. It also switches itself off from time to time to rest, and if you allow it, it is very difficult to get the momentum up and running again. Welcome to the race that never stops! If you want to discuss any of your ideas or challenges, drop me a mine. I am happy to help where I can.

Good luck on your journey.

Lawrence

We have been down at the Internet World trade show at Earl’s Court. The Internet is a very male dominated industry being a techy lead industry. Sadly there are not enough women in our industry. A statistic we at UKFast are doing our level best to change. Women in our work place are essential. They are great communicators and organisers, and life would be very dull without the dynamic that mixing men and women together brings.

That being said, why is it that people automatically assume a pretty girl dressed in heels on a stand is not as smart as those around her? It is funny though, there were a few people (mainly women I am sad to say) who got a bit of a shock after making comments like “get yourself a proper job!” That particular comment was addressed to my personal assistant who takes great pleasure in being part of the team at these events and she manages the girls and their taxing schedule. If only they knew. Rachael took the comment on the chin, smiling at the lady as she laid into the commercial director Gail Jones (dressed in shorts too!) “why do you let them do this to you?” Gail simply said, “I want to dress like this. Last year I wore a dress, but but it’s too hot. The shorts are great and I love the atmosphere we create.”

The girls on the stand all work for the UKFast team. Most of whom have just come back from Verbier. They have the toughest job in my opinion. 30 hours in heels is something I know I couldn’t do! I admire their spirit immensely. I make sure I spoil them as much as I can. They work long hours and never grumble. They all have roles with in the business, some in sales, account management, customer care, but they enjoy the responsibility of representing UKFast publicly at all our sponsored events and client facing hospitality.

For me it’s imperative to have people who work for UKFast all year round representing us and not to outsource. The difference between the UKFast Girls on our stand and the others was so evident and the majority of people who came on to our stand commented, showing their surprise and pleasure that the girls all were able to understand their requirements and business needs, talking comfortably on subjects like clustering and load balanced environments.

But I think this is evident when you look at UKFast. We are so different when you take the trouble to look a little closer. This is why in the week Gordon Brown called someone a bigot for all the wrong reasons, sadly there are bigots out there, maybe someone needs to explain the meaning of the word to him, and for those real bigots, you should take the trouble to look a little closer, stop stereotyping and be a little nicer. There is a place for everyone in this world, and I am only glad the ladies said these hurtful comments to the UKFast Girls and not others who may not be as tough or as confident.

As Rachael my PA put it, “If only they knew, I have been in 4 countries in 10 days, they should have a go at trying to manage your diary.”

That being said, even superheros have to sleep, and boy, do they deserve it. To all the Girls on the UKFast stand, especially Laura, thank you for the energy you put into the event, you are amazing! Lads, you weren’t bad either.

They are human after all

The UKFast girls work incredibly hard. They are all super intelligent, fun characters with big personalities with the caring gene which means they make the perfect hostesses. You find the UKFast Girls at all the outside events, Twickenham, Sale Sharks, Silverstone Grand Prix and all corporate hospitality. They also fly with me on a great deal of my business travels and commitments.

I find it helps having fun people around. The girls help break the ice at events and play an invaluable role in so many areas of the businesses. They all double up in some capacity or other – be they a PA, sales person, account manager or even senior manager. By hanging around with the girls we develop strong relations with each other cementing a bond which is necessary when working under pressure.

I personally believe it is the toughest of all the jobs at UKFast. They are expected to always greet people with a big helpful smile, a task they do very naturally.

They have been a big hit at the premiership rugby this year, we have never had so much involvement directly with the players.

The photo here is of the girls thawing out after a morning skiing. They have all been involved with the 2010 UKFast Hosting Summit in Verbier’s prestigious venue, The Lodge.

After a heavy week discussing how to revolutionise our product offering, The UKFast Girls are due to be flown back to Manchester by Private Jet so they are fresh and ready for the Internet World, where they are hosting the UKFast stand at the hosting worlds biggest conference.

Why not come and say hello! If you are in London this week, Tues, Wednesday and Thursday, come and visit us there and meet the ultimate team that helps make UKFast one of the most unique businesses on the planet.

UKFast Girls on The UKFast Private Jet

It is a good question. I often wonder how and why I ended up in a career so similarly named to one I had been involved with in a previous life.

As an event organiser, I essentially hosted parties for businesses. It involved the ultimate in commitment and service, a degree of attention to detail you seldom see and passion to keep you striving when the going gets tough. First up, last to bed….. it is a thankless task behind the scenes of a busy event.

The business I had that specialised in this field I sold to Granada at the end of the 90′s. they did me a massive favour. I stayed and learnt so much about bigger business, “how to and how not to run my next venture.” It was great time of my life, but one I treated as a learning experience and I was glad to move on.

And somehow I ended up continuing to host again. This time, people’s lives and peoples entire businesses. I thought managing and hosting peoples parties required the ultimate attention to detail, however this new world really does take my responsibilities to another level.

So, what is hosting? And, why is it called dedicated hosting? It should be called dedicated hosting because my team and I are dedicated to ensuring you have the perfect platform to run and host your business. Actually, it is called “dedicated hosting” because the infrastructure that manages your website or application is dedicated soley to you and your business. This means no neighbouring business can impact on your service if they damage their machine or if they hit a busy period.

I do think my previos life has helped UKFast massively. I was talking to a senior official at Microsoft (who incidentally we host too) and he said the level of service we provide is so much over and above even our nearest competitor. He explained he felt this was to do with our attention to detail and sheer passion for customer service. “In a technical environment UKFast are just on another level. Where businesses in your sector are usually driven by process and techies, we find ourselves focussing on people and their needs.”

Thanks for that observation Bill. Most kind. Ironically, having the passionate people around has made us focus more on the technology side of things and 10 years later we find UKFast not only the market leader in the dedicated server area, we also deliver our product faster than any other provider on the planet. Our network is focussed too on speed. And there is no coincidence that we released information about the link between FAST websites which become more successful and gaining better rankings with Google.

I am confident, we are something to do with Google letting the cat out of the bag towards the speed link after we got a letter from Google asking us to remove the information with Speed and Googles rating of faster sites. After a few letters backwards and forwards I finally wrote to the lawyers at Google asking one simple question. “So what you are saying is that there is NO link between faster servers and higher search engine results.”

We were immediately engaged with the big G, who were intrigued with our confidence. What no one knew is we have been testing all the major networks around the world for a decade and we even have servers on our main competitors. Each one is used to test various sites and the results they produce. By 2006, UKFast had already deduced there was a significant link between speed and happy customers.

