The interview was a weird one.
Mark Peters sat off to the side.
His wife sat directly across from me.
At the start of the interview Mark said it might seem a bit strange, but his wife would be asking the questions, and I should answer directly to him — not her.
The interview took place at Mark’s house in Canford Heath, Poole.
The position: trainee bathroom installer.
I remember some banter about the signwriting on the side of his van. It was a blue Volkswagen Transporter with a cartoon woman sitting in a bath. The unusual thing was that supply-and-installation fixed prices were listed on the side. I had never seen that before, and it gave the whole thing a very commercial feel.
Maybe that was the point.
Maybe Mark Peters wanted the company to look bigger than it was.
“How should you leave a customer’s house after you’re finished?” he asked me.
I said you should leave it as you found it.
“Better than you found it,” he replied.
I didn’t get the job.
Maybe that’s why. I’ll never know.
What I do know is that as I walked out, I looked at the vans parked outside his nice house and thought to myself: If you can’t join them, beat them.
That interview stayed with me longer than I realised.
Later that year, on an autumn Saturday morning, Sting and The Police played quietly through the stereo of an RS Turbo. Matt never played music too loud when he drove — and for good reason. We liked to hear the wastegate hiss as he changed gear.
“Don’t stand so, don’t stand so, don’t stand so close to me — fsssshh.”
The RS wasn’t just transport.
Metallic purple. Lowered. Alloy wheels. Body kit. Whale-fin spoiler. Not done on the cheap — thousands had been spent on it. A real show-stopper. Not the kind of car you normally saw twenty-year-olds driving. This was Max Power magazine territory.
The routine was simple.
Cruise around on a Saturday morning. Offer lifts to girls. Invite them out to Poole Quay that night on a pub crawl. Rinse and repeat.
There was no Tinder back then. In some ways things were harder — you had to do everything face to face. But in other ways, things were easier. People couldn’t just look you up online. If they thought you were interesting, numbers were exchanged. If not, you’d never see them again. Curiosity worked in your favour.
The only problem was that it wasn’t Matt’s car.
It was Colin Spencer’s.
Colin had been working with his dad as an apprentice plumber since the age of sixteen, right at the height of the plumber shortage. As a result, Colin was flush. He lent the car to Matt most weekends because Matt was better looking — and far more successful with the pickup routine.
Matt and I were the front end of the sales funnel.
Colin would appear further down the line on the pub crawl.
On this particular ride, our passenger was Nikki — a twenty-four-year-old police officer I’d met at the Brass House the week before. She was four years our senior. I was counting the seconds until we dropped her off at Fleetsbridge Tesco.
The unspoken truth was that Matt wasn’t insured to drive the RS.
You could have cut the tension with a knife.
We pulled into the Fleetsbridge Tesco car park. I hopped out and swung the front passenger seat forward to let Nikki out. She couldn’t have weighed more than fifty kilos and almost floated up out of the car, weightless.
“Thanks for the lift — text me,” she said, flicking her straight platinum-blonde hair back as she walked off.
I looked at Matt.
“Thank fuck for that,” he said.
We both cracked up laughing.
Nikki turned back to see what was so funny, and Matt and I froze — like a pair of kids just rumbled by a teacher.
Matt’s dad was an electrician who dabbled in kitchen and bathroom refurbishments. Matt worked with him on electrical jobs, but he was keen to carve out his own path as a ceramic wall tiler.
I don’t think there was any sound business reasoning behind it. It felt more like the classic case of a son wanting to do something different from his father — to become independent as quickly as possible.
I was working as a jobbing plumber, but I didn’t have my gas registration.
As I explained my idea of starting a bathroom refurbishment business to Matt, it felt like the obvious route to go down. A bathroom is, after all, mainly a plumbing and tiling job.
Two entrepreneurs were born over a full English breakfast.
Or so we thought.
We weren’t entrepreneurs at all.
We were technicians suffering from an entrepreneurial seizure.
An entrepreneurial seizure is what happens when someone who does technical work — a mechanic, a hairdresser, a tradesman — assumes that because they can do the work, they know how to run a business that does that work.
The hairdresser thinks that because she’s good at cutting hair, she should run a hair salon, without realising that running a business requires an entirely different set of skills.
Most self-employed people will tell you they own a business.
They don’t.
What they own is a job.
A business is a money-making organisation that produces profit whether the owner turns up or not. If it requires the owner to be present and doing the technical work, it isn’t a business — it’s employment with extra risk.
Many of these jobs will never become businesses because they aren’t scalable, and the technician doesn’t understand how to build one. They just keep working harder, doing everything themselves.
What Matt and I didn’t realise was that we were about to start one of the least scalable and least profitable businesses you could imagine.
Looking back now, after more than twenty years in business, I can see that Bathroom Solution couldn’t have been a worse business model even if it had been designed that way.
In practice it meant long hours and hard work for very little profit. Responsibility sat with me at all times — the money, the quality, the mistakes, the stress. I was never able to switch off. Even when I wasn’t working, I was thinking about work. And despite all of it, there was no obvious way to expand. The ceiling was low and visible.
What made it worse was watching other people make money in businesses that didn’t seem to demand the same level of effort or sacrifice. They weren’t working harder than me — they were just positioned better.
I’d often heard people say, “A restaurant will never go out of business — people always need to eat.”
That’s an example of a business with repeat custom.
MOT centres. Hair salons. Plumbers doing annual boiler services.
Revenue compounds in those businesses. Once a customer is acquired and satisfied, they return. New customers stack on top of old ones. The business grows without having to start from zero each time.
Bathroom refurbishments don’t work like that.
They’re projects that happen once every ten or twenty years. By the time a customer is ready for another one, they’ve usually moved away — or lost your number.
For Bathroom Solution, customers didn’t compound. Every job meant starting again from scratch. That meant constant spending just to stand still.
I didn’t understand any of this at the time.
I just believed that if you stuck at something and worked hard enough, it would succeed.
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