This book, like most books, tells a story. More accurately, it tells the first part of a story. It's the
story of how I went from a personal crisis - redundancy and having my mortgage offer withdrawn, to setting up
and running a leading care quality consultancy.
It's intended to be the first book of a series, entitled 'The Adventures of a Care Entrepreneur' and will cover the first five years. That part, the beginning, is the part of the process I get asked about most. The scary part. The part where you go from having a set salary which arrives on a set day every month, to launching yourself
into the great unknown.
What is now a nationwide network of care improvement associates and the first UK care consultancy to successfully start franchising, began with me, on my own, sitting at my kitchen table on a laptop. Of course, there's been some good fortune in that journey, but hopefully there are parts of my experience which may be useful to others. In particular, those involved in the care sector or who find themselves in the same position I did in 2016, about to leave the relative safety of a job and taking their first, tentative steps across the choppy waters of self-employment.
I sometimes think of it like that, like crossing a river. The first part is to be brave enough to step off the bank. After that, you're looking for stepping-stones, but the truth is that most of those stones won't appear until your foot is already in the air.
In so many ways, that first step is the most important. Boldness has magic in it.