Aptly named UKFast! Interestingly it comes from the importance I put on customer service and the fact that I believed that the internet will be no different to every other walk of life. We want everything NOW!!!

It is very funny though. I have some awesome quotes from angry competitors about some of our claims. They really thought that the thing was a marketing ruse. Little did they know we have had servers with them for years and we still do. Knowing ones enemy is an important part of the game in my opinion. how else do we develop if we cant identify strengths and weaknesses efficiently and accurately.

When a business describes themselves as “fanatical” for example, I want to know to what extent? I am always intrigued to hear other business owners claims, just as they are to hear ours. I don’t blame them for misunderstanding them. You’d have to be a little over obsessive to go to the lengths we go to to drive our business harder and further than everyone else. Nevertheless that is what we do.

One day I’ll publish some of the ridiculous comments that the leader of some of the largest hosting providers have said. “there is no reason for speed to improve peoples results,” “It is irrelevant” , “what about all the money you are missing out on by contending your network…. they will never know….. we make millions from the excess bandwidth charges.”

For me, whatever you are hosting… customer service is key. Keeping your client happy is the ultimate game. Being honest with your clients is the only way. Yes it might take longer to build an empire, but it is then built on stronger foundations.

If you go to the Virgin Limited Edition website we will see a whole host of amazing properties. They all have a similar style of layout with long sociable dining tables, comfy spacious chill-out lounges and bars where you can help yourself to just about any drink or cocktail you can dream up.

One of my favourites is The Lodge. It is particularly special to me as my early memories of the Alps always involve bus trips and cheap hotels. As I grew a little older I progressed to chalets, but invariably you get what you pay for. I am in a fortunate position to be able to experience The Lodge, at £80,000 to £90,000 per week, it is a place for the discerning skier who wants to really live it up in the mountains. It is the ultimate hideaway, with a beautiful style of bleached & distressed wood throughout the building. Down stairs there is a swimming pool and jacuzzi with a steam-room and gym. Although the gym is small, really with skiing all day (if you fancy it) and mountains to run up and down, even I seldom use it.

Another great point is the location. And even though it is only 250 yards from the bottom of the main lifts in the resort of Verbier, Switzerland, the team here drive you to and from the lift entrance.

Do you remember the queue at the ski rental shop? Here the guys from the ski shop bring the boots and skis to the Lodge for you to try on at your leisure. Nothing is too much trouble for the team of superstars that Branson and the managing director John have hand selected.

The food really is something else too! We are not the easiest people in the world to cater for. We are incredibly disciplined and my wife and I eat no dairy, wheat, and my wife takes it even further with zero citrus as well. Yet the chefs are all too accommodating. Cutting out wheat and dairy more or less rules anything scrumptious out of any meal. Not for these guys, Gerwyn the head chef and his crew design and make cakes you could not believe were possible, using blends of rice and tapioca flour and soya milk. The Michelin stars are evident the moment you put food to the palette.

The bedrooms are wonderful, all spacious and have great touches like funky ducks on the sides of the baths, and bath hats you feel compelled to take home for the kids. There is nothing quite like the Lodge. The jacuzzi, a cup of tea and a Bolivar cigar complete a good days skiing and prepare you for the evening of kicking back and enjoying a bottle from Richard’s wine cellar. That is something that is common to the Virgin Limited Edition properties. You really do feel you are in someones home, and with pictures of Richard Branson with his kids and wife and friends on the shelves, it simply makes it all the more special.

I know it is out of most peoples price bracket, however the touches that these guys lay on can be done by any operator. It’s just that people don’t overlay this layer of attention to detail. Things like:

• your names are written on your door in chalk
• the boot room has an elaborate system which dry and warm your boots so they are warm in the morning and again with areas named for your hats gloves and equipment.
• postcards with stamps already on them are in every room
• a cuddly toy dog with “let sleeping dog’s lie” to leave outside your room if you want a lie in
• great books you can pick up and put down everywhere, in every corner of the house

the list is really endless.

Hat’s off to Hannah and her fantastic team and best wishes to Hannah and Paul who are expecting their first little-one soon. We are thinking about you and we look forward to returning soon and catching up.

If you are thinking about having the ultimate mountain holiday skiing or even mountain-biking in the summer, this is the number one place on the planet for it. I use it for team building and training sessions too where I am able to take people outside of the office environment and get their undivided attention. It is a great place to work!

The Lodge, Main lounge

BBQ Lunch on the veranda

I remember as a smaller business we started to struggle to run events as the numbers were increasing and hotel bills and training fees were mounting.

In the end, we brought our own training centre, that’s how seriously we took it, even back then.

And now, a few years on, the difference between our tight knit culture and most businesses is evident, as soon as you walk through the door or pick up the phone.

That phrase “think outside the box!” is a telling one but how many business owners and managers are guilty of staying in their box to do all their thinking.

This week sees me heading off to Snowdon. There is a group of new recruits going through their paces at Castell Cidwm our dedicated team building training centre in Snowdonia National Park and I have decided to gate crash it.

Jonathan (my mad as a hatter Director of Communications) and I have arranged for an interview, on a ridge adjacent to the summit of Snowdon. To cap it all off I have agreed to stay the night camping on the ridge, which is currently covered in deep snow and prone to 90 mph winds.

Who am I to say NO!  I can see this getting me into trouble!

So why team building? Its expensive, you are taking people out of the business, its more often than not cold, it’s always wet, what do we gain?

We gain an insight to the individuals who participate.

We take them outside their comfort zone, and throughout the days as the pressure mounts you see people’s true colours. Who contributes with the washing up? Who gets up first? Who is fun? Who avoids work? All these answers are invaluable.

Quite often, people come down to Wales and they never make it back to work at UKFast. When someone does not have the necessary credentials we require for them to fit in, contribute and have a great time under pressure, they really wont enjoy the fast paced life ahead at UKFast.

I also believe we do some of our best thinking in the mountains. When you are away with colleagues, you are able to bond in a different way, especially if you genuinely want to get to know them. I think if you put on an event and only show up for the press photo or don’t show up at all, I think you will get the result you deserve. You have to passionately care about your team if you want them truly to develop.

On the flip side of the coin, I know plenty of businesses which do incredibly well with out the significant investment of team building. There is many an accountant who can put up a firm argument that the expense cannot be proved to transfer on to the bottom line. It’s sadly true. How do you quantify the benefit of a weekend away with colleagues?

All I can say is it seems to work for us at UKFast. We do put people high on the agenda and the results the team bring home for us are amazing. I am sure there are many ways we could make more money at UKFast but if they involve inhibiting the investment in people and dampening the culture, then no way!

Mind you saying that, I wonder if I will be saying the same tonight on the top of Snowdon, bedding down for the night. When you are having your cup of Coco spare a thought for me.

