‘I got in fights, I stole, I was trouble – but the Army transformed me into a chief executive’
Civvy Street is a new Telegraph Money series following the lives of armed forces veterans and finding out what happened next. If you’d like to be featured please contact noah.eastwood@telegraph.co.uk
As a teenage hellraiser on one Britain’s most deprived council estates, Andrew Powell used to steal metal from scrap yards.
Now 54 and chief executive of a major recruitment firm, he was paid in scrumpy, by the pint, on Friday nights at the pub.
The late 1970s were unforgiving to directionless young men in South Wales. “The options were working in factories or ending up unemployed and probably heading into a life of crime,” he says.
Life on The Saltings, a council housing development near Swansea, was so bleak that it became the focus of a documentary in 1982 that painted it as one of the worst examples of misguided post-war community planning. It was demolished just a few years later.
“I was always in fights. It taught me so many lessons about survival of the fittest,” says Powell. “I had a very strong mother who was never afraid to give me a good hiding. I deserved it on many occasions. It was quite feral. I wasn’t a good young man.”
When his dreams of becoming a professional sportsman failed to take off, Powell began looking elsewhere in search of an escape. The armed forces provided an opportunity to reforge his destiny, even as funding and manpower has been brutally cut by successive governments.
He joined up aged 16, in what was then still referred to as “boy service”.
“I took it upon myself to go to the Army careers office in Swansea, where I sat an entry level exam and I failed my first exam. I came back six weeks later and I was offered an entry level service in the Royal Signals,” he says.
A few weeks later he was sent almost 300 miles away from home to attend the Army’s apprentice college in Harrogate, a spa town in North Yorkshire, where he studied electrical engineering. “It was a bit of a culture shock,” he says. He felt homesick, but soon found a welcome distraction in the disciplined structure of day-to-day life.
After serving in the Royal Signals following his training, he was recruited by the special forces, serving tours of duty in the Gulf, Yugoslavia and Northern Ireland. Andrew soon became one of the youngest staff sergeants in the British Army aged 26.
“There’s stuff I can’t talk about,” he says of his time conducting high-risk operations in one of Britain’s most elite units.
By 1997, more than a decade after joining up, he was out of the Army for good and working as a technical project manager for insurance firm Sun Life Financial of Canada.
‘I couldn’t understand why people only worked 9 to 5’
But old habits fostered in the military died hard. “I was up every morning at 5 or 6am and got into work for 7 or 7.30am. I couldn’t understand why people were turning up at 9am and why afterwards no one wanted to grab a beer and socialise.”
“People left at 5pm and didn’t do anything in a timely manner like they said they would. It was a very alien concept for me, for people not to do what they said they would.” He adds that this gave him “huge competitive advantages”. “I had a massive work ethic. I understood how humanity worked. I could navigate around challenges that people who had been brought up in corporate [life] couldn’t.”
Powell realised that recruiting people who were effective and dedicated to their work was something many businesses failed to do.
Following a stint at telecoms company Energis, which was eventually bought in a deal by Vodafone, he joined a consultancy in 2000 that hired out senior staff to major businesses, taking on various roles at companies backed by venture capital.
He was behind the re-launch of Boots’s wildly successful No 7 skincare product line. It didn’t matter what role he took on because his military background had taught him to handle anything, he says. “It’s just about making sure you galvanise people around a set of outcomes. Leadership is all about service.”
‘I’ll never hire anyone based on their CV’
He went on to head up operations at City of London Telecoms and set up the Training Room in 2014, giving disadvantaged job seekers training and skills to find work. The scheme has put 30,000 people in front of recruiters of major businesses.
Now chief executive of Resource Solutions, a recruitment company. He says his willingness to give people life-changing opportunities sometimes stuns his colleagues who have spent their whole careers in corporate jobs.
“There’s a couple of things I live by as a leader. I never hire for experience and skills, I hire based on attitude and potential. You can train skills, you can give people experience but what you can’t do is give them a great attitude or give them a work ethic.
“I would rather employ someone who has a great attitude and work ethic and give them the experience rather than have to deal with someone with a bad attitude. That’s what I learnt in the military.”
He believes that “talent develops in quiet places” and adds he has a “track record of finding people in huge businesses giving them promotions and opportunities way beyond what people around me would find appropriate.”
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