Nigel Boyd-Thorpe
Co-Founder and Director | thestudio
A Beginning
Doug Richards, he of Dragons' Den fame, once stated that the key motivating factor in being an entrepreneur is revenge. Now, that may well be his story. It isn’t ours.
This is the story of the beginning of the Studio…
Imagine a clock ticking in the top right-hand corner of your mind. Tick follows tock follows tick. It shows a date. It’s the 13th October 2006.
Now imagine a room. This room is slightly chaotic, but amongst the chaos are three people. They are waiting, waiting for the phone to ring. That phone call will either signal one of the greatest achievements of their lives or it will signal silence. It will be a beginning or an end…
Now imagine the clock moving backwards… like some Netflix real-life documentary timeline.
Now it’s 20th March 2001.
A man enters a building and stands alone; he observes a business in progress. Staff are busy meeting, greeting, setting up, cleaning, smiling, chatting, creating. It’s a veritable hive of activity. It is, to say the least, an uplifting place to stand and watch.
The man is, in his own turn, greeted and taken on a tour of the building. He sees enthusiasm and joy. Customers being served. Ingenuity and a team so motivated by serving its customers that the whole environment is infectious.
The man is asked if he wants to join.
He does…
The clock moves on.
It’s September 2005. Things have changed. The team are still busy serving their customers and setting new, even higher standards.
There is a warning in the air, though. Sometimes, no matter how amazing you are as a team, if you don’t really fit into your company’s plans, you are going to be under threat.
Something needs to be done about the threat that hangs over the whole future of this amazing business.
We live in a world where sometimes being good isn’t good enough. If you don’t fit in, then, to coin a phrase, you may have to do the other thing!
An idea forms.
If the company doesn’t want this part of the business, with its fantastic team, its remarkable customer feedback and loyalty, and its total dedication to being the best it can be, then maybe there is another route.
The man is now over four years into this and has surrounded himself with passionate people who want, more than anything else, for this business to shine and thrive.
He comes up with a plan, maybe while walking in a field or climbing a mountain.
He shares the plan, and the clock moves on.
2nd February 2006.
After months of work, the idea has been finalised and presented. Agreements are in place, and the business plans have been drawn up.
They call it a management buyout.
No one on the team has faced anything like this before, and they are now working against experts. People who have done this kind of thing many times.
The team are out of their depth, but they strive on. They have a single belief that they can create something exceptional.
It’s a tough road. It takes far longer than anyone expected.
The clock moves back to 13th October 2006, where we started. Yes Friday the 13th to be precise.
Three people pacing, looking at the clock. There is a deadline. It is 5.30pm.
The clock shows 5.26pm…
No, this isn’t revenge. This is opportunity.
You see an opportunity and you create a plan. From that, you manoeuvre a possibility and then a probability. Even amongst all that, you need the right people to do the right things.
It’s now 5.27pm… The phone rings.
Of course, we know the call was a positive one, and the voice on the other end of the phone simply said, “We have completed, Nigel. Well done, it’s yours.”
Our reaction, to be honest, was a bit muted. We were drained, and the task that now lay in front of us was bigger than anything we had achieved to that point.
My lasting memory, though, was leaving that office and walking straight into one of our staff. She was a wise owl and simply said, “Is it done, our kid?”
“Yes,” I replied.
“I’m proud of you,” she responded.
Further up the corridor, a member of the cleaning team sank to his knees in tears and said, “Thank God, boss. I thought we were all out of a job.”
It was the first time I realised that this wasn’t just about the three of us and what we had planned and created. It was about all of us, the whole team.
They, as much as us, were in that office that day waiting for that call. They were on this journey with us, and they were waiting as we were waiting.
Studio began, and we all stepped forward into a new world, together.
Emma and Lawrence will have their own specific memories of 13th October 2006 and what preceded it.
For me, that day had started with me returning to the Studio building for the first time in six months.
It seemed a bit like fun at the beginning, being ordered by HR to leave the site as I couldn’t be involved in negotiations for the management buyout while still working in the business.
I thought this would be relatively easy. The deal was set up, just details required, and I’d be back within a few weeks.
It turned out to be far from easy, and it took many, many weeks.
Fortunately, Emma had remained in the business throughout that time. When I was removed, I was asked if anyone else in the building was involved.
“No,” I assured them …
So, she remained and ensured everything carried on as normal with our customers. We spoke every day, and the planning and work towards our new company never stopped.
On the morning of completion, I had arrived back in Birmingham for the first time. Not on a white charger, but in a battered Land Rover Defender.
I wrongly thought it would be a triumphant, easy day.
“Put the fizz in the fridge.”
But even before I had parked and got into the building, our lawyers rang me with the “Nigel, we have a problem” line.
I was no Jim Lovell on Apollo 13, but it felt the same to me.
The deal had been changed at the last minute.
Now, the deal we had agreed was pretty much the only deal we could afford. So, any changes were going to be a serious issue.
It started eight hours of to-and-fro phone calls and negotiations.
It got so bad that, at one point, we agreed that the only way forward was to pull out.
So we did.
I told my then boss I would be back at work on Monday and back in my old job.
The phone went silent.
I won’t go into the details of who said what to whom, but the outcome was that last hour spent standing in that office, waiting for the phone to ring.
All of us waiting, as it turns out.
So here we are, 20 years later.
The clock has moved on.
Studio has been built on the principles of putting our customers and our team first. We have stuck to that, and I am proud of us for doing so.
We have created something amazing and well beyond what any of us could have expected when we set out.
We have all been working together to get us to where we are today. It has been an absolute joy and a task which we have loved and learned from.
The stresses of that first day have been repeated many times, and as I am sure you are all aware, 2020 brought things none of us had ever experienced.
That is for another day and another clock.
But for now, here we are.
It’s our story, and it isn’t finished yet.
Tick follows tock follows tick.
(Yes, I know that’s from Moby Dick, but I can’t think of a better description.)
This weekend the clocks go back …
Ours just goes forward.
Thank you, everyone.
Nigel
