In my pre-retirement gardening leave, my family and friends suggested I needed a project as a sort of methadone to replace all that power and over stimulation from real work. Fellow drinkers at the Poltimore Arms, where I receive a lot of well-oiled advice, agreed and pointed to the Dead Wall (where your photo only goes up when you are dead) with warnings that many, had died shortly after retiring, because they had “nothing to do”.
Inventing a project was the perfect task for pub talking (like Ted Talking but with beer). “Dangerous” Dave suggested building a plane at the local Further Education college with vocational students (like he had been) and not A level swots (like he thought I had been). I was well known at the college. I ran a weekly coaching session helping students prepare for Oxford and Cambridge university interviews and had been the VIP at speech day, doing a banging speech and handing out qualifications from plumbing up to degrees. By the time we got to six beers past five (about 10.00pm), the project was on, spit shakes had been exchanged, insults hurled “you’ll never do it” etc and we were in flight. We had a budget, a timetable and knew the type of plane. I would project manage it (Oxford University, Major Programme Management, MSc, Cohort 2) and fund it, approx £30k according to Dave, who had built planes before, which I obvs knew meant £60k after everything had gone wrong.
Why a plane?
A retirement project must be departure appropriate. You need to be honest about who you are. A CFO (basically an accountant) who retires at 55, might choose to do a jigsaw puzzle. A CHRO might do some colouring in. But start-up entrepreneurs like me, don’t retire young or quietly. We keep wanting to “throw the dice”. We crave the win. We are intense, hyperactive, unpredictable, frightening, uncertain, heroic and, these days, cool. When start-up projects work, there is a unique buzz and a big pay day. But it’s risky. When they fail it’s messy. Very messy. If you want to “get” what it’s really like don’t read those books with beaming billionaires on the cover. Watch Nick in the “Deer Hunter”. He thinks he is brilliant at Russian Roulette. People like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos would be much more honest if they admitted they were like Nick (lucky at dodging the bullet) rather than gobbing off about how brilliant they are.
At 66, after forty years of playing this game and being repeatedly shot in the head (with the bullet sometimes passing dangerously close to my brain) I was as addicted to my fix as any gambler, alcoholic, pie eater or crack head. Building a plane was my methadone. A synthetic start-up. An adrenalin trip without the full-on stress of a real project. It felt real but it wasn’t. £60k was a serious sum of money. We call it “hurt money” in start-ups, but I could afford it and we would recover most of it by selling the finished plane. There was pressure but it wasn’t life and death. It was important. The project was designed to give kids doing vocational courses (for occupations we all depend on) a chance to look cool. It would help them get jobs. It would be a good PR story for Barnstaple college, which loses students to the more exciting big city of Exeter, and it was a man bites dog engineering story for North Devon, which is known for farming and tourism not engineering. But beneath the surface, it was a retirement project, bringing me down not too quickly from all that status and excitement. I checked with Unilever and they agreed, I could do it without breaking the terms of my garden leave. My garden was a plane.
I got busy. Time was short. My project plan sailed through college approvals. Why not? There was no risk. I was a Unilever spinout CEO. I was an Oxford qualified project Jedi. I was funding it. They had nothing to lose. But then we had to make it happen. There was a six-month waiting list for the plane kit, and we needed it in two. Then the delivery date fell back even further due to Ukraine war supply chain problems. I had to find and equip a place to work and recruit students and mentors. I had to register a Community Interest Company, fix insurance, register the build with the aviation authority, arrange for criminal records checks, create policies for safeguarding, health and safety, security, document the roles and processes for the build and buy a kettle and tea bags.
The usual “other stuff” winged in. My son gave me six weeks’ notice of his plan to emigrate to the US to do a masters in motorsport and never come back. We had to look after his dog until he sent for it. My wife started a project to build a factory for her business next to our house and my old Porsche started playing up. An engine warning light was coming on. Ok, I could clear it with the code reader but I had a nagging doubt I was running away from an expensive problem.
That sets the scene. This all happened ten months ago, and now I have retired I know how it turned out. Did it work? Of course, it chuffing did. What do you think I am some kind of flake? I got a hangar to build the plane in. I got the kit delivered early. I recruited students. I recruited mentors. The plane was finished on time and inside budget. The students used the project on their CVs to get apprenticeships with prestigious engineering firms. My son completed the first year of his MSc and has a three-year work permit. He sent for his dog and I flew out with it to Indianapolis. My wife’s factory is built. The Porsche ..? It just needed a software upgrade.
Naturally, there were problems and things didn’t go to plan. So what? Projects never go to plan. Situation normal. I had fun learning a whole bunch of new skills, including how to manage 16–18-year-old boys, whose lives are lived through smart phones and have the attention span of ants. (Girls seem immune to this). But the main thing is: I made the transition. I made the first step into retirement. The dead wall did not get me, because I had nothing to do. We built a plane!
Footnote: This somewhat light hearted account is how I would like to remember it but, along the way, we were hit by the ultimate human tragedy. Dave Karniewicz, who was the inspiration for our project and many others, suffered kidney failure. His transplant stopped working. For six months he had dialysis every other day but still came in to build the plane. He fought like a tiger but it got him. Our students learnt the hardest lesson of life. I am proud they asked for the plane to be named after him and attended his funeral. We are all still gutted. At Dave’s wake one of our team, Roger, a fellow pilot, did a fly past over the Poltimore Arms. Sadly, Dave is on the Dead Wall, but not because he had nothing to do.
Dave Karniewicz. Top man.
