B – Before PlusNet

I think it was in the spring of 1986 that we got “the good news”.

Everyone in our school was told that the school we were attending was going to be closed – we all celebrated (this was a shitty school in a poor part of Sheffield). When our celebrations subsided we were told that our year was going to remain in this school (I had just turned 14) for the final two years and all of the other kids were being relocate to other schools. This was not good news because we did not have many good teachers and we new that the few good ones would no longer be with us come the new school term.

Just when we though things couldn’t get any worse we were then given more good news! We were told that were were going to be spared the stress of major exams at the end of a year by the change to the wonderful new GCSE’s, someone asked what this meant and we were told that grades would be awarded based mainly on year round coursework!!!

Holly fuckin shit – the school was going to be a disaster and we were going to have to do real work all year round1!!!!!

This did not sit well with most of us and especially me.

Fortunately my dad had recently formed his own business installing data cabling (mainly in London) and the business was growing fast. I had the opportunity to go and work as an unofficial apprentice in the school holidays. By Christmas of that year my time in London had bled into school time and in my term I just turned up for the exams. Needless to say I left school with crappy results. By the time I was legally working for my Dad I had worked up to engineer status and early evidence of my project management skills resulted in the other guys listening to what I had to say. Now you might think “bosses son eh, he had it easy” but my co-workers were hairy arsed gruff types typically either from Manor top in Sheffield or the more colourful parts of Glasgow. By the age of 18 I was designing installs and doing surveys and by the time I was 19 I was project managing all of the installs in London (up to 300 co-workers and over 80% of the revenue in my dads business).

On the back of my dads success I gained access to my first non-family member mentor – Brendan Ingle the Sheffield based boxing trainer. My dad started sponsoring Brendan’s fighters including Naseem Hamed, Herol Graham and a great friend of mine to this day Johnny Nelson. I would go hang out with these guys whenever I was back from London.

Next came what I still consider to be the greatest learning experience of my life (some may argue with that point). At its peak my dads business employed around 400 people included within which were nearly all members of my immediate family. One of these people was an uncle who my dad employed at a senior level in order to ensure that he did not go bankrupt and in the process lose everything.

Before going on it has to be said that my Dad and my uncles quite regularly fell out and generally pissed each other off.

After an apparent dispute about future business strategy this particular uncle decided to leave and and no sooner than he did then he set up in competition with my dads business, soon he was winning key contracts with the narrowest of margins between the bids and my dads business started to struggle. This coincided with the last accepted depression of 1991 and one of our largest customers changed our payment terms from net 30 days to net 120 days and by the summer of 1992 my dads business went into administration and was wound up. When the books were closed on my Dads business he had re mortgaged his house and ploughed all his free cash into saving the business and the final accounts showed that after all expenses relating to the administration the business was in profit to the tune of £500k!!!!

Circa 400 people lost their jobs including circa 40 of my relatives.

My uncles business grew by picking up all of the key clients of my dads business and while on principle most of my dads workers refused to go work fore my uncle some had no choice due to financial reasons and or could not get jobs with other firms – needless to say this events destroyed the lives of most of my immediate family members.

So now its the autumn of 1992 and I am unemployed, have no qualifications, no CV and no home – fairly depressing.

My uncle Roger (god love him) persuaded his second wife (Sharon) to let me come live with them. He gave me work as he had set himself up as an antiques trader and removals house clearance man after my dads business folded. This gave me a roof and something to do during the day and access to alcohol in large quantities. What they did for me leaves me forever grateful.

Because I went straight to work in London I missed out on the typical teen years and I took to unhealthy amounts of alcohol with great enthusiasm. Its funny cause I remember bitching about my life (or lack of) to Brendan and Johnny and being told by them that what I was learning was more important that having fun and that there was plenty of time for having fun after working hard and hopefully being successful they of course were right all along but I did not see it that way at the time or after my world had fallen apart.

I spent a few months living and working with my uncle and enjoyed everything we were doing but could not get away from this great feeling of injustice about what my other uncle had done and sense of some greater purpose going unfulfilled. I resolved to find a way to get back on my own two feet and find an opportunity to me more successful than my dad was and show my other uncle and anybody watching that success could be created founded on honesty and integrity and I was determined to demonstrate that this was possible in order to make sense of a world that appeared to me me to be dominated by liars, thief and cheats driven by greed, ego and personal ambition despite the fact that the majority of people were honest and had integrity.

