Jeremy Harbour - Founder of The Harbour Club & Unity Group | He's Bought 100+ Companies. Here's How to Buy Your First With No Cash Upfront.

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You've done hundreds of acquisitions.

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Where did this love for buying businesses start?

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I fell into it by accident.

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I was in the telecoms industry in the 1990s.

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Everybody started acquiring everybody else.

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So I realized, actually, you can do this.

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You just need to figure out the way to do it.

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How does somebody do that successfully, understand the business with never working in that industry?

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To start with, I would do something you do have some understanding around.

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And there's a number of reasons for that.

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People do business with people they like, know, and trust.

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And to get to that position, you have to be credible.

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Today's guest is Jeremy Harbour, an entrepreneur, investor, and expert in mergers and acquisitions.

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He is the founder of Unity Group and The Harbour Club, where he teaches entrepreneurs how to buy, fix, and sell businesses.

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In this conversation, we're breaking down how to acquire businesses, structure deals without large upfront capital, and the mindset behind successful acquisitions.

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One of the ideas that you speak about a lot is the deal is in the structure.

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Explain what that means.

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Structure is everything.

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You name the price, I'll name the structure.

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What you're trying to do is you're trying to balance risk between the buyer and the seller.

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If a person is selling their company for a million dollars and you pay them a million dollars, you have all the risks.

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Small businesses are incredibly risky.

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MyFitnessPal is a success story partner.

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Everybody wants to feel sharper during the day, to not hit that wall in the afternoon where your brain just checks out.

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And people try a lot of things to get there.

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So new routines, new supplements, better sleep habits, more coffee, less coffee, all of the above.

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And some of that stuff works, but the single biggest lever you have for how you feel on any given day is what you eat.

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It's not the most exciting answer,

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Nobody's making a viral reel about eating lunch, but food is a foundation, right?

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Your energy, your sleep, your weight, your recovery, how you perform at work, how you feel when you get home.

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It's the one input that touches everything else.

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Now, the problem is that most people have no idea what they're actually eating.

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They have a general sense.

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They can say, I eat pretty healthy.

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Okay, but how much protein are you getting?

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And how does that break down across your day?

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Are you eating enough in the morning?

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Are you stacking everything at night?

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Those details matter a lot.

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And you can't answer those questions without logging what you eat and looking at the data.

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And that's why I use the MyFitnessPal app, because you log what you eat and it shows you exactly what's going on.

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Your macros, for example, that's just your proteins, your carbs, your fats.

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those are broken down by grams.

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And on premium, it breaks those numbers down by meals.

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So you're not just seeing one number for the day, you're seeing what breakfast looks like versus lunch versus dinner, and that changes things because your body doesn't run on daily averages.

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It runs on what you give it right now.

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The food analysis, another great feature, it shows you patterns across the week too, where things are consistent, where they start to drift, and you're gonna notice how what you eat impacts your energy and why you wanna stay consistent, and when you don't, why you start to feel like you're hitting walls

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in the afternoon.

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Now the food logging.

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This is where a lot of people think it's gonna be a whole thing.

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It's not.

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For example, I can say what I ate out loud.

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There's a voice logging feature and it's done.

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Or I can scan a barcode of something I ate, two seconds.

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There's also a meal scan where I just point my camera at a plate and the app captures exactly what I ate and all the macronutrients.

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And MyFitnessPal has the largest food database out there.

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So whatever I'm eating is already in it.

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And it remembers what I eat regularly.

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Also, it connects with over 40 fitness apps and wearables.

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So everything goes into one spot.

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All of my health, wellness and nutrition.

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So if you have been trying to figure out why your energy dips in the afternoon or why you're not sleeping as well as you used to or why you just feel off and you can't put a finger on it, look at your food first before you buy another supplement or you try some other hack.

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The answer is usually in nutrition.

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And this is the easiest way that I found to actually see what's going into your body and track it and pay attention to it and improve it.

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So do yourself a favor.

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Go to podcast.myfitnesspal.com and use code Scott.

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Code Scott.

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That's giving you 15% off MyFitnessPal Premium.

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Jeremy, you have taken close to 100 companies public.

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You've done hundreds of acquisitions.

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Where did this love for buying businesses start?

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Yeah, really random because it's not something that you naturally think of as an entrepreneur.

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I mean, we're surrounded by startup stories.

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Everyone's doing a startup.

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I think startup is your kind of rite of passage to entrepreneurship.

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It's where everybody kind of,

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starts out and honestly, all the business books I read, everything I looked at, you kind of feel there's three things you can control.

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You know, there's your team and how you motivate your team and how you attract the best talent.

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There's marketing.

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And of course, there's like a million different hacks around marketing and it's a constantly moving landscape.

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And then there's sales, like how you turn those interested people into actual customers.

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But you never think about that kind of fourth lever of, or lever, I guess, as you'd say.

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Yeah.

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For actually acquiring a business.

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And for me, it was just I fell into it by accident.

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I was in the telecoms industry in the 1990s.

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And the telecoms industry in the 90s expanded very, very quickly until the market was kind of saturated.

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So there wasn't any greenfield business out there.

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So everybody started acquiring everybody else.

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And for me, the reason I didn't think about acquiring anybody is I didn't know what I was talking about.

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And I didn't have any money.

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And then loads of people tried to buy me and they had one thing in common.

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They didn't know what they were talking about and they didn't have any money.

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So I realized, actually, you can do this.

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You just need to figure out the way to do it.

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So I kind of had my eyes open just because I was in this very acquisitive industry.

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So this first business in telecom, that was more of a traditional play where you built a business from scratch.

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Exactly.

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Yeah.

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So I started it.

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Yeah.

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Started it with like 50 bucks and got my first customer and then, yeah, grew from there.

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And yeah, it was it was an organic growth story until it wasn't.

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That experience of building a business from scratch, because most people listen to this podcast.

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I would say the the main proponent of of.

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acquiring a business that people know would be a Cody Sanchez.

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Outside of, and now Jeremy Harbour, but outside of both of you, most people are looking to start businesses from scratch.

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That is the first thought when they think entrepreneurship.

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That's the first thought that I had.

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You built one from scratch.

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you didn't fall in love with that process?

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You decided to never do it again?

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Yeah, no, I think it's for mugs.

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I think that, you know, I describe it as the blood, sweat, and years.

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You know, this energy and this stuff you have to put in the beginning.

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I mean, funnily enough, we were talking about this a few days ago where I said, you know, people start businesses for freedom.

