As part of his work with the See It Be It campaign, we caught up with Jeremy Brooke, Co-Founder and CEO of SSB Group, at a recent ‘What’s My Line’ session, held at Astrea Academy school. UnLTD’s Phil Turner chatted to Jeremy about his journey into law, what the future holds for the business, and how his teachers weren’t convinced he’d amount to much!…
Hi Jeremy. Can you start by telling us a little bit about yourself and your early life?
I was born in Rotherham and went to Brinsworth Manor Junior School. When I was ten years old, we moved from Brinsworth to Thorpe Hesley because my mum had a massive heart attack due to a neighbour dispute. The constant noise, banging on walls, playing loud music, and that kind of thing got too much for her and she had a massive heart attack brought on by stress
We moved to a new house, a new place and a new school. Dad was at work, mum was in bed unwell, and frequently in and out of hospital, because back in those days, heart care wasn’t what it is now. My sister was older and had left home when I was seven, so I had to learn to fend for myself. I was looking after my mum and making sure my dad was alright when he got home from work, and we kind of made meals between us.
Don’t get me wrong, my mum didn’t abandon us or anything, but it was a different kind of childhood. Not as bad as some kids have, obviously, but we were constantly living in fear of mum dying as well, which was quite a pressure.
During that time, my sister was in the Wrens (Women’s Royal Navy Service), my dad had been in the Royal Navy during the latter part of the Second World War, and my sister married a Royal Marine. So, from the age of ten through to seventeen, I wanted to be a Royal Marine. That was my entire life. I literally used to run around the village with rucksacks full of bricks on my back and do press ups every day. You wouldn’t think it now, but I used to look after myself!
I went to the recruiting office at age 17 and found out that because I’d had some ear problems when I was a younger child, I was too deaf to join the Marines. I didn’t have a plan B. I’d got absolutely no idea what I was going to do.
That must have been a blow. How did you handle the disappointment?
I walked out of there and went straight down to the cutlery company that my dad owned in Sheffield. We sat there and I cried, he cried, and from there I kind of wandered from job to job for years.
My dad was kind of blue collar, so did all right for himself. He’d come from a working-class background. My grandad was a gardener. He’d done well for himself and set up his own companies. He was quite an entrepreneur in his time, but never quite made it.
Through that, I kind of knew about sales, because that’s what my dad did. And I knew that selling was important, so I went off and tried to sell plants hire equipment, fire extinguishers, and did cold calling and telesales.
Did you feel like you had a skill for sales?
I can talk a lot. Though I wasn’t very confident when I was younger. Going back to my primary school years, we had to build a balsa wood model of a house. All the kids in the class were doing a bungalow. Four walls, the apex roof – done! I decided to build a replica of Wentworth House. Everybody else has finished their build, and I’m still on with mine, and I remember a teacher effectively saying to me, you need to wind your neck in! You live in a steel and coal mining area. You’re either going to go down the pit or into the steel works. Stop all this overthinking stuff, just do what you can do. That impacted me for a while.
Sounds like an inspirational speech! How did you end up working in law?
So, the Marines went wrong. I didn’t want to be a salesman because that’s really hard work, but I did like people, so I bumbled around a few other jobs. I joined the police for four years. Then I saw an advert for an outdoor clerk at a law firm and I applied. The rest, as they say, is history.
What I found was, and back at that time this was particularly true, lawyers were a very particular breed. They’d been to college, they’d been to university, law was still very much a profession. The minute you got qualified, you bought a raincoat and a pilot suitcase. You changed the way you spoke and behaved. And a lot of them weren’t very good, either.
You looked at what they were doing, and they were just going through the motions of being a lawyer without really pushing things, or questioning things.
The main thing about being a lawyer is asking questions, and I’m really good at that. If I got a present when I was a kid, the first thing I did was took it apart. Took it apart, put it back together again and probably got into trouble with my dad. I’ve always been naturally inquisitive, so law suited me, even though I never wanted to work in an office.
What was your role as a clerk?
Effectively, what I used to do was go out to police stations, sit with somebody and represent them during the course of a police interview. Any time, night or day; any type of crime and I’ve done everything from shoplifting, right through to armed robberies and murders.
The guy that employed me, Andrew Dalrymple, who at that time was at a firm called Rogers and Howe was brilliant, and he encouraged me to go on to a legal execs course, which was a correspondence course. I then followed that through about six years of study for legal exec and then another two years to transfer the qualification into being a solicitor.
For criminal law, you need to understand evidence, you need to be inquisitive if you’re going to be a good criminal lawyer. I actually had a case that went right through to the European Court of Human Rights. It was the bugging of a drug dealers house and they’d not got the right warrants. I remember being sat with the QC who was representing this client, talking about the human rights legislation. He didn’t know it, and I’m going, ‘it’s a breach of Article Six,’ or, ‘it’s a breach of Article Eight’. Eventually, we won at the European Court of Human Rights. They had to change the law as a result of it.
Have you always been good on the details? Because there’s being inquisitive and then there’s being able to retain and use that information?
I’ve got the ability to remember facts. I never worked hard at school, and I put my hands up to that, but what I could do is read a book two nights before an exam and retain it for long enough to get through an exam. I always did just enough to get through.
