Introduction
At eight years old, when police stopped him and asked where he was going, Alex Cole didn't answer the way they expected. He asked why they needed to know. "Oh, so we've got one of these," they'd say, before making him kneel and be frisked anyway. That early, repeated experience of power being exercised over him, and his refusal to simply absorb it quietly, became the foundation of everything Alex Cole has built since: a corporate career that took him from a Brook Street recruitment desk to director level at the BBC, and a business, Tin, built at 50 years old to help other entrepreneurs understand and own the power dynamics shaping their own lives.
Growing up between an RAF base, Singapore and Jamaica
Alex spent his early childhood moving with his father's RAF postings, including three years in Singapore before he was eight. At nine, the family moved to Jamaica after his father left the Air Force, an experience he still remembers vividly: the heat, the smell, and an immigration officer who said simply, "welcome home," a moment that reframed his entire sense of belonging. At 13, the family returned to a tougher part of south London, where daily encounters with racism and power were, in his words, "a daily occurrence."
Learning power dynamics before he had the words for it
Alex describes a childhood spent constantly reading tone, intent and authority, whether from his military father, who "would only speak once," from police stopping him in the street, or from security guards deciding who could enter a shopping centre. He learned to distinguish moments worth pushing back on from moments to "go along to get along," depending on what kind of future relationship he wanted with the person in front of him. "I recognised that the dynamics of power were at play all the time," he says, a recognition that shaped how he later navigated interviews, negotiations and leadership.
The Richard Branson biography that set a 50th birthday deadline
At 17, on the eve of joining the RAF at his father's insistence, Alex read Richard Branson's biography and fixated on one detail: Branson had built a brand he could put on anything, and the brand had become synonymous with him personally. That realisation became a private commitment. "That wasn't my destiny, my destiny is to set up my own business," he decided, setting an internal deadline of 50 years old, decades before social media made personal branding a common idea.
Five years in the RAF, then a career built on being portable
Alex completed five years in the RAF, a period he calls "the woodshed", hard, disciplined, and not something he loved, but something he needed. Afterwards, a recruitment manager at Brook Street spotted his ability to explain technical detail clearly and moved him into sales. From there his career progressed through Alfred Marks, a posting to the United States at 28, and back to the UK, always guided by a principle he calls being "portable": confidence and capability that travel with you, rather than borrowed credibility from an employer's brand.
The corporate ladder: BBC, Kent County Council, Cap Gemini
At the BBC, Alex started in a call centre and was quickly promoted to director level once colleagues realised the depth of his experience. He left when the BBC wouldn't pay competitively despite a newly arrived second child, moving to Kent County Council to learn local government, then to Cap Gemini as a public sector specialist. Throughout, he treated every job interview as what he calls a "360-degree interview", assessing the employer as much as they assessed him. "If I don't decide to work for you, then you don't have the power over me," he says. "I get to choose my next step."
Walking the streets of Lambeth: the year that became Tin
A turning point came through a year-long secondment to Business in the Community, a responsible-business charity, where Alex chose to work in Lambeth, the area he grew up in. He spent his first months simply walking the streets and talking to people: young people with nowhere to go since youth centres had closed, shopkeepers afraid of them, and a welfare system that formally labelled anyone unemployed for six months as "long-term unemployed", cutting off meaningful investment in their future. He ran an informal mentoring programme, coaching young people to describe their ambitions with energy rather than reciting rehearsed CV lines, an approach that became the seed of a training programme called Digi Sheds.
Leaving it all at 50, after losing his father
Alex had built financial security by his late 40s: shares, property, a strong salary at Cap Gemini. Then his father died at 69, of a stroke and heart attack, just before Alex turned 50. His father had always been his "North Star", the person who challenged him when he drifted. Losing him crystallised the decision to leave corporate life on schedule, exactly as 17-year-old Alex had planned. "When I walked away, I got cussed out by everyone apart from my family," he says. "Externally I got cussed out by a lot of people, like, what are you doing, you've got this amazing career. But I had my faith and my wife with me, so I was good."
Owning the road: leadership as convening, capacity and capability
Alex now runs Tin, a venture-building organisation supporting social entrepreneurs, many of whom, he says, "look like me." He describes an economic philosophy of wanting communities to "own the road" rather than simply pay the toll, pointing to renewable energy investment opportunities and micro-investing, something he has done quietly for nine years, as practical routes to that ownership. Asked to define leadership, he rejects the idea that it's simply a rung on a corporate ladder. Instead, he offers three C's: convening the right people, creating capacity in them, and leveraging their capability, drawing a comparison to football manager Jurgen Klopp turning a team into believers. "That's leadership," he says. "To turn people into believers that they can do things they didn't believe they could do."
