The One That Got Away

(And Why Most Businesses Are Still Making the Same Mistake)

There’s a particular kind of ache that comes not from failure, but from almost. Not the clean, honest sting of something that went wrong… the slow, nagging awareness that something could have gone beautifully right, and the only thing standing between you and that reality was a bloke who decided to sod off to Gran Canaria.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Fifty Years Is a Long Time to Watch People Miss the Obvious

If you’ve spent five decades working in and around business, you accumulate a certain kind of clarity. Not wisdom, exactly… more like pattern recognition. You start to see the same mistakes wearing different costumes, in different industries, in different eras. And one of the most persistent, most quietly costly mistakes I’ve watched people make, over and over again, is the reflexive instinct to insulate.

To build walls. To protect the patch. To treat every other business in your sector as a competitor to be guarded against, rather than a potential ally to be built alongside.

I know this mistake well. Not because I made it… but because I spent years watching others make it, figured out a smarter way, nearly pulled it off, and then watched it unravel due to circumstances that had absolutely nothing to do with the idea itself.

The idea was sound. I still believe that. This is the story of it.

The Company I Was Working For, and What I Could See That They Couldn’t

For a significant stretch of my career, I was running three roles simultaneously at a well-established security company. Operations Manager. Technical Security Manager. ISO9001 Auditor. All at once, before you ask… yes, it was as exhausting as it sounds, and yes, I was probably underpaid for at least two of those three jobs.

The company was solid. Manned guarding, mobile response, alarm installations, keyholding… the full spectrum of what a mid-sized security firm offers. It wasn’t failing. Business was ticking along. But there’s a particular kind of stagnation that can settle over a company that’s comfortable… and I could feel it. The business wasn’t faltering, but it wasn’t seeing things either.

What I could see, because of the position I occupied and the relationships I’d built, was this: we were operating in an ecosystem that nobody was properly mapping.

Through my work, I’d developed a genuine rapport with some of the bigger players in the industry. The ones with national reach, serious infrastructure, real clout. And here’s what surprised me, even at that level… even the big boys had gaps. National coverage sounds impressive until you try to deliver it consistently across every postcode in the country, across every service type, with your own resources alone. It’s a logistical nightmare. The companies that looked invincible from the outside were quietly struggling with the same problem every business eventually faces when it tries to do everything itself: the limits of its own capacity.

I could see where the edges were. I could see where the gaps were. And I could see, quite clearly, that the gaps in their offering matched the strengths we had, and vice versa. Nobody was joining the dots.

So I started having conversations.

The Meetings That Changed My Thinking

I began sitting down with these larger companies… not as a supplicant, not cap in hand, but as someone with something genuinely useful to offer. The conversations were honest. Here’s what you can do. Here’s what we can do. Here’s where neither of us are fully serving the market. Here’s what it looks like if we stop pretending we’re competing on every front and start thinking about where mutual benefit actually lives.

The response surprised me. Not resistance… curiosity. Interest. A kind of relieved recognition that someone was finally saying out loud what a few people had been thinking quietly for a while.

What emerged from those conversations was a picture of an industry that was ripe for a different kind of model. Not mergers. Not takeovers. Not some grand corporate restructuring. Something simpler and, in many ways, more interesting: a network of companies working to each other’s strengths, covering each other’s gaps, and collectively serving a market that none of them could fully serve alone.

There was real money in it. More than that, there was a structural advantage in it… because at the time, very few people were thinking this way, especially on the technical security side. The alarm installation and monitoring space was still relatively fragmented. The companies that did it well were often doing it locally. The ones with national reach often did it blandly. The opportunity to build something in the middle… high quality, intelligently networked, commercially coherent… was sitting there, largely unclaimed.

And somewhere in the middle of all these conversations, a thought that had been forming quietly in the background started to get louder.

What if I didn’t just help my current employer see this? What if I built it myself?

The Birth of Something That Should Have Been Brilliant

I started talking to a couple of colleagues I trusted. People who understood the industry, who had complementary skills, who could see what I was seeing. We had meetings. Lots of them. We drank a fair bit of coffee and talked through the idea from every angle.

The plan was elegant in its simplicity. One of the three of us was about to leave his current position anyway. He had the skills for alarm installation and sales… the kind of hands-on, client-facing work that would give us immediate cash flow and a real service to offer from day one. The monitoring and response piece, we had relationships for. The bigger companies I’d been talking to were genuinely open to picking up alarm response work and paying us for it. That meant recurring income from almost the moment we opened our doors.

Meanwhile, the network I’d been building provided something that a new startup normally has to spend years earning: credibility, reach, and access. We wouldn’t be starting from nothing. We’d be stepping into a web of relationships that I’d spent years cultivating, with a model that addressed a real need those relationships had already confirmed existed.

We registered a company name. We had a plan. We had a game plan. We had, or so I believed, the right people.

You can probably feel where this is going.

Gran Canaria

The colleague who was going to handle the installation and sales side… the one whose contribution was, not to put too fine a point on it, load-bearing… decided he had a more pressing engagement.

A plastering job. In Gran Canaria.

I want to be very clear that I bear him no particular ill will about this. People make their choices. Life pulls in unexpected directions. Perhaps the Canarian sun was genuinely calling to him in a way that no business opportunity could compete with. Perhaps the walls needed plastering. I genuinely don’t know.

