Tenacity wins the day, the other side of cutting and running

Back in my institutional stockbroking days in London, with the encouragement of a great friend/previous client, I visited a particular institution in a particular European capital trying to convince them that both my firm and myself were worthy of their business for five years without a ticket.

Sure I was writing business with other clients in that town which gave me the opportunity to keep up the visits but as you can imagine my management had long since given up on me ever justifying that investment of time and travel. However, for the following five years that client was my largest commission generator and taker of primary product bar none and the largest offshore account of my two firms respectively during that period!

Growing my own business over the last 18 months has felt very similar. Plenty of hard work, staying the course, having faith and of course one has to have the wherewithal to achieve the results required but there is no doubt that tenacity has and will pay-off. My brother calls it doggedness, my wife determination, others persistence and myself, tenacity but I guess it is all of these and more.

Sure the business has had to evolve; early supporters will remember the original construct was to introduce people with good ideas to people with money to invest. Then of course the GFC hit and whilst the moneyed people were and are still just that their return hurdles went naturally higher and their appetite for risk justifiably declined. Hence freelance business development and with the pleasantly surprising change of State Government, political lobbying.

There remains no shortage of people with good ideas and I have not abandoned all of them though some abandoned me along the way but I have sought to help them in different ways. Some of these are now on the verge of full-on commercialization and I am pleased that Glorfindel Advisory Services has played its part in helping that happen.

A friend of mine loves MAD, making-a-difference and I guess if both people and businesses can do that along the way they will not only survive but flourish.


Best regards, Jonathan.