A little arithmetic tells you I turned 69 this July. Over the past week, I’ve received dozens of LinkedIn messages from around the Pharma & MedTech world congratulating me on another anniversary, my 34th year with Team Consulting. Team was formally incorporated on November 11th 1986, but the photo below shows (R-L) me, John Targell, Perran Newman, Peter Sharpe and Alan Goodman, all in the pub on the day in October 1986 when we each put a fiver in a moneybox, symbolically launching the venture which has filled the last 34 years and which, give or take a month or two, accounts for 50% of my time on earth.
Whatever visions for our company we founders had that evening in the Chaise and Pair, Barkway, 5 years seemed a long way off (and would anyway see me turning 40 – now that sounded scary). Yet 5 years from that October evening at the pub, we would come within a hairsbreadth of losing our firm, my house and all our hopes. We didn’t, and that’s another story – but trust me, it’s better not to know the future!
By 1998 I was the only remaining founder, Team was becoming established in the Pharma/MedTech world and operating out of a Georgian manor house (a bit more glamorous than the Victorian abattoir which preceded it, or the 1960’s house with workshop we began with).
Following a steady upward trajectory, Team became 100% employee-owned in 2016. We now operate from a beautiful campus site south of Cambridge, and the tribulations of the past third of a century are perhaps ancient history of which few are aware.
In half of my own lifetime, the change has been astonishing.
I now have three grown-up children and five granddaughters. My youngest son, Tom, is 33; he has never known his dad working anywhere but Team. He was too young to remember the toughest days, but he’s observed the difficulties that come with building a business.
He is now a highly skilled games designer and has built a company which, like Team, comprises a group of enterprising, like-minded, skilled professionals committed to each other and respected within their industry. He also believes in commitment, honesty and delivering the right product – as does his dad, and Team Consulting. I pray that when he is the age I am now, he can look back with pride at what has been built and the people who built it.
I know that I can.
