Inspiring Career Change – IT Manager to Thai Boxing Coach
Dave Agutter - What a Career Change!
If you have ever wanted to switch careers you need to read this interview! This blog post is a Q&A session with Thai Boxing Coach Dave Agutter – who was previously working as an IT Manager. Enough talk from me, lets hear Dave’s story!
Hi Dave, you have had a pretty varied career – including serving in the Navy, becoming an IT Manager and then making a complete career change by becoming a Thai Boxing coach and gym operator. It would seem that you’re a guy that’s not afraid to make a change! Care to talk us through your career?
Wow, how long have you got?! I joined the Navy when I was 18 and did a lot of growing up out in the Gulf and former Yugoslavia. I reached a cross roads when I was about 23/24 and had the option to go for a commission; promotion; change to technical training or leave. I chose the latter and left.
There followed the obligatory period of mooching around and for the next year I spent quite a bit of time in Australia. Sadly (and quite embarrassingly) I stayed in one small area of the country and lived pretty much full time in and around Tamworth NSW. I did all sorts of itinerant work which included amongst other things lumberjacking which was by far one of the best jobs (and worst paid!) that I’ve ever done.
I left Australia for a while and ended up ski guiding in France for a month or two in between nannying for clients that my brother was teaching skiing to. Great days but my liver and kidney’s demanded a week off, and I wasn’t exactly up to date on my mortgage on my house back home.
I pretty much fell in to IT when in Oz (following on from work I’d done in the Navy), both teaching IT and fixing computers just before the global boom. When I got back home I took an IT hardware course that immediately got me a job looking after corporate IT equipment as a hardware engineer. I stayed in this area for around 18 months before realising that I could make more money; work better hours; and stay clean by converting to a desk job and doing software / system support.
I took the Microsoft route and spent a year of studying / no holidays to gain my Systems Engineer qualification and got the job I was after working for a massive call centre as a senior analyst. It could be fairly high pressure there but I loved the team I was working with and stayed longer than perhaps I should have. It was when one of my very highly paid contractors asked me a technical question that I realised that I could make more money as a contractor, and with Y2K coming up I very cynically made the jump to contracting/consulting.
I would add at this stage that IT was by no means a vocation. I hated the job and the political structure of every company that I’ve worked for. I took a very cynical view that I would take the money whilst hating the job in order to live my life how I wanted to on a weekend.
I went on to work for the Highways Agency firstly as freelance technical consultant over Y2K and beyond, then as the Service Delivery Manager in a full time capacity. I hated pretty much every minute of it, but it was very well paid. Ultimately I was on call pretty much 7 days a week and after a few years of that I realised that I didn’t even have time to spend the money I was making.
I have been Thai Boxing since I was about 12/13 years old and even managed to continue training whilst in the Navy. After I visited Thailand in 1994 to train and compete, I realised that this was the vocation that I had been looking for. I had taught quite a few classes for my instructor and the buzz I got from a good class was almost as good as the buzz I used to get from competing – but without the bruises and pain!
I don’t like just “having a go at things” so I took a “Personal Trainer” course that I managed to virtually complete whilst sat at my desk at the HA. When I had the basic qualification I took a leap of faith and left IT… and managed to get very low paid work in a gym as a fitness instructor. I very quickly fell in to taking classes (spin; circuits etc) and also put on beginners Thai Boxing courses for the gym. After about 5/6 months the money I had saved up was about running out so I jumped ship again and started teaching Thai Boxing full time out of school halls, gym studios etc.
Things just went on from there and I now run the only full time martial arts gym in York (albeit a small one)!
The switch from IT Management to Thai Boxing Coach is an unusual career path. When you left IT was the financial side of things and losing the security of “management” an issue for you? How did you deal with this?
I was earning a decent wage in IT so once I’d decided to “move on” it was just a realistic game plan of working out how much I could afford to live on per month and how long I could keep going on savings. I knew that I could always get IT contract work if things went awry, but I’d have hated myself if I’d had to take that step backwards.
My girlfriend at the time (now my wife) had said that she would help out financially if I needed it, but again I would have felt that I’d failed if I’d had to rely on that.
I have spoken to people who have left management roles who admit that they were surprised to feel a sort of “loss of status” once they were out of that environment. Did you ever get the urge to put the suit and tie back on?
Hahaha – no! I hated wearing a suit and tie! I’ve always been extremely confidant in my own abilities and very self reliant. I never viewed myself as a “manager” when I was working in IT. I felt that I just headed up a section and was the single point of contact for the systems that we worked on. I certainly never felt that there was any “status” involved in what I did.
Get that into you!
What do you consider to be the best things about your current role? What do you enjoy about what you do now?
I like teaching people. There’s no feeling like seeing someone understand something for the first time, seeing the smile on their faces. If I won the lottery I’d do what I do now but for nothing. I like the fact that any mistakes I make are my mistakes. I’m not beholden to anyone else and that buzz is still as strong now as when I started.
