Gary always wanted to be successful.
I don’t say that to damn him. I say it because it’s the most important thing about him, and because wanting to be successful is not the same thing as building something that lasts. That distinction cost Gary everything, and I watched it happen slowly enough that I could see every stage of it.
We worked together years before either of us had a business — same large company, same industry, same starting point. He was good. Understood the product, understood the market, had the kind of energy that makes you think someone’s going to do well. When we both eventually left to set up on our own, I wasn’t surprised he went the same way. He had ambition. You could see it from across the room.
What I didn’t know then was what kind of ambition it was.
---
The sports car came first. Then the house — big place, proper money, the kind that ends up in Lancashire Life with a photo spread and a quote about vision. The office looked the part. The talk was confident. From the outside, Gary was doing it.
From slightly closer in, the picture was different.
He’d had four businesses by the time our paths crossed properly. The names changed. The story was always broadly the same. Things would build, things would stretch, the credit would run out, and then somehow there’d be a new vehicle, a fresh start, the same energy pointed at the same horizon.
I didn’t judge him for it at the time. I’m not sure I fully understood it.
What I did understand was why, every so often, Gary would ring up needing parts. Cash, with an invoice, collected in person.
By then none of his suppliers would touch him. Credit maxed, trust spent. But he still needed stock to keep moving, and I had what he needed.
I supplied him. Not because it was good business — it wasn’t, particularly — but because I knew why he was asking and I wanted to help. He wasn’t a crook. He never took money he didn’t intend to pay back. He just couldn’t quite get the foundations right, and I think somewhere underneath it all he knew that, even if he’d never have said it.
