When his boys raid the wrong farm and post it online, Coach does not hide. He walks in, owns it, and offers to put it right. Guy Ritchie's The Gentlemen is full of people managing a business that cannot afford mistakes, and Coach is the best example in it of how a partner, a consultant or a team leader should behave when something goes wrong.
In Guy Ritchie's The Gentlemen, Colin Farrell plays Coach: a tracksuited boxing coach who runs a gym for teenagers who would otherwise be in trouble. Then some of his boys, the Toddlers, go off on their own, raid one of Mickey Pearson's hidden cannabis farms, and post a video of it online.
That would be the end of most people. Coach doesn't run. He walks straight into the lion's den, explains what happened, takes responsibility for his boys, and offers to work off the debt. By the end of the film he's one of the most trusted people in it.
That's exactly how partners, consultants and team leaders should behave when something goes wrong on a Business Central project. Here's what Coach, and a few of the other gentlemen, can teach us.
Coach's first move is to turn up in person, admit what his lads did, and say it's on him. No excuses, no blaming the kids, no waiting to be found out.
For your project: things will go wrong. A migration script doubles the stock. An extension breaks invoicing after an update. A consultant posts a test journal in production. What separates a good partner from a bad one is what happens next. The good one calls you before you find it, says what happened, says it's theirs, and tells you what they're doing about it. If your partner's first instinct is to explain why it wasn't their fault, that tells you everything. (See what to expect from your support partner.)
Coach doesn't just apologise. He offers his services to make it right, and then delivers.
For your project: an apology is the start, not the fix. The partner who broke something should put it right at their own cost, find the root cause, and change whatever let it happen: a missing test, a missing permission, a step left off the checklist. Trust gets rebuilt by what they do next, not by what they say.
Coach's boys are keen, capable and fearless, and that's exactly the problem. Left to themselves, they did something that nearly got everyone killed.
For your project: every business has enthusiastic people who want to "just fix it": the power user who adds fields with the in-client Designer, the developer who publishes straight from Visual Studio Code to production, the finance assistant with SUPER permissions who tidies up the posting setup. Enthusiasm is valuable. It needs structure: proper permissions, a pipeline for changes, a sandbox for experiments, and a rule that nothing reaches production without going through the process. (See Global, PTE or Dev and permissions.)
The Toddlers don't just raid the farm. They film it, set it to music and post it online, where it can't be taken back.
For your project: data leaks rarely look like hacking. They look like a sandbox copy of production shared with a third party, customer data in a training environment, a screenshot of the payroll in a Teams chat, or an export emailed to a personal address "to work on at home". Once it's out, it's out. Decide who can see production copies, keep personal data out of places it doesn't need to be, and treat test environments with the same care as live. (See environments and sandboxes and GDPR in extensions.)
Coach runs his gym on discipline. The kids train properly, they respect the rules, and that's what keeps them out of trouble.
For your project: methodology is the gym rules. Workshops before design, design before build, testing before go-live, sign-off at the end of each phase. It can feel slow, and enthusiastic teams want to skip it. It's also what stops the project ending up in a video. (See four passes before you shoot.)
Ray, Mickey's right-hand man, is the calm centre of the film: meticulous, organised, always across the detail, always a step ahead.
For your project: every project needs a Ray. The project manager or architect who keeps the decision log, the risk register and the plan up to date, knows where every workstream is, and isn't surprised by anything. It's not glamorous. It's why everything else works.
Mickey's empire is hidden underneath the country estates of aristocrats who need the money, out of sight and unknown to anyone who isn't meant to know.
For your project: most businesses have hidden infrastructure of their own. The server under a desk running a scheduled job. The Access database a department built in 2012. The integration on a contractor's laptop. Find all of it before you migrate, because the moment you switch off the old system is the moment you discover what was quietly depending on it. (See the diamond inside the dog.)
The whole film is narrated by Fletcher, a private investigator who has pieced the story together and is trying to sell it back to Ray. His version isn't always the true one.
For your project: if you don't record what was decided and why, someone else will tell the story later: in a dispute, an audit, or a sale. Keep the decision log, the signed-off designs and the steering minutes. Then the version that counts is yours. (See you can't handle the truth.)
Mickey wants to sell up, and every buyer wants to know exactly what they're getting before they pay.
For your project: if there's any chance of selling the business in the next few years, a buyer's due diligence team will go through your systems line by line. Clean data, documented integrations, current software and code in your own repository all add to the price. A mess takes it off. (See preparing the ERP for an exit.)
Own your mistakes and turn up in person. Put things right, don't just apologise. Give enthusiastic people structure. Keep data where it belongs. Follow the method. Have a Ray. Find the hidden farms. Write the story down yourself. And run the business as if a buyer is watching.
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