Amit Saily Sharma | Canada | Creating Opportunity: The Journey That Built Me
Updated: Sep 19
Founder, Saily Strategic Solutions Inc. | Chartered Surveyor Construction & Commercial Management
Entrepreneur | Business Builder | Project Management
Strategic Leadership 19+ Years of Global Construction Experience
Global Project Experience | Advocate for Minority-Owned Businesses
I grew up predominantly in Wolverhampton, England, and later moved to Birmingham to study Construction Management at Aston University. We weren't a family flush with opportunity, and I certainly didn't grow up in an environment that naturally inspired it. My father came to England from India and settled in All Saints, Wolverhampton, a low-income area where crime was part of the environment. I went to school in Bilston, another working-class community where drugs, crime and violence weren't things you only saw on television. But those surroundings taught me something important very early: "if opportunity isn't around you, sometimes you have to create it yourself". At eleven, I got my first paper round. I was earning around £3 per delivery, so naturally I figured the way to earn more was to deliver more. Some days I'd have three newspaper bags hanging around my neck. Looking back, it sounds ridiculous, but that was probably my first lesson in entrepreneurship: effort could directly influence outcome. As I got older, the paper rounds became buying, repairing and selling mobile phones. For those of you that remember the Nokia 3310s, 8210s, 8890s, these are iconic now and I see that they are trending back into society. I was able to build up customers with a fully operational supply chain. For a while, it worked. Then the market changed. Phone repair shops started appearing everywhere. What had once been difficult to access became readily available. My advantage disappeared. I didn't know the terminology then, but I had just received my first lesson in competitive advantage: "what makes you different today might not make you different tomorrow".
Then came another lesson in hard work.
During those years I worked everywhere I could, bars, logistics, security, and from around 15, I got a job with my father working weekends in a steel foundry. This is the moment I became part of the 5am club. It was hard, physical work, poor environments, changing masks every two hours and blowing out black from my nose at the end of each shift. The money was good, earning roughly £200 over a weekend felt like serious money to a teenager. More importantly, it taught me respect for hard work. Then, at 17, my life took an unexpected turn. My father put his savings behind taking over one of my uncle's restaurants in Scotland, which had previously been owned by my uncle. My brother and I moved there to help run it under my uncle's guidance. Suddenly, I wasn't looking at business from the outside anymore. Decisions we made affected customers, revenue and, ultimately, money my father had worked his life to accumulate. We worked 14-hour days, seven days a week. My first feeling of being an owner of a public business, and I loved it. For the first time, I understood what a successful business could create. I learned about repeat customers, quality, relationships, service and how dozens of small decisions eventually show up in the numbers. It gave me a taste, excuse the pun, of what entrepreneurship could really look like. After two years, Scotland became unsustainable alongside university in Birmingham, but the experience never left me.
I continued experimenting. After working security in recreation complexes with high levels of crime, my closest friend and I believed we had built an exceptional team. Together, we registered Top Flight Security, my first official company. We secured work at parties, events and private properties and were getting close to securing a significant contract. Then life intervened. My friend took his own life. Losing him affected me deeply, and out of respect, I decided Top Flight Security would end with our partnership. It taught me something I still believe today: Sometimes life makes decisions for you. Not every ending is failure. Sometimes circumstances change the direction of your life, and all you can control is what you choose to do next.
By my early-twenties, I had graduated from Aston University and was establishing myself professionally as a Quantity Surveyor. But entrepreneurship hadn't disappeared. My wife had creativity, talent and a strong business mind. Together, despite limited encouragement from some of the people around us, we took our savings and started what became Lavish Weddings. Then things moved quickly. Within a relatively short period, we were delivering weddings for 400–500 people and working at major venues including Aston Villa, Twickenham, castles and venues across the UK. We were travelling from London to Leeds while I continued building my construction career. Lavish taught me that taking a risk doesn't mean being reckless. There is a difference. Calculated risk, combined with relentless effort and creativity, can change your trajectory. Success made me ambitious again, and we continue to expand to keep up with an ever-moving industry including partnering in marquees. That venture didn't last. It taught me another lesson: enthusiasm isn't enough to sustain a partnership. Responsibilities have to be clear, effort has to be aligned and everyone needs to carry their share. So I closed the business and sold the assets. Another adjustment. Another lesson.
