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Greetings!
Three months after selling his company for multi-millions, a man was sitting on his sofa at three in the afternoon, still in his dressing gown, watching television.
He had the money. He had the time. He had done everything he'd set out to do.
His wife came home from her nursing shift and asked what on earth he was doing.
He didn't have an answer.
Jonathan Neill built a school sports equipment service and repair business from a garden shed into a national company of 110 staff, serving more than 20,000 schools across the country. Fifteen years later, he sold it for a multi-million pound sum.
And then he sat on the sofa in his dressing gown.
His point isn't that success is hollow. It's something more uncomfortable than that. The traits that let you build something worth buying - the control, the discipline, the need to be needed - don't switch off the day the deal closes. Jonathan had spent fifteen years making himself unnecessary to the business. After the sale, he had to learn the same lesson all over again. This time for his own life.
Before any of that, he hadn't taken a single holiday in ten years. He was doing the quoting, the invoicing and the engineering himself, hiring people out of desperation just to keep pace with the work piling up. It took a coach he initially suspected of running "some sort of cult" to ask him a question he'd never once asked himself: what do you actually want this business to look like in twenty years?
He didn't have an answer to that one either.
In this conversation, Jonathan describes - plainly, without the polish - what fifteen years of getting it wrong and then right actually looked like:
- Why hiring "out of desperation" cost him two years of the wrong people leaving
- The end-game question that changed how he ran everything
- A quarterly reward scheme that cost £10,000 and moved the bottom line by £100,000
- How he absorbed five competitors without buying a single one of them
- A fax machine marketing method that outperformed email for years
- An electronic quoting system built in India that turned a two-week wait into an instant answer
- What hiring a finance director did to how the business funded its own growth
- What actually happened in his head in the months after the money landed
- Starting again from four staff and no schools - and doing it in an hour a week the second time
This conversation is for you if you're still doing the invoicing and the quoting yourself. If you're growing fast and starting to notice the wrong people are staying too long. If you've never written down what you want the business to look like in twenty years. If you're weighing up whether to buy a competitor or simply out-compete them. If you're already picturing life after the sale and haven't thought past the first few months.
Jonathan isn't handing you a formula. He's showing you the workings.
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