What was it like breaking into the Muay Thai scene – were the other boxing gyms and coaches supportive?
In general yes. I spoke with my instructor at the time and told him what I was going to do, more out of respect than anything else. He’s a good friend and we both teach in entirely different ways, so we both offer our students completely different things. If he hadn’t been supportive I would have still done it, but with a heavy heart. As with any business you will always get the little people and cliques that “don’t approve” but I’ve had that in every job that I’ve been in, and frankly Muay Thai doesn’t hold a candle to the politics of your average IT company!
Competitive Muay Thai is a “niche market” – what other services do you run out of your gym?
Probably less than 5% of Muay Thai practitioners ever compete. If you were to set up a “fighters gym” anywhere outside of Thailand (where they have no notion of training for fun or fitness), then you would likely fail pretty quickly. I run good hard sessions that leave people sweating and hopefully having learned a little more than they knew when they came in. There are a hundred classes that you can go to on any given night of the week in any given town. I have to compete with those and offer “Joe Public” an alternative to their standard aerobics class, so I run my classes with a personal training / fitness bent to them. I have separate fighters’ classes to accommodate those that want to fight / spar or indeed want to step their training up a bit. I’m also running a web site that sells Thai boxing equipment. This is something that runs hand in hand with the classes that I run and was a natural progression from just sourcing equipment for my students to buying in bulk and selling to the public.
Dave Agutter Preparing a Fighter
On the coaching side of things, talk us through the different kinds of skills and qualities a fighter needs to develop e.g. physical, skills, mental attributes.
Mental strength. And that’s it. I have a number of guys that are naturally gifted and could go as far as they want to go, but they could never be fighters, indeed they have never shown any inclination to spar, never mind compete. And there are those that are natural fighters but I have the devils own job trying to slow them down and think about what they’re doing rather than just jumping straight in and “swinging”! I won’t put anyone in for a fight unless they are 100% prepared for it. They have to put the time in, put the roadwork in and be ready for it. They have to be clear why they are stepping in to the ring.
My wife had her first fight earlier this year after training for around 4 years. It was something that she wanted to do in order to “see what it was all about”, but she took it very seriously and we did lots of training together, sparring with all the other guys in the gym and loads of running.
Anyone who gets in to the ring gets my utmost respect – it can be a very lonely place!
Different people usually respond to different coaching styles – I guess it would be the same with boxers? How do you gauge which approach works with which guy?
Trial and error. I’m not a screamer; I don’t enjoy shouting and insulting people in order to get the best out of them. If they don’t want to train then that’s up to them – they are more than welcome to come down and pay me for the session in order to stand at the back and just catch up with their mate about the weekend. Likewise I’m not going to go out of my way in order to teach them the finer points because there are people that actually want to learn.
There are a hundred different ways to teach a certain technique – it’s just finding the right way for that person. That’s what I get paid for! I can tell straight away if a student doesn’t understand something and I don’t leave them until I’ve found a way to put it across in a way that they can understand and feel comfortable with.
Psychologically there are three main ways that people learn. Some people learn by watching you; some people learn by listening to you and some learn by actually doing it (some will use a combination of all three!) As long as I encompass all three methods in my class I can pretty much get my point across.
Finally, what advice would you give someone who is considering changing careers or pursuing their goals?
Do it! You could die tomorrow in a job you hate, or doing something that you can’t stand. Life’s not a trial run and there are no second chances. I have lots of friends that don’t know what they want to do with their lives, I’m just lucky that I’ve found my vocation and I’m loving every minute of it.
Thanks Dave
Check out Dave’s websites at www.yorkthaiboxing.com and www.thaiboxingstore.co.uk
Themocracy
Wow What a read!
I’ve thought about switching careers but I’ve not really known how or had the balls hahhah. Nice to read about someone whos really put it into practise. Good on you Dave.
Hi Andy,
Yes, changing a career is something a lot of us will have thought about at one time or another. Good to read about someone who actually HAS done – and HOW they did it too.
The gym over there in York is thriving and, incidentally, they have just launched a new website which is definitely worth a look.
Gareth
Great read. Really good to see how someone can make a positive change to get themselves out of the daily grind of corporate life. I think Dave’s story describes the feelings many people have toward the modern workplace, but also shows that, with some thought and determination, you can do something to make a change for the better instead of just ‘carrying on regardless’. Inspiring stuff.
Good to hear from you Mike.
Agree that a lot of people feel stuck in a rut in their everyday jobs. From the interview it seemed that when it came to making a career change Dave knew instantly what he wanted to do. The problem so many people have is that “they don’t know what they want to do but they know its NOT what they are doing now!”
Its refreshing to know that there are people who have successfully found their way into the “escape pod” out of an IT career!