Although I have not made massive changes, I find myself with a massive lifestyle change.

I was given advice by one of the greatest entrepreneurs of our lifetime. And in my opinion there is a BIG difference between an entrepreneur and someone who has a successful business. It is possible for anyone to make a success of a business venture. It is highly unlikely that that person will go on to have a string of successes. Someone with this skill, is an entrepreneur.

The advice I was given was to step back a little. Take a couple of days off a week to work elsewhere.

It is far too easy to get too stuck in to the operational issues that confront you every day of your life running a business. Especially as entrepreneurs have an “obsessive” gene. When I get stuck in, I like to get completely immersed. However, if I am honest, I have staff who are significantly more skilled than me in every area of the business.

This week we have had the most successful week of UKFast’s history but not just revenue, which these days appears to drive most businesses. The energy in the business, and the levels of passion and excitement simply went off the scale. Yet I cant have spent more than 8 hours in the business this week. On a normal working day (before my hols) I’d have done 8 hours by lunchtime. That’s not to say I have not been contributing. If anything I have achieved a great deal more. By stepping back, I have done all my paperwork, report reading and emails.

In fact, I have never been so busy. This week I have met more likeminded entrepreneurs than I have done all year. My diary is stacked full. I am not usually a fan of networking, and with my “say yes to everything” approach which I adopted recently I find I am not just cramming more in, I am enjoying events that previously I’d have shied away from. As a result of my minor change in attitude, I find myself joining a body of people who make up North West’s greatest entrepreneurs, and also joining the board of one of Manchester’s finest orchestras.

It is worth offering a word of caution. I am blessed with a great team of people working at UKFast and our other emerging businesses. I was given the advice by someone who understood me, and our business model. If you have major weaknesses in your business, or if your business relies on you to drive it forward, every minute of the day, it is not advisable stepping back too much too soon. Perhaps try it one department at a time.

If you are wanting to grow to the next level, ask people for help. You will be amazed at just how forthcoming great business people are. I only wish I’d asked sooner!

I asked a couple of members of the BA staff, does BA stand for Bloody Awful, after the worst experience I have ever encountered of substandard behaviour by representatives of BA.

I was checking in proudly to my first class seats at the BA counter in Manchester, when I met the second rudest woman I have ever had the misfortune to meet. We had telephoned the night before just to ask advice on the recently introduced ESTA. (An official government document required if you are flying to or through America.) The advice we were given by BA was “don’t worry about it, arrive at check-in in the morning and we will deal with it then as technically you don’t need one as you are not staying in the US.”

We trusted the advice and when checking in, told the lady at the First Class counter why we had not filled out the ESTA as per our instructions from the BA staff the previous night. At this point she categorically refused to check us onto the flight and promptly blanked us. I asked for help, and pleaded with her for someone more senior who could assist.

Enter (stage right) the rudest woman I have ever met. She arrived with a plastic smile that she maintained for the best part of 45 seconds before laying into my wife who was beautiful in her calmness. The BA official told us we should have filled out the ESTA online and that we should have and I quote, “put that you are staying in Miami in the destination box.” I explained that our final destination was the British Virgin Islands, I didn’t dare tell her it was Necker. “we advise people who are traveling through the US to the Caribbean to put down they are staying in the Continental in Miami.”

I explained that this would be incorrect and that this was a US official immigration department document!

Without another word the 2 rude BA staff disappeared.

We were kept waiting 40 minutes. Powerless and no other members of BA staff were prepared to help. When we asked for help, they said, “we are not getting involved.”

It really was like a farce. And if she hadn’t made my 6 year old burst into tears I’d have have been laughing in disbelief. We had turned up to enjoy the first class experience.

Enter Simon, a scruffily dressed man in jeans and a creased polo shirt.  ”Because of the delay at check in and that my staff members had not known how to deal with the ESTA, we are able to board this flight to Heathrow, but unfortunately it was now too late to attach the luggage to the connecting flight.”

He advised us that he had personally seen to it that the plane to Miami would wait for us. He apologised for the behavior of the 2 staff and he assured me we would be met by ground staff and hurried through at the other end.

It was clear this man just wanted rid of the situation. He was working on the principal, Out of Sight Out of mind. (perhaps a new management course BA are running)

My 6 year old asked me , “Daddy, why was that lady so rude?” and I was unable to defend her.

This farce had actually delayed the plane leaving Manchester and stressed 100 or so other people also connecting to Miami and other destinations.

On arrival at Heathrow, there were no ground staff waiting to assist us between the planes. Luckily everyone else just managed to get their flight to Miami, but no surprise, we missed ours waiting for our luggage.

I saw the striking BA logo with the words CUSTOMER SERVICE in massive letters. Fantastic I thought. I’ll pop over and get some help.  The 2 ladies (who reminded me of Les Dawson’s characters) with folded arms grunted back at me when I politely said, “I don’t suppose you can help and tell me where to go, we have missed our flight.”

“We’re baggage.” I continued and the other one piped up, “have you a problem with your baggage?” “No” I replied, “well we can’t help you then. Like my friend told you we are baggage” They carried on talking and I couldn’t help pointing out the irony in how they described themselves.

Walking away I pondered, does BA stand for Bloody Awful. It should do!

Eventually after a series of equally idiotic encounters with various Bloody Awful staff I found someone who was lovely. She was kind and called Jeanette. However the damage was done. The brand was dead in my eyes.

She did start quite hard like the first Bloody Awful staff in Manchester, telling us that as we had missed the flight and it was more than likely non refundable. First class tickets can be as much as £9000 each I didn’t dare ask Gail how much she had paid. I must have turned white with the sick feeling. 4 tickets wasted. 3 demoralised girls, 2 hours extra waiting and 1 missed flight! Jeanette quickly realised what had happened.

She explained the check in staff in Manchester were all agency staff. She fixed the ESTA issue in a few minutes putting “IN TRANSIT” in the destination box.

She went on to explain they had not had a pay rise in 2 years and that they had no idea if their jobs would even be here tomorrow. “The spirit is dead, and I am so sorry you have had all this trouble.”

Every cloud has a silver lining. And thank God, Jeanette booked us on to a Virgin Atlantic seat. One of our daughters, the 3 year old had some sort of anaphylactic reaction on the plane and needed emergency care. 2 doctors on board helped out giving her adrenalin injections, oxygen and salbutamol. Nikki, the Upper Class Senior Cabin Crew team leader was amazing, along with her team particularly Ross and Sacha.

We sat on the floor of the cabin outside the cockpit. The captain regularly came out to check on our 3 year olds well-being and after nearly the entire flight she recovered miraculously as kids do!

