Why I started Cordial

My first job was in recruitment. Hard sales, the kind where you learn fast because nobody is going to teach you gently. I look back on some of the methods and wince, but I loved the graft. Long days, real targets, the discipline of getting on with it. That turned out to be a useful thing to love, because graft is most of what building a business is.

Recruitment also taught me the first version of the observation that Cordial is built on. Sales teams are famously bad at admin. Through pressure rather than laziness: the phone is ringing, the target is due, and the CRM update sits at the bottom of a list that never gets to the bottom. The result is bad data, and bad data usually means a worse outcome for the customer somewhere down the line. Nobody sets out to do a bad job. The system around them simply never gave them the time to do a good one.

It bothered me more than it should have. Give people that time back, without asking them to change how they work, and the job itself gets better. People do their best work when the admin stops getting in the way of it.

Later, at Audley Travel, I learned how to run a team. Audley cares deeply about the experience on both sides of the business: the client’s, and the person delivering it. I had come from a world built on pressure. Audley showed me a different way of doing it. Better results, and a team that got stronger rather than more tired. Coaching people rather than managing them. Holding a team to a high standard without leaning on fear to do it. Some of the best people I have ever worked with came out of that place, and a good deal of who I am as a manager, I owe to my years there.

At David Harber I got to put all of it into practice, running the commercial side of a business I cared about. Watching a team get faster and more consistent, simply because the friction around them had gone, was the first real proof that the idea I had been carrying around actually worked.

David Harber is also where I met Anthony. We ran different halves of the same operation, and we would land on the same answer from completely different directions, most days before ten in the morning. Different paths, same destination. When I started thinking seriously about doing this on our own, he was the obvious person to do it with.

I had been turning the idea over for a long time before I acted on it. Long enough that Elena, my partner, had heard the pitch more times than anyone reasonably should. We have two boys, four and two, the eldest starting school this September. Leaving a Managing Director role to start something from scratch is a serious thing to bring home to a kitchen table with two small boys asleep upstairs. Elena was honest with me, which mattered more than easy enthusiasm would have. Supportive, and clear-eyed about the risk. She is used to my leaps of faith by now, and she still backs them. I don’t take that for granted.

So that is the honest version of why Cordial exists. An ordinary, recurring observation about good people doing worse work than they are capable of, because nobody gave them the time to do it properly. And two people who would rather fix that quietly than talk about transformation.

The name is the one part of the business my sons already understand. Cordial, to them, is squash. I wanted a name with some warmth in it, because it describes how we work: we don’t arrive to change what a business is, we help it do what it already does, more easily. That it made two small boys laugh was a bonus.

If the boys grow up and think their dad built something worthwhile, that will do.