STEVE MATTHEWS INTERVIEWS DEAN THISTLETON
Hello again everyone and welcome to another edition of Up Close & Personal for the Renegade Magazine. Today I’ve travelled to get to my guest. If I could paint the scene of where we are at this moment in time… I sit under clear blue skies, snow-capped mountains and the air is crisp and clear, I feel relaxed and at peace. Civilisation is someway off in the distance. Where am I you ask, St Moritz, St Anton in The Alps, the Pyrenees, Banff, Whistler, Aspen? No… Huddersfield! Not the same ring I guess.
As usual at this time of year in the UK, we’ve had a dusting of snow and the world seems to have ended. Shops have sold out of milk and bread and getting to work seems impossible. In the middle of all that I’ve travelled to meet my fellow faculty member and a Renegade that I first met over a year ago at one of our Mastermind Groups. It’s fair to say that this guy is a force of nature, built like one of the mountains around us and he looks like he eats glass for breakfast, but don’t let that fool you, he’s a pussy cat at heart… But when he’s asking about your accountabilities and how you’re getting on, you’d better have a god answer. His catch phrase in the group is “Just do it”, seamlessly stolen from a sports brand but it works really well for him. From lowly beginnings at 13 on a milk round, to apprentice, to running the show, he has seen a meteoric rise to a successful entrepreneur. Since I’ve known him in the first year of being in a Mastermind process he saw his business grow by 400% with forecasted growth in the second year of another 300%. Now that’s truly staggering and it brings its own issues, which I’m sure we’ll talk about later. I think I’ve talked enough, so the man that brought us London 2012, well, the pool anyway… The Prince of pools, the Heir of hot tubs, Dean Thistleton. How are you mate?
Dean Thistleton: I’m very well, if I can stop laughing! That was a great introduction, thanks a lot.
SM: You’ve got to live up to the intro now.
DT: You’ve painted a pretty picture… I like it.
SM: So, tell us Dean, I mentioned there about the lowly beginnings of being 13 on a milk round. How did it all start for you? Where did it all begin?
DT: I suppose it all started for me at a very young age. I’m a council house boy, I lived on a council estate all my life. Mum and Dad split up when I was 10 and basically me and my brother were basically left to fend for ourselves. I remember my Mum saying, “We’re down to our last can of beans in the cupboard”, so for me it was a point where I woke up and thought, “I’m not having this for the rest of my life”. So, I went to school and didn’t really like it, I just needed to focus my mind on something else. I ended up starting my work life on a milk round, 13 years old, getting up at 4 o’clock in the morning, doing the milk round hanging onto the cold steel bar of a milk float, picking up cold bottles of milk… That’s why my hands are like they are today. But it really set the tone for me, I have to go out to earn money to have nice things because at that stage of my life I didn’t have nice things. It’s something I aspire to and the only way to get nice things, for me personally, is to work hard for it. I always remember somebody saying to me, “If someone gave you a million pound on a lottery ticket or you could have a million pound if you worked the next 5 years”, I said I’d sooner work for the next five years rather than have it given to me. I’ve never had anything given to me so, I don’t think I could accept it. So, the milk round was the start, it gave me something to focus on. I could have been out with my friends stealing cars, burgling houses… The job probably saved me from going down that route to be honest because I knew that if I was getting up at 4 o’clock in the morning, I wasn’t staying up until 11 or 12 o’clock at night. I’ve still got friends that live in the same area, they live in the same house and they’re in and out of prison. So, for me the emphasis is that the milk round started my life to what it is now. With the milk round, the guy who I worked for also had a tiling company, so at the weekend I was doing tiling work with him as well. So, it did keep me off the streets and I’ll be forever grateful to him. I still see him around now, and when I see him I say, “you helped me find that work ethic”. So, milk round and tiling up to the age of 16… and I was still doing the milk round at 16 and then I got an opportunity to work for a swimming pool company as a labourer. I started as a labourer, I was given a £400 float, I thought I was a millionaire… They said, “there’s your float, it’s got to last you month in, month out”. I was like, great… Let’s go to the pub! This was a Friday, I started work on the Monday and something must have just clicked with swimming pools for me because I really enjoyed the work. I was working away, 4 days a week minimum working away and I used to work a lot of weekends. A lot of people used to say to me, “why are you working weekends”? and I’d say, “because I can learn faster”. So, after 6 months I became a semi-skilled engineer, which was basically going with your engineer in a van, going to a job and you’re fitting your own pipework really. I did that for 3 months and then they said, “I think you’re ready to go on your own”. So, what was a 4-year apprenticeship, I rounded down to 9 months. I had my own van, I was 17 years old, just passed my test and I was out and about doing my own jobs. Now, when I first started at Thermelek, I started on £6.5k a year and I was basically getting a wage rise every month. Then I went semi-skilled, which took me to £16.5k and then when I got promoted to a fitter after the 9 months, I was earning £25k a year minimum.
