I’d missed my children’s upbringing completely. They were always in bed when I got home and they were asleep when I went to work. I didn’t see them for months. My wife used to bring them to McLaren and cook Sunday lunch for the mechanics so that I would stop and talk to my children during lunch.
1982 Making Lists
Alastair leaves ATS and decides to set up his own business in self-storage. It’s not as straight forward as he expects.
The obvious thing to do when I left ATS was to start my own racing team. I gave much thought to it, but the real purpose of Ron Dennis and the real purpose of Sir Frank Williams is to beg for money: that’s their number one requirement in life, because they can’t survive next year unless they get some millionaire to give them a bunch of money. They have to persuade them by bullshitting: this is how the rich guy should spend their money. This means they have to pander to them: take them out, entertain them, build a fantastic polished factory, send them flowers. I thought: ‘I don’t want to beg for money.’ I could have gone to Phillip Morris (Marlboro), who I had a very good relationship with, and they would have helped me with funding; however, I wouldn’t have been able to start in Formula 1, I’d have had to work my way up the ranks. If I had gone that route I’d probably still be in Grand Prix racing today.
I sat on planes and made lists because it was the only free time when I was forced to sit still that I ever had. I could do all my paperwork and make plans because, as soon as I landed, I was either fixing the house, looking after the children or going to work – or all three at once. I’d missed my children’s upbringing completely. They were always in bed when I got home and they were asleep when I went to work. I didn’t see them for months. My wife used to bring them to McLaren and cook Sunday lunch for the mechanics so that I would stop and talk to my children during lunch.
So I made lists on planes . One of the things I’d seen in the US was ‘self-storage’ and, of course, there was nobody doing it in the UK. I thought: 'This must sell in England, it must work.’ Self-storage was one of the things on my list alongside starting a restaurant and starting a race team; I had lots of ideas. When you travel to America you get lots of business ideas. Drive around and within the space of an hour you’ll see a business that exists in America that doesn’t exist here and will work. Dog shampooing: that started in the States. Nail salons: that started in the States. Self-service storage started in the States. I knew this was definitely the way to go because it’s based on property so it would be easy to borrow money.
I decided to start my own Self-storage business and stupidly left my position at ATS. My position at ATS was ‘God’ and I could do anything I liked because my boss was never in the country, he was back home in Germany. I could have run the Grand Prix team for another year and gone in only once a week. I could have gone in on a Friday afternoon, signed the cheques, given them all the stuff to do, listened to their worries, made the decisions – but I didn’t. I thought I could stop work and be in business within a week .
It took me exactly a year to get my first customer.
