Background
Before entering the commercial world, I spent seven years serving in the Royal Marines.
It was an environment where preparation mattered, standards mattered and responsibility could not simply be passed to somebody else when circumstances became difficult.
I don’t believe military experience automatically translates into business ability. Business requires a different set of skills. But discipline, adaptability, preparation and taking responsibility for outcomes have remained with me throughout my career.
After leaving the Royal Marines, I moved into sales and business development. Over the following eight years, I developed commercial experience across sales, business development and revenue generation. During that period, I also founded several businesses of my own.
Not everything worked. Building businesses first-hand exposed me to the realities of finding customers, generating revenue, making decisions with imperfect information and being responsible for the consequences.
My career later moved into security and operations, adding responsibility for delivering services effectively in the real world. Those experiences eventually converged in Civsec Group.
Building Civsec Group
I founded Civsec Group with the ambition of building a significant group of essential service businesses through acquisition and long-term ownership.
Across the UK there are thousands of good businesses built over decades by founders and management teams who understand their customers, employees and industries exceptionally well. Many will eventually face questions about succession, ownership and what comes next. I believe there is an opportunity to provide some of those businesses with a long-term home.
Civsec Group focuses on sectors where reliability, technical capability and customer relationships matter, including fire and security, compliance, facilities management, technical building services, electrical controls and building management systems.
How I think about ownership
I don’t believe acquiring a business gives a buyer permission to disregard everything that made it successful. The first responsibility of a new owner is to understand the business.
Buy carefully.
Protect what works.
Build for the long term.
Improvement might mean investing in people, systems, sales capability, technology, management or operational discipline. But growth should strengthen a business rather than undermine the qualities that made it worth acquiring in the first place.
Building for the long term
My ambition for Civsec Group is significant. But I am more interested in building something durable than appearing successful quickly.
I intend to document parts of that process here: acquisitions, operating businesses, entrepreneurship, sales and leadership—what works, what doesn’t, and how my thinking develops as Civsec grows.
There is a considerable distance between starting something and building something enduring. That’s the part I’m interested in.
