About Nic Windley

1. Imagine being born into a family of entrepreneurs and engineers that built companies employing 10’s to 100’s of people making millions in the process and travelling the world.  Sounds good doesn’t it and for many that would be the dream, and it was very inspiring for a period of my life, until something happened that changed everything.  

Something that very few people will experience, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Without doubt I was inspired by all this and genuinely fascinated by all things, so I found myself gravitating towards engineering, as I started building small electronic circuits and writing little programs whilst I was at school.

At home we had apple trees and fruit bushes and I would pick and sell them from the front garden.

I was certain I wanted to be an entrepreneur and build something and be involved with technology.

Then the first hammer fall came.  I witnessed the banks pull the funding overnight from a business that was viable and thriving.  The net result was the family home was lost, the business was gone and we were almost homeless.

And so the rebuild began.

Which led to the birth of other businesses, some founded on new partnerships that would unfortunately sour because of disagreements.

Yet more rebuilding.

Then a big business was built with an exited in 10’s of millions (per director) which would eventually lead to an even bigger blow.

As soon as all these millions were made and was to then witness them be frittered away and ego to consume.

That ego not only lead to financial down fall, it destroyed many relationship and personal credibility.

This was before I could even let my own dreams take flight, and so everything I thought I wanted to be had now turned into darkness.  I no longer knew who I was or where I was going.  I just knew I didn’t want to be like that.

And so I graduated with my degree in Engineering, which I had lost some passion for as all this was going on, pursued a corporate career initially starting in sales, later holding international leadership positions in public listed companies.  Yet I felt empty.  Most of my experiences working in corporates had generally been poor, with little to no training or mentoring and a lot of clearing up to do in organisations that really should know better.

Everyone else I knew seemed to find themselves in better companies that seemed to care.

In fact, my first corporate role I was sent to Japan to bring back and new business model and was successful at establishing a team in the UK.  I was now threatening (only because of our success) the position of existing teams who then took it upon themselves to threaten me verbally and make my working life uncomfortable.

At one point I rescued a large account that was going south.  Instead of thanks I was verbally threatened over the phone by my direct boss.  Luckily the customer, a senior manager in a large chemicals company, overheard my conversation and took the phone away from me.  He then proceeded to tell my boss that without me they would have taken the business elsewhere and he would be making a personal complaint to senior leadership.  My then boss was removed, not from the company, to another role.

And so I left only to be exposed to even more stupidity as I joined other corporates.  Witnessing people physically escorted from meetings, employing ridiculous short term sales strategies that caused a total loss of trust in the organisations, managers who had mental breakdowns in public causing them to threaten potential customers, competitiveness between staff escalating to the point that they would sabotage each others vehicles (scary stuff!), the list goes on.  Surely, this was not the way.

Because of this I interspersed my corporate career with periods of entrepreneurship and a drive to be better, to know myself and my topics better than anyone else so that these environments and problems would not happen again and I knew that a typical corporate career would not let me cover the ground I felt would be necessary.

Without doubt I have learned far more in my entrepreneurial endeavours and the training I have put myself through than I have ever in any corporate role, covering different markets, value propositions, roles and strategies.  I’ve never stopped learning and testing ideas.

I later gained my MBA, developed an interest in M&A, expanded my funding network and rekindled my interest in technology ready for the next chapter.

more to come……

So this leads me to the present day and what I now believe in which stems from 3 fundamental problems I have observed:

1. Ineffectual self serving leadership on exorbitant benefits that are both unjustifiable and disproportionate and which lead to the erosion of a pillar of our societies.
2. A lack of understanding of true value which negates consequence and has placed profit before everything and at any cost, negatively impacting people and our planet.
3. Our eroding identities, partly brought about by ineffectual leadership and party a lack of desire by individuals to take responsibility; because some believe life owes them something and for others, its a lack hope.