Nigel Henry, Chairman & Founder of Fusion

Nigel did not set out to be a developer. At seventeen, he left school to sell the UK’s first digital watches at the street markets. In a weekend he’d make more than his teachers made in a week. "So I thought, what's the point in education?" he told me. But when winter came, the novelty faded. "Standing in the cold all day for a bit of cash wasn't a life."

He admits he was never an academic. "I had the ability, I even got a scholarship to a good school, but I just never had the interest." When he left, he didn't know what work really meant beyond Saturday trading. "My vision of an office job was sitting alone in a small room, shuffling paper around."

A friend in real estate agency told him, "You'll love it, you like people, you'll be in and out of the office." That was enough. He started with no degree, no connections, no idea what real estate even meant. But those early years in agency gave him an education that no university could. "I learned how people behave, how buyers think, how lawyers stall, and how deals unravel. You can't learn that in a classroom."

Nigel worked alone for seventeen years. He calls it his biggest mistake. When I asked what he'd do differently, his first answer was simple: get a partner.

The right one, though. "Somebody very different from you who has totally the opposite skills, someone you can trust implicitly." Not someone like you, someone whose strengths fill your gaps.

When he eventually partnered with Warren Rosenberg in 2005, it worked because they didn't need to talk every day. "We could go weeks without speaking and I'd still know what Warren was doing," he said. "We’d challenge each other but never question."

It wasn't just comfort; it was rhythm. "He'd regularly debate and come up with very good points. But there was enormous trust. That's the thing, we didn't need constant updates because we were aligned."

That kind of trust extends beyond business partners. Nigel's rule applies to anyone material to the business, lenders, investors, and contractors: "When the chips are down and there are cycles in the property industry, I want to be happy sitting around the table with those people."

It's not just about shared upside, it's about shared pressure. The wrong partners magnify stress; the right ones absorb it.

Early on, he chased anything that looked like a deal: a retail unit in Wales, an office in Glasgow, a residential block in Bournemouth. "Really stupid," he said. "Because you know what? I wasn't an expert in any of those. You can waste an enormous amount of time." He was learning geography, not business. "I'd be in Glasgow one day and Bournemouth the next, no pattern, no repetition. It looks like progress, but you're just staying busy." As a side note, this is similar to what both Bob Knakal and Tim Lumsdon said in their interviews – going too broad just ends up being a limitation.

His turning point came when he and Warren decided to focus solely on student housing. It wasn't glamorous at the time, the sector was full of generic boxes and indifferent design, but they saw potential in treating students as customers, not tenants. "We went to a student housing conference," he said, "and it was just people in grey suits building the same boxes. It reminded me of housebuilding twenty years before, standardized types, no imagination."

That's when focus started to make sense. If they could master one product and do it properly, they'd stop reinventing the wheel on every deal. Specialization created pattern recognition. "We know within 30 seconds if something could be interesting or not," he said. When you're a generalist, every deal requires fresh analysis. When you're a specialist, the market starts revealing itself faster.

It also builds credibility. Capital flows to perceived expertise. Brokers, lenders, and contractors all know what to bring. When a market understands what you stand for, opportunity finds you.

Early in his career, someone approached Nigel: "We'll back you. We'll put some money behind your deals. Straight 50/50 profit."

He turned it down (imagine a developer turning down a 50/50 split today). "I thought, why would I want to give half away?"

Years later, he saw it differently: "50% of maybe £100 is better than 100% of £10."

That lesson sits at the heart of scaling. Many developers stay small because the instinct to keep everything overrides the math. "The first time you see your profits halved, it hurts," he said, "but the first time you do a deal ten times bigger because of it, you get over it fast."

The leverage in property does not only sit in ownership, it sits in control, momentum, and partnership.

The principle applies beyond equity:

"Some of the best deals we ever did," he said, "were because we shared them early. We wouldn't have survived otherwise." Over time, he realized capital isn’t the only thing worth sharing, experience works the same way.

Nigel brought on non-executives only in the last few years. "You don't have them when you're young, because you think you can't afford them. I'd argue you can't afford not to."

