I'm a teenager and my dad is on the telly.
ITV are making a programme about the recession and they've picked him to feature. The picture at the top of this post is a screenshot from it. To anyone watching, he's just another business owner having a hard time. To me, he's Dad, and I've had a front row seat for all of it.
He started out as a stevedore in Southampton docks and built his own business from there. It was doing well. When the recession hit, his clients couldn't pay what they owed him. You can do everything right in your own business and still go under because other people can't pay you.
I watch him get buried under problems that aren't of his making. He's pulled away from home, trying to rescue it. When I'm 18 the business fails. It ends in bankruptcy, and we lose the family home.
The second business
That isn't where his story ends, and it's the part I most want people to know.
Dad starts again. He builds a second business, and this one works. It does so well that someone offers him life-changing money to buy it. He turns it down. He wants to build it bigger.
He finds out he has cancer. He goes into hospital, and in April 1998 he dies. He's 50 years old.
The business ends with him, because everything depended on one person and that person was gone. I wrote about the race he loved running in The year I ran my Dad's race.
Following in his footsteps
I went into business too, though on the corporate side. For a while it looked like I'd cracked it. I ran an international sales team with people in several countries. The money was good. The lifestyle looked glamorous from the outside. I got a name for energetic presentations about business growth to big rooms, and for spotting where a business had room to grow.
But the alarm bells started. Just like Dad, my health and my family life were paying for it. I knew there had to be a better way.
So I went back to school, in my own way. I re-educated myself and rebuilt myself, mentally and physically. I became an endurance athlete and spent time helping other people get their health back. After that I started applying the same thinking to business, and that led me to coaching. These days that work happens through ActionCOACH.
The bit nobody teaches you
Here's what still gets me. Nobody teaches this stuff in school. We're taught how to be good at a job. We aren't taught how to run a business. Or how to manage cash when customers don't pay, or build something that doesn't fall over the minute the owner isn't there.
I really believe that if Dad had had that education, his story and ours could have been different. I can't prove it. I'll never know. But I've sat with enough business owners since to see the same patterns. And how much changes when someone helps them spot them early.
So when people ask why I do what I do, that's the answer. It's personal. It's for people like my dad and families like mine. Say a business owner gets their time back, gets paid properly and builds something that would carry on without them. The ripple doesn't stop with them. It reaches their family, their team, their customers and suppliers, and the town they work in.
If you stepped away from your business tomorrow, what would happen to it?
