Texcel's Paul Dickson builds client relationships by day and performs close up magic by night. Read his story as part of our staff profile series....
There are two Paul Dicksons. One spends his weeks driving to customers, hopping between Teams calls and client meetings. The other spends his weekends slipping cards up sleeves at weddings, telling jokes so bad they’re good and quietly serving as secretary of the Surrey Society of Magicians.
Colleagues at Texcel Technology know him as the Business Development Manager who’s been there almost 14 years. Wedding guests up and down Surrey know him as “Magic Paul.”
From a Castle to a Cold Call
Dickson was born in Watford and raised in Stoneleigh and Cheam, “leafy Surrey,” as he puts it, with the countryside close enough to feel but never quite under your feet. He’s the eldest of two, his sister Gemma arrived five years later, by which point, he jokes, the responsibilities of being the older sibling had already settled in.
He was educated at Ewell Castle School, an actual castle, turrets and all, where he fell in with a small, steady group of friends he’s still in touch with decades on. He wasn’t the school’s most academic pupil, by his own admission, nor its most athletic. He was, in his words, one of “the boffins.” Studious enough to make deputy head boy and patrol the playground keeping the younger years in line but never quite able to resist a one liner. That tension between the sensible and the silly has never really gone away.
It was also at school that magic took hold, sparked by Saturday night telly and the unmistakable showmanship of Paul Daniels and Debbie McGee. Nobody, Dickson reckons, has quite filled that mainstream slot since.
His first taste of sales had nothing to do with electronics. A school careers advisor, whose husband ran the local department store, steered a group of Ewell Castle boys into Saturday jobs there. Dickson was put on linens. On his first day, he sold a £400 bedspread that had sat unsold for months, prompting a stunned shop manager to ask who on earth had finally shifted it. Beginner’s luck, perhaps, but it was a sign of things to come.
The real start of his career came through a friend of a friend connection: a contact’s father ran a printed circuit board factory in Kingston upon Thames, and a teenage Dickson found himself thrown in at the deep end, learning an industry he admits he “didn’t have a clue about.” Bare board manufacturing was something of a black art in the UK at the time and not an obvious calling, but under sales manager Tony Cudworth, a mentor he still speaks of fondly, he found his footing and never really left the industry.
“People,” he says, when asked what’s kept him in electronics for nearly four decades. “You build relationships with customers and then you carry on building them, wherever you go next.”
Playing the Long Game
Dickson’s roles at Syntech Technologies and Brantham Engineering broadened him beyond bare boards into the wider world of electronic manufacturing, components and procurement, the technical detail that turns a board into a finished product. By the time he arrived at Texcel in 2012, he’d spent two decades learning that the biggest mistake in sales isn’t failing to win business, it’s winning the wrong business. “In the early days you’re trying to get anything booked in,” he says. “As you go on, you realise that if the fit isn’t right, it doesn’t really work.”
Nearly fourteen years later, he’s still there and still describes Texcel as run “like a family firm,” one that’s grown enormously since he first walked into what he remembers as a fairly modest reception area reminiscent of his Nan’s living room. His week now splits his time between a days in the office and the rest spent on the road or in weekly video calls with his key accounts, checking in on new projects and emerging business. He genuinely looks forward to meeting with clients and supporting their projects. However, there is one part of the job nobody warns you about – the M25!
What he enjoys most, without hesitation, is winning orders. Whether that’s a brand-new client nurtured from a cold call into a long-term account or a seven-figure order from a customer who’s stuck around for years, the buzz is the same. Ask him how he gets there and he keeps it simple: build the relationship and the trust follows.
“Customers can tell when you’re genuinely on their side,” he says. “If they trust you, they place orders with you.”
Which makes for a nice contradiction, a man who spends his weekdays earning people’s trust and his weekends getting away with deceiving them on purpose.
Enter: The Wand
Dickson’s magic nickname, “Magic Paul” since school, became “The Wand” almost by accident, coined as a joke stage name by a fellow performer and stuck ever since. He’s a member of the Magic Circle, attending lectures and meetings in Central London, and serves as secretary of the Surrey Society of Magicians, organising lectures, liaising with venues and encouraging newer, younger magicians into the fold.
His speciality is close-up magic for weddings, parties and corporate events. The appeal, he says, is twofold: the audience’s reaction and the slow, almost meditative process of practice. A single new trick can take six months to learn and longer still to fold seamlessly into a working act, alongside the occupational hazard of tricks that wow fellow magicians but leave a wedding crowd cold, and vice versa.
He’s also, by office consensus, a man never short of a dreadful dad joke. Pressed for his best, he settles on a classic: “I walked into a pub and they’d put a dartboard on the ceiling. It made me want to throw up.” Make of that what you will.
Two Halves, One Person
Ask Dickson whether magic and sales have anything in common and he doesn’t hesitate: body language, timing and perhaps the real trick of both trades, the simple fact that people buy from and warm to people they like. He describes himself as fundamentally introverted, someone who genuinely enjoys solitary hobbies, yet who’s spent a career and half a century of weekends pushing himself onto stages and into boardrooms regardless. The two have fed each other’s confidence for years.
His advice to anyone starting out in sales doubles, fittingly, as decent life advice generally: “Talk less, listen more.” Too many people in sales, he says, are so busy pitching that they never actually hear what the customer wants.
It’s the kind of line that could come from either side of Paul Dickson, the deputy head boy turned dependable salesman or the boffin turned Wand. With Paul, it turns out, you rarely have to choose. He’s simply a thoroughly nice bloke.
