Nick Winton shares a story of what happened when his business failed and he faced his own mortality – and how he is using these experiences to help others.
In 1980, Nick Winton took his business in a promising new direction. After five years running a marketing agency in Maidenhead, he identified a machine that could create promotional graphics for clients, superseding the timely process of producing artwork by hand. He raised £250,000 from a group of private investors and a bank, before visiting the US to learn how the machine worked.
On his return to the UK, it took time for the message to land – he was pioneering a new way of doing things – but Nick began to speak at conferences and explain how this new technology could speed up the creative process. In the years that followed, he took full advantage of the industrial privatisation that occurred during the 1980s, working closely with the financial services sector, for example, as it promoted the sale of major industries to banks and the public.
During the process of building up the business, Nick took a modest salary; any profits were ploughed back in to acquire more machines and expand operations. He also rolled out related divisions, including a film processing unit and a studio. Another acquisition soon followed, and then another; this time, an events business that wasn’t doing very well, but could potentially thrive as part of a larger group. Growth piled on top of growth.
But, on Monday 19 October 1987, global stock markets lost an estimated $1.7 trillion as fears of overvaluation and rising interest rates saw the biggest one-day drop in history. The banks retreated, the taps were turned off, and, within a year, Nick was struggling to pay his leases and loans. He decided to put his own money into the company to keep it afloat while he worked out how to restructure and find more clients. But the inevitable eventually happened; he ran out of money. The business went into liquidation. He was underwater.
“At that point, the worst day of my life was sitting in that creditors meeting, telling people that I couldn’t pay them back,” he says. “The liquidator was sitting next to me, explaining that there was no money left and the business was going to be broken up. To avoid personal bankruptcy, I did a deal to buy parts of the business back so I could trade until my personal guarantees were paid off. But I carried a feeling of failure and a huge obligation to the people I was unable to repay.”
In 1993, after avoiding bankruptcy, Nick began the process of selling what was left of the business. During the due diligence process, he started to get headaches, which he put down to the intensity of the sale. But these headaches then turned to migraines, and he started to get pins and needles in his fingers. He went to the doctor, who sent him to a neurologist, who gave him a CAT scan and told him he had a malignant brain tumour the size of a tangerine. The consultant wanted to operate, but Nick refused. He pushed back the procedure until the contracts were signed on the sale. Then he went into hospital. The prognosis: he had five years to live. “They said: ‘don’t worry about a pension, you won’t need one.’ It was very confronting. I was 40.”
The seeds of entrepreneurial independence
Nick Winton grew up in Maidenhead, Berkshire, as one of three siblings, alongside sister Barbara and brother Robin. His Danish mother, Grete, met his father, Sir Nicholas Winton, while he was working at the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development in Paris. They got married in 1948.
When Nick was a child in the 1950s, he knew nothing about the role his father played in a humanitarian effort to rescue more than 600 children from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia on the eve of the Second World War. Indeed, the story would go unnoticed until 50 years later when the television programme That’s Life reunited his father with dozens of the people he had rescued from potential persecution. But the values which had led to the ‘Kindertransport’ mission were evident in the Winton household.
Nick’s brother Robin, who died from meningitis when he was six, had Down’s Syndrome. Little was known about the condition at the time. While medical professionals advised that Robin should be put into care, Nicholas wanted to look after him at home. The family faced questions from friends who didn’t understand the condition and potential alienation in the community. But Robin’s life motivated Nicholas to set up the Maidenhead Mentally Handicapped Society, which provided parents with a support group and meeting place. Nick says his father’s work – he later became the chairman of care home charity Abbeyfield – was emblematic of his worldview. “He thought that we should fix things and make the world better for ourselves and others,” says Nick. Just before our interview, Nick met with a local MP to drum up support for a local arts charity in Maidenhead. Like father, like son.
This entrepreneurial, problem-solving streak showed itself in Nick’s young life. He enjoyed taking things apart to see how they worked; his father’s shed was littered with objects that Nick had taken apart to discover how they worked and occasionally struggled to put back together. At school, he enquired about career paths that would complement his love of flying – he obtained a pilot’s licence before his driving licence – but the prospect of a career in the RAF didn’t feel right. Friends told him he might fly planes, but he could just as easily end up behind a desk. Civil aviation was a second option, but it was an industry led by procedure. Another idea was to “make a lot of money so that I can buy my own plane and fly on my own terms”.
Nick started working at the age of 20, after leaving university early. He began in sales and marketing, selling Radox and other related products to chemists. From there, he moved into London to work in the advertising industry for J Walter Thompson, before moving back to Maidenhead to set up the production team of a new agency. After meeting a photographer’s rep, they started their own business with Nick working at evenings and weekends; he still needed an established employer to get a mortgage. In the early days, he also worked as a minicab driver to make ends meet. Sometimes, he would fill up his car with jerry cans of water and petrol, drive up the motorway, and offer to help those in broken-down vehicles for a small fee. He enjoyed the autonomy.
