I remember driving up to Ford Halewood as it was called back then in my snazzy red mark 1 Toyota MR2 and hearing a song on Radio 1 that captivated me. One of the things Baz Luhrmann said in his 1999 hit “Sunscreen”, was “what ever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much or berate yourself either, your choices are half chance, so are everybody else’s”. That (along with quite a lot of the lyrics in that song) have stuck with me ever since.
Starting out as a Mechanical and then Manufacturing Engineer, working on projects I could only have dreamed of when I was a boy (I can bore you about them if we ever meet with little encouragement!), I always imagined I would spend the rest of my career working on Automotive projects – little did I know that things would evolve the way they have.
I have been fantastically blessed to have developed through my career into more and more commercially focused roles, but because of my Manufacturing and Engineering background and qualifications, always with a passion for manufacturing and engineering.
The decisions, or half chances as Baz accurately describes have meant I have worked for and had senior leadership positions in a diverse set of companies, from small private equity backed startups, through family owned businesses, right up to multi billion dollar multinational giants. The same half chances meant I have also worked across a vast array of markets, Automotive, Highways, Commercial Graphics, Oil and Gas, Hazardous Waste, Precious Metal Recovery, Construction and Rail just to name a few, not to mention winning major contracts for London 2012.
This luck or half chances taken has put me in the unique position of being able to help companies that have the ambitions to evolve to achieve that ambition. There are some really great companies, with some fantastic leaders, but who have not been lucky enough to have been exposed to the inner working of the companies are markets that are trying to get into or become. It’s a classic example of “you don’t know what you don’t know, until you realise you didn’t know it” or something along those lines.
I set up The Clay Partnership to be the helping hand for those companies, so they can call on us help them get to the next stage of their plan, even to help them write the plan if needed. Whether it be Sales, Marketing of Recruitment, the experience the team and I have harvested over many years means we can speak with authority and from direct experience when building a long term commercial plan, firefighting todays challenges or finding the right candidate to take your company forwards.
We are the hands on support you need to turn a vision into reality.
I am fiercely passionate about keeping things simple, doing what you are good at and letting others you can trust to do the other things and we can provide as much or as little support you need.
As with all of the work we do at The Clay Partnership, this is not complicated, it should be simple, we work in the background, with our customers to make them the heroes, not us.
See what else we do at The Clay Partnership and get in touch to see how we can help you make the change.
