For 16 years Jon Ashworth rubbed shoulders with some of the world's most powerful people.
He describes the man many consider to be the most successful investor of the 20th Century, Warren Buffet, as a bit "folksy," "absolutely normal" and rather like an "elderly professor".
Jack Welch, who ran General Electric for two decades, he says, seemed like a "down to earth guy".
But Sir Richard Branson, the English entrepreneur behind the Virgin brand, was the hardest to read.
"You hear he has a ruthless side in business, which you don't see when you're talking to him," says Mr Ashworth, a former business journalist for The Times.
"He was almost a shy sort of character. This is at least the persona that comes across," he adds.
Mr Ashworth interviewed countless business people such as Sir Richard, Mr Buffet and Mr Welch - until a holiday changed his life.
"[My wife and I] had never been to Sri Lanka and we decided we would go in early 2005 for a couple of weeks and then this terrible tsunami happened," says Mr Ashworth.
He almost cancelled the holiday until he called the tour company, which urged them to still come. The couple did and made a point of visiting a refugee camp to see how they could help.
"I was just amazed by these people. They had lost everything. But they were the happiest most smiley people who were absolutely thrilled that we had come to visit them. They didn't ask for anything," he says.
In the end, Mr Ashworth and his wife bought some plastic tables and chairs so the camp could set up a classroom.
Until that point, he says, he had never done anything particularly charitable but, seeing how the gift benefited the community, inspired him to do more to help.
"I always thought it was for rich people to do this kind of thing. But I took it on as a sort of project and wrote to a few people to say I was raising money," he says.
He started to question his future with the newspaper and began to fear the thought of being stuck in the same job 10 years down the line.
So he handed in his notice in August 2005, five months after he returned from holiday.
By the following month he had raised £15,000 (Dh88,811) and was ready to return to Sri Lanka.
"I thought, 'Let's do this as a sort of sabbatical project and I will head back into work and do something else,'" says Mr Ashworth.
"But when I did this [fundraising] work I thought, 'This is really enjoyable,'" he says.
Mr Ashworth got divorced unexpectedly and found himself spending more and more time in Sri Lanka.
He eventually moved there permanently and founded a charity, the Yala Fund, so called because it works around the Yala National Park in the south-east of the country where he lives with his second wife, a local lady who he met two years ago, her two children from her first marriage and their baby.
At first the charity concentrated on post-tsunami relief projects but it has developed over time to help children, build schools and buy hospital equipment.
It spends between £80,000 and £100,000 on projects every year, money he raises largely in the United Kingdom. The money goes a long way in Sri Lanka but he is careful not to waste it.
"It really is a one-man band. I like to just go around on my motorbike looking at projects. I can speak Sinhala, so I can understand what they're talking about.
"Previously I couldn't understand a word because they don't speak much English in this area, so I had to learn the language" says Mr Ashworth.
"It's been an amazing story, not planned. But it has all kind of worked out in this amazing way from walking around London in a suit chasing crooks or writing up businessmen to living a pretty simple life," he adds.
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