C‘mon, most sites have one of those About pages. This is mine. Most people don’t want to read them, the same applies. It is stuck near the end of the menu, because that is where an About page should go.

Ross was born in 1966 and lived most of his youth in the idyllic village of Windermere in the English Lake District. His father was a manufacturing jeweller with a gift for selling and gardening. The latter would frustrate Ross for many years. He was also a vegetarian, which was the family way until 1976. His mother was a research scientist of some kind and was also good at gardening and chemistry.

After that he moved down to the Midlands and stayed there. There he met his then girlfriend Susan. They finished off a wreck of a home build project. Except for the brickwork, the roof and the gas system, everything else needed fixing or finishing. This was all fixed and finished. They both went off to Las Vegas in 2006 and came back husband and wife. Both of them live in what is now the family home with their two sons, Kenny and Thomas.

His earliest training was in accountancy and medicine. Both don’t seem to work until you get that it is all about attention to detail. Later on he studied law, computer science and errrm casino management. All of this education has proved useful and has been applied in one way or another.

Work was never a problem when growing up in a tourist area. Ross got his first break in the hospitality industry at the age of 14. He worked with his friend Paul in a golf club kitchen run by a violent alcoholic. Later on the tourism thing would come in handy and he would see holiday jobs in retail,  kitchens, behind bars, waiting tables and warehouses.

Medicine was not to be. The three Ps came into play; Pay, Patients and Politics. Ross went onto understand that the academic path was the best and he kept an interest in surgical training and post graduate education. A chance meeting with Professor Angus Wallace, trauma surgeon and inventor of the brace position, on a plane journey was another fork in the road. Angus encouraged Ross to study on his, soon to be launched, programme in medical informatics. Off the back of this he became a tutor, co-founded a post grad. in remote medicine, co-founded a surgical skills course and was assigned as a tutor and clinical research fellow. Academia came to the rescue.

Accountancy, computer science and law seemed to pick him up most of his consulting jobs. All of this worked well until the stupid thought of “let’s buy a restaurant” came along. Between him and his lovely wife they bought a place on the edge of failure, right at the beginning of a recession.  This venue got turned around, got placed in three of the four national guides (including Michelin) and then sold on. Early and current experience has helped out clients in the restaurant and licensed trades.

Very little in life can be done without some form of marketing. Another chance meeting with another mentor taught him deep lessons about communicating ideas and in selling stuff. Drayton Bird must have seen something in this fellow Northerner and gave him the time of day. From Drayton, he learned about some of the most fundamental aspects of marketing and a constant reading list of industry classics to work through.

Hobbies, yes he does have a life too, are fairly simple. Being one of the least practical people on the planet, most forms of home improvement are out of the window. Gardening seems to work now after many years of continuous frustration over killing plants. Cooking started out as a survival mechanism after being fed by his mother and then becoming a student. In fact cooking is more of an obsession, but not to the point of being a “foodie”. If you live in the country, then a little bit of the country lives in you. When he gets the time and one of his friends gets the time, then there is an occassional hope of half a day of shooting.