So how does something so great, become so Bloody Awful? Fancy not rewarding your staff and undermining them so they don’t know if their jobs are safe. I can’t imagine the people at the top have had similar pay problems?

British Airways is overweight in some areas and anorexic in others.

In our business if you have a potential weakness in an area you invest in it, and you allocate the best, strongest most aligned individuals. You certainly don’t cut back.  The problem with BA is they have multiple areas of weakness, so as fast as you build relations with the likes of Jeanette you have sledge hammer Customer Services or disconnected agency staff with their own challenges. Invariably you destroy the brand value.

I think one of the issues BA also has is whilst they are busy infighting, arguing over pay and bureaucracy, the Virgin Atlantic team is taking conflict very seriously indeed. Going about their business with the Sun Tzu approach.

“He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks.”

Well, in my mind BA does stand for Bloody Awful and although I have enough free airmiles to fly around the world 7 times, I’d sooner pay to fly a proper airline. Britain’s best airline Virgin.  And I wouldn’t swap our seat on the floor next to the loo for a BA Experience.

Lawrence Jones
UKFast

I have been lucky enough to have met some incredibly successful individuals over the years, particularly in sport, business and music. These are 3 very different areas and you would think they all require very different needs to make the individuals rise to the top of their game.

In reality though, the answer is “not at all.” The people at the top of their game whatever their profession, share common values. This is evident in all successful people. You will hear experts on this matter talk about “passion, determination, motivation, self-belief.” Yes these are all common in high achievers, so they are the obvious ones to get picked up. They all might also eat 3 meals a day and this does not guarantee success. It is also easy to assume that the confidence a successful person has, once they have achieved greatness, was the same at the beginning of the journey, and this is not always the case either. So what is the secret common ingredient?

It is simple when you think about it. What is the most precious commodity known to mankind? The one thing in life that cant be cheated. Time. Successful people all understand the importance of time. By understanding the clock is ticking, just like in a race or a sporting event, every minute is a minute wasted when you are not working towards a greater goal.

Ironically, it is the one ingredient we also have in abundance, so much so, in my opinion this is why we take it for granted.

The only reason I started to become successful was after a near death experience. Once I experienced the possibility that death was just around the corner, I realised that life was to be lived. I made the slightest change in attitude towards time, and this made a massive difference to everything I touched from then on in.

The answer to every question is “do it now.” If someone had asked me before my accident “do you want to go to the gym?” or “do you fancy organising the house?” The answer would have probably been “maybe later” or “tomorrow.” Ask me the same thing now, and if I now say “tomorrow” it will be because I have genuinely crammed so much stuff into today or rather my wife has! My wife grasped this concept at the same time. When Gail arrived in France and found me in a hospital attached to 2 drips covered in wire and hooked to all sorts of contraptions, it was just as real for her on the other side of the fence.

So when you are doing your New Year’s resolutions. Scrap them all and just do one. Make a conscious decision to treat time as leverage to do more. Imagine what would happen if you crammed in a weeks worth of achievements in to a weekend. Pretty soon you will be doing a months worth in a week, and when you get super efficient, there are people who achieve more in a year than most people do in a lifetime. Think about it,  in today’s society, doesn’t that automatically make these people more successful.

So today, and what better day to make a change, New Year’s day; take 3 things that you have been putting off and just go and do them, now, with out hesitation. See how much better you will feel, then tomorrow, just do the same, and so on.

All these small achievements will amount to massive change a year from now. Try it. It is easier than you think. After all what have you got to loose? Only time will tell!

Time is the most underrated commodity in business and life in general. Have no regrets and live life to the full.

Happy New Year and have a great 2010.

Lawrence Jones

In fact if it wasn’t for a pretty horrendous experience when trying to register and host a domain called theGallery.com, we’d never have changed direction and set up a business in the hosting arena. And I suppose it was the “bad experience” which forged the direction we took to provide the very best in service right from the outset. It was this start which also gave us an understanding of exactly how a client feels when the hosting provider goes wrong or doesn’t listen.
If you are a client of UKFast and you ever have a problem, write to me or pick up the phone. I hate having matters left unresolved and I cannot settle when I know a clients server is down.

Although it is a decade ago, I remember choosing the name UKFast very carefully. The name needed to reflect exactly what we were about. UK, obviously for it’s location, Fast, because we hated slow service and slow connectivity, .net because we were a network and hosting related. Partly too because the .co.uk version had already been registered. It took us 3 years before we were able to acquire the UK TLD version of UKFast.

We must have trawled the who-is directory for 3 days trying every name possible. It was during the boom so the world and his dog were registering every derivative of every word. Design agencies were popping up everywhere linking colours to animal names. Blue Pig, Black Sheep etc. You can almost pin point a company and its date of origin from the style of the name.

So 10 years on what has changed? Well just about everything, in fact it is easier to highlight what has NOT changed. Neil Lathwood, then a teenager working in a computer shop, found by my wife on a search for someone who could network some machines I’d sold. He came in a for a days work experience and never left. He is now the IT director and one of the most well respected boffins in our industry. It is safe for me to say, I do not know a harder working man on the planet. His desire to continually learn and stretch boundaries is only matched by an identical skill inherent in my wife. Together we formed a solid senior management team and 10 years on we continue to disagree and challenge each other. We are considerably more beefed up now with Jonathan Bowers, communications director and Paul Harris, marketing director, yet we all still have to learn new skills every year to ensure we are capable of managing a continually changing business and horizon.

So what lies ahead in 2010. I am so excited by the challenge ahead this year. Even more so than usual. Last year saw UKFast able to compete with a bigger marketing budget. It is one of the challenges of funding a business privately and not borrowing form banks. We have seen many businesses fly past us on our journey, a lot now we have caught up, some we have overtaken, the others give me the challenge and the determination to continue to grow UKFast to be the best of the largest business to business hosting providers in the UK.

Last year we saw the benefit of the Castell Cidwm acquisition, a hotel at the foot of Snowdon in the National Park in Wales. It is an invaluable asset used for training and team building. It is a place where status is removed and replaced with rack-sack and compass, a place where team members can see their managers in as much pain as they experience themselves. We have run more than 40 trips touching more than 100 staff. Put simply it cements all the people who invest time and energy down there and lifts camaraderie when we are back in the office.

This coming year we are focussing on growing the business further and we have some exciting announcements expected in 2010. We are also exploring the opportunities of some potential acquisitions and some new services which will compliment our existing offering.

