A leading regional entrepreneur who prospered after passing up a path into the family fruit business in an attempt to pursue footballing stardom, has published his autobiography.
'Half a Lettuce – the Life and Times of an Entrepreneur' charts Paul Sewell’s rise, from mingling with the barrow boys in Hull fruit market to driving a world class business agenda as chair of city-based Sewell Group.
The Cottingham lad went on to become a key figure behind the Yorkshire International Business Convention and Humber Business Week, and was awarded the Order of the British Empire for his unstinting efforts. Now he is using the platform created to further aid those keen to follow in his footsteps.
“They say everybody has a book in them and that’s true for we all have a story to tell," he said. "I know now that it’s hard work and I have a renewed respect for authors of whatever type. After being encouraged to write it and capture some of my and the Sewell company story I have found the process most cathartic, remembering the journey and reinforcing the values upon which we have built the business.
“To coincide with publication of the book I’m setting up the Half a Lettuce personal investment company to help entrepreneurs, people I am already working with who I like, whose values I believe in and who I know have what it takes to go a lot further.”
Paul was supported in the project by his friend and colleague Alan Johnson, the former MP for Hull West and Hessle who is now an acclaimed author. He is currently working on a novel having achieved great success with a series of four memoirs detailing his time in government and up against it.
Alan said: “From its vivid description of Hull’s fruit market in the 1950s to the way it illustrates the rise of the Sewell Group to be one of the Sunday Times top companies in Britain, this is a fascinating story, beautifully told.
“It shows how a secondary modern boy from a tough East Riding family overcame every setback to become an inspiring leader determined to nurture success in others.”
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The book explores Paul’s personal and professional past, combining social history and commentary, humorous and poignant anecdotes and a treasure trove of business insights and lessons learned from success and failure in transforming a small building firm into a leader in construction, public private partnership, development, facilities management and petrol retail. Sewell Group now employs around 500 people and has a turnover of £100 million.
Self-published using the services of Whitefox, 'Half a Lettuce' is limited to a print run of 1,000 and will not be appearing in a book shop near you. Copies are being distributed initially to private contacts and business associates and can be ordered from Sewell Group.
The book doesn’t have a cover price but donations are encouraged in aid of the Hull Animal Welfare Trust, the organisation formed by Paul’s wife Sue in 1982 and established as a charity in 1992.
Paul said: “The book is in no way a commercial venture and all donations will go to my wife’s charity.
In addition to the support of Alan Johnson, 'Half a Lettuce' carries endorsements from an array of prominent figures from the worlds of business, sport, culture and politics including former Secretary of State for Education and founder of the Social Mobility Pledge Justine Greening, award-winning playwright John Godber and rugby league legend Jamie Peacock.
To request a copy from Sewell Group, email jo.taylor-standley@sewell-group.co.uk
Have a leaf or two on us - first excerpts from Half a Lettuce shared with Business Live:
Early years
Don’t miss
The low-level space in the scullery that Tully and I cohabit is small. This doesn’t bother Tully: he is a Welsh Corgi, the breed that the new Queen Elizabeth and her young family is making popular in the England of the 1950s.
He is the third, supposedly identical dog my dad has bought after an initial long-odds win on a race horse called Tully, this one’s two predecessors being accidentally run over in short order in exactly the same spot by speeding cars on New Village Road at the top of our street.
I am sure I’m not meant to be aware of this tragic carelessness, but the small white flash upon the head of Tully III is a bit of a giveaway, together with my siblings’ loose tongues.
My lifelong love of dogs as the best companion one could have was forged on that scullery floor, even though Tully was soon to use his lead to pull me down the stone steps from the back door and gash my head badly on the bottom one. There was general amazement that I hadn’t fractured my young skull.
I remember being sat on my dad’s knee at the surgery held in the big, strong arms of his substantial frame. Doctor Plant stitched the wound while I was wide awake, but I felt only the security Dad gave me and I never thought of how my dog may have been culpable. The scar on my forehead is visible to this day.
Family wedding
Sewell weddings were known to involve a scrap or two as entertainment during the proceedings, so us kids rushed to get a front-row seat under the tables which ran down the side of the room and carried the buffet. One of my many uncles present tried to sneak some Pimm’s and lemonade under the tables to us but my killjoy sister Joan spotted him, so that was game over. It didn’t matter and we waited for them to consume enough rum and Coke for it to kick off!
It usually started with a remembered wrong or insult, and ‘What you looking at?’ with ‘Not a lot’ the standard response.
This time a drink was thrown and soon half a dozen family members were outside pushing, shoving, throwing ineffective round-arm punches and ending up grappling themselves into a ball of boozy humanity and rolling into the churchyard opposite. This human ball of a brawl rolled on the grass in between the gravestones as we kids got another front-row view from the other side of the hedge.
We thought it was marvellous!
Fruit market
Most of all I loved the old wholesale fruit market based down Humber Street. Just like London’s Covent Garden it was a hive of commercial activity and atmosphere
from early morning until early afternoon when business had been completed. Its sense of community was extraordinary, its characters legendary be they buyers or sellers, and I loved accompanying Dad and seeing him in his element having the type of banter I never saw him enjoy anywhere else.
