14 Years In — What I’ve Learned About Running a Business People Actually Trust

I didn’t set out to build a compliance business.

I set out to be an electrician. Qualified, self-employed, back yourself. Do good work, show up when you say you will, don’t cut corners. I thought that was the whole formula.

Fourteen years later, D Squared has 20 staff, 10 vans, and a client list that spans MOD sites, care homes, schools, churches, and manufacturing facilities across Hampshire and Sussex. We carry BAFE, NICEIC, ECA, CHAS Gold, and Constructionline Gold.

None of that happened because the formula was right. It happened because the formula wasn’t nearly enough — and I had to learn that the hard way.

I was not easy to work for

I’ll be straight about this, because I think it’s worth saying.

Early on, I was highly strung. The business was chaotic. I was holding it together professionally with clients, but internally — with my team — I wasn’t. When an engineer made a mistake, I’d lose it. Not physically, but verbally. I’m sharp when I want to be, and I used that sharpness in the wrong direction.

It’s taken a long time to work on. What I’ve landed on is this: count to five, find what can be moved forward, and treat every mistake as a training asset. Because that’s genuinely what it is. You learn more from what goes wrong than you ever do from what goes right. A smooth job teaches you nothing. A job that falls apart in week two teaches you how your systems, your people, and your own character actually hold up under pressure.

Diamonds aren’t formed in easy conditions. Neither are good businesses.

All work is not good work

The second big mistake was thinking every job was worth taking.

When you understand the 80/20 rule properly, you start scrutinising who you work for, not just what the work is worth. Twenty per cent of your clients will generate eighty per cent of your problems. And once I saw that pattern, I couldn’t unsee it.

Business relationships are like any other relationship. You meet someone, you share a bit of small talk, you get on. But you don’t know that person. You know the version of them that exists when things are going well. The real test — in business and in life — is what happens when something goes wrong.

When you’re working with someone calm, solution-focused, and realistic about the fact that problems happen — a bad situation gets resolved and you move on. The relationship often comes out stronger for it.

When you’re at opposite ends of the spectrum from someone, small issues become enormous very quickly. And nobody wins.

We’ve become more deliberate about this over the years. Who we work for shapes what the business feels like from the inside. Get that wrong often enough and the best team in the world starts to fray.

Why clients stay

The clients who’ve been with us for five, eight, ten years — they’re not there because we’ve never had a problem. Everyone has problems. They’re there because of what happens when we do.

We answer the phone. We fix the issue. We move on to the light.

If it’s 5am on a Saturday and something has gone wrong on site, there’s one number to call. One number. The issue gets taken away from the person on the other end, and we deal with it. That’s not a feature of what we do — it’s the whole point of what we do.

Clients in regulated sectors — care homes, schools, manufacturers — carry real liability. A fire system that fails an inspection, an electrical fault that shuts down production, a certificate that’s missing when the CQC walks in — these aren’t inconveniences. They’re serious. What they need is someone firmly in their corner. Not a contractor who answers emails in office hours. A partner who owns the problem the same way they do.

That’s what 14 years of doing this builds. Not just the accreditations and the track record — though those matter — but the instinct to move fast when it counts.

What I’d tell someone starting out

Do it for the love of the game. Not the money, not the status, not the idea of what it looks like from the outside.

Because there will be periods where you are, in every sense, cold, naked, and exposed. Nothing going right, money tight, people letting you down, your own decisions costing you. And the only thing that gets you through that is knowing — at a level deeper than logic — that this is worth it. That the pain is temporary. That you’re building something real.

The second thing: mistakes are not setbacks. They’re the curriculum. You should be learning more from what goes wrong than from what goes right. If every problem gets dealt with, blamed, and buried, you’ve wasted it. If it gets examined, understood, and used to make the next job better — that’s how you actually improve.

That shift in thinking — from problems as failures to problems as training — is probably the single most important thing I’ve changed in 14 years.