In the mean time, to everyone who has helped UKFast grow, people past and present, thank you for your ideas and contribution. To our amazing client base, thank you too. By having such a strong client base we are able to invest in infrastructure that ordinarily none of us would be able to afford singly. Thank you for having the foresight to choose UKFast and if you are not already a client I look forward to meeting you one day on our quest to speed up the Internet and improve the way we all do business online.

Happy Christmas.

Lawrence Jones

It was 11 years ago at Granada I first used the Grand Ballroom at the Palace for an event. It was to raise money for the Christie’s For Cancer Appeal. The night was a huge success and I fell in love with the room. It is the perfect room for hosting a ball.

I knew the hotel well, as I’d originally played the piano there in my early years when I first came to Manchester. I had some great memories of the place and I made some fantastic friends. It was during the era of Les Miserables. And the cast used to pile in there for a few drinks after the show, before dragging me out until dawn. It was a real experience and my links to the area so strong, I bought an apartment in Oxford Place next door.

Years earlier I had my first job in a shop called A1 music, right opposite the Palace on New Wakefield Street. I did a range of jobs, from brushing up, to decorating. The funniest of these jobs, (although not at the time) was when Ann the proprietor asked me did I know anyone who could do plastering? Fancy asking a 17 year old for advice on building. Of course I promptly answered, “I can.” I had seen people plaster many times  with the houses my father used to renovate when I was growing up. I failed to mention my specialty was demolition.

The plaster eventually went up and although not particularly smooth, I was quite proud of the job. I spent that evening building all the furniture for the room. The next day I was greeted by Ann’s husband Graham who was furious. He marched me up stairs to see my handy work. All the plaster had peeled off the walls and had covered all the brand new furniture. It had then promptly dried over night!

I did a variety of jobs at A1 including their book keeping, but it was the selling I enjoyed the most. As a “Saturday boy” the professional sales guys hated me in the sale floor, so I was only able to cover for people when they were on their lunch.

Guaranteed with out fail, every lunch I would have a field day selling. I learned that by being honest and directing clients to what they needed as opposed to what the thought they wanted was a great recipe for success. I also realised I only had an hour, so I concentrated my efforts and honed my craft.

As I held the record for the biggest sale in the company’s history, Ann was much aggrieved when the sales men clubbed together and convinced Graham to put me in the basement wiring up reconditioned speakers.

Happy to accommodate, to the basement I went. It was there I was told to answer the telephone and I learnt a knew skill. I was now only able to sell when carrying the speakers across the floor. So this is precisely what I did, and I learned how to get to the point almost immediately, and with in months, we had sold every pair, with me selling the lions share. On the telephone I was also developing relationships, there were a few massive deals where I convinced the keyboard player of a touring band who were playing at the Apollo, who were number 4 in the charts at the time to come in and part with £21,500. Eventually Ann forced Graham to concede that it was ridiculous to bury someone showing promise.

It was around this time that I got my first job as a professional pianist, and rather than rock the boat with the other guys, I moved on and decided to use my musical talent to further my career. Which brings me full circle back to the Palace.

The event on Saturday was seamless, from the outside at least! Behind the scenes, the band, Clem Curtis and the Foundations were without a drummer who had broken down in Nottingham, and with 45 minutes before the start, I called my brother-in-law to ask for help. Dave is a fantastic drummer and agreed to lend me his kit, so we could get it set up and sound checked whilst everyone enjoyed the champagne reception upstairs. He also offered his services as a stand-in drummer too!

There is a saying “you cant chose you family,” and if you could, I couldn’t ask for a better guy. His attitude and calmness meant I was able to enjoy dinner and even with 30 minutes to spare when the actual drummer turned up, I couldn’t have been more relaxed.

On hind site though, it reminds me why I dont do this sort of thing for a living anymore.  If you think computer hardware is unreliable, you should try managing musicians!

I also was reminded of what I loved about event organising too. Giving pleasure to so many people is so rewarding. Being on this side of the fence too, where I was the client and the organiser, meant I could make the right decisions there and then. The team comprising of Gail, Rach, Paul and Jonathan literally had the entire evening organised and scripted to the minute. I could not have asked for a better team. Jim Collin’s description “the right people on the bus can be moved anywhere” was demonstrated by the way my events team, comprising of a few of my senior management team, changed roles as efficiently as a chameleon changes colour. But although I had great fun revisiting this former profession, I would not swap what I do now for the world.

Well, maybe it’s time for that discussion.

A couple of weeks ago we were planning our new “School of Hosting” campaign. This was at a time when we had just had a very successful day where staff dressed up in St.Trinian’s outfits to raise money for charity, it was suggested, why not use the photography and continue the theme to promote the School of Hosting.

Business men and women of City Tower Manchester are used to the staff at UKFast turning up in all sorts of outfits. Dressed in suits for 4 days a week, from time to time UKFast relaxes its dress code policy in line with various calendar events or charity days.

This particular one was done in a similar vein.

As soon as the advert hit the shelves and the banners appeared on various websites, a few people complained. Now I am a great believer in freedom of speech, just as I am a believer in the right to express oneself and exercise your individuality.

We all need our own passionate driving forces and conflicting views, that is what makes the world such an interesting place.

Personally I feel the advert is completely innocuous and as it was designed and created by women and as I know it was never meant to offend I think it was harmless. It is funny how people automatically assume something like this was dreamt up by the men in an organisation. But to the thousands of positive comments and visitors to the site, thank you.

So, going back to the original comment about being raised in a convent, growing up amongst 150 girls does have its advantages. The greatest of these was that I was able to gain an understanding of how the “other half” work, their minds, their behaviour, their communication, their sensitivity.

It is safe to say, as a result of my social conditioning, I empathise far more with women than men. I feel far more at ease on a night out with 30 mums from the school our kids go to over a rugby club networking dinner full of men.

I am not sure of the split of men and women in management  positions across the UK, however at UKFast it is clear to see my trust in women is carried into the work place. In positions of trust where a high level of autonomy and delegation is required, the split of men and women is 50:50. We have 9 ladies and 9 men, managing 102 staff. As we have more men in the business overall, it is a fair claim that on average, the women at UKFast hold higher positions over the men.

I hope it is not too sexist to say also, out of all the management, I have slightly more confidence in the organisational skills of the women over the men.  (Oops, sorry guys)

My wife has put her views on the subject of the advert itself here.

The 3 circles. You may have come across Jim Collins a lecturer at Stamford University, he is an authority on the study of successful businesses. He predicted and charted the growth of some of Americas biggest businesses and when challenged as a young lecturer by a student not much older than himself on the success of Apple (a then unknown) he decided to put his formula down on paper and test it amongst other great fortune 500 businesses.

One of the things he found with his research is that all of the businesses which grew at a faster rate than everyone else, did some things in common. One of these was called the 3 circles principal, adopted by the likes of Walmart, Sony, Apple, Microsoft.

