You get around eighteen summers with your children. Eighteen, from the year they’re born to the year they’re technically grown. And the ones where they actually want you there, splashing about in the sea with them rather than watching from a sun lounger with one eye on your phone, are fewer still. Once you actually sit and count them, it stops being an abstract nice-to-have and starts feeling urgent.
That number has quietly run my calendar for the last five years, and this summer was the fifth I’ve built around it.
Where it started
I spent fifteen years as a Met Police detective, the last stretch of it with the Homicide and Serious Crime Command, before I left in 2016. On my own resume that entry is filed under “all in”, full-time founder, full-time dad, and that wasn’t an accident of phrasing. Married life, three kids, and a stable desk job all landed on me around the same time, and somewhere in there I made the decision that whatever I built next had to work around my kids, not the other way round.
That’s a big part of why CCTV Aware and Metserve Media are both built the way they are, family-run, mine to shape, mine to step back from when it matters. Not every job lets you do that. Mine does, because I built it to.
Six weeks, five years running
This year’s break started, like most of them do, in North Cyprus, which has been home from home for us for years. Sea, sun, dinners that ran later than they should have, and kids who had to be physically dragged out of the water each evening. No diary. No site visits. No quotes to chase.
Five years in, and switching the business off for six weeks still feels like a small act of rebellion every single time. This year in particular, on top of the usual CCTV Aware and Metserve Media workload, I’d just launched two new sites, HIK Installer and Ajax Installer, both still young, both still needing attention. If anything, that made the six weeks feel more necessary, not less. New ventures are exactly the kind of thing that talk you into believing you can’t step away. I’ve learned not to listen to that voice.
It isn’t magic, it’s just planned
I want to be honest about how this actually works, because “I just switch off for six weeks” sounds a lot easier than it is. Some mornings I’m up at 5am for two or three hours before anyone else in the house has stirred, working through what needs doing while it’s quiet. After that, the phone goes on divert and my attention goes where it belongs. It takes a bit of planning, a genuine amount of trust in the systems and people around the business, and a willingness to let things run without me hovering over every decision. In five years, that trust has never once cost me more than it’s given back.
A gentle push, if you’ll take it
If you run a business and you’re telling yourself you can’t possibly step away for a proper stretch of the summer, I’d gently push back on that. I’m not saying it’s easy, or that everyone’s situation allows for six full weeks. But most of the time, the thing standing between you and more time with your kids is a belief rather than an actual wall. Work will still be there in September. This won’t.
I’ve written about protecting your kids’ future before, securing their online presence while they’re still too young to do it themselves. This is really the same instinct, just pointed at the present instead of the future. Some things are worth being deliberate about before it’s too late to do anything about them.
I’ve talked about this before over on LinkedIn too, if you want the shorter version. But eighteen summers is not a lot when you actually count them out, and I intend to keep spending mine exactly where I have been.