Martyn Bould is a highly successful entrepreneur based in the Cayman Islands. He is a founding member for the Cayman National Cultural Foundation and the National Gallery of the Cayman Islands. He was honored by Queen Elizabeth II in 2012 for services in preserving and developing Caymanian culture, and by the Cayman Islands Government in the 2025 Hero’s Day Awards as a Legacy Builder for laying the groundwork for future economic development since 1970. His memoir, More than Just the Climb – Life’s Lessons Well Learned (Unicorn, Nov. 24, 2025), weaves his personal journey alongside the transformation of the Cayman Islands. Learn more at MartynBould.com.

In More Than Just the Climb, you describe being told early in your career that you would “never make a quantity surveyor.” Your mother kept that letter for the rest of her life. What role did that moment of rejection play in shaping the decades of professional success that followed?

It was incredibly motivating as it enabled me to establish the goal posts to prove it wrong. I went on to complete my studies by what is known as “day release” studying — one day a week at college and working the balance of the week while studying at night. The net result was I graduated at the age of 21 with five years of work experience, compared with a full university course graduate who wouldn’t complete studies until 23 and then need two years of post-qualification experience before becoming a chartered surveyor. 

You arrived in the Caribbean in 1969 as a young surveyor and never really left. What was it about the Cayman Islands in particular—at a time when the population was barely 10,000—that made you decide to build your life and career there rather than return to England?

It was an incredibly exciting place with limited agricultural capacity and supply chain issues and a history of independent management of its economy. Most men left to go to sea for six months at a time to earn a living, which led to a very strong matriarchal society. Although initially it was tied administratively to Jamaica, when Jamaica achieved its independence in 1962, Cayman chose to remain a colony of UK, which it remains today. Now, with a sound economy and a population of 90,000 comprised of 130 different nationalities, it’s a wonderfully rich potpourri of cultures.

Your quantity surveying (construction cost consulting) firm grew from a small practice into a regional powerhouse covering more than 30 Caribbean countries. You write that the key to your business plan was offering a full range of services across the entire region so that multinationals didn’t need different advisors on different islands. What challenges came with operating across so many small, independent economies, and what advice would you give to entrepreneurs trying to scale a professional services firm in fragmented markets?

The reason a client seeks out local advisors is that they need to analyze the risks inherent in operating in a new environment. They want to put a plan put in place to manage them. Given the history of the Caribbean and the various nationalities that have settled the islands with different cultures from far flung places in the world, the challenge is to understand how business operates on each island. My work over many years has led to a deep understanding of the different cultures and ways business is done within each one. This, of course, leads to managing a broad area of operation. For example, if you superimpose a map of the Caribbean with that of Europe, the Bahamas is overlaid by Edinburg in Scotland and Trinidad by Istanbul, Turkey. For the Caribbean operator, that results in a lot of flying and hence my 6 million miles flown with American Airlines! Apart from travel, the resulting corporate complexities of different countries with different laws for comparatively small operations results in significant administrative issues.

A central thread of the book is your corporate philosophy of training and developing local talent wherever your firm operated. In an era when many international firms brought in their own people, why was this principle so important to you, and how did it shape your firm’s reputation across the region?

When one comes to a country from “outside,” I’ve always considered it essential to put back into that community. I found very early on that there was a “briefcase brigade” that had an airline ticket and, yes indeed, a briefcase, offering advice on how to do things but not investing in the community. Our approach was to always put back. It’s interesting now in Cayman where bids for public work, in addition to a description of the services and fee, are required to submit a Local Impact Statement in which the bidder must describe what benefit will accrue to the community if the bidder is awarded the assignment.

You completed the Owner President Management Programme at Harvard Business School over three years in the mid-1980s. You describe case studies, “can groups,” and the intensity of the workload. Looking back, what was the single most valuable thing Harvard taught you about running a business—and was there anything it didn’t prepare you for?

First, to return at mid-life to a structured education course with 120 people from all over the world was a truly magical experience. The participants’ range of nationalities and different types of businesses, both in services provided and the size of each business, was extensive. I certainly learned that my business was minute compared to some of the others, but essentially we all had the same issues of people, motivation, planning for the future, etc. Subsequent reunions over many years provided an opportunity to see the world through the eyes of our local host who would also ask friends in their home country to entertain us. For me, and I feel many others, it was a life-changing experience. A testimony to its value was that the course was held over three years and the attendees remained over this time.

The Baha Mar resort in the Bahamas—the largest construction project in the Western Hemisphere at the time—occupies a dramatic section of your story. As the Project Monitor appointed by China’s Export-Import Bank, you had a front-row seat to an extraordinarily complex collision of international finance, Chinese construction, Bahamian politics, and American bankruptcy law. Without that experience, what would be missing from this book?

I don’t think anything would be missing. The Baha Mar experience provided the mix that is described and I believe points to the changing global dynamics, the longer eastern view of business planning, and the cultural dilemma. 

You write that you “have always claimed that in life there are players and spectators,” and you cite Theodore Roosevelt’s famous “Man in the Arena” speech. How has that philosophy guided the choices you’ve made—particularly the ones that involved real risk?

I believe that you see opportunities and go for it. Of course some don’t work out and there are plenty of people standing on the sideline watching and being Saturday morning quarterbacks. I feel President Roosevelt so eloquently summarizes what we often see day to day.

Beyond construction, you served for years as Chairman of the Cayman National Cultural Foundation and have been a passionate advocate for arts, heritage, and cultural preservation. You write that you have always believed cultural development was key to Cayman’s social stability. Why do you think culture is so often overlooked in discussions about a country’s economic development?

Happily, I do believe culture is gaining ground in people’s understanding of how life works. Culture includes fine art, but most importantly reflects how we eat, communicate, worship, interact, etc., and is constantly evolving. Our heritage defines where we’ve come from. 

You began training for a climb of Aconcagua—the highest peak in the Western Hemisphere—in your late 70s, complete with altitude prep, freeze-dried dinner taste tests, and breaking in double boots by walking around the Cayman Islands Yacht Club. What drew you to mountaineering at that stage of life, and what has the physical pursuit taught you that decades in business did not?

I’ve always been interested in hiking and being at one with nature. The challenge of climbing higher peaks and the preparation and the grit to keep going when the desire not to continue was strong appealed to me. 

Your wife Vivian—whom you affectionately call your “eternal teenager”—is a constant presence throughout the book, from strapping your sleeping mat together with quick-release buckles to overseeing renovations in London while you trained for your climb. What has her partnership meant to both the life and the story you’ve written?

Experiences need to be shared to be fully appreciated and to have a partner with similar attitudes helps. However, as an ex-banker, Vivian is the grounding influence and I am the entrepreneur.

Each chapter of the book opens with an inspirational quotation—Emerson, Einstein, A.A. Milne, Abraham Lincoln, Rudyard Kipling’s “If—”. Your mother gave you that Kipling poem on your 21st birthday and it still sits on your desk. If you could add one original line of your own to that collection of wisdom, what would it say?

As I said in the book, keep climbing and listen more than you speak — but really it’s very hard to top Rudyard Kipling’s advice in “If.”

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