A bit more about Howard...

 

My formative years were spent by the sea in LA (that's local speak for Little-'ampton (the 'H' in Littlehampton should really be pronounced but is often overlooked by folk round here) where I attended the local comprehensive school. I found that I was quite good at numbers and somehow managed to win a place at Cambridge University to read Mathematics.

 

On graduating, I thought it would be fun to become a Chartered Accountant (huh ?!) and joined Price Waterhouse in London. It was fun actually, being sent to top-quality firms in the City and the West End on audit assignments every few weeks where you'd meet new people and new work systems.

 

After qualifying (having received a tremendous training with PW) I sought the high-octane world of investment banking in the City and was lucky to be able to join the Corporate Finance Dept of Barclays de Zoete Wedd (BZW) just at the start of the 80's 'Big Bang'.

 

After being overheard by the MD struggling with some schoolboy French on the phone to an overseas client, I was deemed eminently qualified to be posted to the Paris office of BZW where, in the early 1990s, I became a 'Directeur', heading-up a small team that transacted a number of succesful finance-raisings and cross-border acquisitions for major international corporates.

 

My greatest acquisition though, or rather merger, was in my personal life when Veronique, a young 'Educateur des Jeunes Enfants' in Paris, agreed to marry me.

 

Unfortunately, Veronique fell very ill with a rare cancer (from which she has made a full recovery thanks to the wonderful work of the team at Charing Cross Hospital) and this made both of us re-evaluate the values of what was most important in our lives.

 

When our first son was born, we moved the family back to the UK near Chichester, West Sussex and I started a business consultancy practice that led on to me co-founding and developing a number of highly successful internet based companies (which have subsequently since been sold and merged with larger businesses).

 

Now, with the capital proceeds from those sales, I'm passionately pursuing an interest in property I've had since being taken around my grandfather's property development portfolio in Oxford when I'd visit him as a child.
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Aside from the purchase of the family home, I first dipped my toes in the property investment market back in 1996 with three BTL flats, which were re-sold at a good profit only two years later. With hindsight I wish I'd kept these assets and re-ploughed the gains released through re-mortgaging them into further properties and to have grown the portfolio. Wiser now, I'm not going to be making that mistake again!