The 3 circles are:

Can you be the best at something?
What are you passionate about?
What drives your economic engine?

If you answer YES to all of these when venturing into new unchartered territory you cant go far wrong.

Can you be the best at something?

There is no point setting up a business if you cant genuinely create a better company that those which already dominate an industry. It make years of trying, but ultimately you have to aim high and keep focussed on the end game, to provide a consistently better service or product offering than already exists. But just believing it isn’t enough, you have to have a scientific plan and competitive edge which separates you and existing competitors.

Ask yourself, what things have I already which help enable us to be the best?

What are you passionate about? Is this new business going to make you incredibly satisfied? If it is purely a vehicle to make you money, I guarantee it will not work. You have to have enjoyment first, which comes from passion and determination, long before the success and the financial gains.

Mohammed Ali said, “I run on the road, long before I dance under the lights.”  Although he became incredibly successful and rich through his boxing, he focussed on his training and the outcome of each fight, never on the purse.
What drives the economic engine? Is it sensible to make this investment? Do we have a competitive advantage with cost savings if we enter a particular industry?

For example, UKFast entering the world of Cloud Hosting makes perfect sense. Although the investment of £500,000 seems on the steep side, we already have the technical know how and infrastructure in place to run this type of business. It therefore becomes very easy to bolt on this sort of new venture.

Data centre space is another good one. We already have the expertise to be the best at it. We are incredibly passionate about the thought of improving resilience and customer care and does it make financial sense? Absolutely, we will save £1.5m to £2m each year as a direct result.

Do we venture into data centres? Already have done is the answer.

Using the same principal, on ideas that have not gone so well. The mobile phone division of UKFast.

Can you be the best at it? Yes absolutely and we were.
Are you passionate about it? Not really, driven by the fact that we were making money.
Was it financially the best thing to do? Although it made good sense to go into this venture at the time, on hind sight, yes we had a competitive advantage writing the software that made this company immensely successful, the business model was too far removed from UKFast’s hosting model.

Business to consumer vs. business to business. This one fundamental difference made it impossible to be financially viable. Our entire existing infrastructure was designed to manage the business to business relationship. We underestimated the amount of work involved in the change management.

The same applies to UKFast’s entry into the broadband arena.

Can we be the best? Yes and we were undoubtedly. We were too good and the strain this put on the existing support team was not sustainable.

Was it financially viable? NO! It was a disaster. BT had designed a business model from hell. The only winner was BT, the customer, the supplier, everyone lost out.

Were we passionate about it? No, we love hosting and we love the fact that people appreciate what we do. Supplying broadband which was effectively turned into a commodity by the telco’s (BT, Pipex, AOL) was not fun and we were too small to roll out a business model that was incredibly niche.

The result: Doomed! Luckily we were able to foresee this and we sold off our connections to a small business who specialised in this area. We were very careful not just to “ditch” customers as they also had hosting with us and they were incredibly important.

So the 3 circles principal is key to tackling the unknown. And if it is good enough for the businesses like Gillette, Nike and the others I mentioned earlier, it is a good enough litmus test for me too. Try it with your business ventures past, present and of course the import ones, the future ones!

Go have fun.

I always say, “well I’ll be leaving work at about 7pm this evening.” I hear this question 3 times a week.

I think it is important to know where you are going. Businesses need direction. I am a great believer in goals and raised a laugh at the How-Do convention recently when I admitted my wife and I have a “50 year plan.”

But why not? I work on the principal that you need to know where you are going. What is wrong with mapping out your life to when you are in your 90′s. You are far more likely to get to a desired location or destination if you have thought about it prior to setting out. One thing is for sure, I know we will be together as we are both integral to it.

What happens when you go shopping without a clear understanding of what you want to come home with. My wife’s wardrobe was littered with rubbish when I first met her. Shopping was haphazard and directionless and she probably felt this was part of the fun. Ask her now how much more fun shopping is, especially when she brings me along.

So when do you sell your business? You have to have made something worth selling first of all. This needs a plan in its own right. When we set up UKFast we were tiny. The smallest company in the fastest growing business environment and for years no one knew we existed.

But we had a plan, and we were sticking to it. And when the internet bubble burst and businesses were dropping out of the sky affected by the calamity we just carried on regardless. And still no one really knew who we were.

And over the years we have readdressed the plan, yet we still continue to stick to it. Even during the recession we felt it was more important to keep firmly on track than to falter.

And as the business got bigger so do our goals. Our latest 5 year plan includes a target and MAP to hit £100m turnover. Now as this plan unfolds people are begging to take note of us.

The problem with our initial plans were they were too small, and therefore so was the outcome. You get what you focus on so in my opinion you are better aiming higher. If you miss you still are probably better off than you would have been if you’d been conservative.

But on the journey of growing your business, when do you sell? UKFast is already worth far more than we anticipated in the first plan we wrote. So surely I’d be happy to sell?

For me it is not about the money.  It is about the game. I love work. I love people and I love competition. If I didn’t work at UKFast what would I do? I’d be bored sitting on a beach for more than 22 minutes. I don’t drink and I am consumed by learning.

For me, you sell when you stop learning or when you cannot learn at the speed you need to, to continue driving your business in a controlled fashion.  I am fortunate to work alongside my wife. When we have problems we are able to tackle them together.

We are on a weekend business trip and I am writing this, she is tackling a “too heavy for me” book on Balanced scorecard management, whilst we fly from Rome to Amsterdam for our next meeting.

If you have a business partner that is this close you are able to take on much more than if you do it alone.

What is most fun about UKFast is that we are having to learn at such a pace it is incredibly exciting. We take it so seriously that each year we review our goals together in the Maldives and have the final week of a 3 week break where we then strategise and plan for the future.

We have literally hit every goal we have set, and the crazy ones which take time all have a MAP (massive action plan) and we monitor their progress.

So when do you sell you business? In my opinion only when you are bored. But if you are bored, simply pick up a book and find another challenge. There is always something out there waiting to tax our hungry minds. After all isn’t that why we are in business in the first place?

Great question, and there is no right or wrong answer.

I explained that I have tried and failed many different things. The important thing in my opinion as an entrepreneur is to dust yourself off and have another go. Great entrepreneurs are resilient, they don’t know how to give up, they are prepared to push the boundaries and if they fail they do not see this as a negative emotion. In fact failure to a receptive mind means you are learning.

If you are going to try something new I think it should compliment what you are doing in other areas. Venturing into completely unknown territory carries more risk and therefore should warrant more research.

I enjoy new challenges, however I don’t see myself as a big risk taker. I have never had the luxury of huge sums of money to invest in new projects so the downside to most of my ventures is never a particularly alarming one.