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They want time freedom and they want financial freedom.

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And then they start a business that takes away all of their time and all of their money.

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And they create like a prison for themselves and they haven't had a vacation for years because you do have to...

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I don't know if you can swear on your podcast, but you have to live, breathe, eat shit and fuck a business in order to make it successful.

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You have to literally go all in or it's not going to work.

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And so I think you only have so many times in your life you can do that.

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I have this useful life idea, which is the first 20 years you're pretty pointless because you're figuring stuff out.

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The last 20 years, you're pretty pointless because you're getting up five times a night to pee.

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So what's the gap in the middle?

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You know, is it like 30 years, 40 years that you have that you're really on it?

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Well, I was running that telecoms company for 10 years.

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How many times do you want to do that?

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So, you know, the business I bought, the first business I bought was 13 years old.

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So I bought somebody else's 13 years.

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You know, I didn't have to run the marathon.

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I ran the last 10 yards and I got the medal.

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So I think when people look at the opportunity to buy a business, they think, oh, it's going to be too expensive.

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I'm going to screw it up.

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I'm everything, you know, because they'll listen to your story and they'll say, well, I didn't have 10 years of entrepreneurial experience.

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Maybe it depends.

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You get money from different places.

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Maybe some people do.

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So acquisition entrepreneurship is kind of catching on as a thing.

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Unfortunately, it's a little bit of like the blind leading the blind, because I think people have spotted that it Googles well.

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So they've developed a course trying to sell you on the idea and they they've never done deals.

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They don't know what they're talking about.

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So they've just taken, you know, content from MBA courses or books that have been written about leverage buyouts, and they're kind of repurposing it into some sort of information product.

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They're trying to ram down your...

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So most people talking about this have not done it.

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Yeah, they either haven't done it or they've done it a bit, but haven't broken it down into a replicable system.

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And I think, like everything in business, it always seems really easy on the outside.

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And all of the challenges and everything else is in the execution.

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You know, nothing's as easy as it looks.

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No, of course not.

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So that first business that you acquired...

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how did you navigate it?

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Was it an object failure?

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Did it work out?

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How did you learn how to do this?

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But at that point, there wasn't anything online.

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Exactly.

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And it was a total and there wasn't a thing called acquisition entrepreneurship.

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I mean, it just didn't exist.

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And so basically, I found this company.

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So all these people were coming and pitching me.

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And that's what it was.

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It was a pitch for them to buy my business.

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And they would all come up with solutions that I didn't know I needed, but actually were quite compelling.

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And so I used to take the best bits of that and then go try it out on other people.

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Because in telecoms, you could literally have, you could have a meeting every day with someone trying to buy you.

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It was that, it was that busy.

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It was that popular an idea.

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And so I was very fortunate because that gave me a great education because I'm a sucker for saying yes to meetings, you know, because it beats the shit out of working.

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So I would have all these meetings and...

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and learn from every meeting.

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It would take me further forwards in my own knowledge and experience.

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And so I went out and started pitching other business owners with the same types of ideas.

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And I found this company, it was 13 years old.

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They had about a thousand active handsets, which is what we were organically growing by in a year.

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So it was like a year's worth of

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customers in one go.

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The guy had a few motivations, and this is always really important.

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If they don't have a motivation to sell, they're not going to sell.

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I mean, if they don't have a reason to sell, you can't convince them.

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So his building was being demolished by bulldozers and they were turning it into apartments.

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So this created a bit of a ticking time bomb for him to do something with the business, either move or sell.

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He had this huge problem with one of his suppliers.

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They were constantly fighting...

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And it was his main supplier.

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Oh, it was like endless headaches in this guy's life.

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It was just like every day was a battle.

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And most importantly, he had like a shiny new thing.

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So he had another business that he was way, you know, everyone's always more interested in the new one than the old one.

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So he was just way more interested in this other business and just wanted a way to get out and do that.

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Now, he wanted a load of money up front.

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I wanted to pay him later.

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I didn't have any money.

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My choice was like pay my credit card or my staff.

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There wasn't like this, give this guy some money.

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So my position was, I can't, you know, I have to pay you later.

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His position was, I want it all now.

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And basically, our two ideas coalesced at the point where the bulldozers were about to knock his building over and he took my deal.

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So I put no money into the transaction.

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I grew by a year's worth of sales in an afternoon.

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I inherited 13 years of goodwill and brand and marketing.

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everything that he'd built over that 13 years.

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And yeah, it was just an epiphany.

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It was, you know, people always ask me, oh, how do you buy a business with no money?

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And my facetious answer is, well, you start with no money.

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Because necessity is the mother of invention, you know, so you do get more and more creative with how you can position it, how you can structure the deal when you don't have the capital to put in.

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So that first acquisition, no capital in, it was, but

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those three pieces that you just outlined.

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So they want to do something different.

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There's a meaningful event.

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And then there's just stress or de-stress in the business.

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Yeah, exactly.

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And to be honest, because this was my first one and I was really green, I didn't know what I was doing.

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If the bulldozers weren't going to knock that building down, I don't think I could have gotten past the procrastination point, you know?

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We've got loads of tactics now as to how to create kind of false scarcity or lines in the sand that, you know, that drive people toward a...

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But back then, there was a huge element of luck associated with getting that transaction done.

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00:12:05.573 --> 00:12:08.656
But what was fascinating is two weeks later, I bought my second company.

223
00:12:09.177 --> 00:12:11.119
It was like a champagne cork popped.

224
00:12:11.319 --> 00:12:13.301
And all I could think about is how do I do this again?

225
00:12:14.362 --> 00:12:16.425
And two weeks later, I bought an IT company.

226
00:12:16.665 --> 00:12:19.348
And I just thought that was random, you know, like it just walked in.

227
00:12:19.828 --> 00:12:22.772
I've now coached thousands of people on how to buy businesses.

228
00:12:23.072 --> 00:12:24.654
And I see it again and again and again.

229
00:12:24.674 --> 00:12:29.399
They might take 12 or 18 months to buy their first business and they buy three all at once.

230
00:12:29.539 --> 00:12:31.562
It's kind of something clicks.

231
00:12:31.602 --> 00:12:34.005
Your confidence, your competence all collide.

232
00:12:34.665 --> 00:12:36.487
And suddenly it just becomes very easy.

233
00:12:36.748 --> 00:12:39.751
And that first business that you acquired...

