By: Martyn Bould
From a very young age, my parents drummed into me that if a job was worth doing, it must be done well. Throughout my youth in the Midlands, UK, I practiced this principle and carried it with me into adulthood.
After completing secondary school at age 16, I pursued a degree to become a quantity surveyor, or construction cost consultant, studying via a correspondence course and graduating at the tender age of 21. By then, I had five years of practical experience under my belt. This period really honed my entrepreneurial skills because, to supplement my minuscule salary, I had to engage in commercial activities. This included taking orders for the sale of bri-nylon shirts in a local pub (such attire being very popular amongst the bachelor set as they required no ironing), as well as selling a men’s toiletry line called Twelve Bore in which the product was encased in a cartridge shell and labeled “For men of the right caliber.”
Upon reaching the “key of the door” age of 21 (as it was known in the UK at the time), my mother gave me a copy of the poem “If” by Rudyard Kipling for my birthday. I framed it, and it continues to sit on my desk today, some 60 years later.
Every line conveys a key message about how one should conduct their life, and particularly in my case, with entrepreneurship. Isolating any one line as more relevant than another is impossible, but these especially struck me: “If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,” and “Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And, which is more, you’ll be a Man, my son!”
A couple of years later, I applied for a position through our professional journal, not knowing where it might lead but trusting in my as-yet undeveloped or unrecognized “entrepreneurial” spirit. Fortuitously, it led to me boarding a plane from London to Kingston, Jamaica. My arrival coincided with the country’s social and political turning point, about which I was totally ignorant but in which I soon became immersed.
For reasons about which I often wonder, serendipity has played a significant role in my life. My move from a secure professional life in the UK to a much more exotic and challenging life in the Caribbean started with the sharing of accommodation with a Jamaican pilot who was the fiancé of my boss’s daughter. Our friendship embedded me in a colorful cultural richness that otherwise wouldn’t have been possible with typical accommodations for newly arrived staff.
The large global company I worked for in Jamaica had a joint venture business based in the Cayman Islands, and I was asked to manage this entity. Of course, I responded positively and proudly announced this to my colleagues, who immediately laughed at my boasting, saying that they only sent people to the Cayman Islands who had done something wrong. At the time, there were only 10,000 people living there, and word was that there were so many mosquitoes they could lift you up and carry you away!
Again, fortuitously, I didn’t listen to the naysayers and took up my new post. I quickly saw opportunities to develop townhouses, which had, for security reasons, gained popularity in Jamaica. Funded by friends I had made in Jamaica, I secured a parcel of land and, at the age of 26, became a property developer in Cayman.
Challenges, of course, followed as homes in Cayman typically were single stories, and the more compact town homes with two stories required the construction of staircases, which provided a challenge to local builders. Other challenges included the difficulty of potential Jamaican buyers being able to move funds out of their country to complete the purchase because Jamaica had introduced exchange control. The other shareholders in the development company were Jamaican-based, and the ever-tightening situation in that country, coupled with a global economic downturn, led me to seek others to buy the shares of the original shareholders and enabled me to complete the development.
I’ve always been keen on maintaining physical fitness, believing that mental acuity follows, and so have for many years been an enthusiastic squash player. In Cayman, there were no squash facilities, so I set about developing a club in Cayman. After some significant looking, I found a suitable piece of land that I was able to purchase by issuing shares in the club to the owners of the land. For part of the construction costs, I persuaded an accountant friend to invest. To bolster the income stream, I planned to include a bar, yet the bar had to be constructed before a liquor license could be issued, and, depending on the proximity of schools and churches to the property, this may not be possible. I took the leap of faith and proceeded, and we were fortunate to secure a license on completion.
Later, bitten by the property development “bug,” I went on to develop office buildings, luxury apartments on the beach, and a mini self-storage facility.
Entrepreneurs are known for seeing opportunities, analyzing and managing risks. But the ability to steer a steady course even when others doubt you is difficult emotional terrain to navigate. Each entrepreneurial effort I pursued taught me levels of humility. They also required courage. And, through the course of my career, I honed my ability to admit when I’d made the wrong decisions, and then learn from those mistakes, which were okay to make once, but not again.
Martyn Bould is an entrepreneur based in the Cayman Islands. He is a founding member of the Cayman National Cultural Foundation and the National Gallery of the Cayman Islands. He was honored by Queen Elizabeth II in 2012 for services in preserving and developing Caymanian culture, and by the Cayman Islands Government in the 2025 Hero’s Day Awards as a Legacy Builder for laying the groundwork for future economic development since 1970. His memoir, More than Just the Climb – Life’s Lessons Well Learned (Unicorn, Nov. 24, 2025), weaves his personal journey alongside the transformation of the Cayman Islands. Learn more on his LinkedIn profile.
