I was fortunate in finding a manager who 'believed' in me. He said I should do my MBA and thatno MBA was as good as the Henley one! - So really I didn't have much choice since he was responsible for sponsoring me. Henley however, had plenty of choice. I had no primary degree - my numeracy wasn't great and they could easily have said 'no'. But they didn't and suddenly I found myself in a completely strange environment. Even at forty I was older than everybody else, but the real difference was that for the first time I found myself in a 'commercial' environment.

The first few weeks were hell. We raced through the preliminaries in Finance because almost everybody else knew what ROCE and ROI/CashFlow/P&L and a Balance Sheet were. In those days we learnt about Source and Application of Funds – another mystery. On top of that we were learning French and Statistics and the final straw was when we had a lecture on 'Venture Capital'.