234
00:12:40.632 --> 00:12:43.493
How come it was so successful after you acquired it and not before?

235
00:12:43.533 --> 00:12:45.154
Why couldn't he figure out these things?

236
00:12:45.234 --> 00:12:45.494
Yeah.

237
00:12:45.514 --> 00:12:46.835
So there was a number of aspects to this.

238
00:12:47.215 --> 00:12:52.237
The most important one is because we were in the same business, we didn't need any of his overhead.

239
00:12:52.918 --> 00:12:55.399
So he had a business that was making 12 grand a year.

240
00:12:55.419 --> 00:12:59.341
And for us, it would make a couple of hundred grand a year because we didn't have any of his overhead.

241
00:12:59.361 --> 00:13:02.302
We just bring his customers into our ecosystem and off we go.

242
00:13:02.802 --> 00:13:07.043
And that's not always the case, but that's a good opportunity if you see that.

243
00:13:07.323 --> 00:13:07.743
Exactly.

244
00:13:07.823 --> 00:13:11.024
And there's a lot of reasons why you might buy a company.

245
00:13:11.064 --> 00:13:14.764
So in that particular instance, it was to increase our customer base.

246
00:13:14.784 --> 00:13:17.065
So we were just growing customers with that acquisition.

247
00:13:17.145 --> 00:13:21.326
But we could equally do it to get a new product line or to open up in a new geography.

248
00:13:21.406 --> 00:13:22.566
I want an office in New York.

249
00:13:22.946 --> 00:13:28.107
Do you go start an office in New York, hire people, rent space, do all that stuff, or you just buy a business in New York?

250
00:13:28.387 --> 00:13:31.988
And for people who are doing an acquisition in an industry they know nothing about.

251
00:13:32.048 --> 00:13:35.730
So you mentioned you purchased an IT company a couple weeks later.

252
00:13:36.470 --> 00:13:38.351
It's adjacent, but it's not telco.

253
00:13:38.751 --> 00:13:44.453
So how does somebody do that successfully, understand the business with never working in that industry?

254
00:13:44.573 --> 00:13:46.554
So the key thing, I mean, to start with, I wouldn't.

255
00:13:46.894 --> 00:13:49.895
To start with, I would do something you do have some understanding around.

256
00:13:50.295 --> 00:13:51.435
And there's a number of reasons for that.

257
00:13:51.575 --> 00:13:53.516
One is analyzing the business and understanding it.

258
00:13:53.556 --> 00:14:00.778
But the other one is actually your rapport with the business owner that you're buying from, which is really critical.

259
00:14:01.598 --> 00:14:04.759
You have to, you know, people do business with people they like, know and trust.

260
00:14:04.879 --> 00:14:07.200
And to get to that position, you have to be credible.

261
00:14:08.000 --> 00:14:11.462
And you're not going to be credible if you have no idea what you're talking about when they're talking about their business.

262
00:14:11.542 --> 00:14:15.724
So basically, yeah, it's helpful to do something you know.

263
00:14:15.804 --> 00:14:20.206
But once you've done a few deals, the credibility comes from the deals that you've done rather than the industry.

264
00:14:20.386 --> 00:14:23.008
So it's then easier to do deals in weird sectors.

265
00:14:23.208 --> 00:14:30.932
So if you look at my deal history, I've been in everything from education to IT to telecoms to I've had a cooking school.

266
00:14:30.972 --> 00:14:31.912
I've had a music school.

267
00:14:31.932 --> 00:14:32.973
I've had all sorts of things.

268
00:14:33.653 --> 00:14:35.335
Um, so yeah, you can do.

269
00:14:35.355 --> 00:14:45.505
Well, no, I was going to say, it's so interesting that the concern about acquiring a business in an industry that you don't know anything about is less about whether or not you're going to be able to run it.

270
00:14:45.906 --> 00:14:48.088
It's more about whether or not you're going to be able to get the deal done.

271
00:14:48.715 --> 00:14:53.159
Yeah, it's more about the rapport that you build at the beginning, because actually business is fundamentally very similar.

272
00:14:53.319 --> 00:14:56.522
You know, at its base level, it's more money coming in than going out.

273
00:14:56.562 --> 00:14:56.782
Right.

274
00:14:56.982 --> 00:14:59.324
And often people lose sight of that.

275
00:14:59.364 --> 00:15:01.586
But ultimately, that's what it's about.

276
00:15:01.967 --> 00:15:03.508
And so business is business is business.

277
00:15:03.688 --> 00:15:04.309
And also...

278
00:15:04.789 --> 00:15:07.892
To a great extent, we want to be a shareholder, not an operator.

279
00:15:08.412 --> 00:15:17.140
So when people talk about this work on your business, not in your business, it's a really easy sentence, but it's quite hard to execute, particularly if you've started the company.

280
00:15:17.200 --> 00:15:20.343
Because if you started it, you did everything in that business from day one.

281
00:15:21.003 --> 00:15:24.644
And you're ingrained in every part of the DNA of that business.

282
00:15:24.684 --> 00:15:31.326
And so, but if you buy a business, you can choose what you get involved in because you're only a shareholder on day one.

283
00:15:31.826 --> 00:15:36.888
And then any operational stuff, you can choose whether or not you get involved in it.

284
00:15:36.968 --> 00:15:39.549
If you're an expert in that particular part of the business.

285
00:15:39.789 --> 00:15:43.934
Much easier to work on a business you've acquired than it is to work on a business you've started.

286
00:15:44.215 --> 00:15:48.059
When you look at opportunities, so somebody is listening to this, they're excited about this.

287
00:15:48.540 --> 00:15:50.262
They think, okay, I'd love to be a shareholder.

288
00:15:50.362 --> 00:15:51.964
I don't necessarily want to be an operator.

289
00:15:52.505 --> 00:15:56.470
Is there a place where like in terms of revenue or size that you have to start at?

290
00:15:56.790 --> 00:15:57.491
Yeah.

291
00:15:57.671 --> 00:15:59.072
Below a million dollars is a job.

292
00:15:59.432 --> 00:15:59.692
Yes.

293
00:15:59.813 --> 00:16:00.013
Okay.

294
00:16:00.513 --> 00:16:02.395
And that's probably moved up in the last few years.

295
00:16:02.435 --> 00:16:07.138
It was probably below half a million dollars, you know, in 2020 or somewhere like that.

296
00:16:07.178 --> 00:16:08.980
And now, yeah, below a million dollars is a job.

