If you fail, it''s not the end of things --Paul O''Leary I''ve always considered myself quite an unremarkable chap. I was over a year younger than my class all the way through school and the youngest sibling of three in my family. I went to a boys'' boarding school run by priests, where punishments were harsh and readily meted out. I was fearful of failure and not fitting in and totally relieved when I snuck away for good. I''ve always told myself that my life really only started at that point. I headed off to art college, where freedom, creativity and girls made life a whole lot more fun for a 17-year-old slip of a lad, still wet behind the ears. A foundation course in Art and Design is just a taster really. You try a bit of everything: life drawing, photography, sculpture, model making--pretty much anything that''s fun.

It''s the polar opposite of revising for A Levels. The culture is laid back; it''s up to you how hard you try, and nobody''s going to beat you with a cane for talking out of turn. It was like coming out of prison and going to summer camp. I loved every project they set us, but I also saw more talented people all around me. They seemed so much freer at expressing themselves. I don''t really blame myself for not doing a great deal of work. College serves many purposes, and I just needed to live a little, do a lot of growing up and figure out who I was. Having too much fun was bound to end in failure, and it didn''t take too long to find that out.

Before the year was done, my mates were being accepted for degree courses around the country, while I continued to drag my meagre portfolio around second-rate colleges to no avail. It was a sorry day when I said goodbye to the lovely friends I''d made and left our halls of residence with nothing lined up for next year. Moving back to Mum and Dad''s and getting a job in a factory was the bitterest pill, but maybe just the motivation I needed. I worked in an engineering firm that made huge electrical switchboards for power stations. I was drilling copper bars and bolting down relays alongside dozens of other teenagers. They would go out at the weekend and spend all their money on lager and fruit machines, without a thought of what else they could be doing. But I''d seen the promised land and I wanted to get back there. If my portfolio wasn''t good enough, then I''d have to retake my A Levels and get into university to do a design course.

I gave up my job, left home and bunked down on my college friends'' sofas. I worked in temping agencies and spent a year doing evening classes with a focus I''d never known before. Instead of being shushed, I was doing the shushing. All the same, I had no idea whether this renewed effort would be enough. I''ll never forget the day I got my results though. I was just getting over glandular fever and was cycling across Ireland with my girlfriend, Jane, who was a jewellery student. I slotted my 10p pieces into a red phone box somewhere near Tipperary and listened to my dad read out my results. I''d never been so happy.

I had exceeded all expectations and finally I was in. It was the first little something I could actually feel proud about. The degree course in Industrial Design at Loughborough University was perfect for me. I''m not an artist and I''m not an engineer. I''m somewhere in between, and as it turns out, that''s not a bad place to be. If ever there was a course made for a skill set that wasn''t easily identifiable, this was it. Week one: take a picture of the department from the air, by Friday! The sort of brief that makes you just shrug your shoulders and look blankly around you. Groups formed.

What about a kite, a box kite? We''ll need balsa wood sticks, or bamboo. We''ll need polythene or fabric. Is there a fabric stall on the market? We had ideas and we had to get stuck in because on the next bench somebody was way ahead of us. Week two: make a car that can travel the furthest using this rubber band. And while we pondered each new problem, we had hands-on experience using lathes and milling machines, learning about vacuum forming and injection moulding. It was three years of learning how to solve problems, and I didn''t just apply those newfound skills to coursework. One of my most pressing problems was money, or my complete lack of it. Students lived in slums in those days, with cling film on the windows and flea powder around the carpet.

Clothes were from charity shops, and we ate beans and tinned tomatoes to afford a night out. With begged-for overdrafts creeping higher and bank managers'' ''Nos'' becoming ever more stern, it was time to get resourceful. So I hitched rides and earned cash pavementdrawing or gathering mistletoe for free in France and selling it on the streets, in the run-up to Christmas, back in England. By a determination that I''ll never figure out, with a £1,600 overdraft and no job, I managed to buy a house. Still in my second year at university, I had become quite the problem solver, and no problem was too big. I set my sights on an eight-bedroom house that I would let out to students to pay the mortgage. Of course, the bank manager said no, over and over, but I phoned him every Monday morning at five past nine for two months and asked him to change his mind. One day, in a moment of madness, he did! When I turned up on my bicycle to this four-storey Victorian villa, the other students gathered at the door asked if I was here to look at the house as well.

I said ''No, I''m the landlord!'' Looking back, that was remarkable indeed, and it set me up for many attempts at business, all of which ended in failure, but as I''ve found out, failure is quite the cathartic experience. Every failure tells its own story, and to an enquiring mind, it''s easy to see what went wrong after the event. The most important lesson of all was the realisation that failure is not the end of things. For me, failure became nothing more than a train coming to a halt at the station. It''s not necessarily the end of the line, you just have a choice to make. Stay on, get off, take another train--there are lots of options. When the train pulls in, there''s time to reconsider and recognise what''s important. So when I lost the house, I was OK with that, and being broke was something I was used to.

The house was gone, but so was the mortgage. I had no kids and I was young, so I could just go again. There really wasn''t much to get upset about. Especially because I had gained such a lot. I was wiser, more canny and less naive, my eyes wider open, more awake to the ways of the world. Each failure made me more resilient and even more determined. I thought, how hard can it be? I can do this. I soaked up advice like a sponge, always asking anyone who ran their own show what made it tick.

In the end the answers are simple, business is simple, success is simple, and you look back and wonder how it took you so long to see just how simple it really is. This is a book about kitchens and design, and it''s also about deVOL, which is quite a remarkable story. We came from nowhere, the three of us, but each of us has something unique that stems from our childhood and the things that interested us. We are all shaped by experience and it''s the challenges that really wake you up and make you into the somebody you become. The three of us bring different things to the table, each of them essential, and we also recognise that we can''t do it alone. We each lack what the others have, so we pull together on different ropes, but all in the right direction. For many years, we were working from a very unremarkable brick shed on an industrial estate. Your premises say a lot about your business, and we needed to find a place that would really put us on the map and set us apart from every other local joinery shop.

That''s when we found Cotes Mill; the great white elephant, a forgotten gem on the River Soar where it had been perched for over a thousand years. What seemed at first like an impossible dream soon became our greatest and most rewarding adventure. Whenever I look at our sales chart for that period, I call it the Cotes Mill effect. Orders grew and the calibre of kitchens moved up a notch too. It gave us the confidence to open a shop in London. It''s a big step for a company from the Shires to open up in the Big Smoke. It was a risk, it meant lots more overheads and we had no idea if it would work. But my hunches seemed to be paying off; so onwards and upwards--we were on a roll.

This time we bought a lovely listed Georgian house in Clerkenwell and converted it into another showroom. We were blown away by how well it was received, and before long we had some really big names walking through our door; I mean like ''Oh-my-God-guess-who-walked-into-the-shop-today?'' type people.