What does turning 40 mean for our MD, Pete Fellows? 
Pete is our boss so occasionally we let him ramble on and pretend we’re listening.
Later this year I turn 40. And I know that it is probably a cliché at this age, but it has caused me to re-evaluate my life to some extent. Yes I have bought a new car, and yes it is much sportier than my previous car. However it is unlikely that my wife would agree to me finding an age inappropriate mistress, so we’re sticking with the car as the change for now.
So, is the aim of this article to parallel my current misfortune and to try to teach you some sort of business or life lesson? Perhaps not. I think that it is more likely to be a rambling assortment of ideas, of which no one was really sure what the point was in the first place.
Well to start with, no I am not excited about getting older. I know I’m supposed to be all positive and that, but if I had the choice between being 25 again or 40, I’d go with 25 – if we’re being honest wouldn’t most of us? The saving grace and the thing that may allow us to accept the fact that we’re getting older, is the ability to acknowledge what we’ve accomplished by the time we get there. Okay so you may be asking is this article going to be about all of my achievements and how because of those I will be able to settle into a 40-something life with my head held high and renewed sense of confidence? Well no it’s not. I still want to be 25 and I haven’t achieved everything I wanted to when I was younger; although I appreciate that some of my earlier goals might have been unrealistic. It also depends on how far you go back. At 16 I wanted to be a sound engineer. By 17 I realised that science is really hard, so the prospect of being any kind of engineer was unlikely. In any case, I have always been more creative than scientific (at least that’s how I perceive myself I guess). Earlier still, I’m not entirely sure where I thought I’d be – a career in the music industry perhaps? I was a decent piano player but not a great one, and I’m not sure that greatness would have ever been achievable for me even if I’d worked at it incessantly.
Did I ever dream about a career in recruitment? Well no. I didn’t even consider a career in recruitment. When I graduated, my goal was to have a successful career in London and my plan was to apply to whatever was available and to see what happened (at this point I could be a manager in a cinema chain; an accountant for a music retailer or a financial services consultant amongst the myriad of possibilities based on the positions I interviewed for at that time). I managed to secure a job with Manpower, and so my recruitment career was born. Since my late twenties, I have harboured the desire to start my own business and Fellows and Associates is my second attempt. Like many people who start their own businesses will know, the first attempt is not always particularly successful. To be honest, my first idea would have needed mass market marketing, and I didn’t have anywhere near the budget to get it off the ground. I would have needed to spend a lot to make a small profit, and even more to make a large one. Unfortunately, when I realised this I was financing the business on hope and buttons. Licking my wounds I went to work for someone else. On my second attempt, I went down the less risky route, and started a business in an area I knew and I knew to be successful; and yes it’s worked.
Having said that, by 40 I would have liked the company to be bigger but I hadn’t factored in the impact of recession and unforeseen staff turnover. Unfortunately one of our earlier and very successful recruits decided to relocate overseas, and although she certainly left with our best wishes, it did cause a considerable setback. We didn’t lack for ambition early on but we did struggle to figure out how to implement the ambitions that we had. Perhaps it takes few years to know what you have and how to sell it? The last 12 months or so have certainly suggested that understanding our offering and the audience it might appeal to beyond the clients in front of our noses should really aid our growth over the next few years.
I don’t want this to side track into a discussion about my Fellows and Associates based pursuits; although I think that they do contribute to the being almost 40 malaise. In part this is because I’ve typically gotten itchy feet in previous jobs, I’ve been bored of what I’ve been doing and moved on; in one instance to go travelling for a two year period as a pretty extreme counterpoint to boredom. This does make things a little difficult, because my career is now set with Fellows and Associates. Yes that is exciting and yes I have the freedom to take it in directions that will constantly maintain my interest. But on the other hand it also seems kind of overwhelming to think that I might not be changing jobs ever again in my life, which at this point (given my hopes for and the trajectory of the business) seems likely to be the case. I imagine newly made Equity Partners in firms feel much the same way – excited about the earning potential and career achievement, but surely there is an element of apprehension with regards to the finality of it all?
So now that I’ve had my middle aged whinge, what exactly am I trying to say? I’m not quite sure – it’s crappy being old? Well not exactly that. If things had gone differently, I’d be a very old football player or musician at present, but a young football manager or prime minister not that any of these are, or were, on the cards. I do have hopes for the future, in part because I like buying new things and I’d like to get an even more expensive car at some point. And it seems by growing this business as we are, that seems highly achievable. We feel like we’re at the precipice of major successes. We have had to turn some client work away recently, given how much retained work we have. Working on a ‘no win, no fee’ basis against numerous competitors didn’t seem like a good use of our time for that particular instruction (or actually the best way of recruiting for that role). We’re expanding our US work, meaning you should be seeing increasingly more US positions that we’re working on over the next year or so. We have also identified other markets, in which we seem to be the only resource available.
Okay so what have we learnt? I can easily ramble on about my business, even when I promise that I won’t. Perhaps to some extent, that means that I’m more comfortable in my current position than I would have been at 40 as a failed piano player or a sound engineer with a limited understanding of science (by the way I understand enough to get by but I’m better on the reasons why the science is there than the minutia of how it works). Maybe we have learnt that although I’ve failed to achieve some of my dreams, by constantly changing them I’ve managed to achieve most of them? Or, most importantly, we have learnt that at 40 you should most definitely buy a new car. I think the last point is something that most of us could agree with.
Pete is hopeful that the cure for ageing is only months away and that when it arrives it will be remarkably inexpensive.