We are currently venturing into the data centre arena, and although this now does involve millions of pounds of investment, it is a “related area” and therefore compliments what I already do elsewhere in the dedicated hosting industry.

It actually not only allows us to improve the quality of the service we currently receive, it also saves us millions of pounds each year of money which for the past decade has been growing some very happy businesses in Manchester and London.

I am not sure my current suppliers of data centre space will share my excitement. UKFast makes a very attractive anchor tenant however this sort of diversification is one I wholeheartedly recommend.

If you can provide a service where you are already paying considerable sums to a supplier and in our case competitor to boot, this should help you in your decision of where to diversify.

We once diversified in to the mobile phone arena specialising in Orange phones. We were good at it and we got about 20,000 customers in our first year trading. However it was so far removed from our hosting product. We were selling Oranges network when we had our own UKFast.

We got out of this industry after Orange put pressure on us to stop bulk text messaging to win business. Companies like Carphone Warehouse and other high street retailers were complaining that we had an unfair advantage. Our route to market was incredibly effective and hit our customer right at their heart. A simple text message encouraging them to use UKFast was all it took.

It worked famously until one day I received a phone call from my distributer saying that we had just inadvertently sent messages to the board of directors of Orange themselves during a board meeting. The message said, “upgrade your mobile phone with the latest Nokia on the Orange network, call UKFast now to find out more.”

Orange were fuming, mainly because they hadn’t thought of this themselves. They switched us off.

I could have targeted them and switched hundreds of thousands of Orange customers to other networks who our distributer put us in touch with, however this wasn’t our style.

We had invested huge sums of money and a great deal of time. We weren’t just the fastest growing supplier of Orange phones back in those days, we were the best. Each customer of ours also received confirmation text messages with Royal Mail special delivery tracking codes so they could know where their parcel was. Royal Mail even printed UKFast on the special delivery bags next to their name as we were shipping so many. They even sent us our own van each day.

Quitting whilst you are ahead is not quitting. Ironically Orange came back to us weeks later and asked me personally if I’d redesign their systems and manage their call centre. Someone had produced a report comparing all the dealers, distributers and Orange themselves. UKFast came out above everyone for the best customer satisfaction and retention rate.

The mess Orange are now in is indicative of their poor management and decision-making ability.  A decade on they still are not using the technologies that we brought to that industry. Shortly after we left, Oftel banned the use of direct text messages as a form of introductory communication as too many businesses jumped on our “banned” wagon: A shame really as they were exciting days. We would send out 20,000 text messages in a morning and sell 250 phones. The inbound phones went wild. If you were a visitor, staff member of a different division of UKFast or a prospective supplier, and were in our building when we pressed send, you were given a pad and pencil and told to answer the phone. Some of my funniest memories of this time include 2 bank managers caught up in the frenzy for a couple of hours locked in my office taking orders.

This was one example of diversification that was too far from our comfort zone, however I wouldn’t change this chapter for the world. We learnt everything we know now from this era.

Yet there are those amongst us who feel the need to talk about their goals. What they are going to achieve and what they nearly did. I am talking of the ones that you have a sneaking suspicion are “all talk.” Yet, they keep talking and that is all they seem to do.

And on the journey because of their gregarious nature and confidence they have a tendency to land great jobs and rise through the food chain. Yet they never take the plunge themselves.

I know a few people who fall into this category. I dont need to name them as my aim is not to embarrass them. It is something that intrigues me however.

One person in particular on the out side, has all the skills necessary to run a business, yet for some strange reason cannot take the plunge. Even when offered all the cash necessary to set up a business in a sector where they previously have a very successful record, this person chose the easy option. A slightly higher salary and share options (Fake shares as I call them!) over a slightly lower basic, true  50% ownership and zero cash investment from themselves.

Why does some one take what at first seems the easy path, yet it is a path they have trodden before only to find it leads to redundancy and ends in tears. Once the business is established you are a very expensive luxury and extremely expendable.

After selling my first business to Granada TV once I had integrated the 2 businesses and I had trained all the staff I was no longer needed. I was quickly squeezed out. It was a lesson that meant I could never work for another organisation again.

So why do they never take the plunge. Personally I believe it is because they are not true level 5 leaders. What is a level 5 leader? It is a person who shows the correct set of skills and characteristics to lead a business of any type through all seasons.

Yet a level 5 leader is not the sort of person that traditionally gets the job of the MD or other directorships in the UK and US. We seem to employ the loudest, most confident, best communicators, yet ironically these are never the best choice. Yet they rise to the top becasue they are more pushy than their fellow colleagues.

Often these sort of people want to take the credit for all the good that happens, yet when there is a problem, they are quick to point the finger and blame anyone but themselves. A level 5 leader is more likely to apportion luck to their success and be relatively shy when it comes to public speaking or taking the credit.

I suppose it is also about  what makes people tick. Their “significance” as Tony Robbins puts it. The person I am referring to in this article is very happy to have the lifestyle, the clothes, watches all the trappings of a senior director, yet does not want the responsibility or real control of the whole business.

So if you are put off by becoming a businessman or woman because you are not as confident as others, this is not a bad thing. In fact you are in good company.

A great friend of mine, Dan Innes has finally set up and gone it alone after a decade of growing someone else’s business in London. His new business Innesco is already super successful as he has a long client list of those strong relationships he has spent years developing. Dan merely needed the confidence to make that final push.

I gave up ranting and pushing him, knowing he needed to find his own feet in his own time. Last year at his wedding in Bath I said to my wife, “there you go, he will be self employed with in a year from now.”

A great man like Dan simply needed a great woman at his side. When you have someone you love to this extent, being in business suddenly becomes easier. You have someone to work for, someone to build a future for.

If you are not destined for the madness of entrepreneurship however, do not let this stress you out. I do not think any the less of my friend who prefers to work for other people than himself. Definitely not. When the businessman sits at home worrying about the bank, the tax or the detail, the managing director or senior manager is still able to switch off!

One thing I can say though, for Dan embarking on this new journey, “It is a lot like the day when you set off and rowed across the atlantic. You had a goal and a purpose. To that end, you achieved what you set out to achieve. The same applies in business. Set your goals out clearly and stick to them. Revisit them regularly, take nothing for granted. Have fun on your journey and good luck to you sir.”

If you are considering being in business and going it alone, take a pen and paper. Draw a line down the centre. On one side write down all the reasons why you want to be in business, and on the other the reasons why you have not done so yet.

If you find yourself procrastinating  and looking for reasons not to, seek help, but never give up. It’s easy.

