Later this year, we will be celebrating our 30th anniversary here at Team, and over the summer holidays, Peter Sharpe, one of the original five founders of Team, sent me a few photos from the formation of the company all those years ago. I thought the first one, taken in October 1986 in the Chaise & Pair pub, Barkway High Street, would be of interest.
The photo captures all five of us at once – and all smiling (which at times, especially in the early years, was not always the case I can assure you). The Chaise & Pair was our boardroom for the first couple of months before Team’s incorporation and indeed for a few weeks afterwards (it was converted back into a private dwelling about 15 years ago).
The formation of Team Consulting Ltd, October 1986
The day that photo was taken (by Keith, the landlord, a retired army officer and a ‘bit of a character’), we each put a symbolic fiver into a money box. Little did we know how much more we would commit over the coming years, and of course none of us had any idea of what Team would actually be 30 years on – but we had enough enthusiasm, determination, faith and ‘chutzpah’ to get on and do it. Peter Sharpe and I have wondered from time to time what happened to the money box and the £25 in now faded and moth-eaten notes!
The second photo (below) features me, much younger and not as cynical, at my desk at our first premises. That was the first floor of 36 High Street in Barkway, Hertfordshire. The building was a 1960s built 2-story house with a ‘tumbledown’ workshop at the rear (and was a convenient two minute walk from the Chaise & Pair).
Note the absence of a computer. We possessed just one Amstrad 1640, which lived alongside a dot-matrix printer in another room. Forget email, after all, this was 1986, so the world wide web, internet, routine emailing etc. was still at least five years away.
Any urgent documents were sent as a fax, but we didn’t have a fax machine either, so faxes were sent from a nearby office in Barley which published ‘Hertfordshire Life’ and had an accommodating manager.
Back in 1986, we never would have thought we’d be where we are today.
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