From entrepreneurial dreams to reality, what inspires people and where does the journey start? My inspiration began when I was around the age of four.
Each day, my mother would collect my brother, sister, and me after school, and we would head to our grandma and grandad’s house. On the way, we always stopped at a corner shop called Spreclys, located at the corner of Fletton High Street and Duke Street in Fletton, Peterborough.
The shop fascinated me. It was packed from floor to ceiling, with absolutely no wall space visible. The smells, colours and vast array of things drew me into this captivating world of retail.
In an instant, I wanted to be like the man behind the counter. He would empty sweets from a big glass jar into a bowl on the weighing machine and then quickly transfer them into a brown paper bag. My mum would hand him money, and I thought, “Wow, I want to be a shopkeeper.”
That was when I was first inspired to be like that man in control of his life. I remember when we got home, I asked my mum to keep all the empty tins, jars and boxes so I could make a shop of my own, then pretended to sell them to customers, my mum’s friends.
That thought never left my mind. The idea of one day owning a shop and being self-sufficient carried me through the next 11 years.
Each day, as I sat in class, not understanding the lessons, the only thing I could understand was what I wanted, so I planned in my head what I would do from the moment I opened my shop door to when I closed it.
Looking back now, I realize it was like taking a drug to numb the pain—the pain of not being like everyone else, not knowing the teachers’ names or what they even taught.
My thoughts took me away; I wanted to escape that house of horrors each day and find a job to earn money and feel free.
At the age of seven, as far as I know, I was the only one in that institution who couldn’t read or write, yet I was the only one who had earned money in my pocket.
One day, just after 9 am, the teacher caught me eating a biscuit; he asked if I had enough breakfast. I replied that I had not had breakfast because I had been to work. I was eight years old, and the class howled with laughter. I didn’t know what was funny; didn’t everyone work?
Dreams are inspiering. After leaving school at 15 and going through 18 jobs, I finally became self-employed, cleaning windows at the age of 24. Three years later, on 6 April 1977, we started our first shop selling second-hand prams in a two-up, two-down terrace house.
Fast forward 34 years. On 14 February 2011, when the average independent baby nursery shop had six staff members, we had grown to 125 full-time employees in one shop, and I had decided it was time to sell.
Marilyn, my wife, had the idea for the shop all those years ago. At the time, I had forgotten and closed off my thoughts and memories of my early days as I was far too busy trying to make a living, but her enthusiasm inspired me, and memories came flooding back.
In those 34 years, it appeared to people that we worked so hard, but in my mind, I never worked a single day as it was our family’s life. I was inspired and wanted to inspire everyone around me.
The hardest thing in life is to be inspired; turning that inspiration into reality is easy.
After that, Marilyn was my inspiration for writing a book,