Do you think that might have been because the teachers didn’t inspire you? Do you think that was cultural at the time?
Probably. My son was going to Winkfield Academy in Rotherham and Phil Davis, who is the head teacher, took us around the school and it actually made me want to go back. It was absolutely stunning. Again, it’s in a deprived area of Rotherham, but the kids are really, really achieving and he makes them believe in themselves.
That’s what I lacked from school. I didn’t from my dad. My dad had always sort of pushed me along and said to go and give it a go, or drive me to interviews, or drive me to work. He’d do anything to help.
If you can imagine coming out of Chapeltown, in Sheffield, working in a tank factory as a 17-year-old apprentice; the next thing you’re in Malaysia getting sunk twice in three days. When he comes back to England as a 20-year-old, suddenly he’s seen the world, and I think to some extent, socially, the Second World War changed Britain, because people had been away seeing things they should never see.
Would you say your dad is one of your heroes?
Oh, absolutely! He died 20 years ago, a lot younger than he should have done. But yes, he did everything for me. You couldn’t have a better mentor. I had to get out of bed and be at work 15 minutes early. If I’d got a cold, you’d get up and you’d get to work. You only didn’t go to work if you were on your way to the hospital in an ambulance.
So, you worked for a number of years, then you qualified as a solicitor, how did you did you take the leap to setting up SSB?
I got fed up of getting out of bed at three o’clock in the morning, driving right across Sheffield to see some 18-year-old joyrider, who then sacked me because I’d not brought him a packet of cigs. I had a word with my bosses, and they let me move into their industrial disease department, which again is really heavily evidence-based.
That’s the point at which I’d started talking to my then bosses about, ‘what if we did this?’ and they were like, ‘that’s not how we do things, Jeremy’; ‘the laws not like that, Jeremy’; ‘we don’t sell things, Jeremy’. I thought, that’s not right, and if something doesn’t feel right, it’s clearly not right for you. Ultimately, I decided to leave that firm.
I didn’t think I could afford to set up a business. And to be honest, I’d not really looked at it close enough to work out how complex it would be to own a law firm. Remember, I’m from Rotherham, and I’ve got five O-Levels! My idea was become a partner of a law firm. When that happened that opened my eyes entirely, because partners of traditional law firms get promoted to partner positions on the basis of the amount of time they’ve served, not necessarily on the contribution that they made to the business or their skill set.
That frustrated the heck out of me. I worked on a small management team and we did things like setting up pay scales, dress codes and HR. About two days after the pay scales had been implemented, one of the senior partners comes in and says, ‘I’ve given my secretary a pay rise, she’s not being on the same as her!’ We’ve just spent six months putting this together. I got more and more frustrated.
I worked with a guy called Mark Tongs at an organisation called Leadership Management International. I told him my issues and he went away and came back about a month later. He said, ‘I’ve spoken to people in this country and I’ve had a couple of chats with some friends across the pond who work with law firms, and I’ve got some advice for you – you need to leave!’
He made me realise I couldn’t change the culture from inside. I can either sit and be miserable for the rest of my life, or I can go and give it a go.
Was that a scary time?
Well, I was 40, I had an 18-month old child and I’m about to leave a relatively well-paid job. There were also restrictive covenants all over the partnership agreement, so I had a year of not being able to take clients with me. Two partners came with me to do family law and wills and probate law. We switched the lights on and there were three of us and the secretary, and that was it. Simpsons Sissons and Brooke.
From that point onwards, I got my mojo back and started to look at business and realise what could be done as a business, not just as a law firm.
We’ve talked about the culture of law firms so how is the culture of your business informed by your experiences?
I came from a good family with a decent mum and dad. If they didn’t like you, they didn’t like you for a reason. Not because of the colour of your skin or your age or whatever it could be. They never displayed any of those behaviours, so I’ve never adopted any of those behaviours.
When I came to run a business, and I looked at other businesses, I thought, why not make your business such that somebody who’s got a young family can work how it suits them? Why not encourage diversity? If you’ve got a diverse community, you can’t be served by a white middle class business. We have a really grown up way of working. If you need to go to the doctors, you go to the doctors, you don’t take a day off. You just let us know and I would expect that you make that time back. You’re treated like a grown up.
When we opened the new building, we put in a prayer room, because we had people praying in board rooms before and that’s not right. Not in this day and age. We also put in a chapel, and we put in a bar on the top floor for the drinkers. It’s 2023, a prayer room should just be there. It shouldn’t be an effort to be inclusive.
What does the future hold for SSB?
We’re currently at 250 staff and we should have been at 600 staff by the end of last calendar year, but Covid put a stop to that.
How did Covid affect the business?
Covid absolutely smashed us. We were growing towards 100 staff, and suddenly we have to shut the doors and send them all home. The court shut down. The whole world shut down! We’ve had to do a lot of nimble restructuring, and relearning, and continue acquiring in order, hopefully, to get through the Covid legacy, because that’s not over for us yet.
My dad used to say, ‘Worse things have happened at sea’ – and I guess for him they did!
