How Jon Fish Leveraged 15 Years in Development to Build a Property Business

John, knowing you and the business that you operate today, people might assume that you've been a developer for a long time, but your journey started with a struggling family manufacturing business.

Can you take us back and explain how you ended up taking such an unconventional path to get where you are today?

Yeah, well, what happened with us is in 2008, my granddad suddenly passed away while I was at university.

I was finishing my degree in real estate management to become a chart surveyor.

Having done my one year placement with McDonald's restaurants in acquisitions, which is really good fun and brilliant.

It kind of got to 2010.

I realized very quickly that to kind of, it was now or never to help the family.

The business was deteriorating.

The property was in really bad nick and it was kind of dive in, sink or swim.

The aim was to obviously try and get an exit of the family business, owning the asset.

I thought that would take about 18 months.

It actually took four years.

So in 2014, we finally agreed Sold the factory to Chinese investors who were going to use it for their own investment, which is kind of a full circle when we'd actually probably lost the business due to competition from them, the foundry.

Yes, that's kind of how we started.

I mean, 18 months to four years, there's a big gap there.

So...

I'm interested to know what happened, but perhaps more interested to know what you learned about it and what it was that kind of pushed you to do it, John.

Was it a sentimental thing? Was it something that you just felt you had to do for your granddad as a family thing? Or was there some sort of interest in property getting hands-on? Because at that point, you were already somewhere down that academic route.

You had a pretty... obvious path in the professional field of surveying set out.

So I guess, what was it that kind of pushed you into it or pulled you into it? And what did you learn from that process and those kind of years developing out that project?

Well, yeah, I think where it all kind of went wrong is I realised very quickly that I didn't have the budget to do the factory, which is why we're on so long.

We had to effectively set up a construction company where I did extensions, patios, drives, anything we could kind of get.

And the money from that is what was pumped into the factory to complete.

It's obviously a big factory, three units altogether, 10,000 square foot.

And I would effectively work the week in doing the construction work and then weekends, nights and evenings doing the factory.