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The founder of Authentic Transformation describes the journey that has led him to the path he is now on. "By conventional standards my formal education was not a success. I spent most of my time very confused as to why I was there
and what was expected of me. After school I went to the local college for a bit, ostensibly to do 'Business Studies'. In reality this had nothing at all to do with entrepreneurship (which would have been interesting), and a lot to do with preparing students for a career in insurance or banking (which I was not!). The beauty of this education was that I was never taught how to think and I find one of the greatest strengths is to be able to question everything and think differently. I got a job selling trucks so that I could leave college
and left that job to start my real education by going motor racing. Three
years of race driving, running the team, finding the money
and preparing the car taught me a lot and left me in debt (a bit like
university). I learned about management and motivation, organisation and
planning, selling and media and fear, focus, flow and commitment. I still
don't think I have had another flow experience like the last 2 hours of
a 24 hour race that I did. The Mac was amazing, I chose it because I felt that I would not have to learn to use a computer in those pre-Windows days. The Mac allowed me to communicate in writing for the first time and this was a huge liberation. At school my hand writing had been deemed so poor that instead of teaching me how to write the focus was on teaching me how to shape letters. So I only learned to write properly after I got my first computer at the age of 24 My business was devising and selling special media products to sponsors and led to me being recruited by one of my clients. I was still very much going with the flow and had no plan of my own. Three weeks after I started working for the company they went into liquidation, it was less of a shock this time but I still had that sick feeling in my stomach and felt the blood drain from my head. The Directors and I got together and were able to raise money from a contact of one of the Directors and restart another exhibition business and fairly soon I was asked to be Managing Director. We ran a number of events, never successful enough to feel we were winning, never disastrous enough to persuade us to stop. I remember standing on the balcony of Grand Hall Olympia seeing thousands of people flooding in through the door and feeling a huge wave of relief that we had finally cracked it. We sold the business to a subsidiary of a French publishing group. We ran another even larger event which nearly broke even and our new owners decided it would be better if we moved into their offices. This move coupled with a number of broken promises took what little energy their was left in the business and after three months I resigned. I had a small payoff and some money from the sale of my shares and I decided to spend these starting another business, still with no real plan for my life. After three months the money had gone, the investors had not materialised and I had to get another job. I was still thinking in a conventional way and so I ended up taking a job organising exhibitions. I was not and never had been a natural exhibition organiser, but I could do both the strategic bit at the front end and I could sell. After a depressing and stressful year, and organising a successful event, I took a three week holiday in Australia and New Zealand over Christmas. When I got back they sacked me. I was more used to this by now and had my own computer and car, I was quickly back on my feet and through a recruitment consultant I got a job with a publicly quoted digital design company. It was early days for digital design in the UK and my remit was to help the business transform from a CD-ROM publishing business to an internet services agency. When I was interviewed they told me that they had £1 Million in the bank from their public offering and that they were committed to becoming a web agency. If they had they would have been by far the largest in London at that time with 80 staff. What actually happened was that three weeks after I joined I went to the MD with my plan to migrate the company from CDs to internet, only to be told that actually they had spent all of the money and so I would have to achieve the transformation for free. I did manage to sell a few projects and over the next six months saw the number of spare coffee cups in the kitchen increase as people left. One day all of the remaining staff were called in for a meeting and told that the company was going to close, it was not going into liquidation because of the royalty income on the CD-ROMs, it was just going to close as an employer. We were told that we would get a final month's salary if we continued to come in to the office for a month. Still with no plan for my life I was now looking for where the wind would blow me next in a very well equipped, high tech job club. I got a job with a little web design company near London Bridge called CHBi. The atmosphere and energy of this place were entirely different to anything I had experienced, there was passion, idealism and energy. This group of people, together with the internet, were going to change the world. I loved it. Over 2 years the 16 person company I had joined transformed into Razorfish, one of the largest and certainly the coolest web design company that flourished briefly during what became known as the dot com boom. It was the first time in my life that I felt trusted and I blossomed. There was a deeply ingrained sense of enquiery in the team that suited me perfectly and our training courses were inspiring, transformative and enlightening. As Razorfish grew dangerously quickly our wonderful energy came to be diluted and when the dot com bubble burst it crashed in a frightening and painful way. Friends turned on friends as we struggled to comprehend how our lovely little world had been so brutally shaken. In the end after a desperate attempt to save it many of us took redundancy rather than continue to participate in the brutalisation of our dream. As I left I vowed never to compromise my values again.
I had a few months off while I worked out what to do and turned the rest
of my life upside down as well, I cycled over the Pyrenees and then took
another job, just to prove to myself that it was definitely the wrong
thing for me to do. At this point I also finally moved out of London to
Bath and one day I was in our sitting room flicking through a couple of
business magazines and wondering why I never read them. I realised that it was because the magazines were about businesses that were simply for profit and that I did not find that inspiring. No wonder I had so often felt uncomfortable in those meetings. I realised that I wanted to read a magazine that wrote about inspiring businesses that existed for more than just profit. After a few seconds of research I realised that such a magazine did not exist and that I would have to start one. It was in this moment that the term and the concept of authentic business came to me as both a personal and a global solution to the issues we face. That was in December 2001. Since then the concept and my ability to articulate it has evolved into authenticbusiness.co.uk, Authentic Guides and Authentic Transformation which started at the beginning of 2005 as a clarification of the services that I can offer. In September 2007 we moved to Mallorca where I had already been running the Authentic Transformation Advance events. We life in a wonderful small village in the mountains with our two children Minnie and Casper. The village is also the home of C'an Pujola, the centre where we run the Total Potential Retreat. My wife Benedicte has now joined me in the business to offer her speciality of relationhship coaching.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of the earth. Your playing small does not serve the world. Theres nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people wont feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do... And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As were liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
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