He had a timber shed which he called his ‘box’ by the still water of the Humber dock at the top of the street and he used it as his office base when in the area. This was more for drinking huge mugs of the sweetest tea and smoking a proportion of his 60 Players a day, rather than doing any paperwork.
Gazing through that dirty window and seeing far enough through the Humber Street bustle, he would have spied the legendary café at the other end of the fruit market where just about everybody gathered at the close of trading for brunch and a natter. This place not only served the best bacon butties in town but became pivotal later in my early life. This was because, coincidentally, some of the most influential local football people worked down Humber Street after retirement from the full-time game, or as their full-time job while they were paid for playing part-time.
It was a ‘footballville boot room’ with the smell of sizzling bacon and mashing tea!
Teenage kicks
It was truly the best time in history to be a teenager. Hope, joy and optimism abounded like never before or since. Social mobility was for the first time a fact and it was to benefit my generation.
My concerns were parochially focused, as they were bound to be at that age, but it was nearly over before it had all begun thanks to a Lambretta SX150 scooter and my inability to control it.
In those days if you were motorised on two wheels you were either a greasy hard-case ‘Rocker’ with a motorbike, or a more fashion-conscious, music-loving ‘Mod’ with a scooter. It was tribal and the girls had to choose what genre of bloke they were interested in before looking at the personal spec.
The Rockers in their leathers seemed really bothered about the technical side of their steeds and their intimate workings, but Mods like myself in our fur-hooded parkas were interested only in the colour and the many accessories with which you could personalise the machine.
Mods and Rockers battled violently at bank holiday seaside resorts as was seen regularly on the national news, but I experienced only one dose of real aggro.
I was surrounded by a group of the smelly Neanderthals en route to a Saturday school game in Hornsea as they tried to kick in my beautiful side panels while I was going at 50mph past Brandesburton. Their collective IQ not matching the capacity of the engine that the sculpted panel cloaked probably saved my bacon as they were swerving around with more bravado than sense, and attracting the attention of other road users.
Football career
I returned home to find none of the confirmation details that Blackpool FC had promised. I rang the telephone number I had been given. It was answered by a girl who knew nothing other than the manager and his coaching staff had been sacked and they were awaiting developments.
All I could do was await a call from the new regime.
It never came.
Prospecting calls did come from Johnny Steele, the manager of Barnsley, and the renowned former Manchester United and Scotland boss Tommy Docherty, then at Aston Villa.
‘Hello, Paul, this is Tommy Docherty here of Aston Villa Football Club. We wondered if you would like to come down for us to have a look at you.’
I thought this might be a hoax at first so just said yes.
‘Good. We will be in touch.’ And that was it. I heard nothing more from Mr Docherty or Aston Villa.
Over the years I have often doubted whether it happened at all, but I guess it was at a time when the manager did it all at a club and a call from the top man might swing a young player with other options towards their club.
I don’t think for a minute you had to be a star for them to want you to go for a trial. You just needed to have enough promise for them to play the numbers game with hordes of young players from which one or two might make it.
Exam flop
I can remember sitting the pivotal 11-plus exam in an impatient mood hankering to get out into the fresh air for our football game. I didn’t understand the mathematical progressions or the various shapes and forms. Anyway, nobody told me it was that important, so I treated it as such.
When the results came through some weeks later and an envelope was presented to my mother I honestly didn’t think it was a big deal.
Mum didn’t see things in quite the positive way I did. I was ‘more than a disappointment after the wonderful upbringing I’d enjoyed. Unlike my siblings and through my father I’d had everything I could wish for and still couldn’t make anything of myself’.
I was going with the thickies, deserved a slap and got one!
More than one, in fact.
It took my mother ten years to be placated and that was at the graduation ceremony in Leeds when her and Dad saw me in cap and gown picking up a first-class degree. I stood on Dad’s foot as, first up on stage, I edged along the row. He issued a rather loud Humber Street expletive but not in rhyming slang.
I wished it had been!
An education is about more than academia and exams and I’d had the lot, brilliantly well rounded. It was not an education bubble but all human life was there, including the bad guys and, of course, most importantly girls.
The streak
A night out at the Gipton pub, a few pints and a discussion about this new phenomenon led a group of about ten of us agreeing to meet up naked at the front door of No. 28 when we got back. We would then streak around the clocktower in Oakwood and into the local fish shop to order our supper before bringing it back to the common room.
I should’ve known that most of the others would bottle it, and when just myself and Mike Dyer met giggling at the door it came as no real surprise. Mike was a first year studying music and evidently as good a sport as he was a drummer. We had to make a quick decision as to whether or not to go through with it.
He who dares suffers severe embarrassment!
Off we went. Out of the front gate, left down Oakwood Avenue at a fair sprint.
Mike was younger but I was fitter and quicker. On to the main road and a quick executive decision to miss out the loop around clocktower, and so on to the parade of shops and into the fish shop.
