What War Taught Mark Moseley About Business
The PestGone Environmental founder spent years in the world's most hostile places. On The BEYOND Podcast, he explains why the boardroom never frightened him.
Most entrepreneurs describe pressure in the language of deadlines and cash flow. Mark Moseley measures it differently. Before he founded PestGone Environmental, the London pest control company he now runs, he was a Combat Engineer in the British Army, and then a private security specialist working in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and the Democratic Republic of Congo. When he sat down with Aleksandra King on The BEYOND Podcast, the through-line of the conversation was simple: once you have built a watchtower under mortar fire, a sales meeting holds very little terror.
That is not bravado. It is a thesis about where business resilience actually comes from, and it is worth taking seriously, because Moseley has tested it in places most founders will never see.
The Taliban next door
The story that anchors the episode is almost too strange to be invented. In 2003, Moseley's unit was sent to Mazar-i-Sharif to convert a row of derelict mud-brick houses into a Norwegian safe house. The complication was the neighbours. The Taliban lived next door, and would stand watching, AK-47s in hand, while the soldiers rigged up solar showers from water bags warmed in the sun. For a period, the two groups coexisted. The fighters were not seen as a threat to the construction crew, so they left them alone, heading off in open-backed trucks at night to fight rebels in the town and returning by morning. The British engineers slept in the basement with their rifles ready, never quite certain the truce would hold.
It did not, of course. When the wider war escalated, everything they had built was destroyed, the safe house blown up almost as soon as the troops moved in. Moseley tells the story without drama, which is part of the point. He learned to operate inside ambiguity, to keep working while the situation around him stayed unresolved, and to accept that not everything you build survives contact with events. Those are not war lessons that stay in the war. They are the everyday conditions of running a business.
Calm is a competitive advantage
Moseley came closest to death not in a firefight but in a shipping container on Bagram Airbase, where he lived during his security years. When the alarms sounded and the rockets came in, the instinct that kept him alive was not panic but procedure: get to the bunker, take cover, wait. At FOB Shank, an American forward operating base that drew more indirect fire than every other camp in the country combined, the constant cycle of alarm and cover became routine. You learn, he says, to function while part of your mind is occupied with the genuine possibility that the next round lands on you.
Transplant that into commercial life and it reads as the single most underrated business skill: the ability to stay calm and keep deciding when the information is incomplete and the stakes feel total. PestGone Environmental works across London and Kent, including a contract with the Port of London Authority keeping the Thames clear of deceased animals, and a client list that runs from royalty to celebrities to the merely wealthy. None of that work rewards a founder who freezes under pressure. The discipline that kept Moseley alive abroad is the same discipline that lets him run a business at home without flinching.
The Apprentice, and the value of being remembered
Moseley appeared on Series 17 of The Apprentice in 2023, lasting eight weeks on air before Lord Sugar fired him. He is clear-eyed about why. On a task selling tickets to an event in rural Shropshire, the team set a price of one hundred and fifty pounds and upward. Moseley's instinct, formed by years of judging what people will actually do rather than what a spreadsheet suggests they should, was that no one makes an impulse purchase at that price. He argued to drop it to around ninety or a hundred. He was overruled, the tickets did not sell, and the decision became part of his firing. He takes the accountability, but he is right about the underlying judgement, and the episode is a small lesson in the cost of confusing the price you wish people would pay with the price they will.
What he gained from the show was more durable than the result. Credibility, he tells Aleksandra King, is the real prize of national television. When people search his name now, they find a recognised business owner, not an unknown, and that recognition opens doors and builds trust before a single conversation begins. He frames it with a pitch he made to Lord Sugar's aides: think of Tesla and you think of Elon Musk, think of Amazon and you think of Jeff Bezos, and the ambition is that when you think of pest control, you think of Mark Moseley. It is a serious point about how reputation compounds, dressed up as a joke.
From the minefield to the market
Moseley's career is a study in adaptability, the quality he believes the military builds better than any business school. A soldier is an electrician one minute, a firefighter the next, clearing a minefield the minute after that, then deploying on operations. That range, he argues, is exactly what running a company demands, and exactly what civilian employers overlook when they pass over veterans. He has built PestGone Environmental partly around that conviction, employing veterans and military spouses alongside civilians, and he has written the lessons down: his book, Pests to Peace, sets out a six-step process for businesses and homeowners to deal with infestations, turning hard-won field knowledge into something others can use.
He is candid, too, about the parts of entrepreneurship the war stories obscure. Running your own business is lonely, he says, a daily fight against everyone else, and the camaraderie of a unit is the thing he misses most. It is a quietly honest note in a conversation full of extraordinary tales, and it is the one most founders will recognise instantly.
The lesson Moseley draws from all of it is not that business is war. It is that the disciplines war demands, calm under pressure, judgement under uncertainty, accountability for your own decisions, and the adaptability to do whatever the moment requires, are the same disciplines that separate the businesses that last from the ones that fold. He learned them somewhere most people would not survive. The boardroom, by comparison, was never going to scare him.
Mark Moseley is the founder of PestGone Environmental and the author of Pests to Peace. He spoke to Aleksandra King on The BEYOND Podcast. Listen to the full conversation below.