However you choose to look at time, it was six years ago today that we made the biggest life-changing decision that we could possibly think of. Up to that point we had lived in a nice, if mildly compact, three-bedroom terraced cottage on the opposite side of the road to pub we now run.
My career was in the world of internet software; my wife’s was mostly housewife, with a part-time job at the new Waitrose store in Newmarket.
It was a straight-forward, pretty ordinary life for a young family of four. And then one day I got bored, learned that the licensee of the pub was selling his tenancy, and decided it would be a jolly good idea to have a career change.
Thirty-three is a pretty young age to have a mid-life crisis, but having been made redundant at the end of 2004 I was struggling to settle in to my new job as a sales manager for a small IT company and was looking for a new challenge. This, it seemed to me, was it. And three million, one hundred and fifty five thousand and forty minutes on, it still seems like a good idea, if perhaps a tad harder than it was a few years ago.
I was talking with some customers about this very subject before sitting down to write this piece and one thing always stands out to me when I think about what I know now compared to then. Up to the end of 2004, I was a business development manager for an internet software distribution company. My job meant managing a large area of retail and corporate clients selling, through their channel, software solutions for employee internet management and website analysis and statistics to companies both small and large. This involved travelling around the country and, occasionally, others making sales pitches, presentations and training courses.
Despite all those audiences and individuals met in conferences and sales meetings, I have never learned more about people than I have done standing behind my bar, just watching people interact. I wish that ten years ago I’d had some of the skills and understanding of people I have now.
But things have changed, as they always do; even in the short time I’ve been here this industry has changed, and we struggle to cope with it.
Many simply don’t like to evolve, to move on, to face challenges from a different angle. When I started out, I didn’t think for one moment that I would have the opportunity to get my voice heard, to see myself in print in publications such as The Publican, the Morning Advertiser, the BIIBUSINESS magazine and, now, InaPub.
Over the years I’ve also been quoted in Private Eye and the business section of The Times and, for a short while last year, I even got to have a bit of a feature on BBC Radio Cambridgeshire’s Breakfast Show as their “voice of Strictly Come Dancing.”
I always try to remember that, despite the adversities we face. I’m still enjoying my pub, but I’m also excited to find out what the next 189’302’400 seconds will bring.
