Rhubarb December 2025

stand out is in extremis. Currently we are building an airfield in Brazil for a mining client.We recently had to parachute two oxygen cylinders onto a superyacht (well, near the boat – six-foot, steel gas cylinders turn into torpedoes when you push them out of a fast jet!) to successfully save a Covid patient 600 miles off Bermuda.We are also designing, and will eventually run, a training programme for a friendly Middle Eastern military. If you could give one piece of advice to your16-year-old self, standing outside Tilly's in 1990, what would it be? PPPPP! Planning Prevents **** Poor Performance! It certainly wasn’t one of my strong points at 16! I rather relied on luck and pulling a rowing boat along as hard as I could! Looking ahead, what’s next for you – personally or professionally? What are you most looking forward to in the next chapter? We are transforming NGS into a tech company.We have built a highly sophisticated tracking and travel management platform and App with numerous functions – safety check-ins for lone travellers, emergency button, country profiles and advice, location alerting and safe/unsafe area geo-fencing.There are a lot of similar Apps out there but integrated with our global response capabilities our model is unique.There doesn’t seem much point someone pressing an emergency alert if all that happens is a light flashes in a room somewhere.When the Radisson Blu hotel got hit in Bamako, Mali, we had three clients there with our App.We had them extracted before the local emergency services could respond because we knew exactly where they were.The App is increasingly using AI which is quite useful. As a company we have long employed wounded veterans.Working in an environment with others that have shared similar experiences is very good for those suffering from PTSD and I’d like to do more in this area. Fortunately, some really big employers now have similar employment programmes which is great.When we started this wasn’t the case but now there is a lot in place for the guys and girls having a hard time.

NGS has operated in some of the world’s most critical crises – from Ukraine to Gaza to the Arab Spring. Can you share a moment or story that captures what you and your team do, and the impact it’s had? People don’t call us if they are having a good day. Generally, they are having the crisis of their life.We’ve done over 25,000 cases now and never failed a client, so it’s hard to pick out individual ones. NGS is essentially a military-style operations centre with access to over 36,000 different service providers across sectors including aviation, security, medical, tracking, satellite imaging, maritime, land transport, safe housing, legal, cyber, diplomatic and cash movement. Clients call us and we provide options for them very quickly. We secured the release of a kidnap victim in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 17 minutes; we were on the ground in Ukraine within four hours of the invasion and moved about 6,000 people to safety. A current case that stands out is a 'find and retrieve' operation in Ukraine where a two- year-old girl is being ransomed by her mother from Ukraine. On the other hand, we have also been commissioned to return a teddy bear that was left on a plane! Do you still keep in touch with many OSE? Have any of those friendships or connections played a part in your personal or professional journey? I was lucky enough to have a great bunch of people in my age group at Teddies. I’m still in regular touch with dozens of them. Chris Pearce and Ed Boughton are Directors at NGS and have been exceptionally helpful professionally. Simon Gibson was one of my fellow founders,Tim Waite has been a huge supporter and any number have been involved at one stage or another. Rick Morris and his lovely family used to put me up on numerous trips to Dubai when I was building the company and couldn’t afford hotels.We are a very close group.

INTERVIEW

Teddies 1992 1st Eight with progeny in 2020.Tim Browning,Tim Waite,Tariq Hussain, Punys Sakarat,Ted Jones, Rick Morris, Lucas Jones and Ed Boughton.

What does a typical day (if there is such a thing) look like in your world now? And what continues to excite or motivate you most about what you do? I remind my team regularly that our core business is to save lives. Certainly, a lot of what we do is planning and a lot of the more day-to-day work is setting up dental appointments and routine medicals but where we really

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