297
00:16:09.300 --> 00:16:11.662
Now, buying a job isn't necessarily a bad thing.

298
00:16:12.362 --> 00:16:13.904
Buying a job is great if you don't have a job.

299
00:16:15.344 --> 00:16:25.307
Buying a job is great if you don't want to do a startup, but you want to learn about business because you need to, you know, to be an entrepreneur, you need to know how to manage people, how to do sales, how to do marketing, how to do all those things.

300
00:16:25.827 --> 00:16:32.530
But to do a startup is going to cost you a ton of money and burn three years of your life getting to break even kind of stability.

301
00:16:32.630 --> 00:16:37.431
Whereas buying a business that's doing less than a million could be a shortcut to getting that experience.

302
00:16:37.531 --> 00:16:40.092
And it also gives you a platform business to go and acquire other things.

303
00:16:40.652 --> 00:16:43.333
It is much easier to buy a company when you have a company.

304
00:16:44.073 --> 00:16:47.296
Um, so, because again, it's that credibility gap thing.

305
00:16:47.716 --> 00:16:57.083
Um, and so, uh, yeah, buying a smaller business to give you a, uh, a kind of anchor tenant or whatever in the, in the, in the whole thing is, is kind of, uh, worth doing.

306
00:16:57.263 --> 00:17:01.786
One of the ideas that you speak about a lot is that the deal is in the structure.

307
00:17:02.938 --> 00:17:04.019
So explain what that means.

308
00:17:04.039 --> 00:17:10.186
So for somebody coming in first time buyer, you said before your first deal, you didn't put any cash in.

309
00:17:10.746 --> 00:17:14.971
So let's assume that people have no idea how to structure a deal whatsoever.

310
00:17:14.991 --> 00:17:16.172
They've never done this before.

311
00:17:16.192 --> 00:17:19.956
They're thinking, OK, how does somebody buy a business with with no cash at all?

312
00:17:19.976 --> 00:17:21.037
It doesn't make any sense to me.

313
00:17:21.398 --> 00:17:24.901
Let's walk through all the different opportunities, but then also taking it a step further.

314
00:17:25.702 --> 00:17:28.825
And where do you find some of these opportunities?

315
00:17:28.885 --> 00:17:29.586
You're absolutely right.

316
00:17:29.606 --> 00:17:30.406
Structure is everything.

317
00:17:30.426 --> 00:17:32.068
You name the price, I'll name the structure.

318
00:17:32.228 --> 00:17:36.472
You're basically, what you're trying to do is you're trying to balance risk between the buyer and the seller.

319
00:17:36.972 --> 00:17:42.297
If a person is selling their company for a million dollars and you pay them a million dollars, you have all the risk.

320
00:17:42.617 --> 00:17:44.699
And small businesses are incredibly risky.

321
00:17:44.879 --> 00:17:50.344
You know, if they lose two customers or two staff members, the dynamics, the economics change completely.

322
00:17:50.384 --> 00:17:51.765
So it's a volatile asset class.

323
00:17:52.165 --> 00:17:55.646
So the first thing I would say is you should not borrow money and buy a volatile asset.

324
00:17:55.766 --> 00:17:58.327
It's like mortgaging your house and buying Bitcoin.

325
00:17:58.447 --> 00:18:00.407
And there's a lot of people that would do that, but they shouldn't.

326
00:18:00.527 --> 00:18:03.328
Well, this is what SBA loans are and personally guaranteed.

327
00:18:03.368 --> 00:18:04.128
So don't do SBA loans.

328
00:18:04.168 --> 00:18:05.468
Don't do bank loans.

329
00:18:05.488 --> 00:18:13.230
Basically, if you do a leverage buyout, if you borrow money to buy a business, you are effectively betting your house because you have to personally guarantee this debt.

330
00:18:13.390 --> 00:18:14.491
So you're betting your house.

331
00:18:15.031 --> 00:18:19.372
You're taking that money and you're giving it to your star employee so they can leave.

332
00:18:20.312 --> 00:18:27.457
because that guy is probably doing the job of three people for the salary of half a person and you're going to give them enough money that they don't need to come in anymore.

333
00:18:27.997 --> 00:18:30.679
And that's a very toxic mix of things to do.

334
00:18:31.079 --> 00:18:34.641
So what you want to do is you want to shift the balance of that risk the other way.

335
00:18:35.082 --> 00:18:39.024
And instead of doing a leverage buyout, you want to leverage business owner.

336
00:18:39.064 --> 00:18:43.747
You want them to support you in the transaction so that they get to the financial goal that they're headed for.

337
00:18:43.767 --> 00:18:44.848
They get their million dollars.

338
00:18:45.248 --> 00:18:48.669
but you get to a more asymmetric risk profile.

339
00:18:48.689 --> 00:18:53.430
In other words, you don't have the downside, but you still have the upside in the transaction.

340
00:18:53.850 --> 00:19:09.234
And so the deal structures that we use, and we have like 15 different kind of methodologies that we use for different circumstances, are all designed to create that asymmetric risk in the transaction and to also get the existing business owner what they're looking for, because it has to be a win-win.

341
00:19:09.274 --> 00:19:11.794
If you're not giving them what they want, then they're not going to sell to you.

342
00:19:12.174 --> 00:19:13.855
For that particular deal,

343
00:19:15.776 --> 00:19:23.845
How often does a business owner actually say, I'm okay with not getting cash right now?

344
00:19:24.165 --> 00:19:26.528
Because they're making money in their business right now.

345
00:19:26.568 --> 00:19:28.170
They're pulling out a salary from the business.

346
00:19:28.550 --> 00:19:35.839
So they have to be okay with, say the business, the whole number is a million, the small business, but say a million dollars, right?

347
00:19:36.239 --> 00:19:39.441
So if they're not going to get a million now, do you have to offer them more later?

348
00:19:39.581 --> 00:19:41.102
Like, how do we actually incentivize?

349
00:19:41.122 --> 00:19:43.424
So basically, it's no money down doesn't mean no money.

350
00:19:43.464 --> 00:19:43.964
That's the clear.

351
00:19:43.984 --> 00:19:49.187
That's the first thing, you know, you're not like ripping anybody off or getting anything for free.

352
00:19:49.347 --> 00:19:58.233
And oftentimes, they've got a number in their mind that's probably not achievable on a cash one-off basis, but might be affordable by the business over time.

353
00:19:59.073 --> 00:20:04.637
And you have to remember, anyone buying a business, that business has to pay for itself.

