Just over a month before I was due to leave JD, I went out to lunch with one of my suppliers, DPD the parcel delivery company. The meeting that fell on that date just so happened to be our annual review with the CEO. It was me, him and my director and we met in a restaurant down the road. The meeting went as planned, nothing out of the ordinary and after we’d discussed what we needed to my director left for his next engagement, leaving me and DPD’s CEO, Dwain to finish our drinks. I started to continue the conversation about the strategy for JD in the coming months but he stopped me, and simply said “so I’ve been told you’re leaving in a month. I want you to come and work for me”. I’d admired Dwain for as long as I’d known him. He gave powerful speeches at conferences I’d attended. He commanded the room in every meeting I’d been in. He was very inspiring, so I said yes. After some backwards and forwards with his team, I agreed to take a role in the international department as General Manager of Strategy and Solutions. It was a big job, bigger than anything I thought I’d land aged 28 and it was another title that gave me far-reaching responsibilities and I was responsible for a lot of people. At first the job was brilliant, I loved it. I could create, I could design, I could shape the way things were done and how parcels got across the globe, it was refreshing, but Brexit came over the horizon, fast. The vote had been in 2016 but no one had taken it seriously until a few months after I started in 2018. Suddenly, it became real, and a threat, and it became my responsibility. This company had traded with Europe for 20 years, only needing a name and an address to get a parcel to 27 countries across the continent. It was as easy to get a package from Birmingham to Bristol as it was to get one from Birmingham to Paris, but all that was about to change. That small amount of data went from name and address to over 200 pieces of information. The sheer magnitude of what we had to build in less than 12 months overwhelmed just about every department, and not just us, the French, the Germans, the Belgians, the Latvians, all had to comply, and couldn’t understand why we were asking them to do what we needed them to. I used every skill in my arsenal that I’d learned and developed over the years. I had to ask the business to change almost everything they were doing, for no financial reward, it was effectively damage control. New processes, new equipment, even a whole new warehouse to store parcels that hadn’t had tax paid on them, all needed to be built and ready in 12 months, something that our veteran competitors had spent 20 years building up. It was massively stressful with countless nights losing sleep, but after a (thankful) 12-month extension and working full pelt for two years solid, we achieved what our competitors could only dream of creating, allowing the company to continue trading with the EU for years to come.