My eldest daughter chose The Dad Lad as this nickname for me some years ago, which kind of reflected my refusal to grow up gracefully. As I’m now a Grandad Lad I’ve decided to settle for Janner Boy to reflect my origins.
So I’ve been sort of retired for a couple of years, I say sort of, because the company is still running and it takes time for these things to sort themselves out, but I’m nearly there.
So I was born and bought up in Plymouth and I’ve got the green blood running through my veins, I’ll be an Argyle fan long after I’m dead !
A potted history
I left there when I was 24 and spent 14 years in London before landing in Bristol in 1997. By then I was 38 and have lived here happily ever since. But however much I love living in Bristol, my heart will always be a Janner (Plymouthian).
Life started out OK, my parents had a nursing home and I can still remember going to private prep school but that all went tits up when my mum was paralysed in a car accident.
I was 6 at the time and for the next 10 years my mum spent much of her life at Stoke Mandeville hospital and became well acquainted with Jimmy Saville in his prime, a topic we shall come back to.
The good times were over and we were broke for the rest of my childhood. Lots of other things shaped my childhood, I won’t go into here but I had a pretty difficult childhood and adolescence.
Unnatural energy
ADHT is a condition that most of the population seem to have been diagnosed with since Covid but I’ve had it all my life. It has shaped who I am and what I’ve achieved, being hyper active is a gift if you can focus it, and fortunately I have been able to.
It does, however, come with challenges. For me I had to cope with some horrible twitching habits as I never relax and often I felt I was an outsider looking in on the world. For people around me we have lots of fun and there aren’t many dull moments, but there isn’t much downtime either so I’ve learned I need to give them space.
I’ve had an interesting career that shaped my view of life, society, values and how to approach life which will come through in the blogs I’m sure.
My first job when I was 16 was as a Trainee Court Usher, not sure why they thought I would be better at controlling a court room than the normal retired Coppers. They didn’t repeat the experiment and after various other roles I moved on when I was 18 for reasons that will be a blog later.
I headed into the Dockyard as a Civil Servant where all my mates worked, but nothing is that straight forward. Somehow I managed to end up working under ground on shift worrk with a load of ex navy people sending telexes.. Very dull 6 years but another valuable education and one that convinced me my destiny was away from Plymouth.
At 24 I moved to London and joined the BBC, a stupid decision based on the salary they offered by but the best decision in every other way. My heart made the decision and 14 wonderful years later I made the decision to start up on my own, I don’t think I could have worked for another company but it was time to move on.
The family
The last 25 years have been spent running a training and consultancy company, this gave me the opportunity to fulfill everything I wanted to do in work life, there was no balance, it was relentless desire to be the best in our industry and generally, we made it. I built the business with my wife, something few couples can achieve, but it worked brilliantly for us,
Initially it was all about revenue and building a brand, but once we hit the £1m turnover I turned my attention to profit, which is why I have the time to write this blog, the saying “Revenue is vanity, profit is sanity” is absolutely right, but it took me a while to get there and you can’t have profit without revenue so it’s part of the journey.
In the background I have wonderful 4 kids from two marriages, ranging from 38 to 20, each with big parts of my good and bad attributes which is helping them all have great lives, but I plan to keep my family out of this blog as much as I can, mainly because they will want to approve everything I say and that isn’t going to happen.