A little journey back in time

Having moved house recently, I have been sorting out the last boxes and came across a box of ‘memories’. This is a battered old cardboard box, held together by many layers of gaffer tape that contains bits and bobs from my life.

I am not a hoarder of things, but I do indulge myself this one box of items that bring back memories. Every few years I come across this box and spend several hours looking through its contents. It contains everything from school books, to certificates, poems, tickets, love letters and small gifts and post cards from the people of my past.

The reason I mention this here, is because I found two things of interest and relevance to this blog.

The first was an old piece of paper, with a hand written contract on it. It details that I and my business partner will divide up the profits equally from our car wash business, it details what happens if one of us doesn’t turn up for work and a few other points and what should happen. This was my first contract I created, I was 10 years old. My business partner was my best friend Andrew Bentley.

The second was a portfolio of a cafe I started up after University. I took over a rundown old greasy spoon cafe and turned it into a multicoloured chill out cafe. My friends and I turned it into a co-operative business. We did not make very much profit, but we did get into the paper and also expanded the cafe to include an art shop next door and got an allotment to grow food.

These two items reminded me that I have always had an entrepreneurial spirit. I just thought I would share that here.

 

 

My Career and experience

I thought I would write a bit about me so you can see where I have started from and what experience I had had so far. This may put some of the blog posts into more focus.

I left University in the second year whilst studying physics. I felt the physical laws too constricting for my free spirit!

I started my own cafe business and ran this for about 9 months. It was the first ‘chill-out’ cafe with a fixed location in the UK. The cafe was based in Norwich.

I studied and passed my exams in reflexology and started giving treatments for money, and this went OK although I could not make enough to live on.

I moved to London and tried my hand a dispatch riding on a motorcycle delivering parcels to businesses. After several near death experiences and realising that I wanted to be the one sending and receiving these important parcels in nice chrome and glass offices rather than merely delivering them on my tatty old bike, I left and, reluctantly due to having no money, got a temporary office job at GlaxoWellcome.
The internet was becoming more popular, so I was sent on a two day course on how to build basic web pages using MS Front Page.
Given the tools it was a miracle I found a fascination for the web, but I did a left GW and went to work as a project manager at an ‘up and coming’ new media agency called the hub.
This was a big learning curve, with all the madness of the .net boom, I started managing hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of projects with no training or support.

I quickly realised I preferred development over project management, and left to be a developer for the car rental company Hertz.
After making some money, training and learning more, I bought a laptop and moved to Quito in Ecuador.
I spent 3 months travelling the country and learning to program web sites on my laptop.
After South America, I came back to London and did various full time jobs working my way up to a senior developer and ran many big projects creating the websites for Sony, One2One, Tetley, Mars, Fiat and many other big corporate web sites.

As part of all my developer roles, I had maintained a level of project management and client facing skills. It was always important for me to see the business I was working in as a whole and not just as a developer nerd in a backroom.

I realised I could do this much better than any of the many agencies I had worked for, so I set up my own company. I decided with my partner, Heather to move to Cambridge where the entrepreneurial energy was at its peak.
We both built up the company as self employed people and moved back to London once we had out grown the small business of Cambridge.
We then took on bigger clients and started hiring other contract developers to help complete the coding work as the projects are now too big to complete on our own.

During the last year, I married my long time girlfriend Heather. She is now my wife and pregnant with our first child who is called Thomas.

This is when I read Rich Dad, Poor Dad and started this blog.

 

Philosophy

Firstly I will cover my philosophy on life (briefly) which will provide you with a framework of which I will be working to achieve my goal of being obscenely rich.

The cornerstones of my philosophy are these:

1.    That the highest goal in life is to be happy and that this is one’s only true responsibility

2.    You create your own reality every second with your thoughts, emotions and actions.

3.    There is no right and wrong. There is only action and consequence.

4.    Belief in oneself is the most important asset you can ever attain.

5.    Honesty is the most important character trait. (Both internal and external)

6.    You get back many times in life what you give, giving and receiving are both equal in importance.

7.    The universe is abundant. There is enough to go around.

8.    Love is the energy which creates all life and things and underneath all of the layers that we create since birth, every human has at the core, LOVE. Never under estimate the power of love.

9.    Live is the opposite of entropy. Life creates order; entropy is the tendency to disorder.

10.  Paradox, Change, Humour

And a quick definition: Work is the measure of how much you dont want to do something.

I am sure that I will add many more things to this as I write this, but this will do for starters.

It will be interesting to see if these change over the course of this journey.