No queue, thank God. Don’t meet anyone’s gaze.
‘Haddock and chips twice, please.’ All steady and matter-of-fact.
Business upgrade
There was no agonising over decisions for us in those days. No business case, risk analysis or board approvals, just a gut feeling as to whether we could deliver and make it pay or not. It was possibly the naivety of youth, added to a growing entrepreneurialism that was making us more than the building contractors we were trained to be.
Two new brands were created, ‘Sewell Service Stations’ and ‘Sewell Homes’.
I was very brand-aware even then and convinced the others that we had to put thought and investment into representing ourselves internally and to the outside world, what we were creating and the changes we were making. We needed to upgrade our image from being just mucky, dusty building contractors to something distinctly different.
Buy local
I have spent a career enduring the public sector mindset that they have to work with the big corporates to be safe and secure on delivery. But here in the Humber it is local Mittelstand companies that actually produced the goods.
I have spent a lifetime in construction knowing that on our patch, with our people and supply chain, we outperform any of the big nationals. We proved this in the Building Schools for the Future government programme to build and renovate the schools estate in Hull. Yet the big boys provide the default option for risk averse civil servants who fail to appreciate the regeneration effect of using local companies and keeping the public pound circulating round the local economy.
This is a shame that, for me, verges on the scandalous.
Glitzy award
At the end of the evening the chair of the judges panel came over to our table and I was introduced to her. I expressed an appropriately gracious degree of embarrassment, but she would have none of it.
‘The fact is it wasn’t even close! You were so far ahead of the competition. That was the only thing that was embarrassing!’
So how did it happen?
How could a result like this on an evening like this come about?
How did a little retailer from little old Hull in the frozen North of England morph from that four-pump brick box outlet in Sutton to the staggering triumph in Park Lane that night?
Firstly, our retail guys find who does what we do the best in the world and we go and see it.
I ask all our businesses to contemplate this unashamed ‘nicking, then personalisation of ideas’ but the retailers and their thirst for travel do it best.
These comparison exercises can be called ‘benchmarking’, but it is much more than that. It is the pursuit of ‘world class’ by seeing and hanging out with the best on the planet.
Cultural change
We had called out the old culture of ‘job for life’ complacency, low productivity (albeit good quality), and an unprofessional but friendly image.
We had to keep the best of the tradition, track record and experience, but add professionalism with the pace, energy and a metabolic rate that would sink the competition.
And sink the competition we did in what now feels like a corporate blitzkrieg that even took us by surprise. I’m sure it was actually more one of building momentum than that, but it was still pretty rapid in business terms.
The small east Hull builder that we inherited had grown into a local giant, with 250 workers on the books who enjoyed quality site accommodation and had a yard full of top-notch plant and machinery at their disposal. We knew the best people needed and demand the best tools to do the job.
We were leading the way with our traditional competition trailing in our wake. My involvement with the Construction Industry Training Board and the local group of employers they had set up, gave us a talent pipeline of apprentices, many of whom are still with the company as senior staff.
PFI and PPP
The new Preston Road Village Centre went on what was called ‘the Boots Triangle’ bounded by three roads including Preston Road.
An east Hull company had created the centre that the community craved and we left the project proud of what we had delivered with them, and for them.
I was called a ‘PFI Pioneer’ at the PFI awards in London and subsequently in the press, but ‘PPP Pioneer’ is more accurate and what I’d prefer. The public-private partnerships that I am involved with go and get the finance needed from the best appropriate source available in order to make a project happen, but to make people’s lives better rather than an investment return. The odds are that the money is being borrowed from somewhere whether people like it or not!
I gave Sewell Construction the challenge of proving that they were better than the big boys, and they did just that with delivery of the superb Thomas Ferens Academy, Newlands School for Girls, Endyke, Frederick Holmes, Kingswood, and the most difficult and risky one of all, Malet Lambert, where £25 million was spent on refurbishing and remodelling a school with its 1,500 pupils still in it!
To make sure we left a legacy beyond the buildings we converted a storage shed on Geneva Way into a Skills Academy where over a thousand kids who were having their school renewed got a taste of the construction skills needed to do it.
Jean Bishop
The most recent LIFT building is the award-winning Jean Bishop Integrated Care Centre which is re-engineering services for the benefit of older people.
I have known Hull’s famous ‘Bee Lady’ for years since we created the Age Concern Healthy Living Centre almost 20 years ago and she was rattling her tin for loose change even then, way before she won a ‘Pride of Britain’ for her fundraising. I was delighted when everybody agreed we would name this wonderful new facility in east Hull in her honour.
Citycare is now a nationally recognised exemplar that has reshaped the Primary Care Estate in Hull, just as Esteem has in secondary education, and as the Preston Road NDC did for that community.
I love this stuff and am so proud of my company’s contribution since the turn of the millennium – whether invoking the ‘F’ in ‘PFI’ or not!
Further excerpts and full review to follow on Business Live tomorrow.