For years I was fascinated by a simple question: how do the businesses we now think of as major companies actually get there?
I'd started several businesses from scratch, so I knew what it was like to begin with an idea, find customers, generate revenue, and build something where nothing existed before. There's something genuinely satisfying about that process. But the more time I spent in business, the more interested I became in scale. I didn't want to simply start another company. I wanted to understand how enduring businesses were built, how organisations grew beyond their founders, and how a collection of good businesses could become something significantly greater than the sum of its parts. That curiosity eventually led me to acquisitions, and ultimately to Civsec Group.
My route here wasn't conventional
I didn't come into acquisitions through investment banking or private equity. My background is considerably less conventional: modest beginnings, significant challenges from a young age, and seven years in the Royal Marines, an environment that fundamentally shaped how I think about responsibility, standards, and operating under pressure.
After leaving the military, I spent eight years across sales and business development, and started businesses of my own along the way. Some worked; others didn't work as well as I'd hoped. But building from scratch teaches you things that are difficult to learn from a textbook. You discover very quickly that a business isn't a logo, a website, or a Companies House registration. It's customers choosing you when they have other options, people turning up every morning, cash flow, reputation, and systems developed through years of trial and error. Above all, it's execution.
I later moved into security and operations, which gave me another perspective: what it actually takes to deliver consistently when customers depend on the service being provided. Looking back, those experiences seem disconnected on paper. To me, they increasingly became pieces of the same puzzle.
Why acquisitions?
Starting businesses taught me how difficult it is to create something valuable from nothing, and it made me appreciate businesses that have already survived that process. Across Britain there are thousands of companies that have taken their owners decades to build. They have customers, employees, technical knowledge, supplier relationships, reputations, and, in many cases, recurring or repeat business earned over years rather than created through a marketing campaign.
Many of those companies now face a fundamental question: what happens when the founder wants to step away? Britain has an ageing population of business owners, and over the coming years, increasing numbers will need to think seriously about succession. Some businesses will pass to family. Some will be acquired by competitors or private equity. Some will simply close. I believe there's another option worth building: acquire good businesses, protect what made them successful, and provide the support and long-term ownership they need for their next chapter. That's the idea behind Civsec Group.
Why essential services?
We're deliberately focused on businesses that perform work the economy actually needs: fire and security, compliance, facilities management, technical building services, and electrical controls and building management systems. These aren't always the businesses that attract headlines, and that's part of the appeal. A building still needs to operate safely. Fire systems still need to be maintained. Critical equipment still needs servicing. Regulatory obligations still need to be met. Customers still need competent people who turn up and solve problems. I'm attracted to businesses where the value proposition is rooted in doing something useful, necessary, and difficult to replace.
Buying a business is not the same as building one
One thing I've become increasingly convinced of is that acquisition alone creates very little value. Buying companies isn't the achievement. Building them is. An established business may have taken its founder twenty or thirty years to create, and walking through the door on completion day doesn't suddenly mean the new owner understands it better than the people who built it. That demands humility.
Our approach at Civsec isn't to acquire a business and immediately change everything. It's to understand what already works first: why do customers stay, who are the people everyone relies on, where does the institutional knowledge sit, what makes employees proud of the company, and which processes are genuinely valuable even if they've never been written down in a manual. Only once you understand those things should you start asking where the business can get better.
Technology can improve. Systems can improve. Commercial capabilities can improve. Management teams can be supported. Businesses can cross-sell, share expertise, and benefit from belonging to something larger. But growth that destroys the qualities that made a company worth acquiring in the first place isn't intelligent growth.
The opportunity ahead
I don't underestimate what I'm attempting. Building a group through acquisitions requires capital, judgement, patience, operational discipline, and the ability to bring different people and businesses together. There will be deals we pursue and don't win, businesses we decide aren't right for us, and undoubtedly mistakes along the way. There will be periods when progress looks considerably less impressive from the outside than the eventual result, and that's part of the attraction. I've never been particularly interested in choosing a path because it was easy. From modest beginnings to the Royal Marines, from sales to entrepreneurship and operations, some of the most important periods of my life have involved taking on things that initially looked bigger than me. Civsec is another one of those challenges. This time, though, the ambition is considerably larger.
What we're trying to build
I want Civsec Group to become a significant long-term owner of essential service businesses. Not through acquisition at any cost, not by collecting companies for the sake of announcing transactions, and not by pretending a spreadsheet tells you everything worth knowing about a business. I want us to acquire carefully, work with good people, protect strong businesses, and create an environment in which they can become better.
If we do that successfully, the impact extends beyond Civsec. It means giving business owners another credible succession option. It means protecting companies that took decades to establish. It means creating opportunities for the people inside those businesses. And it means building an organisation capable of serving customers at a scale I could never have achieved by simply starting another small company from scratch.
The demographic shift among Britain's business owners creates an extraordinary opportunity. My own experiences made me want to take it on. Together, they created something close to a perfect storm. That's why I'm building Civsec Group.