8173 Days... (and one very bad business decision)

I was twelve years old the first time I tried to build a business.

My older brother Jean introduced me to a publication called Hustler Humor — a comic he sourced from a local flea market. The product-market fit was immediately obvious: a school-age peer group with disposable pocket money, limited access to quality entertainment, and a demonstrated appetite for exactly this category of content.

I spotted the opportunity immediately.

The supply chain was elegant. The vendor wouldn't sell directly to a twelve-year-old, so Jonty served as my strategic procurement partner — my purchasing agent, effectively — giving me a sourcing advantage my competitors simply could not replicate. I had exclusive supply, a captive market, and margins that would make a reasonable person uncomfortable.

For a few glorious weeks, business was exceptional.

Then I made a strategic error.

I showed my mom a joke I thought was funny.

She had not, it turned out, been briefed on the enterprise.

The following morning she marched me down to the principal's office to confess, hand over my entire inventory, name every customer, and offer my profits as reparations for what she was now calling, with remarkable specificity, a porn ring at the posh private school they had worked so hard to send me to.

Mr Ellis, the principal, gave his very best effort to treat the matter with the gravity it apparently deserved.

There was a faint smirk.

He confiscated 25 magazines, which I can only assume became his private collection.

That was my last successful business.

On Friday, 22 May 2026, I will walk out of corporate employment for the first time in 8,173 days.

That count started on 6 January 2004.

Across those 22 years, I worked inside four organisations — Alcatel-Lucent, Vodacom, Deloitte, and Nedbank.

Each one built on the last: a technical foundation, then scale, then what rigorous thinking looks like inside a complex institution, and finally a close-up view of how you protect value and earn trust in a sector most people deal with whether they want to or not.

The people solving hard problems inside these places are, in many cases, exceptional. I was lucky to work alongside a number of them. I learned an enormous amount.

I also have no idea how much of it will translate outside the building.

My wife has worked exceptionally hard her entire career.

She has built something really impressive, and recently that work opened a door to an exciting opportunity in Canada — one that was too good to leave on the table. As a family, we decided to pursue it. For the next three years, we will be living in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, where she will be doing what she does well while I become the primary parent for our two boys.

She is carrying the financial weight of this chapter so that I can have something I have never had before in my working life: runway. The space to try to build something without needing it to pay the bills from month one.

That is not a small thing. It is, in fact, an extraordinary thing.

I am genuinely grateful in the way that sits with you quietly when you actually think about what you've been given and what it cost someone else to give it.

It is both a privilege and a pressure I intend to honour.

I love building things. I always have — the magazine business being, perhaps, the earliest evidence.

I am fascinated by what AI is making possible for small, highly capable operators. The leverage available to a single focused person today, with the right tools and the right systems, is unlike anything that existed at the start of those 8,173 days.

So over the next three years, I'm making the jump from corporate employee to solopreneur — building customer-acquisition systems for service businesses, with AI doing the heavy lifting that used to need a whole team.

I'm starting narrow, with one group I hope I can add some value to: independent vet clinics in Canada. My hypothesis is that most are run by people who'd rather be treating animals than wrestling with booking software and websites — and that might be something I can help with. That's the first test I'm going to run.

I am expecting to grind.

I am expecting to hear no — a lot, and from people I expected to say yes. I know I have learned to add value inside large organisations.

What I am uncertain about is how much of that translates out in the big wide world, when it's just me.

I am both excited and, if I am honest, slightly nervous about what unfolds next.

The last time I had a business idea this clear, I was twelve years old, and it ended with me sitting across from Mr Ellis while my mother explained, at some length, the legal and moral implications of what I had been running out of my schoolbag.

I like to think I have better judgment now.

I like to think the inventory won't get confiscated.

But I've been wrong before — and that, more than anything, is probably the right spirit in which to begin.