It might sound easier to say than actually live by this philosophy, but its true, “there is no place for stress in any form in business life.”

Stress is not only bad for your health it is also bad for your business. It is a major distraction and the main reason why people do not achieve their full potential.

So how can you achieve zero stress in a fast paced and potentially stressful environment?

Before I launch into telling you how easy it is, I think it important for me to own up and tell you that in my first businesses I was always stressed by something. I would find myself being distracted from time to time on tax affairs, disputes over non payments and all the usual problems you get running and growing a small business. In my home life I was no better and I had resigned myself this was just a personality trait that I’d just have to live with.

I don’t think I could have mismanaged my time more effectively!

A turning point came after my accountant gave me a frank talking to and asked me “when was the last time you took a holiday Lawrence?”

I proudly said “9 years ago!” He looked at me shaking his head and said, “well you need to take a break and go and see how the other half are living!”

When I realised how stupid I’d been I was able to see that he was right of course. We all need space from time to time, space to breathe and recover. Time to ourselves is a must. I often talk of passion, but all the passion in the world misplaced without common sense is wasted energy. It’s funny how you become wiser with age!

But it is not the ‘time out’ itself that is the real key. We all know you can take time out from work yet be consumed by all the negative thoughts that follow you home.

There is a secret to it. This technique is so effective, it saved my life when I was trapped helpless underground dying and I have spent the rest of my life since trying to understand the phenomenon, develop it and share with others.

I later found a chap called Tony Robbins who used and taught a similar technique to hundreds of thousands of people. He is a life coach, someone who helps get you back on track or working to your full potential.

Ordinarily I am not a person interested in a listening to someone preaching about a new way of living your life. However when you hear the list of people Tony Robbins has helped lift to the highest level, you cannot help but be impressed. Ever heard of Andre Agassi, Michael Jordan? Or politicians such as Clinton or Gorbochov? The list is a modern day who’s who of living legends.

What I liked about Robbins, is that he openly admits not coming up with these ideas. Robbins is a brilliant orator and motivator. He has studied what makes people function to the best of their abilities in every walk of life. He has traced the originators back through time as far as he can and translates the methods into easily digestible chunks we can all understand.

For example, he wanted to find who was the fastest or fittest person on the planet. Eventually all the roads pointed to a tribe of Indians who run for fun 60 miles in the hot sun. During his study, he found that these Indians used a form of meditation and unusual breathing patterns before they exercise that almost leaves you trance like seeing clearer and completely focused. The first time I used this particular technique, I was on a cycling machine in a gym in Spain. The gym was empty and I put a towel over my head to help me concentrate. I listened for an hour with Tony Robbins in my earphones whist I cycled like a maniac. The only thing was, I had not cycled properly since I was a kid, and I certainly wasn’t exercising enough at this time in my life. When I stopped, after the hour long CD had finished, I lifted the towel from my head to find 3 people peering at me from down a corridor. They looked perplexed. I was suddenly embarrassed; my cycling machine was on the other side of the room pressed against a wall. Apart from the 30 km or so I had cycled, I’d also rocked the machine 50 feet across the gym.

As I got off the machine and proudly walked down the corridor, I bid the 3 people good afternoon and left. They were probably thinking how did that guy carrying all that extra weight do that? I know I was! The strangest thing the next day I wasn’t even stiff.The point of this particular part of the story is that all the techniques involving ultimate performance in some way or other use the mind.

I learned many things from Robbins and his CD’s, books, and I even went on to meet him in person. Most importantly I learned true success is already in you waiting to burst out. He simply uses a series of techniques that help you discover harness and help you find yourself. You can use these techniques in a variety of places; sport, competition, teaching, getting over phobias, breaking negative trends and associations.

The most effective and easiest of techniques that Robbins teaches and that I realised I used the day I almost died, is best described as an “Emotions trick”.

The simple fact is we can only feel one emotion at a time.

Happy, sad, exhilarated, stressed, grateful.Try it. Think about it, you can only feel one at a time. You can’t be happy and sad. You can’t be sad and amused, or stressed and happy.

So here is the trick. If you are stressed, afraid or want to stop feeling negative in any way, simply choose another emotion.

Now I can imagine you are already challenging me thinking if I am feeling desperately unhappy how do I suddenly condition myself to feel happy. “If I could do that” I hear you say, “there would be no problem!” You are right, but there is one emotion you can muster from anywhere, and that is feeling of being “grateful”.

This is one emotion we can all summon on tap. No matter how bad things become, there is always a worse place or someone less fortunate. This is a source of being grateful. If you replace whatever anxiety or suffering with “thank you God for this opportunity” or “for the air I breath.” This is one I use after being in an avalanche. Believe me no matter how bad things get I only have to think of this or moments I share with my kids and I replace the negativity in a flash.

Try it and practice it. The power of the mind is awesome. The more I discover the more I realise just how amazing our brains really are. I am confident if you use this technique your life will improve, as you will spend less time in a negative place and therefore more time being positive.

Buried under 10 ft of snow, cemented in with no air to breath I realised this was the end. Instead of getting stressed, I said “thank you”.I said thank you for a wonderful varied life, thank you for the experiences, but most of all I said thank you to everyone I had been lucky enough to share time with and learn from.

This simple act of being grateful, I am confident, saved my life. Above ground one of my friends, a doctor, luckily enough, who actually resuscitated me, was actually consoling a life long friend. He said to Dan, “he wont survive this length of time.”

I not only defied the laws of nature after they brought me back to life I stood up, (with help) and walked with a friend on either shoulder to the rescue helicopter. I remember seeing Stefan, our guide and lead rescuer, lighting cigarette, taking in a drag and saying in his unmistakable French accent, “there goes one tough son of a gun.”

But it wasn’t toughness, it was strength of mind. It was a second chance given to me for not squandering the last 8 minutes of my life in panic, even if I was entombed in a dark and lonely place. I wasn’t going to be carried to the helicopter, I was going to savor every step no matter how hard.

So when things get harder now, I go back to that dark place where I listed my friends and family, and I say “thank you.”I am on this earth to make a difference and no one is going to stress me out.

After surviving an event like that. I started asking lots of questions, “why?” was a reoccurring question: A little like my two a half year old who asks this question over and over again!

I wanted to find out who else used positive thinking to overcome difficult situations, and in the true spirit of positive thinking, I started bumping in to other positive people. I not only found and met Tony Robbins I ended up befriending one of his close colleagues and fellow workers, Suzie Mitchell who now is on our board of directors.It’s a funny old world.

So if you want to accelerate your success and avoid getting stressed, try this simple technique. You will be amazed at the outcome. You will be amazed at what you can achieve when you spend your life being positive, being grateful.