SM: That’s a good pay rise isn’t it… 300% in 9 months!
DT: Yea, and I was probably only a few months short of my 18th birthday, so it was cracking money at the time for my age. Some of my friends were either still stealing cars or working in a factory or something like that. But I do put most of that down to… back to the beginnings of not having much food, going to a point where you might not be able to feed yourself or my Mum wouldn’t be able to feed me and just trying to better myself and get myself off the council estate. So, that was the start of my swimming pool career with Thermelek.
SM: It’s funny you should say that actually because the council estate rings home to me because obviously I was from a council estate as well. It’s strange because I always see people that I was in school with and they’re still there, great people, nothing wrong with them; but it’s funny, I couldn’t wait to get off the council estate, some people stay on the council estate and stay in the council estate mind set, don’t they. There’s nothing wrong with coming from a council estate or even living on one now, but it’s how you progress, how you change and how you bring that into everything you do. Funnily enough, I remember taking my daughter, who’s 20 now to a party with her school friends, back on the same housing estate that I grew up on and I remember pulling up and saying to her, “I worked for 30 years to get out of this place, and you’re dragging me back”. She said, “She’s a straight A Student Dad, so it’s ok”. But it’s funny how it’s a driving force to get out of there isn’t it?
DT: Absolutely, yea!
SM: You mentioned then going from the apprentice and I’ve said about the 2012 games. Tell is a little bit about that because I know you were a big part of bringing that in on time, on budget and making sure that the games went ahead well. So how did that come about?
DT: In 2010 I decided that I wanted to set up my own company, and at the time I was working for a company in Scotland called Euro Pools. I was probably the right-hand man of the owner there, David… and so I was obviously in on all the contracts. The lads were installing and I was floating from site to site and the opportunity for the Olympics come up and I said to David, “I think I want to go on my own”, in fact I said, “I know I want to go on my own”. He said ” I knew this day would always come because you’re not the type of guy who’s going to keep working for someone else for the rest of your life. However, I’ve got the order for the Olympic Pools in London sat on my desk and the only way I’m signing it, is if you oversee the job”. So, I said, “Ok, let me have a think about it. Give me a week and I’ll get back to you”. So, the following day I rung him back… because I make decision instantly and I said, “Right, what I want to do, is set up the company, get it trading, install the Olympics but basically set up the company along the way; so, I’ll start opening accounts and things like that”. He said, “Absolutely no problem with that. If you give me that commitment now, I’ll sign the contract and we’ll get the design moving”. So that was that! I knew I’d committed myself for another 18 months without actually going out on my own with my own company, but I had set the company up, which looking backwards was good for me to do. And then I also thought, if I can set up this company, install the Olympics, get it over the line, what better to have on my C.V. than I built the Olympic Pools in London but I’m going on my own, here’s my card…
Listen to the rest of the interview at 729Renegades.com/podcast
