- I was a board director of a local builder’s merchant... >
I was a board director of a local builder’s merchant, a £200m business, which was taken over in 1992. I was on a very nice corporate ladder, but decided to come down from it after I was made redundant and when my wife and I were trying to adopt.
I think I probably became an entrepreneur by accident. I was 32 at the time and it had taken us three years to get onto the adoption list. My wife said whatever we did, we couldn’t move because we didn’t have another three years to play the adoption game.
When my employer was taken over Teesside had ICI, UK Steel, and us and there wasn’t exactly a hot bed of £200+m businesses. I could have gone to London, but we would have had to come off the adoption list. In those days you couldn’t adopt a baby when you were past the age of 36 so another three years wasn’t really on the cards.
I stayed in the North East and I reversed, the small in-house printing business, out with my redundancy in 1992. I’m not saying I would never have been an entrepreneur had we not adopted our little boy, who’s 15 now, but a nice steady life on the corporate ladder was very much what I had in mind at the time at the time.
Alan Timothyi-snapshot
