Return of the Prodigal Employee and a Weekend to Remember

After returning to the UK suddenly in December 1990, my world soon spiralled downwards as Sue’s father, rather than recovering in Hospital as expected, suddenly died at the young age of 56.

Sue was devastated and rightly wanted to look after her grieving mother, so it was time for me to look for a new UK job. But one phone call later to Nigel Wright of ILG, and I had been offered the job I had turned down nearly 9 months ago, at a higher salary and with a start date of the 1st March, as Nigel needed to quietly shuffle his team to accommodate me.

So after long discussions with Sue, it was decided that I would return to Australia to close out the flat we had left overnight and send her stuff back before I headed off around Australia and the Far East with my old housemate Rob Todd, who also found himself between jobs.

However, the day after we flew out to Australia, the Gulf War started on the 17th January. Although my travel plans were not affected, there were a number of calls from pay phones to Nigel Wright to check all was OK and I still had a job offer.

It was clear that the business was massively over-geared and needed urgent consolidation and cost-cutting, with virtually every division needing to be slashed and merged into one business, so I set about writing the strategy and business plan to make this happen.

But on the fateful afternoon of Friday the 8th March, the business collapsed and went into administration, sending us down Jasmine Wine bar to drown our sorrows as I realised that spending all my remaining cash travelling around Asia may not have been the smartest of moves after all.

Having been dragged back legless to my good friend Sam Eliatamby's house in South Norwood, I was awoken by Sam shaking me and telling me Peter Long, one of the top bosses at ILG, was on the phone, screaming and shouting, demanding to know where I was.

After a quick shower I headed back to Intasun house for what turned out to a 48 hour solid work session as I created the business plans to be taken to the bank on Monday morning to raise the cash needed to launch a phenix tour operations from the ashes of ILG.

The Collapse of ILG and birth on Sunworld

This was my first taste of being at the top table when a new business was created, and I remember sitting in Peter's office on the Sunday morning when the name Sunworld, inspired by seeing the Sun and News of the World coverage of ILG’s collapse, was sitting on the coffee table.

The next 6 months formed the foundation of my later Entrepreneurial life, as we improvised every single day to get the business up and running from finding still live phone lines in the basement of the old ILG offices we where renting to pillaging the old furniture and computers of ILG at remarkable low prices for the liquidators because although in those days most computer look the same, we knew which ones had the hardrive upgrades and held the software and historic reports that we need to recrste for the new business.

Get a program priced and on sale within a month was seeminly an impossible task as the only experienced commercial person there, it was my job to recruit a small team of 3 people to achieve the impossible.

Interstingly when I business goes down there is a massive amount of talent available but limited budgets to pay for it so although I would have loved to have Dave Pearton my old pal at Lancaster back, I simply did not have the budget so instead I racked my brain about who form the junior ranks had impress me and chose a young accountant called Seamus Conlon, who would later become a life time pal and follow me to Airtours.

I have always recoganised in my business life that recuiting people by looking at their CV and a hour long interview is a very hit and miss process, and you much better with the devil you know i.e people you have worked with or who have worked with trusted friends than anything else and this has severed me well on lots of occasions/