The Way Forward

After receiving the wake up call that I needed, I promised myself that I would do everything in my power to provide my family with a reasonable standard of living that they truly deserved.

Back in 1986, Alison and I were in the process of buying our first home. Like many other young married couples repaying the mortgage was a struggle, especially when the interest rates on the payments were around 13% or 14%. Despite this hardship we always felt a considerable amount of pride toward owning our own home and we worked really hard to make it an enjoyable family place to live in. It wasn't all doom and gloom back in those days, I had a very supportive wife that understood my passion for the martial arts and a gorgeous baby daughter that was full of laughter and joy. 

Rachel Aged 18 months

Rachel, I have to say was the perfect baby; she’d sleep all the way through the night without a murmur and would be a bundle of fun upon waking. As a toddler she always had loads of energy, so much so that I nicknamed her “Sparky.”  I first started teaching Rachel martial arts at a very early age, even before she could walk. I had this idea that I wanted my daughter to be able to look after herself in later life.  I always treated her initial training like a game, my hand often being the target for her to strike, however sometimes my training methods did have an adverse side-effect. I remember having to frequently warn many of my friends and family not to put their faces to close into Rachel’s pushchair, as she would often try and palm strike anyone who got too close. I have to admit - I always found that slightly embarrassing - but highly amusing at the same time.

Apart from spending lots of quality time with my family, operating my martial art club took precedence over most other things. It gave me a real sense of purpose and something to strive for each day. The number of students that were actually training at my club hovered around twenty-five. Being unemployed it was very difficult to make any kind of headway as I wasn’t allowed to earn any income from my classes - things did however change. I was thrown a lifeline from a very unlikely source. The support came in the way of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government, under the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, which was basically a government initiative set up to help reduce mass unemployment in the UK. It was deemed to be an effective incentive for getting the British public off their backsides helping them to start-up their own small businesses. As a matter of fact, it was reported that during the eighties the Enterprise Allowance Scheme actually helped 325,000 individuals to become self-employed.

If you were on the dole back then you got £26 a week and you weren’t allowed to work. If you were on the Enterprise Allowance Scheme you got £40 and you could work. I qualified for the scheme   having been unemployed for a certain amount of months.  Once I had signed on for the project I was also given the opportunity to attend several free business start-up sessions. I immediately thought if I’m to stand any chance of survival I need to take full advantage of any additional help that was being offered. I did  make full use of three business workshops that were presented to me as part of the development package. It was during these meetings that one of the tutors reminded us of a very grim statistic; he said that only one in six people that were using this system would still be in business after their first year. 

These were gloomy figures indeed, however I made a very firm promise to myself that I wasn't going to be on the wrong end of those stats. My positive outlook was definitely going to be the way forward. It was now going to be 'all or nothing.'  I realised that my focus had to shift. I wasn't going to be doing battle against any single adversary anymore - the challenge was much larger - it was now all about business survival.