What if?

When the end of a major chunk of your life (working) rapidly approaches you tend to think "what if?" (well at least I do) and a lot of "what if's" have occured in my life. What if one Jack Thompson hadn't invented a steam injector and called it the Thompson Instanta"? If that hadn't happened my dad would not have moved to Southport to work for him and I would not have met Marion and our children Paul and Sarah would not have been born and I would not be sitting here now writing about retiring from Instanta in less than two weeks time. And what if, after leaving Thompson Instanta, my dad had not been interested in buying the business when he was approached? And what if Barclays had not lent him the money to buy it? It makes you realise just how many small things influence what happens in every life - things that may seem insignificant when they happen but result in life changing consequences.

And it wasn't just my life that was affected by some of those "what if's". My brother Peter (pictured above with his wife Val and my mum) had the same life changing result from our parents' one decision to move to Southport and he would not have met Val (and had his kids) and would not have made a career working for Instanta. I've been writing final tributes to customers, engineers , past employees and suppliers over the past few weeks' blogs but must also acknowledge the very important role that Pete played here for many years.

Instanta's fortunes were turned around during the big recession of the 1970's when Peter and our father Bill developed the WB100, WB200 and WB300 water boilers. These models revolutionised automatic water boilers in the catering industry and ran a coach and horses through the price structure making auto fill boilers available to many businesses that had previously had to rely upon manual fill urns. Without Peter's ingenuity in solving some development problems, the range of boilers would not have got off the drawing board and that's a "what if" that could well have resulted in the business failing to survive the recession.

Peter went on to develop the hugely successful Fast Flow and Concept ranges of boilers and recruited an army of first class sub-contract engineers who promoted the Instanta name throughout the country. He built up the production facilities and instilled a sense of pride and quality in the products. If he had not done that it would have made my role in continuing to offer the excellent service that the brand has become known for extremely difficult. He always put the customers first throughout his career and that influence enabled Instanta to gain the respect and position that it now holds within the industry. So thanks for that support Pete and for the groundwork that has helped us to continue in your footsteps. I hope that (hip permitting) we can get together for some metal detecting trips when the weather warms up again. Clapham? What if we find one of those Roman Helmets?

Peter enjoys playing the guitar. I'll close today with a new guitar playing viral video phenomenon. I don't really get the popularity of this bloke but his videos are spreading around the Internet like wildfire.