Sutton

Luckily, I'm an optimist, and I do believe that when your back is up against the wall, you can have a little bit of luck, and I had a little bit of luck.

Somebody called me and said, "Have you seen this little water company in Surrey? They've developed Service Scheme Plus, annual cover for your pipes." I went down and, um, drove down to Sutton in Surrey, stopped people in the high street and said, "Have you joined up? What did you like about it? What did you not like about it?" And literally designed our plumbing insurance membership on the street.

Brilliant.

And literally with the last £10,000, we printed 1,000 mail shots, we branded them as South Staffordshire Water, and it was offering plumbing insurance cover for £50 a year.

Um, and I thought, you know, in oncology you can really transform cancer care because you're taking the findings of basic science at a very, very early level and impacting them onto the patients and in some cases making huge benefits, stepwise changes.

At that point, it wasn't straightforward to be trained in medical oncology, so I took three years out to work with another inspiring character at the Institute of Cancer Research in the Sutton branch, a chap called Richard Holston, and he's a genetic epidemiologist who has an incredible breadth of knowledge around our, our genes, the impact of our germline variation, its relationship with, um, normal tissues and how that might change in cancer.

And at that stage it was really exciting.

You know, we'd gone from traditional Sanger sequencing to ABI sequencing.

first, Pete? Yeah, so it's almost a bit like a fairy tale, like once upon a time sort of scenario.

But in honesty, I remember I was working in PC world, selling computers, and I was selling computers to... business people and I thought I really don't want to be in retail I want to be in an office you know selling something or doing something like that opposed to selling insurance that never works from PC World and I went into the local Sainsbury's and back in the day it's a long time now they used to have these like little magazines local magazines that would say what vacancies there are and stuff yeah and I saw there was a based in Sutton, in Surrey, and they were looking for junior recruitment consultants.

I kind of knew about that because Blue Arrow and that had various shops in Harrow and in and around West London where I lived.

And I remember I literally picked up the phone at the time, home phone, didn't have a mobile Landline.

His name was Harry.

And probably to today, it's still one of the best interactions from a recruiter I've ever spoken to.

So he was like, yeah, can you come down to our offices in Sutton? so i remember i just told my mum just got myself the old suit out the cupboard green polyester i remember i dressed up to the nines because you know my mom at the time was like you've got to make sure you know you know you're seeing a recruiter but you've got to make sure you do a good impression and um i went down to the offices and i was overwhelmed like sensory overwhelmed it was like 20 30 people the phones were going very much what a lot of people tried to still live today yeah yeah um and i sat with him in this room and he was like what do you know about recruitment and i said you get paid to find people jobs but what he did explain is where you can go career path he actually gave me the warts and all so it is quite hard it's not like selling computers because it's either going to work or not it is people things will go wrong but you can make so much more money than getting like 20 quid from selling a compact

or whatever