I’ve done this job at every level of it, in two countries.

I was drawing floorplans before I knew it was a job

I grew up in Newton Abbot in Devon. My dad was a Royal Marine, a warrant officer, and one of very few black men to reach that rank. My mum was a Navy nurse. Between them they gave me a set of standards I ignored for about a decade and then came back to.

As a kid I drew houses. Designed the floorplans, named them, priced them up. There was a brief period where I wanted to be a bus driver, but mostly it was this.

My first job was at sixteen, in a phone room for a timeshare company, three hour shifts cold calling people about apartments in the Algarve. Hard dial targets, hard appointment targets. I learned more about resilience in that room than in the ten years after it.

At fifteen I’d done a week of work experience with my next door neighbour, who owned an estate agency. Valuations, viewings, other people’s houses. That was it, decided.

The interview I didn’t know I was sitting

I moved to London at eighteen, lived with my dad in Clapham, and got a job selling mobile phones while I worked out how to get into property.

Then Foxtons. The interview was at head office in Chiswick, about thirty of us in a big room with snacks and a free bar, left alone for an hour with no instructions. Most of the room drank. A good number got properly drunk. Then the directors walked in and started asking people to leave.

I’d convinced myself it was a test. Years later somebody who ran those interviews told me it wasn’t. Either way, it taught me something I’ve never let go of: what you do when there are no instructions and nobody is watching is more or less the whole job.

My first deal was a two bedroom ground floor flat at 58 Braeside Avenue in Wimbledon. Corner of a cul de sac, eleven fifty a month. I rented it more than once over the years.

Then Featherstone Leigh, and a manager called Mimi who was in the office at quarter past seven and left at eight at night. She taught me discipline and systems, and she told me repeatedly that going out clubbing was a fake life and I should put myself into my career instead.

I ignored her for about ten years. I’m forty two now and I’m at my desk at quarter past seven. I didn’t invent that. I copied it, a decade late.

The best year of my career happened in a crash

Credit crunch. My company made every single sales person redundant and shrank the whole sales operation into one office in Wimbledon. I was running lettings in Balham with a team of six, and the mood in that building was grim. Nobody talked about targets. Everybody talked about who was next.

We doubled the previous year’s revenue. There was one street in Balham where our boards ran the entire length of it and I still remember driving down it. I got promoted to the Battersea flagship off the back of it.

It wasn’t cleverness. Everyone else went quiet and we didn’t. That single fact has shaped everything I’ve taught since.

Why I actually left

I’d moved back to Devon to be near my mum while she was recovering from cancer. She passed away, and I was left with two options that were both wrong. Stay in Devon, where I didn’t belong. Or go back to London, where I knew exactly what I’d go back to.

A friend took me to Dubai on holiday. I came home, handed in my notice, gave up my flat, and started clearing my mother’s house. It happened fast enough that I never really stopped to think about it, which was probably the point.

Nobody tried to talk me out of it. Twelve years on, four of my friends live here, my sister’s in Doha, and my dad is thinking about six months a year.

Two suitcases, thirty thousand pounds, and a very quiet month three

I arrived at thirty with two suitcases and about thirty thousand pounds. More runway than almost anybody I coach turns up with. I spent most of it on going out.

My first deal landed inside two weeks, a five and a half thousand square foot villa to an Australian couple, and I genuinely thought I’d cracked it. Then nothing for months.

By month three my desk was by a window on a high floor and I spent a lot of time up there planning how to tell everybody I was going home. Nothing had landed. Everything I’ve built in the twelve years since came from the version of me who didn’t book that flight.

Built, scaled, and occasionally got it badly wrong

I’ve built and scaled teams, taken agents from non performers to top performers, and turned businesses from a loss into a profit. My teams here have rented and sold over AED 5 billion in property value.

I’ve also made two genuinely bad career decisions in twenty three years, and both of them were made on a day I felt awful. I was sacked more than once in my twenties for going out. There was a stretch a few years ago where I didn’t make a proper call for three weeks and told myself I was busy.

I mention all of that because I think it matters. I’m not teaching this from the outside.

Nineteen years. Five companies. Two countries.

Different markets, different logos, different economies. Same system.

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