How we built a business out of recession - chapter 53 - we've only gone and done it
The story of CitNOW*
This is the 53rd chapter about CitNOW, the company started from a kitchen table in Winnersh, Berkshire. If you’d like to read from the beginning, here’s a link to chpt 1. Each chapter is a 5-minute read. It’s an early draft of a book.
CitNOW was founded by Andrew Howells and Donna Barradale in 2005, although the company was only registered in 2008. In February 2018, we sold the company to Tenzing, a UK private equity company. It has been sold again since.
Snow was forecast for the last day of February, 2018. We were supposed to start at midday, but Tim, the more junior legal beagle, didn’t seem hopeful.
Just be somewhere local and wait for a call.
Platform 1, up to London, had been half empty. The premium paying commuters accustomed to a crowded carriage and the whiff of last night’s garlic were long gone.
The charming station announcer, well-known for entertaining his customers with extracts from Winnie the Pooh, was still on the platform. He was tightly wrapped in hat and scarf against the Arctic wind, with the promise of more to come.
There was no reciting.
The battleship grey steel benches remained empty, as the teenage mums opted to push their babies and the pensioners preferred to shuffle rather than sit. No one smiled when he announced that the 10.56 was only going to be a cheeky three minutes late.
We’d decided to take a mid-morning train from Wokingham. Perfect timing for a day out in London - shopping, late lunch, the theatre?
A smile must have slipped onto my face as my daydreaming gathered momentum. It hadn’t gone unnoticed.
What are you smiling about? asked Donna.
Oh, the thought of empty trains, late breakfasts and a desire to visit the Tate Modern, if there’s time, I replied, slightly disappointed that I’d been interrupted and found out. Perhaps it was still too soon for such musings?
The journey was uneventful. The blend of well-to-do lives leaving stations like Ascot and Virginia Water continued to jar with Feltham, the institutional home for young offenders, where several pushchairs departed before we were reunited with the comforting suburbs of Twickenham, Richmond, Mortlake, and Barnes.
It was all change at Waterloo.
We found a hotel on London Wall. It was close enough, and we could sit, drink coffee and wait for the call.
The sleet that started on the train had quickly blossomed into snow, softening the dystopian landscape of faceless offices hemming us in as we crabbed clumsily under our brolly blotched with sunflowers.
Every table in the overcrowded lobby was taken, mostly men in suits talking at each other or their phones. It helped to explain the fogged-up windows as we’d entered.
The opportunity to network appeared to have easily overcome any concerns with the weather, a pricey menu and the snail-paced service.
We were shoehorned into a line of crowded tables with just enough room for one person on either side. It could easily have been mistaken for a speed dating event. Some tables were doing well, others barely talking, and a few were already back on their phones.
We looked blankly at one another, on our low, tangerine-coloured stools, presumably designed for hotel efficiency rather than comfort. We said little; the silence welcome, unlike a date, where the lack of engagement screams at the futility of it ever becoming anything other than something not to be repeated. Ever.
We’d talked too much about this day already. Are we finally doing this, or was something else lurking, a final twist in the tale? Another postponement while something had to be mulled over once again. Don’t worry, Tim would say, a simple rearrangement in the diary for a day, maybe two. Or something more gut-wrenching, a postponement with no new date that drags on to the point where it can’t be called a postponement any longer.
What would Mum and Dad have made of it all?
I can’t remember when I started calling them every day. Probably when I always seemed to be driving. They’d grab a phone and the extension, keen to talk and catch up on the latest since yesterday.
Then it was only Mum.
I would have explained our wait today while she listened patiently. Few questions would have followed, not through lack of interest, but because logic dictated. As a retired maths teacher, she wouldn’t have wanted to know why selling a company might be complicated.
Unlike some, age had finally softened her. As sharp as ever, but now much happier to live in the moment and forgive the flaws and weaknesses of her children, friends and god. She knew her time was nearly up, and she chose to live what was left differently.
The call came late, after the rush had gone. The suits having vanished to their ergonomically designed high chairs to once again stare at their monitors.
At the lawyers' office, we were ushered into a presentation suite with a large U-shaped table that could comfortably seat thirty. It was littered with columns of paper and people moving back and forth, bringing more. We spent the next hour slowly moving in an anticlockwise direction, signing repeatedly. We could have opted out, giving our authority to someone else, but where’s the fun in that? We wanted to experience every tedious last moment.
The lawyers popped a few bottles of champagne with the new owners when we were done. We felt like gatecrashers at our own party, except it wasn’t our party anymore. We didn’t stay long.
Outside the tall revolving doors of the lawyer’s office, the darkening sky was crystal clear, the fallen snow still muffling the busy hum of the city. We stared upwards, lost in thought, aware that it was now done.
The freezing conditions reminded us it was time to go. We reached for each other’s hand and held on tight. It was partly to stop ourselves from falling and mostly because we still couldn’t quite believe that we’d only gone and sold our company.
We laughed at the complete lack of taxis. Which way now?
We walked away from the footsteps and took the path less trodden.
*CitNOW was our company’s trade name before we sold it in 2018.