So here is my story...

I’ll start with a little personal information. I am married to my wonderful wife Michele and have two super sons (an Accountant and a Television Producer) and two lovely stepdaughters (a Project Manager and a Customer Services Advisor).
 

In my younger years, I enjoyed a fun and fulfilling Round Table career and more recently became a Rotarian with my local Rotary club and have been given the honour of becoming next year’s President which I’m really looking forward to. Both organisations have enabled me to make many long-term friends and engage with various charities and local organisations and ‘give something back’ to my local community in Bedfordshire. On the business front and following a successful career with NatWest, which included training and consultancy roles working with seconded accountants from the UK’s major accountancy firms and becoming an Associate of the Chartered Institute of Bankers, I left in the year 2000 to start my own business consultancy company.

Realising the opportunities that were emerging in UK Franchising, I started to specialise in this sector, which ultimately led to the establishment of Franchise Finance Limited which became a multi award winning company and the UK Franchise’s premier provider of brokered finance, business planning and business training.

I became a British Franchise Association Qualified Franchise Professional (QFP) and then I and my team, trained many franchisors through our Training Academy to become similarly qualified, thus helping to raise the standards, professionalism and financial awareness across the industry. We also set about training their franchisees. This is something that I am both very proud of and passionate about.

We also raised our own £50m fund for lending into the sector, which complemented our broking work with the bank franchise departments and our panel of asset finance specialists.

My dear friend and business partner, Stuart Walsh and I, sold Franchise Finance to Hitachi Capital in 2018 and I took some ‘time out’ to decide ‘what’s next’, with one option being early retirement.

After a few months I found that I wasn’t very good at retiring because I was well and truly hooked on franchising, and having been asked to take on some other roles and non-exec positions I found three that were tugging at my heart strings because they involved things that I cared about.

So, I became:

1) A shareholder and Chairman of Chantry Group, a ‘franchise’ marketing and recruitment company in which I subsequently led the establishment of a resales brokerage and valuations division, within the business.

2) A senior consultant for NGI Finance who wanted me to help them enter the franchise sector and guide them on their Journey to provide a top tier franchise funding and business planning service (NGI Franchise Funding was subsequently created to do this).

3) Co-founder and Chairman of Franchise Business Training and Consultancy, which is doing exactly what we did in the Franchise Finance Training Academy, i.e. providing workshops and training courses for franchisees and franchisors, covering subjects such as understanding business finance and accounts and preparing business plans and projections. The business also provides consultancy services in the form of detailed business health-checks.

So why am I writing a book?

People sometimes say they feel ‘they have a book in them’ and after many years of speaking at franchise conferences and exhibitions, writing training material and various articles and blogs and being a judge for a variety of franchise award schemes, I came to the conclusion that I fell into this category. So, given that I had played my part in the above three ventures, I decided to bite the bullet and retire, but in the process, to write my book by pulling together all the various strands of my career, which fell broadly into 3 categories, which were:

1. Starting businesses and helping other people to start businesses

2. Growing businesses and helping other people to grow businesses

3. Selling businesses and helping other people to sell businesses

This led me to creating something I now call the ‘Value Growth Business Model’, which is at the core of my book.