354
00:20:05.137 --> 00:20:07.680
If you borrow money from the bank, the business has to pay the bank back.

355
00:20:07.940 --> 00:20:12.704
If you're going to put money into it, you're going to want to get that money back out in a reasonably short space of time.

356
00:20:12.744 --> 00:20:17.249
Like in the next two to three years, you're going to want to be able to get your cash back or you're not going to buy that business.

357
00:20:17.289 --> 00:20:21.433
So every business is self-funded in its acquisition.

358
00:20:21.793 --> 00:20:24.416
It's just how you structure that self-funding.

359
00:20:24.756 --> 00:20:25.297
And so...

360
00:20:25.997 --> 00:20:36.981
Not giving it to them on day one just means you're going to have to give it to them in other ways, shapes or forms or with other instruments that you use as part of the kind of deal structure.

361
00:20:37.321 --> 00:20:42.023
And that mostly is just the secret behind this is finding the person who's willing to do that.

362
00:20:42.263 --> 00:20:43.063
Yeah, exactly.

363
00:20:43.243 --> 00:20:50.486
And the good news is that the universe of businesses that are for sale is like a triangle.

364
00:20:50.506 --> 00:20:53.867
There's a few big ones at the top and there's thousands of small ones at the bottom.

365
00:20:54.468 --> 00:20:58.489
And the universe of people who can buy those businesses is the opposite.

366
00:20:58.629 --> 00:21:01.570
There's one guy at the bottom who can buy the hundreds of thousands of them.

367
00:21:01.950 --> 00:21:04.031
And there's loads of people that can buy the big ones at the top.

368
00:21:04.051 --> 00:21:06.272
You get into private equity, family offices, et cetera, et cetera.

369
00:21:06.732 --> 00:21:09.955
So, it's a buyer's market at the bottom.

370
00:21:10.055 --> 00:21:11.816
There are not many people that can buy those businesses.

371
00:21:11.956 --> 00:21:14.318
And also, those businesses, by the way, are not ready to sell.

372
00:21:14.899 --> 00:21:18.041
So, if any serious buyer did look at them, they all look shit.

373
00:21:19.042 --> 00:21:21.964
So, they've got personal stuff running through the accounts.

374
00:21:21.984 --> 00:21:23.426
They haven't got, you know, they're not auditable.

375
00:21:23.446 --> 00:21:25.047
They don't have proper processes in place.

376
00:21:25.067 --> 00:21:26.428
They don't have a data room.

377
00:21:26.828 --> 00:21:29.090
They're just not ready to be sold.

378
00:21:29.130 --> 00:21:31.072
So, that gives us a huge advantage.

379
00:21:31.272 --> 00:21:31.392
Yeah.

380
00:21:31.572 --> 00:21:35.035
in that there aren't many natural competitors to us in that space.

381
00:21:35.395 --> 00:21:39.117
So I keep hearing about this wealth transfer.

382
00:21:39.378 --> 00:21:42.600
Like all these older business owners are now retiring.

383
00:21:43.140 --> 00:21:47.964
They're looking to sell their businesses or to not work in them anymore, not even, you know...

384
00:21:48.544 --> 00:22:10.815
not work with them at all forget not working with them like they just want to find a way to get rid of them the kids don't want them so this is a huge opportunity yeah it's insane so 40 percent of um small to medium-sized businesses belong to baby boomers and they have to retire in the next 10 years or pretty much die in the next 10 years i mean it's like they the baby boomer story when we first started talking about it the baby boomers are in their 70s they're now in their 80s um

385
00:22:12.396 --> 00:22:14.217
And so we're really getting to the end of it.

386
00:22:14.357 --> 00:22:19.458
And unfortunately, what tends to happen is business brokers overpromise them on what they can get for their business.

387
00:22:19.878 --> 00:22:22.099
They try and sell it for a couple of years at that price.

388
00:22:22.139 --> 00:22:24.919
And of course, nobody buys because the business is not prepared to sell.

389
00:22:25.359 --> 00:22:29.540
The people that could buy that business don't want to pay that sort of money.

390
00:22:29.600 --> 00:22:34.922
So they lowball or they come up with silly deal structures that aren't win-win.

391
00:22:36.163 --> 00:22:44.469
And then eventually those elderly people either end up dying or retiring, locking the door, walking away or winding the business down over time and locking the door.

392
00:22:44.789 --> 00:22:46.870
I literally had one not long ago.

393
00:22:47.071 --> 00:22:51.434
It was a guy selling solar panels, which you'd think actually is like a modern style business, right?

394
00:22:51.934 --> 00:22:57.718
And his speciality was selling these like camping ones, you know, so for charging your phone, boiling a kettle stuff when you're camping.

395
00:22:58.038 --> 00:22:59.499
They were doing $10 million a year.

396
00:23:00.179 --> 00:23:04.422
Most of it was online through a web shop and they had a physical presence as well.

397
00:23:05.403 --> 00:23:10.566
He'd been running it for 10 years and he was trying to sell it and a business broker told him he could get $2 million for it.

398
00:23:10.606 --> 00:23:11.827
So he advertised it for $2 million.

399
00:23:12.507 --> 00:23:15.228
Nobody was buying it because the margins were really tiny on it.

400
00:23:15.528 --> 00:23:18.589
And they wanted to retire.

401
00:23:18.889 --> 00:23:22.470
His wife had already moved to the overseas home that they were due to retire in.

402
00:23:22.591 --> 00:23:27.192
And he was stuck in this city working because he thought he was going to get this two million for selling it.

403
00:23:27.672 --> 00:23:29.493
And so after two years, he hasn't sold it.

404
00:23:29.513 --> 00:23:32.834
He hasn't lived with his wife for two years in his retirement years.

405
00:23:32.874 --> 00:23:36.255
You know, there's a precious time when you might not have much left.

406
00:23:37.316 --> 00:23:39.877
And so basically his URL came up for renewal.

407
00:23:40.197 --> 00:23:41.037
He just didn't renew it.

408
00:23:41.632 --> 00:23:42.192
He was over it.

409
00:23:42.373 --> 00:23:42.573
Yeah.

410
00:23:42.833 --> 00:23:47.696
Just let the URL expire that was generating 10 million of sales a year in solar.

411
00:23:48.017 --> 00:23:50.879
Let the URL expire and just move the problem.

412
00:23:50.959 --> 00:24:02.367
And that business would have sold and he would have got a decent price had he not been overpromised and been told, look, if you accept a risk balance deal structure, there's a buyer for this business.

