REMEMBERING CLIFF

How it started

My dad Cliff started Justice & Co back in 1991. It began as a family-run accountancy practice, and he ran it from the outbuilding at our home in Offington. I’m Worthing born and bred, and I had a wonderful childhood there – a lovely house, a happy home, and a dad who worked tirelessly, because that business was everything to him.

He built the business from nothing. It grew from a one-man service to a much larger practice with around 240 clients, based in serviced offices on the outskirts of town. Just before he passed, he rented his very own office for the first time – on the fifth floor at Columbia House in Durrington. He was so proud of that. He’d brought my uncle in, who’s also an accountant, to help with the books, so for the first time he had his own little team.

The man behind the business

Cliff was kind-hearted – a much-loved part of our family and the community, and someone we were so proud to call ‘Dad’. Whatever life threw at him, he always found the positive in the negative. His favourite saying was, ‘There are blue skies ahead.’

Away from work, he loved brass band music – the Salvation Army was his second passion in life after his business. He’d grown up in the church and played all the instruments over the years: euphonium, cornet, trombone and horn. But what he really wanted was to conduct – and so he did. He was bandmaster, on and off, for over twenty years, and he also had a stint as choir master. He conducted at the Assembly Hall in Worthing on more than one occasion, standing up front, leading the band. That was Dad.

A sudden loss

The last time we saw him was in December 2010. I was planning on proposing to Sarah, and he knew all about it. He went to give Sarah a kiss goodbye, she turned the wrong way, and he caught her right on the lips – we still laugh about that. Dad then set off on a family holiday to Australia and New Zealand. We spoke to him on Christmas Day, when Sarah and I had got engaged.

Between Christmas and New Year, out in New Zealand, he suffered a bleed on the brain, and just like that, he was gone. He was 55. It was completely unexpected – no illness, no warning, no chance to say goodbye, and that is the hardest part. He never got to meet our three girls, Victoria, Millie and Hope. He’d have been wonderful with them. He loved his sport – football and cricket especially – and his holidays down in St Ives, so would have been right in the thick of it, playing and entertaining them. They know their granddad from all the photos at home, and we talk about him a lot. The brand colours of our residential services are a nod to his football team, Tottenham Hotspur.

Keeping Cliff’s name alive

After losing Dad, keeping the accountancy practice proved a step too far, and we sold the business in June 2011. But my three older sisters and I were adamant about one thing: we would keep the name. We held on to it, always feeling that one day someone in the family would need it again.

That time came on our tenth wedding anniversary. In 2022, Sarah and I decided to open our commercial business, and we didn’t even have to think about a name – it just felt right to bring Dad’s back. I asked my sisters, and they gave us their blessing.

Carrying it forward

Today, his original logo and letterhead hang in our office, with a photo of him on the wall, so his name lives on precisely as it was – and he watches over everything I do.

Every day, I try to run this business the way he ran his. Integrity was everything to him – he would never put his name to anything he didn’t believe in, whatever it was worth. And that is how Sarah and I work too, side by side, upholding the standards and the ethos he set.

I have his words, ‘There are blue skies ahead’, above my desk now. On a hard day, I look up at them and know tomorrow will be brighter. We have a bench for him down in East Preston too – we often go there as a family, come rain or shine, to sit and remember him.

So, the fact that business is good, and we’ve been able to expand into the residential market – to me, that’s Dad. That’s him telling us we’ve done the right thing. That blue skies are ahead indeed.