“I still don’t like being told what to do,” he says. “I like input, advice and feedback, but I don’t make a particularly good ‘drone’. I’m still a bit anti-authority. Sometimes, when I am giving talks, I show the audience one of my father’s expressions: ‘if you see a sign that says you can’t do something, you know you can do it, because if you couldn’t do it, they would bother to put up a sign.’ All of this is repressing us from going out and finding solutions to problems.”
Learning to live again
After Nick’s rollercoaster decade in the 1980s, and his hospital treatment for the brain tumour in the 1990s, he started his recovery with trepidation about the future. His experience of business success and failure had coincided with facing his own mortality – and it changed his outlook. Until that time, he had assumed that life was somehow predictable; a bit like an escalator, he would get on at the ground floor as a child, go to school, university, start working, and ascend to the sunny uplands of retirement. But as he turned 40, he realised that life is what happens and it may or may not tie in with what he had planned.
In 1994, Nick persuaded Imperial College let him study for an MBA. He wanted to see if his brain was working and he still loved business. But he had to contend with a shorter-than-expected lifespan. After graduating, with a distinction, he joined the Institute for Interim Management to run and stabilise companies as a chief executive or managing director. He wanted to help business owners to avoid the trouble he had experienced, realising that people often start businesses because they are good at something, but have to learn how to run them along the way. He also worked as an advisor, non-executive director and chairman with start-ups and turnarounds, as they experienced periods of great change.
As his work evolved – and the risk of death was misdiagnosed – Nick’s approach to leadership began to crystalise. In addition to his advisory work, he also trained as a business coach to extend his support to leaders facing challenges. He also works as a speaker, distilling the rollercoaster of his working life and his father’s story, helping people believe they can create change in their lives and in the lives of others. The threads of his life have woven together to form the person he is today: from his father’s influence, to fixing problems, to dealing with failure and making mistakes, Nick has developed his own philosophy.
The courage to make mistakes
Humility, courage, and acting in service to others, are key. Personal agency and power also matter in a world that wants to take those things away. “You need humility because you are going to make mistakes,” he says. “You have to accept that things go wrong, or you make the wrong choices. Sometimes, you don’t know what the right choices are. One of the things that motivates me is to recognise that ‘unknown unknowns’ exist – events that nobody considers.
“How well do you cope with unpredictability?” he asks. “Some people are not good at dealing with it. They want a plan and to stick to that plan. Sometimes, it helps to have an impartial mentor or adviser to help you let go of your plan because it is no longer workable. Even with my board of directors, they could have been quicker to say, look, the plan is toast; you are in a whole new world. How are you going to rewrite it before liquidation?”
His second point is about courage. “Most people think that in a difficult or dangerous situation, they are going to step up to the mark and be brave,” says Nick. “The truth is, before we are faced with a situation, none of us really knows how we are going to react. I’ve known people who thought they were honest, but when the shit hit the fan, they wanted to pass the blame or take the money out of the back door.”
He adds: “I’ve also done personal development courses that deliberately stress the participants. I’ve done a fire walk three times, and I still don’t think it’s possible. But if I don’t think it’s possible and I have done it, then what else don’t I try because I don’t think it’s possible? Experiences like this test the assumptions we make about our capabilities.”
His third point is about servant leadership. “It’s one of the ways I tried to express my role, particularly when doing turnarounds: the leader isn’t the person at the top, they are the person at the bottom supporting everyone. In my view, this is about enabling and facilitating others,” he says.
Nick is on a mission to remind people of the power they possess to make a difference, particularly in companies; to recognise they can be part of a vision that is bigger than returning money to shareholders. He wants to remind leaders of organisations that having a worthwhile vision to follow creates positive outcomes that ripple out far beyond performance indicators.
But he is worried about the direction in which the world is going and suggests we are going to need courage in the coming decades; moral courage to do what is right, not what is easy, or expedient. He also calls out the consequences of making the world safer; a world in which if something is risky, it should be eliminated; or if you have a problem, then it’s someone else fault.
“Slowly, without realising it, our agency is being removed, leading us into a position where we feel less and less powerful – and more powerless,” he says. “That worries me because it dilutes the ability of people to take any action that has an impact. I don’t believe it and I want to make sure that other people don’t believe it either.”
When he was younger, Nick’s mother introduced him to Danish poet, Piet Hein, and he quotes this line near the end of the interview. ‘To be brave, is to behave bravely when your heart is faint. So you can be really brave only when you really ain’t…’ “Bravery isn’t running into a minefield without recognising there is a danger; being brave is stepping into things you are terrified of but still doing it,” he says. “If you aren’t terrified, then it’s not bravery. It’s either stupidity or ignorance.”
This philosophy has punctuated Nick’s life and taken him on a rollercoaster of a journey. But his anti-authority, problem-solving, moral flame is still burning at the age of 73 – and isn’t going out anytime soon. Like father, like son.
This article is part of Rupert Cornford’s Substack series called Voices For The Future.