I lost a £120,000 a year account when I was 26 because of one drive to an airport.

We had made provisions for bad traffic, but not quite enough. The passenger was late and, funnily enough, the plane did not wait. The fault was ours and ours only.

I covered the cost to the company, apologised properly and spoke directly to the MD. At the time, I genuinely believed I had fixed it. I had taken responsibility, put my hand in my pocket and done everything I thought a decent business owner was supposed to do. I had read the book and everything.

He accepted the apology. He accepted the compensation. Then he ended the relationship.

At the time I felt betrayed. Looking back, he was not punishing me. He was protecting his customers, his business and the food he put on his family's table. I was irrelevant in that picture.

Business is not a social club. You can be friendly, but you are often not friends.

You can make the right moves afterwards. You can apologise, compensate and dance all the right dances. What you do not get to decide is what happens next. If you get it wrong in business, it is not your decision what the punishment should be. The offender is not the judge and jury.

There were staff involved and internal mistakes that contributed to what happened. I could have pointed the finger and badly wanted to. I suspect some people were waiting for me to. Even at 26, I knew that was nonsense.

If somebody on minimum wage can make a mistake that costs your business hundreds of thousands of pounds, that is not really a staff problem. That is a management problem and, in my case, a Tom problem.

The real failure was not the late airport run. The real failure was allowing that much risk to sit in one place.

Someone earning minimum wage deserves to be protected from errors that can make or break a business. After that, every account booking had to be confirmed by email and signed off. We built paper trails where there had not been any. Not because we wanted more administration, but because I had learned what a missing process could cost. An eye watering amount.

A few years later, the same MD was let down by one of our competitors and gave us another chance. The original incident was never mentioned. It did not need to be. We both knew what had happened, and he knew it would never happen again.

If I could speak to myself at 26, I would tell him it hurts now, and rightly so. But one day you will thank him for it.