There’s no wrong path in life
I left school at Christmas time 1978 with zero qualifications. My thinking was to have six months time ahead of the clever folk leaving with qualifications entering the jobs market in competition with me having sat their O-grades as they were then known. I wasn’t sure I’d pass anything if I stayed on at school because I wasn’t engaged in it or the system it was adhering to at that time (corporal punishment, etc).
Two months after leaving school I got an apprenticeship as a burglar alarm engineer. I was in the right place at the right time with the help of my brother Jim who managed to get me a start.
I took to the work like a duck to water and by the end of year one I was flying and by age 19 I was out installing security systems all over central Scotland by means of public transport all by myself.
By the time I was 20 I was a service engineer and on callout throughout the nights and weekends to carry out repairs and support for customers having issues with their security systems as well as repairing equipment damaged by thieves breaking into premises during the night. The good thing was I had a wee Ford Escort car to take me around so no more buses or subway.
By the time I was 23 I and my two brothers, who also worked in the security industry, saw a glimmer of opportunity to start CSS; our own security systems business. So in 1986 I went from an engineer to doing sales (apparently I had the Glasgow patter or ‘gift of the gab’) then onto employing people, supervising, managing, ordering gear, billing, chasing dough, programming works. It was a time of expanding, falling, getting back up, crying, laughing, getting ahead, getting pushed back and pushing forward. I mourned the loss of my founding brother Jim at the age of 49 in 1998.
So, time for sink or swim, banks, loans, mortgages, fall down get up, fall down, get up. Laugh or cry, we were up against it and the cards seemed to be against us, as was the tide, as was everything else it seemed for a long time. But, guess what? As Sir Ranulph Fiennes (the world famous endurance explorer) said often “polar plod”, one step and one rung of the ladder at a time or as the famous Glasgow singer Lina Martell sang “one day at a time sweet Jesus.”
People around us kept us up and pulled us up, then we pulled them up – we all fell down, we all got up.
Now after 33 years in business CSS employs around 100 people. Looking back, the thing that we as individuals need to have in my humble opinion is… to be brave. It’s courage and the ability to keep going and keep dusting ourselves down and keep getting up from being down that gets us ahead in not just business but life too.
If you didn’t get what you wanted yesterday by means of the exam results in the big big picture it is just a snapshot of your history in your journey of your life. I, like hundreds if not thousands of business people, left school or college with null, nada, nothing, zero. Yesterday did not define your life. It’s hard to take one on the chin or the balls. It’s sad but by the passage of time you will get over the disappointment of not getting what you wanted or needed at that point as you consciously analysed the news.
Your life will be defined by who you are and what you do as a person and definitely not by a scrap of fancy paper with a few As or Fs on it.
There is no wrong path.
Paul Connelly
Managing Director
Connelly Security Systems LTD
EST 1986