My first step was to sit down and have a long talk with Brendan Ingle. I expressed my thoughts and he told me the following “Lee I get all sort scum and fuck-ups walk into my gym and none of them have the talent, experience and hunger that you have – and if you don’t stop talking and start doing then I will have nothing to do with you any more”.  This was a timely cattle prod and my response was” I know how to get on my own two feet but I need help, I need somewhere I can go and be a different person than the one doing manual labour and getting pissed aver night”. Brendan offered me free use of a room in a house he owned where he put up out of town boxers training at his gym. What I had decided to do was sell telephone systems to schools in the Sheffield area. I decided this because I could do this with no capital outlay and I could get the job done end to end myself. My uncle carried on feeding and housing me and I also signed on at the dole office (claiming benefit whenever I was not earning money through the telecomms start-up).

In the first year I put approx £1500 in my pocket and in the second year just over £4000. By the third year I had established a good reputation in the Sheffield area and was gaining business by referral – stage one complete,I was “back on my own two feet” which in real terms meant swapping Netto beans on toast every night for dinner in my cheap flat in Sheffield to being able to go out to the Italian across the road .

My big breakthrough was selling a large telephone system to the Sheffield college. This got the attention of the manufacturer of the telephone system that I was selling, a company called InterTel based in Phoenix Arizona. They approached me and said that I was their best performing dealer and they wanted to come work for them.

My response was blunt – I told them about my prior experience and said that I would never work for someone else again. They persisted and I agreed to work with them as an agent using their branding alongside my own. This development meant that for a trade off of some of my time I could leverage the resource of this big company – the downside was that I needed to drive to Kettering where Intertel UK were based at least once a week. To be fair there were some good people working there (George, Frank, Lee Etc) and a few still are despite being recently acquired by a competitor.

The first day I landed in Kettering I took a call from a very agitated guy called Mike Naylor who said that he was in Worksop and he was working for someone who had just started a business selling computers and they could not cope with the demand. I told him that I could sort them out and that I could come see them the next morning. I arrived in Worksop the next morning and meet Mike and his boss – a guy called Paul Cusack. The company was called Express Micro and they had been brave enough to advertise PC’s cheap and now they needed to field the sales calls and build the PC’s in much greater volume than they were geared up for. When I arrived they had bunch of phone lines with individual phones plugged into them and not enough people to answer the calls.

I sold them an Intertel system and fitted it in what was record time the following week. Over the next couple of years Express Micro and latterly Choice peripherals became probably the most active investor in new / increased Telecomms infrastructure in the UK

This activity and the other stuff I did with Intertel put me in a position where I was making good money and it was clear to me that if Paul managed to keep his business going long enough then between what he was doing and what I was gaining access to through Intertel in terms of understanding what was happening in terms of Telecomms and data convergence then something big was coming down the road. I spent a disproportionate amount of time in Worksop over the next year or so and on more than one occasion Paul made it clear that there was opportunity for me with him and I told him about my past and stated that I would never work for anyone else again and besides I was making more money working for him indirectly part time than he would pay me directly .

In run up to Christmas 1996 Paul approached me and said that he had been prompted by one of his tech support guys to set up a service providing Internet access to customers that had bought PC’s and modems. He asked me what I thought of it and whether it could be done viably with a reasonable investment from him. At this time I was one of the early users of Demon Internet and had been genning up on VoIP based PC / Telecomms convergence. My response was that being an ISP was the next natural evolution of the Telecomms businesses and that if he could get the Email and Webspace sorted that the access piece could be put together. He said that his tech guy was a brilliant Sheffield University graduate and he was confident that the services could be delivered (wishful thinking!!!), Paul then said that his skills were not suited to running an ISP and that mine were and asked me to run it for him. This is where I made the biggest mistake of my life (I might just argue with myself on that claim later in this story) – I reminded him of my prior basis for turning down prior offers and added that I wasn’t sure that committing to a risky start-up launching within a highly pressurised computer reseller that could well go bust at any point if he did not sell it soon was probably not the right move for me. I added that I was willing to help as a supplier and give all my availability time in the effort and if we could get to launch then we would review at that point. In the mean time I would report progress to him.

The start-up launch brand was Force9 and that ends this chapter………..