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My Early Life

Beginnings

My childhood was unremarkable – I was born in Coventry and grew up in the small town of Nuneaton in Warwickshire. What did mark me out as different was being an adopted child. Whilst I came from a very loving home, there was an imbalance somewhere; I felt I had something to prove. I think my drive was a result of not knowing where I came from.

At school I was above average but not amazing. I studied really hard to get seven O levels and then left sixth-form college after only 12 months to join Sterling Metals as a management trainee, a foundry making components for automotive and aerospace industries where my father also worked. All my friends were off to university but I knew I was going in the right direction – it didn’t feel like a big risk.

Early career

I progressed quickly at Sterling, but in 1990 I left when I was headhunted by Massey Ferguson the agricultural tractor manufacturer. I had a great time with this company but came to realise life in a big company was not for me. By the summer of 1991 I had met my future wife Trudi via Dateline and declared my intention to move in with her in London and start my own business.

I registered for a one-week training programme with the British Standards Institute on auditing management systems of companies and in August of that year I left Nuneaton, moved in with Trudi in her flat in Crystal Palace and started my business. I was providing quality assurance and training consultancy to small businesses, mostly within manufacturing. The word entrepreneur meant nothing to me at that time, but unbeknown to me I was on my way.

My first business – Martyn Dawes Associates

There are a number of things I notice from my early entrepreneurial endeavours. Firstly, I was not looking for a gap in the market to fill. Instead, I was applying what I knew from my professional career to date. This was enough to get me started. I also began to recognise that very often your environment plays a big part in the success you achieve.

Two such factors laid the foundations for me to start my own business. My career in quality assurance and the training I had undertaken (paid for by myself) gave me the credentials to help businesses introduce quality management systems to the ISO9000 standard, which at the time more and more companies were being required to implement by their customers.

The second factor was my girlfriend. Crucially, she supported my ambitions 100% and encouraged me to think bigger than I knew. She had just met me and was happy to be the main source of income whilst I got my business off the ground.

My business was called (somewhat unimaginatively) Martyn Dawes Associates (MDA). I had no idea who the associates were, but somehow it gave the impression that it was more than just me operating out of the back bedroom in Trudi’s south London flat. I was successfully winning clients from day one. I noticed I loved the thrill of identifying the opportunity and winning the business.

When Trudi joined me as a business partner we started winning clients such as The Burton Group and delivering consultancy support to help companies achieve the Investors in People standard. We really started to motor and landed clients such as USA Today, Selfridges and Sandvik.

MDA gave me a terrific grounding in business basics. We were very successful, but after about four years I started to ask myself whether what I wanted to achieve with the business was realistic. I was determined to scale up and build a larger firm and longer-term client base to grow the firm to the next level. Driving the momentum of a growth business is essential – a sense of pace and urgency is critical – but this behaviour has to go with the right sort of business.

I realised that as a professional services firm we were forever trying to create products or services that could be delivered repeatedly in order to create some degree of predictable fee income – but it became clear that it was almost impossible to build this kind of business in a planned and measured way. Worse still, MDA (by now renamed Dawes Ryan Consulting, DRC) was an adjunct to its clients. If they grew so did we, if they contracted it was likely our fee income would shrink too.

DRC was a great business I could be proud of but I realised I craved building a company that could really grow and trying to drive DRC forward at breakneck speed was not the answer. I would have to look elsewhere.

My realisation was that I wanted to build a business with a product and that wasn’t so reliant on a small number of high-value clients, something that wasn’t all about a fee for a day’s work. It was time to set my sights higher and look for a high-growth business opportunity.

Learning points

 When you know it’s right, jump. Don’t hesitate or over analyse.

 Be prepared to stand up for what you believe in and don’t follow the crowd; if you need to fit in with friends and colleagues you’re probably not an entrepreneur.

 Think bigger than you know and set goals that are almost beyond you – they won’t always come off but when they do the confidence boost will propel you forward to the next goal.

 Pushing forward is vital but all businesses can only grow at a certain rate; learn what is the optimum pace of expansion for your business and sector.