erwin@thefoundersfieldmanual.com
I did not arrive in business fully formed.
I did not leave school with a grand plan, a polished network or a theory about how companies should be built. I arrived the way most founders arrive — with more confidence than evidence and a willingness to find out what I was made of.
Before business, there was the RAF. Eight years. The RAF gave me discipline, teamwork, calm under pressure and a respect for the people behind the scenes who make important things work. It also gave me the belief that difficult things could be done if you were willing to prepare properly and stay focused when it got uncomfortable.
When I left, almost everyone thought I was mad. I was walking away from a secure career, a good pension and a life that made sense to other people. From the outside, a brave decision can look clean and decisive. Inside it feels considerably less certain than that.
I wanted to get into sales. I could communicate. I liked people. I believed I could learn. Every recruiter told me the same thing: you need sales experience. I pushed back. That was the door that opened.
What followed was not a straight line. Cold calling. A Ford Sierra and a phone fitted in the car. Early businesses that did not work — sometimes the product was wrong, sometimes the timing was wrong, sometimes I was wrong. I learned that rejection does not kill you. I also learned that learning under pressure is faster than learning in a classroom.
Computer Telecom Installations — CTI
With £120, a trusted partner and a market that was opening at exactly the right moment, we built CTI from nothing. It grew to more than £30 million in turnover, £5 million EBIT and operations across multiple countries. That is the neat version. The real version is messier and more useful.
The real version involved every kind of pressure a business can put on a founder: cash problems, people problems, commercial problems, the technical crisis that arrives the morning after the biggest win of the year. It involved decisions I got right and decisions I got badly wrong. It involved learning, in the doing, what separates businesses that hold together from businesses that do not.
That is where the Field Notes come from. Not from theory alone and not from having always known what to do. From having been in the room when it mattered and from having got enough of it right to still be here.
Advisory work — and why
After CTI, I spent years working with founders and leadership teams across a range of businesses. What I noticed was a consistent gap. Not a lack of ambition or intelligence. A lack of the straight, experienced outside view that most founders are missing at the moments that matter most.
The people around a founder — team, investors, co-founders, advisers — all have their own positions to protect and relationships to manage. That distorts the advice they give, sometimes without anyone noticing. What a founder at a critical moment usually needs is someone with no stake in the outcome who has been in the same position and will say what they actually see.
That is what I do. Not therapy, not coaching in the non-directive sense and not consulting where I take on part of the business. A straight advisory relationship built around the founder's most important decisions and the moments when clarity is hardest to find from the inside.