Throughout the 90’s InterExec was well ensconced in Charing Cross and my wife Chris’s Outplacement Consultancy, Compass, in Victoria – business was developing well with good long standing teams.

Compass secured the largest UK outplacement contract at the time, which necessitated staffing facilities all over the country and our minds turned to opening joint offices, for which we would need son Carl to develop our own unique computer software.

So, we set about securing and equipping premises, sourcing and training staff and opening and overseeing offices in Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Bristol and Reading as well as our City office.  My days were totally filled with travelling for roughly a day a fortnight in each – but they had little time to become economically viable before a disaster occurred in Compass.

My wife was approached by a leading Outplacement Consultancy; offering to buy Compass for a 7 figure sum, when she was suddenly taken ill and required a liver transplant within 48 hours, which amazingly she got and survived.  But as soon as her bankers heard they withdrew her facilities on salary day and it fell to me to sell her company during her recuperation.

The outplacement company had moved on, so I sold Compass to an Essex County Council company which subsequently went bust and as a result never paid for it.

It was at that time that I planned to retire and accepted a 7 figure MBO offer for InterExec, but our bankers ‘Merchant Bank’ threatened to call in my overdraft guarantees if I did not sign over the company to them, which I refused.  So, we lost the business and had to start again.

I took over the City office and with just one retired staff member, who commuted weekly from Edinburgh, looked after the Clients and started to rebuild the City office and the England regional offices, whilst my wife ran the Scottish offices.

In hindsight, although the previous times had been bit of a low in the history of InterExec, we bounced back and that period became part of our learning process and recognition that the career pathway for any Senior Executive has twists and turns some of which are positive and others more challenging.

InterExec’s little office in the City was soon over-run with both former and new Clients, in part as a result of the run down of Regional offices, but in addition to Top Executives becoming more mobile within the UK, they were also becoming more international, so we found ourselves needing to develop the ability to accept overseas Clients, many with objectives outside the UK, so staff had to grow and very shortly we moved to a much larger office in St Helen’s Place.