I wondered why I hadn't written this post in 2013 (it's the end of 2014 now), and I can see why: 207,000 miles, two trips of which were around the 30,000mile mark each. Truly knackering and, towards December, disheartening, too. The locus of travel was largely around North America, en route to Japan and Australia. In 2014, it's interesting to see how this has changed. The long way round, perhaps, but much more interesting in terms of stopping off on land en route to the other side of the word: Dubai and Singapore in particular became hot points in 2014, where they don't even figure in this map!
Three years ago, nearly to the day, I registered my dream with Companies House: my new enterprise NoTosh was conceived on December 21st, 2009, with that magic serial number that, at the time, means so much. Of course, once the mortgage payments become due, the romanticism goes out the window: a company is only a company when it grows.
Anyone can conceive a company. It's when they turn over some cash that they get born, and so NoTosh was really born on January 5th, 2010, when I went to (paid) work for the first time. The first client was Northern Film & Media, growing their digital strategy to something that still makes up a large chunk of their revenues and investments. NoTosh worked with them on loads of innovative strategies, including the creation of the world's first ever iPad Investment Fund, something that has kick-started several successful businesses. I'll be forever grateful to Agnes Wilkie and Tom Harvey for taking the plunge with me and my nascent venture at such an early stage, and putting enough cash in the bank to allow me to start taking some risks.
Wanting to take advantage of a Christmas gift I'd asked for from my wife, I cycled to work in Newcastle from Edinburgh, through some of the most bitter, deep snow. I left the house at 0610 in the morning, realising by 0620 that I'd never make my train on time at the speed I could muster on the slippery roads. That was also NoTosh's first ever taxi receipt claim.
It is rather apt that, 3 years from that date, Tom Barrett is arriving bleary-eyed in Melbourne to kick off NoTosh Australia. It's not -4C, as it was on my first day off to work, but more likely 40C+ as he heads into a summer heatwave. But one thing remains the same: his flight arrives from Dubai at 0610 - the same time I set out on my bike for that first day's worth of work.
Tom joined NoTosh on May 1st, 2011, his initiation spent in the buzz of the world's biggest ever election swing (33% swing in 100 days flat!) that NoTosh helped lead with the SNP political party. He saw, fast, that this was no ordinary "education consultancy". Over the next six months a lot of Tom's time was spent getting aquainted with the books and with his own core clients. It was November, in the taxi to the airport at the end of a long trip to Taiwan and Brisbane, our first big foreign trip together (boy, those are fun!), that Tom said, quite emphatically: "We will live here one day, I'm sure. It's just a matter of when."
By April, we were working intensively on a new project in the fashion industry, helping a behemoth company see how it could help people learn better about themselves. Tom and Peter, who had joined us that winter, had come for a few days lockdown in Edinburgh as we worked out our masterplan for this huge programme of work. Working away from home is mostly fun, but not seeing your family is very unfun. Tom had just come off a conversation with his family, a little bluesy, and we got talking about how we could make that better. We'd both been having several trips downunder that year, and Tom's wife had long harboured an ambition to go there. Was now the right time? Would it work for NoTosh? Would it really be possible?
Yes. We make things happen for ourselves. And that was that.
It goes to show what a complex process it is to get things started overseas, and we're far from finished with the practicalities of setting up a subsidiary in Australia. That conversation was eight months ago, and there's much still to do. The first task is no doubt for Tom to do some unpacking! But already we're speaking to those districts and schools who, like NoTosh's first clients in 2010, want to help create something unique and fresh downunder, with the experiences from our truly global work.
Far from "leaving the UK" (there have been scores of tweets along the lines of "UK's loss, Australia's gain"), Tom's change of base, change of home, means that we can bolster and amplify the amazing work Tom and the rest of our team has been doing in Australia, the US, the Middle East and around Europe. It means that we can all spend a little less time in planes. It also means, I think, that more of the amazing work we've already started in Australia, but which isn't widely known back home, might be brought to audiences in the UK and elsewhere.
It's tremendously exciting, and the next three years will undoubtedly prove as exciting as the first three. By then, we'll no longer be a toddler. Heck, we'll be about old enough to go to Elementary School.
Ewan McIntosh is the founder of NoTosh, the no-nonsense company that makes accessible the creative process required to innovate: to find meaningful problems and solve them.
School leaders and innovators struggle to make the most of educators' and students' potential. My team at NoTosh cut the time and cost of making significant change in physical spaces, digital and curricular innovation programmes. We work long term to help make that change last, even as educators come and go.