413
00:24:02.707 --> 00:24:04.789
Is this whole industry a relationship industry?

414
00:24:04.829 --> 00:24:05.930
And I'm asking that because...

415
00:24:07.004 --> 00:24:08.965
I don't think the best deals are on biz buy sell.

416
00:24:09.326 --> 00:24:09.686
Exactly.

417
00:24:09.746 --> 00:24:10.166
No, they're not.

418
00:24:10.346 --> 00:24:11.327
And they're not with brokers.

419
00:24:11.347 --> 00:24:14.169
Well, I was going to say, it doesn't sound brokers are doing anybody any good.

420
00:24:14.589 --> 00:24:15.050
Usually.

421
00:24:16.211 --> 00:24:18.472
How do you market anything, right?

422
00:24:18.833 --> 00:24:24.096
You figure out who your addressable market is and you go and contact them in some way, shape or form.

423
00:24:24.176 --> 00:24:25.337
It's exactly the same with this.

424
00:24:25.417 --> 00:24:28.800
If you decide you want to buy HVAC companies in Florida,

425
00:24:29.420 --> 00:24:31.802
There is a finite number of HVAC companies in Florida.

426
00:24:31.882 --> 00:24:41.888
Figure out who they are, make a list, and your job is now to go meet all of those owners of all of those businesses over the next year or two and build relationships with them.

427
00:24:42.028 --> 00:24:44.649
And it's those relationships that will turn into deals.

428
00:24:45.650 --> 00:24:51.654
And the traditional M&A approach is to get a corporate finance company to write them a letter.

429
00:24:52.895 --> 00:24:58.041
which says, hi, we're a big corporate finance company and our client's buying HVAC companies at the moment.

430
00:24:58.461 --> 00:25:03.026
Although, I mean, if you know an HVAC owner, they've had 50 of those letters this week and they just ignore them.

431
00:25:03.046 --> 00:25:04.107
It's like fucking noise.

432
00:25:04.368 --> 00:25:08.272
It's like when dental offices are doing DSOs with private equity and yeah.

433
00:25:08.412 --> 00:25:15.663
And those guys come back to me and say, sorry, the corporate finance guys and the PE guys come back to me and go, oh, yeah, sourcing doesn't work.

434
00:25:15.923 --> 00:25:16.965
We have to go to brokers.

435
00:25:17.005 --> 00:25:19.408
We have to go to guys because the sourcing doesn't work.

436
00:25:19.428 --> 00:25:20.269
We write to them all the time.

437
00:25:20.290 --> 00:25:20.950
They never reply.

438
00:25:20.971 --> 00:25:21.992
And it's like, yeah, of course they don't.

439
00:25:23.374 --> 00:25:27.096
You need to be, it's about an individual relationship.

440
00:25:27.116 --> 00:25:30.698
You need to reach out to them everywhere, on LinkedIn, by letters, by whatever.

441
00:25:31.158 --> 00:25:32.999
And you need to find them, speak to them.

442
00:25:33.219 --> 00:25:35.200
And don't say, I'm trying to buy your business.

443
00:25:35.220 --> 00:25:36.001
Let's have a meeting.

444
00:25:36.301 --> 00:25:39.042
Say, I'm thinking of rolling up HVAC companies in Florida.

445
00:25:39.082 --> 00:25:42.164
I'd love to pick your brains.

446
00:25:42.184 --> 00:25:43.384
Then you're pandering to their ego.

447
00:25:43.504 --> 00:25:44.725
Oh, you're the expert.

448
00:25:44.745 --> 00:25:45.866
Please educate me.

449
00:25:45.886 --> 00:25:46.286
Teach me.

450
00:25:46.626 --> 00:25:47.927
Because this is their baby, too.

451
00:25:48.547 --> 00:25:53.112
They don't want some, this cold, heartless thing to come in and take it.

452
00:25:53.132 --> 00:25:54.434
This New York hedge fund or whatever.

453
00:25:54.454 --> 00:25:54.874
No.

454
00:25:55.115 --> 00:25:59.900
And like, I mean, some of them really do care about not only their business, their employees, what's going to happen.

455
00:25:59.940 --> 00:26:03.124
Are you going to, you know, deconstruct it and sell it for parts after?

456
00:26:03.244 --> 00:26:03.404
Yeah.

457
00:26:03.424 --> 00:26:06.368
I mean, often also with a lot of those baby boomer things, they've made their money.

458
00:26:07.249 --> 00:26:08.109
They've got their holiday home.

459
00:26:08.129 --> 00:26:08.770
They've got their yacht.

460
00:26:08.810 --> 00:26:10.611
They've got all the stuff they want.

461
00:26:10.771 --> 00:26:13.273
Now it's just a safe pair of hands for the business.

462
00:26:13.574 --> 00:26:18.278
And actually, with the economy as it is at the time that we're recording, things are a little bit tougher at the moment.

463
00:26:18.298 --> 00:26:20.860
You've had inflation, interest rates are up.

464
00:26:21.060 --> 00:26:22.461
It's a fairly constrained environment.

465
00:26:22.481 --> 00:26:25.984
So they kind of recognize this is not the ideal time to be selling it.

466
00:26:26.344 --> 00:26:29.145
but they don't get to choose the time because they're getting really old.

467
00:26:29.445 --> 00:26:33.226
So now it's more about that, like you say, the safe pair of hands.

468
00:26:33.466 --> 00:26:37.828
And sometimes it's, you know, keeping the company name because it's their family name.

469
00:26:38.508 --> 00:26:40.249
You know, it's on the side of a building.

470
00:26:40.269 --> 00:26:43.410
Everybody drives past every day and it's part of their legacy.

471
00:26:43.630 --> 00:26:50.092
So things like that are often more important to them than, yeah, getting a few hundred grand on day one.

472
00:26:51.153 --> 00:26:53.635
versus the same price, but over a period of time.

473
00:26:54.075 --> 00:26:56.557
Life at the Speed of Play is a success story partner.

474
00:26:56.617 --> 00:26:59.579
Now, this is a book by Mark Pincus, the guy who founded Zynga.

475
00:26:59.599 --> 00:27:00.760
I've actually had him on the show.

476
00:27:01.061 --> 00:27:06.845
I met him in person, and Reid Hoffman wrote the foreword, calling him one of the best idea people in Silicon Valley.

