After graduating with a BSc in Civil Engineering I joined a ready mixed concrete company where I was thrown into the commercial world as a ‘profit-responsible’ plant manager. I took to it like the proverbial duck-to-water and through a succession of promotions moved into marine aggregates, producing graded aggregates on the River Thames for the 1980s construction boom!Having reached the position of London Area Production Manager, I took up an offer to work in Saudi Arabia as production manager for a ready mixed concrete and asphalt company that was ‘Saudi-ising’. This is where I discovered the rest of the world, realising I was very much amongst the global elite, certainly when it came to pay and conditions.Other nationalities, working in the same company, were paid a tenth of what I was and had very much worse living conditions, yet were able to send money home to family who they weren’t going to see for periods of up to two years. I, on the other hand, was able to live with my wife, at company expense.This range of living standards and the ‘endless’ extraction of finite minerals for the construction industry weighed heavy on my mind. It was not until I read Kate Raworth’s ‘Doughnut Economics’ that I realised there was an alternative way of living and ‘doing business’ where both people and planet were treated fairly and on a ‘forever’ basis.By now I had changed industries and was working in infrastructure asset management.How could I start applying this new approach to my life and career? Redundancy, usually unwelcomed, gave me the opportunity to formally learn and train in leading sustainable corporations.During this time, I also realised that the discipline of infrastructure asset management was an ideal vehicle for companies to use to properly, i.e. without greenwashing or green-wishing, embrace and apply sustainability with a systems approach.My sustainability knowledge, training and the professional environment in which I now find myself, now enables me to appreciate the issues and challenges faced by businesses, providing them the approach for ensuring their organisations are sustainable and fit for the future.