Why 2021 Was Never Going to Be A Disaster....

2021 What a year!

It’s difficult to say how badly it started. My wife was refused boarding onto a UK flight. That started a chain of events that almost had the family deported to multiple different countries, most of us surviving as illegal immigrants, ransoms being raised, and threats of violence, blackmail and intimidation being reported to the police…

 In a very glum hour, we stood in the bowels of Dubai airport just before Christmas last year and vowed that the family would stay together through thick and thin.

We’d packed up everything in Malaysia, put all our possessions into storage and turned our back on the warmth of the climate and Malaysians, and my beloved jungles. The stopover in Dubai should have been hours but it soon turned into months.

For a long time, we had no idea what the problem was as the UK Home Office wouldn’t talk to us, the consul seemed to think that helping British citizens was not part of the job description and the MP couldn’t get a meaningful response either. Thanks to the dozens of people who wrote to her pleading our case!

By the time we figured out the problem most of us had overstayed our tourist visas and the borders were closed. Because of a botched announcement by the Sultan, we were illegal and the only way to get out of the country was to become residents.

That took my wife, Senay, months. Hundreds of visits to government offices. Trying to solve bureaucratic conundrums such as getting Birth Certificates attested into Arabic when the Malaysian Ministry that did it was closed due to lockdown and didn’t do it anyway.

My part was small, but I still drove almost 4,000km as the temperature rose inexorably during the middle of the year and my Friday evening solo runs deep in the desert flagged, faltered, and finally failed in the face of 40C and then 50C heat.

Whilst Senay took care of this and the multitude of other tasks of finding us a home and schools in a foreign land I had to somehow find the money to pay for this, and the fines, with a business plan in total tatters.

I proudly proclaim that I am a company of one. The reality is that there are a lot of people who help me every step of the way each week. Kira and Lesley-Anne act as coaches and mentors, constantly challenging me to raise my game. Angela, Johan, Thilla and Malek share my struggles trying to get heard and make my presence felt; Simon, John, Domenic, Danica, Greg & Marck look at ways where we can bootstrap ourselves out of solo consulting roles. Then there is my writing group and Eileen who is always pushing me to write better copy.

If there is one thing that kept my business going this year it was them. Always timely, often critical, amazingly constructive advice that helps me lift my business up. Each a small voice, but behind me, an army.

Thank you, everyone.

When I started my consulting path, I chose really bad clients. Looking back every single one ended in a disaster and often in court. It was very difficult to see that it was them and not me. On the face of it, the evidence was that I was a f***wit. Yet, Senay gave me the strength to keep going, always telling me it’s not you, it’s them. Slowly I came to believe her, not just nodding at the words.

As I did David Baker’s words kept returning – the most important indicator of a consultant’s success is his confidence. I moved from being a great but beaten-up thinker to a confident consultant.

I worked on business models for a major church, government organisations and development agencies as well as dozens of startups. I held the hands of corporate leaders as they took their first steps into intrapreneurship and worked to ensure that proofs of concept for an oil and gas major demonstrated real economic value, not gee-whiz technology.

During the year I worked on blockchain, ai, Insuretech, food tech, drones, edtech, 5g and leadership startups (and more). I kept mentoring at one of the worlds most successful venture capital firms (was their top rate mentor) and joined the Sustainable Oceans Alliance as a mentor to help make the world a better place. Add in the deep tech innovation centre at one of the UK’s leading universities and the national innovation centre in a SE Asian country and it certainly got busy.

More than that I spent a huge amount of time developing my thought on business model innovation, trying to go far beyond existing books and research on the subject. Time and energy continually crippled me, but I wrote 150,000 words in the first draft and 70,000 in the second draft, both of which I ripped up. (that’s enough text for 3 normal length business books).

I lectured on platform design and theory for an Indian university and did more lectures, podcasts and webinars on business model innovation than I can remember. What came clear from all this is that understanding that I must simplify and clarify business model innovation if it is to be widely adopted by the millions of SMEs who need it most.

Then there was the fundraising, where working with several startups, we developed what looks to be a model for growing the business rapidly as we go into 2022. 

I applied some of this energy to the UK government and did a f**k you 1-inch thick visa application for Senay in June. The response came back quickly. “We can’t give you your green card (ILR)back because we don’t have a record of you ever having one”. The problem finally became clear. It was a bureaucratic screw-up. Fortunately, Senay still had the 1989 hand-typed letter giving her permission to live permanently in the UK. Days later we had our papers in order and headed to the airport in trepidation.

Nothing went wrong, but we were soon in prison in the UK under 24-hour guard. The government called it quarantine but at least I got to run round in a 10m-by-10m courtyard at 5 am for 20 minutes every morning.

Mum, Dad and my Mother-in-Law Meryem were all amazing. Having seen them all for just a couple of days every few years we’d got so used to being an island. We realised that we were part of a vast continent and that support and love made us realise that we were finally home to stay.

But where are we going to live? I had no idea. The UK was the same, but also a foreign country. We bought a car over the internet and rented a house. I had no idea what it looked like until we rolled up the drive. Senay had chosen well. Close to good schools (special needs ones, which meant another change of plan) and less than 5 minutes to the open fields and the ancient oak woods and even older volcanoes of the Charnwood.

We did Gladiator through the ripening cornfield, gorged on fish and chips and kebabs and had a pork pie dispenser installed in the fridge. That’s a joke. The dispenser was for the diet coke which stands between me and a resurgence of my smoking.

Slowly but surely, we settled. Senay had to go back to the UAE on a mission of mercy which is when a lot of scary shit happened. We’ll never go back there or even transit. I had an equally scary time looking after all the children on my own for weeks. All of them wanted to keep their hair, so I learned how to brush it rather than giving them a marine buzz.   

The family got covid, mildly, but this didn’t stop us from putting up a Christmas tree and surrounding it with presents.

Yesterday I got an email from a client saying that ‘I was the best investment he had ever made’. Then I got messages from both 500 Global and MaGIC tell me that I was one of their top-rated mentors! Awesome! It was a nice finish to a year that could have gone so wrong at so many points.

Why didn’t it? The biggest reason was that Senay and I trusted each other. She did her part. I did mine and we both delivered. There was no backbiting, second-guessing or backseat driving. That gave us a huge foundation.

Secondly, friends, families and strangers came through for us on so many occasions. Work always appeared, help was always offered, solutions always appeared.

Thirdly, after each and every disaster, we cried ourselves to sleep, and then woke up in the morning with smiles and a spring in our steps determined to get back to the UK and make a home for our kids that we could be proud of.

The best moment of the year? Loudly and publicly swearing at the leaders of Malaysia, the UAE and the UK on landing at Birmingham Airport, because for the first time in 15 years I didn’t live in a police state and I could.

That police state lives in all of our minds. In 2022 the goal is to leave it mentally and physically further and further behind and see what I am truly capable of. I hope that you will join me in the wonderful journey of being the best possible of all possible yous

Keep exploring, lots of love

Denis