477
00:27:07.045 --> 00:27:10.708
The book is Life at the Speed of Play, Launch Products People Love.

478
00:27:10.788 --> 00:27:12.190
About 170 pages.

479
00:27:12.470 --> 00:27:13.971
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480
00:27:14.251 --> 00:27:15.112
It's his framework.

481
00:27:15.332 --> 00:27:20.435
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482
00:27:20.635 --> 00:27:22.156
Not theory, the way he actually does it.

483
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And he's repeatedly built successful businesses.

484
00:27:24.537 --> 00:27:26.318
On top of that, you can read it in a weekend.

485
00:27:26.478 --> 00:27:29.540
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486
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So right now, if you go to getmarksbook.com slash success, you get two copies for $32.

487
00:27:34.963 --> 00:27:36.224
That's $16 each.

488
00:27:36.584 --> 00:27:41.407
Mark is paying for the second copy himself because he wants you to give it to somebody, a friend who's been sitting on an idea.

489
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someone who needs to push, whoever.

490
00:27:43.168 --> 00:27:45.809
That's getmarksbook.com slash success.

491
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Mark with a K, buy one, second one's free.

492
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My fitness pal is a success story partner.

493
00:27:50.931 --> 00:27:55.992
People always ask me how I have time to track what I eat, pay attention to my nutrition when I have a daily podcast.

494
00:27:56.233 --> 00:27:59.794
I have a weekly podcast, I have a newsletter, I run a marketing agency, my days are super full.

495
00:28:00.194 --> 00:28:02.696
But honestly, that's exactly why I have to do it.

496
00:28:02.736 --> 00:28:08.882
See, when you're running that many things, when you are a high performing person, you cannot afford to have your energy be inconsistent.

497
00:28:09.042 --> 00:28:13.366
Food is a foundation for everything, for energy, for sleep, for weight, for recovery, for performance.

498
00:28:13.806 --> 00:28:15.788
And the days when I'm not paying attention to what I'm eating,

499
00:28:16.248 --> 00:28:16.708
I feel it.

500
00:28:16.928 --> 00:28:19.490
The MyFitnessPal app makes tracking a non-issue.

501
00:28:19.570 --> 00:28:26.173
I can say what I ate, it has voice logging, or I can point my camera at a plate with meal scan and it figures out what's there.

502
00:28:26.233 --> 00:28:28.974
See, I'm not sitting around entering all my ingredients.

503
00:28:29.234 --> 00:28:30.475
The app does the work for me.

504
00:28:30.835 --> 00:28:37.098
It also connects to over 40 fitness apps and wearables, so my training, my steps, my nutrition, it all goes to one place.

505
00:28:37.558 --> 00:28:40.660
One picture of what's happening instead of having to piece everything together myself.

506
00:28:40.820 --> 00:28:42.060
The whole thing is frictionless.

507
00:28:42.080 --> 00:28:43.281
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508
00:28:43.521 --> 00:28:46.304
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509
00:28:46.324 --> 00:28:47.586
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510
00:28:47.866 --> 00:28:53.753
Go to podcast.myfitnesspal.com and use code SCOTT, all uppercase for 15% off MyFitnessPal premium.

511
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512
00:28:57.958 --> 00:28:59.579
HubSpot is a success story partner.

513
00:29:00.260 --> 00:29:04.604
every entrepreneur, founder, CEO is listening right now needs to pay attention.

514
00:29:04.944 --> 00:29:05.685
I have a question for you.

515
00:29:06.005 --> 00:29:13.652
When a buyer asks AI for a solution or a product that your business sells, does your business come up?

516
00:29:13.932 --> 00:29:16.755
The answer is that most companies have no idea.

517
00:29:17.075 --> 00:29:30.879
They don't know if their name shows up in any of the AI tools, chat, perplexity, clod, and by the time they find out, they have lost tons of traffic and tons of deals to someone who did show up.

518
00:29:31.239 --> 00:29:32.779
HubSpot AEO.

519
00:29:33.260 --> 00:29:40.562
It helps you show up in those moments with the right answers that your customers and your buyers are looking for when they go type in a question.

520
00:29:40.782 --> 00:29:44.763
It's before the first click, it's before they fill out some form on your website,

521
00:29:45.303 --> 00:29:49.066
That is the moment that HubSpot AEO is built for.

522
00:29:49.446 --> 00:29:55.150
So if you want your company to show up in AI searches when your customer is looking, check out HubSpot.com.

523
00:29:55.511 --> 00:29:59.213
They are the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.

524
00:29:59.494 --> 00:30:01.915
I want to understand a little bit more about your story.

525
00:30:03.156 --> 00:30:06.939
So those numbers I was talking about at the beginning...

526
00:30:08.200 --> 00:30:12.703
You've done hundreds of acquisitions, taking over 100 companies public.

527
00:30:12.743 --> 00:30:13.604
Nearly 100, yeah.

528
00:30:13.984 --> 00:30:18.588
How does somebody simultaneously manage all of these companies?

529
00:30:18.608 --> 00:30:20.209
I don't know what your infrastructure is like.

530
00:30:20.389 --> 00:30:24.132
I don't know if you have thousands of employees, but you seem to be relatively lean.

531
00:30:24.272 --> 00:30:26.334
Yeah, we're pretty lean.

532
00:30:26.394 --> 00:30:27.915
We're a small business.

533
00:30:27.935 --> 00:30:34.000
We're based in Singapore and Dubai, and it's mainly legal and financial kind of resource.

534
00:30:34.340 --> 00:30:35.701
But we don't manage these businesses.

535
00:30:36.662 --> 00:30:37.363
Not a single one.

536
00:30:37.883 --> 00:30:41.826
Every single one, you found a business that has a great operator or you found a way to hire one.

537
00:30:42.047 --> 00:30:43.728
Yeah, we're shareholders.

538
00:30:43.748 --> 00:30:49.293
So obviously, when you're taking a company public, it's important they have a really great management team in place as part of the organization.

539
00:30:49.873 --> 00:31:11.574
requirement of being a public company and so we're very low interference we don't want to participate in the operational aspects of their business and particularly when we get into businesses we know nothing about we're reliant on the operators in there to be competent and to and to be able to deliver so and that's on the public company side and then on I mean when I used to do back in you know 2008 2009 I did a lot of distressed

540
00:31:13.796 --> 00:31:15.678
acquisitions because pretty much everything was distressed.

541
00:31:15.698 --> 00:31:19.160
So even if you're trying to find a solvent one, you end up finding distressed deals.

