Jamie Gibbs

Royal Marines. Business. Law. Practice.

There is a pattern running through all of this and it is easier to say up front than to leave you to spot.

Every time I have come up against something I could not do, I have gone away and learned it properly rather than winging it or hoping nobody noticed. That has happened four or five times now over thirty years, and the gaps have got more expensive each time.

It is also, as it turns out, what the research says actually predicts whether somebody makes a go of a business. Not age, and not appetite for risk. Knowing your own trade properly before you start, and then knowing the next bit when the business outgrows what you knew.

Here is how that went.

I wanted to be a Royal Marine from the age of thirteen. I applied at sixteen and I failed.

An instructor told me, politely, that he had run quicker after being shot. I sat in the car at the station with my parents and my sister and said I would go away, get a trade, and come back in twelve months, which was how long you had to wait after a fail.

So I did. I fitted ductwork. My boss paid for a City and Guilds over two years. I trained five days a week. I walked back into the careers office at twenty-three and passed.

I mention it first because it is where the pattern starts, and because the reason this practice is called what it is has nothing to do with liking the sound of it. I had already done the thing the word means, seven years before I knew the word existed.

Commando training is the longest and hardest infantry training in the world, and I loved it.

I learned something about myself in it that I have used ever since. When the pressure mounts and you are wet, cold and short of sleep, humour is what carries you. Sometimes dark, sometimes stupid, but laughing while being beasted by the training team and telling myself it is only pain and it will end soon. I am fairly sure they thought I was a lunatic. It worked.

I finished in a different troop from the one I started in, after injuries, and passed out as most improved recruit with a marksman’s badge.

Twenty-four miles into the thirty-miler, my ankle went. Somebody asked if I had heard a crack. I had not, because I was too busy screaming. We laced the boot back up rather than open it, walked it off for a hundred metres or so, and then ran the last six miles across Dartmoor and came in inside the time. Torn ligament. Passing out was a fortnight away, so I strapped it and got back on the drill square.

Difficult is not the same as impossible. I have been proving that to myself since I was sixteen.

I later trained as an Assault Engineer, which is where the spinal damage and the prolapsed discs came from, and it is why I finished with a medical discharge. I was devastated, and then I got on with it. It has not stopped me. I climbed Kilimanjaro last year and suffered accordingly.

The first thing that struck me was that the rules had changed.

I would arrange to meet a client at a given time and they would not turn up. In the military, letting somebody down was a sin and being late came a close second. And people lied, routinely, in a way that would have been unthinkable where I had come from. Picking the truth out of what I was told became a skill I had to learn from scratch.

I started in asbestos surveying and moved into industrial roofing, and I will be honest about how that went at first. I found subcontractors who did the work, and they knew I was green, and they took advantage. It was expensive and it was painful, and it taught me the single most useful lesson available, which is what not to do.

Making it by luck is not making it. It is getting there by the grace of God rather than by experience.

So I went and closed the gap. I enrolled with the Institute of Roofing, passed their technicians course, and later served as Regional Chair for the South West until the role ceased when the Institute was absorbed into the CIOB.

I went round and round it for weeks.

The turnover did not obviously carry it, and once I had signed that off their mortgage was coming out of my decision every month whether the work came in or not. That is a weight nobody warns you about and nobody who has not done it quite understands.

It was the hardest call I made in those years and it was also the best one, because it gave me back the time to go out and sell, and the business grew because of it.

It was never the arithmetic that made it difficult.

The contracts got heavier than my understanding of them, so I started a six-year law degree with the Open University, evenings and weekends, while running the business. That gave me my LLB.

Then the terms got heavier still as the turnover climbed towards six million, so I went back and did a Master’s in Construction Law and Dispute Resolution with Leeds Beckett. Four-year programme, and I finished it in two.

Neither of those made me better at the trade. What they did was close the distance between knowing the work and running the business, which is a different thing entirely and is where most of us come unstuck.

Be better today than you were yesterday. That is not a slogan I adopted. It appears to be what I have been doing since I was sixteen.

I founded a charity to get veterans the support they were entitled to and were not getting. Any cap badge, any service, as long as they were of working age and needed a hand. Work, shelter, a plan, somebody to talk to who spoke the language.

It was just me. The business by day, the charity in the evenings and at weekends.

It was the most worthwhile thing I have done and it very nearly broke me.

Twenty years of watching capable people make poor decisions under pressure, myself included.

What I noticed is that people stop looking at what the problem is doing to them and look only at the problem, and that is precisely the point where the thinking gets worse. No amount of experience protects you from it. I hit the wall in my own business and made some of my worst calls in exactly that state.

I used coaches over the years and they were good. They helped with the problem. What none of them could touch was the state I was in while I was trying to solve it.

So I read, and then I trained. The Level 7 coaching qualification first, then the clinical work, and I did both with executives in mind rather than as a general therapy training. The people I had spent twenty years around were dealing with stress, acquisitions, teams that were not working, and sometimes just wanting to be sharper at something they were already good at. All of that sits in the same place, which is what happens in your head when there is a lot riding on it.

Once you get past the idea that hypnosis is a man on a stage making people cluck like chickens, and understand what the brain actually is and what it can be persuaded to do, a great deal of self-imposed suffering turns out to be optional.

In March 1941 the centre of Plymouth burned. St Andrew’s, the mother church of the city, was left a roofless shell.

The next morning somebody nailed a board over the door with one word on it. RESURGAM. I shall rise again.

It stayed there. The church was not properly rebuilt until 1957, and in the meantime it held services in the open ruin, roof or no roof. That is the part I keep coming back to. They did not wait until they were whole to start operating again, and they put the word up first, while it was still smoking, before there was any evidence it was true.

There is a carved granite plaque over that door today. It is a short walk from where I see clients.

Not comfort. Reconstruction.

That most people are not broken. They are running a system that is doing its job perfectly well on information nobody has updated.

That the change is yours. I can put the tools in your hands and show you how to use them, and after that it is you doing it, which is the whole reason it lasts.

That knowing what is outside what I do is part of being any good at it. If you need somebody else, I would rather tell you that than take the booking.

That you are owed the truth about whether it is working, every session, including when it is not what either of us was hoping for.

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