A non-exec with forty years of experience might cost £5,000 –10,000 a day. That feels impossible when you're small. But what you're buying is every mistake they've already made. Every cycle they've survived. Every pattern they've recognized before you will.

"You're not paying for their time," he said. "You're paying to skip their worst years." You can pay for that learning in cash or through errors, one costs more.

And if someone experienced believes in you, they might not charge market rate. "They may say, let's take an uplift in your business," Nigel said. "If they've got faith in you, they'll want to be part of it."

For him, the "wise old heads" have become essential. "They've seen cycles, they've got networks, and they spot risk quicker than you do."

The right advisors don’t just help you avoid mistakes, they expand your sense of what’s possible. Once you see through their eyes, scale starts to feel logical.

At a leadership forum, someone once asked Nigel what changed his career. "Adding a zero," he said.

He went from fifteen-unit blocks to hundred-unit blocks, then to schemes with over a thousand beds. "The effort was about the same," he said, "but the outcome was completely different."

The logic is pretty simple:

"If I walk into a bank and say we need a £5 million facility, they're half-interested," he said. "If I ask for £200 million, they're listening."

He laughs about it now: "As a friend says, go big or go home"

It's a bit counterintuitive, but true: once the systems are in place, big is often simpler. "The bigger the scheme," he said, "the simpler our life becomes, because we can afford better professionals."

Nigel and Warren started informally. No investment committee. No process. "We'd call each other on the drive home," he said. "'What do you think? Can't go wrong there. Love that city.'"

That worked when they were small. But as the business scaled over the last three to four years, that had to end. "We were a small business that ended up doing quite well," he said. "We didn't really know what an IC meeting was."

Now they run weekly ICs and have brought in people from around the industry. The institutionalization was deliberate. "We've been institutionally acceptable," Nigel said, "but we probably wouldn't be top of the list for an institution to partner with. Our back office reporting was acceptable, but not to their level."

That's changing. The new hires aren't just filling seats, they're rebuilding infrastructure. "We're saying to this team: put all the processes in place we want. Don't be scared of changes. But we still want to be a beautiful place to work."

The IC itself reflects that balance. "Our IC isn't there to say no to a deal," Nigel said. "Maybe on day one before we put an offer in. But we should be aware of something along the way. Unless there are real big red flags, it goes through. We've got a reputation, if we shake someone's hand, we're going to do it."

He invites everyone to IC meetings, even juniors who won't speak. "Come and sit in and listen. I think it's a great way for younger people to learn. Not just 'the computer says yes or no.' It's an informative process."

The bigger transformation is strategic. For years, they followed the traditional developer playbook, "We were only as good as our last deal," Nigel said. "Build it, sell it, goodbye. No longer interested."

Now the model is different. They're raising core capital, holding assets long-term, and layering in multiple revenue streams, planning fees, asset management fees, property management fees. "We may end up with a small shareholding," he said, "but we keep our flag above the door. We help get planning, buy other sites, build data that has enormous value. It gives the business longevity."

They're also looking to bypass the private equity layer entirely. "We made a decision a few years ago: let's go direct to capital," Nigel said. "That's the end game over the next five years."

Going direct takes time and infrastructure. That's where the institutional hires come in. Their investment management team, initially built to serve their own deals, is evolving into its own business line. "Their main focus is for us," he said, "but they may end up helping other people raise capital. It's another arm of the business."

The strategy is clear: transform from a deal-dependent developer into a scaled business. From transactional to generational. "We need reasonable scale to do it," he said. "But as a few more do it successfully, others will follow."

When I asked Nigel what really makes the best developers, he didn't mention capital or deal flow. "Be rounded," he said. "Manage people, manage transactions, charm partners. Be in people's faces without driving them mad. And be memorable."

That's probably the point. The best developers aren't just good at finding deals or raising money. They're decent at all of it - the people, the numbers, the relationships, the timing.

Partner well. Specialize. Share equity when it makes sense. Hire experience early. Think bigger. Let capital follow the work.

None of it works in isolation. You need enough of each. Nigel is a testament to that. Nigel left school at seventeen to sell watches. Forty years later, he's built one of the UK's largest private developers. Not by being brilliant at one thing, but by being good enough at everything that matters. And today he's still showing up, still memorable, still the person people want at the table.