By Martyn Bould, author of More Than Just The Climb: Life’s Lessons Well Learned (Unicorn Publishing, 2025)
When I was sixteen years old, working as an articled pupil in a quantity surveyor’s office in Birmingham, I summoned the courage to ask my boss for a raise. His response was to tell my father I would never make a quantity surveyor and to suggest I go back to work in the family factory. My mother kept that letter in a black safekeeping box for the rest of her life.
I think about that letter sometimes, usually when I’m sitting in a boardroom somewhere far from Boldmere. In 2015, I found myself seated across a vast table from the President of China’s Export-Import Bank in Beijing, surrounded by thirty officials, attorneys, and development executives, being asked whether the $3.4 billion Baha Mar resort—the largest construction project in the Western Hemisphere—could be completed on schedule. I said, as clearly as I could, “not possible.” The mood in the room changed instantly. So much for Mr. Britton’s prediction.
I share that story not as a boast but as the bookends of a career that has taught me a few things about building a professional services business in places most people only visit on vacation. I arrived in Jamaica in 1969 as a young chartered surveyor with a one-way ticket and a willingness to learn. By 1972 I had moved to the Cayman Islands, which at the time had a population of barely ten thousand. Over the next five decades, my firm grew into a regional practice spanning thirty-four Caribbean countries and Central America, serving multinational banks, hotel chains, foreign governments, and some of the most complex construction projects the region has ever seen.
None of that happened because I had a grand plan on day one. It happened because I paid attention to a few principles that revealed themselves along the way.
The first was understanding the geography of risk. Small island economies are inherently volatile. A hurricane, a bank collapse, a shift in tourism patterns, or a change in government can transform a booming market overnight. I recognized early that if our firm depended on any single island’s economy, we would be at the mercy of forces entirely outside our control. So, we built a regional model: offices in Cayman, the British Virgin Islands, Barbados, and Turks and Caicos, each positioned to cover a cluster of neighboring islands. When one market slowed, another was typically growing. Our multinational clients—Barclays, Cable & Wireless, CIBC, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office—preferred working with a single professional advisor across the entire region rather than assembling a different consultant team in every country. That preference became our competitive advantage.
The second principle was investing in the places where we worked. Wherever my firm opened an office, we committed to training and developing local professionals. This was not charity; it was strategy. In small communities, your reputation is your most valuable asset, and nothing builds reputation faster than genuine investment in local talent. When I was appointed President of the Cayman Society of Architects, Surveyors and Engineers in 1977, one of my first goals was to standardize construction contracts and tendering procedures across the islands—not just to improve our own practice, but to establish best practices that protected clients and contractors alike. It took six years to get those standards published. That kind of institutional work rarely makes headlines, but it builds the professional ecosystem that makes sustained business possible.
The third lesson came from a painful experience. After successfully completing a landmark development project in Cayman, my wife Vivian and I were informed that the purchase contract for the apartment we had been promised—our dream home—had been rescinded by the development’s board after more than two years of unchallenged participation. We were advised by multiple attorneys to sue for specific performance. Instead, we chose to move on and channel our energy into new opportunities. That decision taught me something I carry to this day: when large sums of money are involved, trust must be verified, not assumed—and knowing when to walk away from a fight is sometimes the most productive business decision you can make.
I have always believed that in life there are players and spectators. Theodore Roosevelt said it far more eloquently in his famous “Man in the Arena” speech, but the core idea is the same: the credit belongs to the person who is actually doing the work, not the one on the sidelines pointing out what went wrong. Every significant opportunity I have pursued—from opening offices on new islands where we saw future opportunity, to monitoring a $3.4 billion project on behalf of a Chinese state bank—involved stepping into the arena when the outcome was far from certain.
For business leaders building professional services firms—especially in emerging or fragmented markets—here are a few principles I would pass along:
- Diversify geographically before you need to. Don’t wait for a downturn in your home market to start thinking about regional expansion. Build your presence across multiple economies so that volatility in one doesn’t threaten the whole enterprise. Position your offices strategically to serve clusters of clients efficiently.
- Invest in the communities where you operate. Train local talent, contribute to professional standards, and build institutional relationships. In small markets, your willingness to develop people and strengthen the local profession will earn you a reputation that no marketing budget can buy.
- Protect trust with documentation, not assumptions. Verbal agreements and assumed goodwill are not substitutes for properly executed contracts. This is especially true in cross-cultural business environments where expectations, legal frameworks, and communication styles may differ significantly. Verify everything in writing.
- Be a player, not a spectator. The biggest opportunities of my career came from stepping into situations where the outcome was uncertain and the stakes were high. You cannot build something meaningful from the sidelines. Get in the arena.
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