I have always had a keen interest in business. From the age of about eleven or twelve I ran a car-washing service in the village car park on Saturdays, and had a few regular customers amongst neighbours too. I used to do gardening as well, with a couple of regular customers and some more ad-hoc ones. As I grew up I moved towards regular employment, but still kept an eye out for business opportunities. I remember once the hotel I worked in had an over-supply of melons, so I bought them for 20p each, took them to school and sold them at lunch time for £1 (or 50p if they were bruised!).

However, over the years as I got a little more experience of business, I started thinking there must be a better way. The papers were always full of industrial disputes, and it seemed that somehow over the years a pretty acrimonious relationship had developed between many employers and employees. Obviously this was not the case everywhere, but in many cases it seemed employers were only interested in money, and employees were only interested in their rights. From my point of view, it seemed to be totally upside-down. Employers, I thought, should have the rights and wellbeing of their staff as their number one priority, whereas the staff should have the quality of the work and ultimately the profitability of the company as theirs. The reasoning is simple. For the employer, no staff = no business, and for the employee, no business = no job. Why was it all back-to-front, and why had relations between employer and employee ever disintegrated? After all, each are both purely dependent on the other.

Part of the problem, it seemed, is that directors ultimately report to shareholders, who in most cases have only one interest: money. This is quite a natural thing, and we needn’t get all hot and bothered about the money-grabbing banks and pension funds who are often the shareholders. After all, we bank with the banks, and it’s our pensions and investments that the funds are looking to get the best return for. And they only do that because we have an interesting habit of putting our money with the people who pay the most interest. How selfish! For the banks, to do anything other than single-mindedly pursuing maximum profit could even be seen as immoral behaviour, a betrayal of the trust granted to the fund managers by the punters.

Added to this problem is the fact that customers’ interests are often different from both shareholders and staff. And without them, both shareholders and staff have nothing. It became clear to me that all three are totally reliant on both the other two, yet often have competing interests. If the company makes a big profit, the shareholders will want a generous dividend, the customers will want extra or cheaper services, and the staff will want a pay rise. Who says who gets what? Whatever is done, there is bound to be someone who feels hard done by. All three parties are working against each other, trying to maximise their share of the cake while minimising their input of the ingredients. This does not seem to be the basis of a successful business. The business might make money, but there is so much more to a successful business than that. Moreover, the system seemed to me to be vulnerable to all kinds of distrust, argument and unrest, and this is damaging to all of us. (At the time of writing, British Airways staff have voted in favour of industrial action. This hurts the business, financially as well as damaging the brand; it hurts the customers as they can’t fly and it also hurts the staff, who lose pay as well as morale.)

What is needed is a framework where staff, shareholders and customers have incentives to work together and put in 100% for the benefit of everyone. That way, the cake gets bigger and everyone gets a bigger slice. But what does this mean in practice?

For the shareholders, putting in 100% means taking a long term interest in the company so the company can p

I thought long and hard about a name for the business. The first decision was what kind of name I wanted. Would it be something personal, like Tom's Travel? Or something descriptive, like Sussex Buses? Maybe I should try and sell myself a bit by calling it The Big Friendly Bus Company. I wondered also whether I could try and describe the kind of service I wanted to offer in the name. Maybe something like Sussex Railbus or The Sussex Express.

Every few days I had another idea. Obviously the web address had to be available, and I had to ensure there were no transport companies with similar names, so I checked all sorts of names on the internet. Tom's Bus sounded quite friendly, but I didn't like the personal undertone. It was to be a team effort. Another name I liked was the Rural Railway, as I wanted to make the point that this was to be an express service coordinated with the railway. But a few days later I decided it was a silly name. I didn't want to restrict myself to rural areas, and as much as I would have liked to run trains along these routes, I couldn't.

Then one day I was walking along the road thinking about what colour the buses should be. What would really stand out? It had to be red, orange or yellow; nothing else would attract much attention. I decided against red as I was not running a London Bus and I decided against orange as it would look like a new 'Easy' service, easyBus. So, it would have to be yellow.

As I was thinking this through, I walked past a grocer with an array of fruit outside on the pavement. A big box of lemons caught my eye, and I thought, "That's a nice colour". Imagining a big bus painted bright yellow, I decided to call the business The Big Lemon.

As a boy, I thought a lot about what I wanted to do when I grew up. First I wanted to be a dustbin man because our dustbin man was always smiling. He seemed happy, so it must have been a good job. Then wheelie bins arrived, and we used to run to the window to watch them being picked up by the bin lift on the back of the truck. It all looked so much fun.

Then I wanted to be a scientist, and then an astronaut, and then a fireman. Every boy wants to be a fireman – a hero who saves people's lives and attracts all the girls! I even wanted to be a soldier, and I remember telling my dad it was because I wanted to serve Queen and Country. Quite a little patriot.

The thing I wanted to do most, though, was save the world. Quite literally. I loved the countryside, and when I heard of road-building projects that went through ancient woodland I used to think that adults were mad. The forests needed saving, certainly, but if adults were so stupid as to think that roads were more important than woods, then they needed saving too.


On a global scale, I became aware of two environmental disasters, and these shaped a lot of my thinking as a teenager. The first was the near (and in some cases total) extinction of some of the world's most beautiful animals. We used to collect stickers as children and the most popular album in my class was the WWF album. It had hundreds of different animals, and all kinds of information about them. I was fascinated. I soon realised that many of the animals were nearly extinct, including some amazingly beautiful ones such as the Panda and the Tiger. Wake up, people; how can we even contemplate a world without Pandas and Tigers?! I joined WWF.

It was in Germany when I was 13 that I learnt more about another ecological disaster: the destruction of the rainforests. I was on an exchange, and I became friends with a boy whose sister had just come cack from Brazil. She told us about the Amazon, and showed us pictures of the lush greenery stretching for miles in every direction. Wow! It looked amazing. Then she told us about how quickly it was being chopped down and burned and we saw pictures of smouldering wasteland. I couldn't believe it. How could they do that?

Back in England I learnt more about the state of the world, and joined a number of other conservation organisations. As a teenager I had posters on my walls, but these were not pictures of Ferraris, motorbikes and ladies in bikinis. They were posters from Friends of the Earth warning against landfill, pollution, nuclear power, and species loss. Global warming, however, was not as talked about then as it is now, and it was not for a few years that I fully appreciated the seriousness of it.

In January 2005 I was struck by a sense of renewed direction. The Asian tsunami of Boxing Day 2004 had put life into perspective a little, and the New Year was a time for reflection and change. I decided that life was too short to spend doing things you didn't really believe in. At the time I was flying from Gatwick to Scotland almost every two weeks to train with the Territorial Army, which I had been in for five and a half years. Why? Because it was fun, I learnt a lot and made a lot of good friends. Maybe my childhood dream of single-handedly saving the Queen from certain death at the hands of crazy foreigners played a part too, I don't know. However, it was not what I wanted to do with my life and so essentially it was a waste of my time. I was also increasingly angry at what was happening in Iraq and decided I wanted nothing to do with it.

Alongside my decision to leave the TA was my decision to stop flying. I wouldn't say it was a moral decision, or a belief that my absence on a plane would have any tangible environmental benefit by itself; it was a decision which I made to maintain logical consistency between my beliefs and my actions. It does not make sense to believe that flying causes massive environmenta