Risk: An unlikely manifesto for entrepreneurs

At 12 years old I was already low on a vital quality, and I remember clearly the day when what precious remnants I had left began to slip away.

It was 1982 at All Saints Comprehensive School and my eyes were filling with tears of humiliation. My head had jolted back in shock and I was looking up through a cloud of chalk dust at my English teacher’s angry jawline. A throbbing pain was building from where he’d flung the board duster and hit me flush in the face. Now he was pacing towards me, screaming at the top of his voice. ?

?“Barber, you idiot!”

?“You are the scruffiest, most useless, uneducated person I’ve ever taught.”

?He carried on insulting me for what seemed like an age. I shrunk back in my chair and instinctively clutched my face, as though I were bleeding.

?There was no blood, though, only a ripening bruise. But something else was seeping out of me at a terrifying rate.

?The last of my confidence.

I wasn’t the only one badly haemorrhaging. In the early 1980s in Huddersfield, confidence leaks were springing up everywhere. A board duster punctured me. But the blows were coming from all quarters. Job losses, home repossessions, breakdowns. You could literally feel the town’s esteem draining away.

Wherever I looked, people were treading water and the sense of decline was very real.?The poet laureate, Simon Armitage, once said, “if you were going to choose a way of making it in this world and a place to start from…you might not choose Huddersfield.”

He wasn’t wrong. My formative years shrunk my horizons so much that I couldn’t recognise any sense of opportunity – and saw no signs of where it might come from. I recall scouring the boards in the local jobcentre moving from one heavy engineering job to the next. I couldn’t for the life of me find any job that either interested me or was something I could do.

So I found myself going to interviews for the craziest of jobs. They could smell the desperation on me as soon as I walked in the room. On one occasion I went for a marketing job as a teenager, which involved having to travel to fish and chip shops across Yorkshire and sell them a cheap framed picture of a ship. At the interview they asked me to imagine bounding into a chippy and giving an inspiring sales pitch to get the owner to buy a picture of the said ship.

Needless to say, I failed. Who could do a job like that?

For years my teacher’s insults became an endless loop in my head. At certain points of the day, whenever I was in a difficult situation, his voice would loudly pipe up, telling me how useless I was. ?He’d hit a raw nerve that didn’t stop hurting.

?I had struggled to keep up at school and, as a small, plump red-haired boy, I was an obvious target for bullies. I used to dread getting on the school bus, as I knew they would be waiting. My family had it tough too back then. My dad was working two jobs and living in fear of losing the family home due to spiralling interest rates. My mum, who meant the world to me, was doing her best. Due to the school bullying, my personal hygiene began to suffer and, naturally, my appearance began to reflect this. My collar was curling, fantastic stains took pride of place on my tie and my flies were permanently jammed at half-mast.

?As I entered my teenage years, the thing I remember most is a feeling of powerlessness.?Teachers clearly saw their role back then as separating the wheat from the chaff instead of helping everyone fulfil their potential. I felt they’d already decided I wouldn’t amount to anything. My name had been writ large in the losers’ column and I was being unceremoniously shunted towards a government youth unemployment scheme.

This had a profound psychological effect on me. There were over three million unemployed in the 1980s and the thing about living in a period of prolonged economic decline is it makes you terrified about your future.

And that fear was only compounded by the feeling that some people seemed to be taking a perverse pleasure in making it brutally clear that you didn’t have one. ?

It felt like a silent genocide of sorts was taking place. At the time, Pink Floyd had achieved a number one hit with a song about sadistic teachers pouring their derision on kids, stripping them of their identity and herding them into a meat grinder. It resonated across the country because many of us felt we were on a conveyer belt heading towards a similarly bleak fate and couldn’t get off. Teachers were destroying the confidence of far too many kids, preventing them from getting on in life and setting them up to fail.

