When opportunity knocked, he had two days to... A Conversation with Dave Aspden
with Dave Aspden · Co-founder & CIO, Stable Resources, Stable Resources
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About Dave Aspden
Dave Aspden is the co-founder and CIO of Stable Resources, a Microsoft-focused technology resourcing company he founded in October 2001 alongside his wife Ans, who is now its CEO. What began as a one-person contractor operation has grown into a business of over 100 people. Dave has spent his entire career working with Microsoft technologies and has been a supplier into Microsoft since the company's earliest days.
Episode Description
Dave Aspden, co-founder and CIO of Stable Resources, shares the moment in 2001 when a simple question from a client became the unlikely starting gun for a company that is now 25 years old and still growing.
Key Moments
In 2001, Dave was about to sign a contract with a new client when they asked one question he had not prepared for: what is the name of your agency? He asked for two days and used this timee to found Stable Resources.
Opportunities rarely arrive in a form you recognise. Sometimes the only qualification required is the willingness to say yes and work out the rest quickly.
Dave Aspden left his home in England at 19 to study at the Polytechnic of Wales. He returned to Cardiff years later for a friend's housewarming party, met Ans, fell immediately in love and never really left. That is one story. The one we are here for came later.
A question he had not prepared for
It is October 2001. Dave is a contractor with seven years of contracting behind him and a long-held ambition to build something of his own. A former colleague leads him, somewhat cryptically, down country lanes in Wiltshire to a client site. The meeting goes well. He gets the handshake. And then the client asks a question he has not prepared for.
What is the name of your agency?
Dave asked for two days to come back with an answer. What happened in those two days is what this episode is about.
What followed
Stable Resources Limited was founded in October 2001, named after the old stables at the bottom of Dave and Ans's garden, which were earmarked to become their commute. The stables were subsequently found to be full of asbestos and demolished. The company has thankfully fared rather better!
The road from that two-day window to where Stable is now was not a clean one. There was an IR35 investigation that ran for three years. There was a Christmas that almost did not happen. There was the 2008 credit crunch, which arrived as a threat and resolved into something unexpected. And at some point Ans left her career as an executive producer at the BBC, took the role of CEO, and became Dave's boss.
On what he would take from it
Dave does not present his story as a template. He is clear that luck was involved and that being in the right place at the right time is a real factor, not something to dismiss. His point is that the opportunities only counted because he was willing to move on them, often quickly and without full information.
His broader reflection is that the business he has built looks nothing like the one he originally had in mind, and that this is not a problem. The version that exists now got there through flexibility, collaboration and a willingness to lean into situations as they changed rather than waiting for conditions to match the original plan. That pattern runs through the whole story, from the two-day agency decision to how Stable navigated everything that came after it.