Outside business, sport played a huge role in developing my mentality. I competed in football, cricket, badminton and table tennis, trained in karate, boxing, wrestling and MMA, and spent years around powerlifters and bodybuilders. I loved competing. I also hated losing. When I was younger, I didn't always have the maturity to understand what a loss was trying to teach me. Over time, I realised that losing wasn't the problem. Sport taught me about teams, discipline, preparation and pushing yourself beyond the point where your mind tells you to stop. Those lessons followed me into business.
Alongside all of this, I was building what would eventually become an 18-year corporate career in construction. I worked for multinational, billion-dollar organisations and learned how major businesses operate. I developed my strategic thinking, learned how to turn ideas into execution and gained experience on projects and within organisations at a scale my younger self could never have imagined. But corporate life would eventually teach me another lesson: There are ceilings. Some are created by your circumstances. Some by other people. And perhaps the most dangerous are the ones you unknowingly create for yourself. Looking back, I don't consider the businesses I closed to be failures. The phone business taught me about competition. The restaurant taught me about customers. Topflight taught me about loss. Lavish taught me about calculated risk. The marquee business taught me about partnerships. Sport taught me to adjust. Corporate life taught me how to think bigger.
None of these experiences individually made me who I am today. Together, they did. Today, I am the Founder of Saily Strategic Solutions Inc., bringing over 19 years of global experience across the construction industry, with projects delivered throughout Europe, North America, Asia, and Africa. A Chartered Surveyor by profession, my expertise spans cost, commercial, project management and enterprise risk, built through hands-on delivery in complex and high-value environments. Saily was created as a reflection of my approach to the industry. It is practical, solutions-focused, and grounded in real experience. I believe projects succeed when teams work collaboratively, decisions are based on clear insight, and value is demonstrated at every stage. At its core, my work through Saily is about raising standards, building strong relationships, and delivering outcomes that stand the test of time.
But Saily is also about something bigger than projects.
I am committed to creating pathways for minority-owned businesses within the industry, supporting a broader goal of building a more inclusive and opportunity-driven supply chain. For me, that matters because my own journey has always been shaped by opportunity-or the lack of it. I know what it feels like to grow up in an environment where opportunity isn't necessarily around you. And I know what can happen when you create it.
That is the kind of company I want to build. Not simply a business, but a community.
Not simply a team, but people who feel that they are part of something. People who bring their experience, their ideas, their energy and their full selves. Because looking back at my own journey, I understand that no chapter was ever really wasted. Even the businesses that didn't survive gave me something. Even the opportunities I lost taught me something. Even the moments that hurt shaped how I think today.
My journey has never been linear. There have been businesses that worked, businesses that didn't, opportunities I created, opportunities I lost and moments when life changed the plan without asking my permission.
And perhaps that's the biggest lesson I've learned.
You don't need to have your entire life figured out.
Take the opportunity in front of you.
Take calculated risks.
Surround yourself with good energy.
Learn from the losses.
Make the adjustment.
And don't be afraid to build something new from everything you've learned.
Because sometimes life makes decisions for you.
What you do next is still your decision.
My story started in Wolverhampton, carrying newspaper bags around my neck because I wanted to earn more. It took me through a steel foundry, restaurants, businesses, sport, loss, weddings, construction sites and some of the world's largest organisations.
Today, it has brought me to Saily.
But perhaps the most exciting part isn't where the journey has taken me.
It's who I get to build the next chapter with.
Social Media & Professional Platforms
LinkedIn: Amit Sharma
Instagram: Amit Sharma
Saily Strategic Solutions Inc.'s Website