?Britain was becoming a country filled with abattoirs of wasted potential. We had developed complex instruments to measure consumer confidence for the likes of banks, retailers and government agencies. And there were global indexes to measure investor confidence. Analysts constantly poured over stock market movements to assess market confidence and votes of confidence were passed in Parliament to determine whether governments could continue or not.

But no one measured the confidence of communities like mine. Nobody seemed interested in building confidence in places like Huddersfield in order to unlock the potential of people who needed to follow a different path than rote learning and exams. While governments and investors were hyper vigilant to the slightest confidence blip that might spook the markets, no one cared about the confidence crash affecting millions like me.

I craved a feeling of agency, to have some control, some confidence in my life. But how do you build confidence when teachers keep hammering you down?

The ‘father of psychology’, William James, had asked a similar question over a hundred years ago and came up with a theory of self-esteem, which concludes that self-worth is dependent on our goals and our achievements. In other words, I had to find something I was good at to lift myself out of the mire.

There must be something, I thought. There has to be a place where I can shine. After I left school with one O Level in English at 15, I went to see a careers adviser to see if he could put me on the path to success.

He listened intently as I told my story, made some notes and then pulled a ring binder off a shelf and spent several minutes thumbing through files.

?“I’ve got the perfect job for you,” he said, looking up at last.

?“A life guard at Huddersfield Sports Centre.”

?“But I’m not a great swimmer.”

?And that was the end of that.

It was back to the drawing board. They say true terror isn’t being scared, it’s not having a choice on the matter. And I was desperate to have options. I may have had my teacher’s words of disgust constantly ringing in my ears, but something was driving me; a niggling torment that I couldn’t locate, an itch to find something.

?There’s no word in the English language to describe this feeling. But everyone has felt it. The Russians have the word ‘toska’, which explains a sick longing and spiritual anguish.

It’s a yearning for something and a vague restlessness. But that doesn’t fully do it justice either. What I was trying to express was a deep-seated desire for a sense of purpose. After all, without purpose, we’re barely human. Everyone wants to realise their potential and that’s why in popular culture some of the best lines in films and songs are about the regret people feel at not realising their dreams.

?Think of Marlon Brando’s “I coulda been a contender” scene in All Along the Waterfront or Shane MacGowan singing “I could have been someone” in Fairytale of New York. ?They speak of a universal truth about not being able to live up to expectations and having hopes cruelly dashed.

But back to Huddersfield in the 1980s. I wasn’t singing about New York and reminiscing about Broadway and Sinatra. I was riding a Leyland Atlantean cream and green bus through West Yorkshire with a second hand Electrolux petrol lawnmower at my feet. On my knee was a canvas bag filled with gardening tools and in my pocket was a crumpled list of people who wanted their lawns mowing.

I’d taken on lots of dead end jobs and now decided to reinvent myself as a mobile gardener. ?Ploughing through overgrown gardens and bringing order to the unruliest lawns was my business. It was hard work lugging a lawn mower around West Yorkshire on buses, but as I wrestled with chaotic vines, dense overgrowth and awkward clumps, I felt myself powering up. My fuel warning light had been on for so long that as the first signs of confidence began to flow through me again, I could feel every drop as though it were cool water in a desert. ??

Little did I know, as I stared out at the blurred landscape from the bus on the way home and up towards the red sky above Blackley brickworks, I was finally making the change I’d desperately wanted. I was beginning to find my purpose. Not as a mobile gardener, but as an entrepreneur.

I didn’t know this at the time. I didn’t even know what the word meant. If someone had said it to me, I’d have thought it was a fancy foreign dish.

I’d spent all my life so far doing my best to play by the rules, walking the line and trying to do what was expected of me. It hadn’t got me very far and now I was trying a different path.

Taking a risk.

Of course, it could have gone disastrously wrong. I wouldn’t recommend anyone taking a lawnmower on a bus nowadays. But no one seemed to mind back then. And it did me the world of good. Within a few weeks I was starting to establish a client base and build a reputation for being reliable, hardworking and delivering good value. I took pride in my work too. Gardens that had a Jurassic Park feel to them when I arrived would be transformed into the immaculate fairways at Augusta by the time I’d finished.