What I do know is that when the person responsible for generating the initial revenue decides to apply render to walls on a Spanish island instead, the business model requires some fairly urgent revision.

Partner number two, sensing perhaps that the structure was now somewhat less solid than it had been, decided that a steady job was a more attractive proposition than a startup missing one of its three founders. Which is, honestly, a reasonable thing to think. I can’t fault the logic, even if I found the timing inconvenient.

And just like that, a company that had been weeks away from launching… a company with registered status, real relationships, a coherent model, and a genuine market opportunity… became a piece of paper I was paying to maintain while waiting for a situation to resolve itself that was never going to resolve itself.

I deregistered it eventually. Having put in the money. Having built the associations. Having done the groundwork that neither of my prospective partners had quite gotten round to contributing to financially.

Am I Bitter?

No.

I’ve asked myself that question a fair few times, and the honest answer is no. Frustrated, yes. A little melancholy, perhaps, in the way you feel melancholy about a version of your life that didn’t happen but might have been rather good. But bitter? Bitterness is what happens when you keep turning something over and over looking for someone to blame, and I’ve never found that to be a particularly productive way to spend time.

What I feel, more than anything, is a persistent niggle. A sense that the idea itself was right. That the timing was genuinely good. That there was a window, and it was open, and we just… didn’t go through it.

The technical security side of the industry was under-developed at that point. The collaborative model I’d been building towards was novel enough to be interesting but grounded enough to be credible. The relationships were there. The logic was sound.

It just needed people to show up. And one of them went to Gran Canaria.

The Thing I Keep Seeing, Twenty Years Later

Here’s what I want to say now… not as a eulogy for a company that never quite launched, but as an observation that I think is still relevant, possibly more relevant now than it was then.

Most businesses are still doing the thing I watched my employer do back then. They’re insulating. They’re protecting. They’re treating the fence around their patch as a strategic asset rather than a limitation.

And I understand the instinct, I really do. You build something, you protect it. You don’t hand ammunition to people who might use it against you. That’s not stupid… that’s just human.

But the model I was trying to build… the model that those conversations with the bigger companies had started to validate… was based on a different truth. That in a fragmented market, the businesses that figure out how to work with each other don’t just share the pie. They make the pie bigger. They serve clients that neither of them could have served alone. They build coverage that neither of them could have built alone. They generate income streams that don’t exist until the collaboration creates them.

The security industry is a good example because the fragmentation is so obvious once you look for it. You have companies that do manned guarding brilliantly but couldn’t install an alarm system if their lives depended on it. You have technical specialists who’ve never managed a mobile response contract. You have national players with gaps they’d rather pretend aren’t there, and regional players with genuine excellence they can’t get anyone to notice. The inefficiency is enormous. The opportunity sitting inside that inefficiency is also enormous.

And yet the default posture, for most companies, is still: keep your cards close, don’t let anyone see your gaps, and treat everyone else in your sector as either a threat or a irrelevance.

What Collaboration Actually Looks Like When It Works

I’m not talking about being naive. I’m not suggesting you invite your competitors round for a cuppa and hand them your client list. Real collaborative models have proper structures. They have clear agreements about who does what, who earns what, and where the boundaries are. The work I did building those associations wasn’t informal goodwill… it was deliberate relationship architecture, grounded in mutual commercial benefit.

What I’d observed, in those meetings with the larger companies, was that even the most fiercely independent businesses will engage with collaboration when the proposition is clear enough. When you can show them: here is a gap in your capability, here is how we fill it, here is what that means for your revenue, and here is why it costs you more to ignore this than to engage with it… the walls come down.

The conversations become different. They stop being about competition and start being about coverage. They stop being about protecting territory and start being about expanding it.

That’s the shift. And it’s not a soft, idealistic shift… it’s a hard commercial one. Because the businesses that figure out mutual benefit tend to end up with more of both words.

The Lesson I Took From the One That Got Away

If I’m honest, the experience taught me several things, not all of them comfortable.

It taught me that a good idea needs more than a good idea. Execution is everything, and execution depends on people, and people are gloriously, infuriatingly unpredictable. You can have the sharpest model in the room and still watch it fall apart because someone decided the Canarian sun was more compelling than your cash flow projections. That’s just life.

It taught me that when you’re building something that depends on other people showing up, you need to be very certain… not fairly certain, not optimistically certain, but genuinely certain… that they’re going to show up. A registered company name is not a commitment. A series of enthusiastic meetings is not a commitment. Money in the pot and skin in the game is a commitment.

And it taught me, perhaps most importantly, that the instinct I’d had about the collaborative model wasn’t wrong. It was just ahead of where my circumstances allowed it to go at that time.

The window I saw back then… I still see it. Not just in security, but across sector after sector. Businesses working in silos that don’t need to be silos. Companies competing for scraps of a market that they could collectively expand if they’d stop treating “working with someone else” as a form of surrender.

The ones who figure that out… the ones who have the conversations, build the relationships, and design the agreements that make mutual benefit concrete rather than theoretical… those are the ones who end up with more than they started with.

Sometimes a plastering job in Gran Canaria is just a plastering job in Gran Canaria.

But the idea? The idea was right.

And honestly, some days, that’s enough.

Until Next Time