The door taught me more than the boardroom did. It took me thirty years to notice.

 

I left school in Merthyr Tydfil at sixteen and Wales at seventeen. For almost eleven years after that I worked nightclub doors in South London. It's a strange education. You learn how quickly a room decides who you are. You learn that the loudest man in the queue is rarely the one to watch. And you learn, usually the hard way, that the person you most need to control on a Saturday night is yourself.

 

I went into corporate sales with no degree and plenty to prove. For a while that was enough. Then I was passed over for a regional manager job in Scotland, one I'd been certain was mine. It went to a Scottish colleague, which made perfect sense to everyone except me. I was furious. Underneath the fury was something worse: the suspicion that they'd seen me more clearly than I'd seen myself.

 

What came next was the making of me. I took on an Autogas division turning over £250,000 and grew it to £6 million, building a joint venture with Shell along the way. Then came a region of 160 people and £80 million. Then my first director role and first overseas posting, in Poland, followed by Australia, the Netherlands, Singapore and China.

 

Not all of it was wise. Australia had been a dream for years. It turned out to be a small market and a slower pace than I was ready for, closer to semi-retirement than a career. Admitting that, first to myself and then to the business, led straight to my next role: Strategic Sales Director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

 

Looking back, the part I was good at was never the numbers. It was people. Several of those I led went on to C-suite roles, one of them to chief executive. That still means more to me than any target I hit.

 

Alongside all this, I chaired The Wallich, Wales's largest homelessness charity, through Covid. The Welsh Government required that everyone sleeping rough be housed, and we had to deliver it. I also sat on the board of National Theatre Wales.

 

Now I write, speak and coach from Singapore. The Power Within: Ancient Greek Wisdom for Modern Leaders is my first book. I host The Power Within podcast, and I'm a certified clinical hypnotherapist.

 

Underneath all of it is one belief. Pressure rarely finds a leader short of ability. It finds the gap between who they are and how they lead. The Greeks were writing about that gap two and a half thousand years ago. I learned it on a door in Catford.