Alistair’s Story

Moorfields Eye Hospital sits in a category of its own. The institution that attracts the most complex problems in its field — cases sent there when everything else has been tried.

Three years surrounded by clinics full of kids who were too young to speak, whose eyes couldn’t tell us what their brains were seeing. I worked with some of the world’s best clinicians and surgeons — but the instruments could only take you so far. To understand what was happening inside the mind of each young patient, I had to learn to read the room differently. Look at what wasn’t there. Trust the quiet, unprovable signals.

It’s a habit I’ve carried into every room since.

It’s what made me leave the NHS to join a healthtech business that was acquired by AXA Group. What followed was a place on AXA’s senior leadership programme — reserved for those identified as future group CEOs.

I was in my thirties. Whatever I was on, it felt supercharged.

Then 9/11 happened. Within weeks, the map had been redrawn entirely.

I exited the corporate track to co-found another healthtech startup. For fifteen years, I led the business operating at the leading edge of what the industry understood about human behaviour and predictive health. Global partners and real scale. A brand that carried real weight in its market.

One afternoon, a homeless man on a seafront took a hot cup of coffee from my hands, looked me in the eye, and said: All I need is a chance to get back on my feet.

It wasn’t a revelation. It was a signal — quiet and clear, like the ones in the clinic years before. Commercial muscle without purpose is just noise. So I founded a housing business to keep families off the street and keep local capital in the town.

Ten years later, it’s still running.

We sold the second health technology business in 2018. By most measures, the first act had delivered.

I expected a choir. What I got was white noise.

The exit did its thing and then went quiet. No agenda arrived to replace it. I had energy with nowhere particular to go, and no language for what that was supposed to feel like.

So I set up something else. A factory acquired and repurposed for precision-engineered affordable homes, staffed by men coming out of the local prison system — not as a social programme bolted on, but as the business model itself.

It didn’t make it.

I carry that. You learn different things from a business that doesn’t survive than from one that does.

The View from the Wrong Mountain is the story of the eighteen months that followed my last exit. The Second Act Blueprint is what I built from what I found there — the navigating principles assembled through trial, error, and more than one spectacular wrong turn.

I’ve been through this more than once. Multiple clean exits and a difficult one. Builds that worked and one that didn’t.

Those credentials don’t appear on a CV.

But it’s what I bring to the room.