?But It didn’t last.

Beginners’ luck only gets you so far. The growth of home improvement and DIY stores in the 1980s didn’t help, as many people started buying their own mowers. Increased competition from other mobile gardeners who were better equipped than me (they had vans for starters) also went against me. As did the time when I almost mowed over someone’s cat.

?It didn’t matter, though. By the time I hung up my gardening gloves I’d already gotten a taste for working for myself. I knew that if I didn’t take risks I was going to return to the same fearful state I was in when I left school. If I didn’t keep moving forward, my past would catch up with me and whenever I was alone I’d hear the gruff Yorkshire tones of my teacher abusing me once more.

I still had a long way to go and it would take the best part of two decades before I would eventually establish my dream business. My self-esteem remained low even though the warning light on my confidence gauge was no longer flashing.?And I had plenty still to learn. But I had taken my first steps towards a better future – and this is where my story joins with millions of others across the UK and connects to a far more important struggle than my own.

This is a story about unlocking Britain’s potential and encouraging a new generation of unlikely entrepreneurs and dreamers to back themselves. It’s a reminder that we can’t afford to write off hidden talent and we can’t let a generation go to waste. But above all, it’s a manifesto for change and a blueprint for Britain’s recovery. ?

As I write, the UK government deficit is the largest on record in peacetime and the size of the deficit is close to double the level of public borrowing at its peak after the 2008/09 global financial crisis. High unemployment is rising its ugly head once more and many families are being pushed into poverty.?

Britain’s entrepreneurial spirit has never been more needed and yet we’re in danger of making many of the same mistakes I saw in my youth all over again.

?The ghosts of the past are everywhere. Our polarised politics have more than a whiff of the 1980s.?And our schools are still writing kids off.?Whether it’s children diagnosed with special needs who are not given the support they need to understand and contribute to lessons or thousands of difficult or low-achieving kids being removed from school through a process known as off-rolling (so they’re not included in GCSE results and in order to reduce costs), the result is still the same.

People are unable to thrive and are pushed to the margins. Add the 2020 pandemic into the mix and the disconnect between young people’s hidden talent and opportunities to realise their potential is even greater.

At a time when young people are paying record tuition fees, have had many benefits taken from them, such as educational maintenance allowance and lost huge amounts of education and social opportunities due to the pandemic, we should be tearing barriers to opportunity down, not erecting them.

But, if anything, the barriers to setting up a business have become bigger. A significant percentage of UK start-up founders are still privately educated and it remains true that coming from money makes it easier to make money.

The biggest barrier, though, remains the same and psychologists have now come up with a fancy term to describe it. They call it imposter syndrome and it describes the feelings of doubt, inadequacy and the constant fear of being exposed as a fraud. These insecurities plague many people and it’s ultimately a fear that you don’t deserve success. ?

?I’ve lived all my life with it. ?

?This book is about how to shake off the shackles of imposterism and build sufficient confidence to find your purpose.

?It’s for everyone who’s thought of striking out alone whenever they clock in or spent bus journeys to and from work dreaming of setting up their own business. It’s for those that harbour secret ambitions to be their own boss but can’t quite take the first step to make it happen.

Those voices of encouragement, imagining a better future are easy to ignore sometimes. I spent far too long trying to suppress them. I convinced myself they were fantasies because I was unable to face my fears.

What I eventually realised, however, is that it’s good to do things that scare you sometimes. Taking risks helps you grow and helps you overcome the fears that hold you back.

Over the following pages I’m going to share a journey that vast amounts of people think about every day. With latest figures showing that 64 per cent of the UK workforce would like to set up a business and four out of five Gen Z’s want to start a business one day, it’s a widely shared dream – but one that fear frequently turns to dust.

There’s never been a better time to face up to those fears and make the change.

And you never know, you might just frighten yourself at how good you’ll become.

?

?