542
00:31:19.601 --> 00:31:23.904
But I was, yeah, I went through a phase of literally just buying companies for a dollar.

543
00:31:24.324 --> 00:31:32.870
And then you'd figure out if you were catching the falling knife and it was going to, you know, you had to close it down anyway, or if you could restructure it, turn it around and sell it for a profit.

544
00:31:32.930 --> 00:31:34.031
And it's about 50-50.

545
00:31:34.111 --> 00:31:36.413
So half of them, you could rescue half of them, you couldn't.

546
00:31:36.653 --> 00:31:40.476
And the ones you could rescue, you could make six or seven figures on the exit.

547
00:31:40.496 --> 00:31:42.297
And the ones you couldn't rescue, it cost you nothing.

548
00:31:42.597 --> 00:31:44.700
It was opportunity cost, maybe.

549
00:31:45.361 --> 00:31:46.722
And it's just a lesson at the end of the day.

550
00:31:46.863 --> 00:31:47.183
Exactly.

551
00:31:47.203 --> 00:31:47.543
Yeah, yeah.

552
00:31:47.563 --> 00:31:49.306
You figure out what works and what doesn't work.

553
00:31:49.326 --> 00:31:51.809
So I don't do retail anymore because I bought a few retailers.

554
00:31:51.829 --> 00:31:54.332
So over time, like not everything has worked out.

555
00:31:54.772 --> 00:31:55.193
Yeah, of course.

556
00:31:55.213 --> 00:31:55.613
Yeah, yeah.

557
00:31:55.653 --> 00:31:57.396
No, I mean, hey, look, it's entrepreneurship.

558
00:31:57.436 --> 00:31:57.916
Nothing works.

559
00:31:58.137 --> 00:31:59.618
It just seems like the volume.

560
00:32:00.279 --> 00:32:04.323
seems incomprehensible to somebody who speaks to individuals who do one at a time.

561
00:32:04.343 --> 00:32:07.966
Yeah, I was really lucky in the telecoms industry was so acquisitive.

562
00:32:08.006 --> 00:32:11.149
I had this baptism of fire in terms of people trying to buy me.

563
00:32:11.510 --> 00:32:12.450
That was unusual.

564
00:32:12.871 --> 00:32:17.915
And that gave me a very rapid education in that space that doesn't really exist in any other industry.

565
00:32:17.996 --> 00:32:20.838
So the fact I was in that industry gave me that kind of rapid education.

566
00:32:20.858 --> 00:32:21.719
And I think that's a very rapid education.

567
00:32:21.939 --> 00:32:28.346
And then when I sold that company, like 10 years later, we arrived in the global financial crisis.

568
00:32:28.366 --> 00:32:32.910
So now all of a sudden, just as I'm doing distressed acquisitions, I can have 10 meetings a day.

569
00:32:32.970 --> 00:32:36.594
Well, if I wanted to do distressed acquisitions today, I might get one a week.

570
00:32:36.714 --> 00:32:40.357
So again, I had this baptism of fire because everything was distressed.

571
00:32:40.378 --> 00:32:42.600
So I could have as many meetings as I wanted to.

572
00:32:43.020 --> 00:32:44.481
So again, it was fortuitous.

573
00:32:44.521 --> 00:32:50.425
It was lucky that I was right place, right time, right skill set to be able to capitalize on that.

574
00:32:50.445 --> 00:32:59.470
And then since 2016, which is when we did our first public listing, we now have this community around us, the Harbour Club community, which is like...

575
00:32:59.850 --> 00:33:23.097
two or three thousand uh members there's like two thousand active members in our in our app um who are bringing us deals constantly so you know when i say i'm looking at buying marketing agencies i'll suddenly get a thousand marketing agencies introduced to me um so we get this massive inflow of of potential uh acquisitions the the like just taking a company public um

576
00:33:25.242 --> 00:33:27.304
What complexities are added when you take it?

577
00:33:27.324 --> 00:33:33.068
So is it just like, so you, I'm just, so layman's, I'm like the guy who's trying to figure this out from the outside.

578
00:33:33.108 --> 00:33:36.491
And I think most people will be like, okay, oh my God, taking a company public, what the fuck is going on?

579
00:33:36.971 --> 00:33:43.897
But okay, so you have a company, it's running, it's successful, you're a shareholder, there's operators, you take it public, now there's liquidity.

580
00:33:43.917 --> 00:33:44.457
Yeah.

581
00:33:44.978 --> 00:33:47.681
But outside of that, it's like IR and hands off, really.

582
00:33:48.021 --> 00:33:48.802
Yeah, absolutely.

583
00:33:48.942 --> 00:33:57.551
And also, look, we try and look at public listings as like a five-year plan because I think everybody assumes you go public to raise a ton of money or to exit.

584
00:33:57.692 --> 00:34:00.495
And actually, it's a terrible way to raise money and it's a terrible way to exit.

585
00:34:01.415 --> 00:34:08.877
But if you look at the richest people in the world, so if you take the Forbes 400, 100 are in the Lucky Sperm Club, right?

586
00:34:08.997 --> 00:34:10.797
They inherited it.

587
00:34:10.957 --> 00:34:19.099
And then 220 of the remaining 300 took their companies public and built their wealth on capital markets, including all of the big ones.

588
00:34:19.139 --> 00:34:29.082
So Bernard Arnault, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, all of those, all the big ones, Warren Buffett, etc., took their companies public and built their wealth on the public market.

589
00:34:29.102 --> 00:34:30.462
So it's a really well-trodden path.

590
00:34:31.022 --> 00:34:35.764
But none of them took their companies public and spanked all their stock into the market.

591
00:34:36.144 --> 00:34:38.185
They were long term with their approach.

592
00:34:38.265 --> 00:34:47.309
So we look at businesses where we can see a clear path within that five years to get out of being a small cap and into a billion dollar plus market cap.

593
00:34:47.349 --> 00:34:48.690
So they have to have a clear path.

594
00:34:48.770 --> 00:34:57.053
And that clear path either has to be an amazing organic strategy, which we don't see that often, but an amazing organic strategy where we can see absolutely great.

595
00:34:57.193 --> 00:35:01.557
These guys can get to a billion market cap with the organic structure that they're currently adopting.

596
00:35:02.018 --> 00:35:05.141
Or it has to be a very predictable acquisition strategy.

597
00:35:05.541 --> 00:35:07.563
You know, so, OK, we've got through acquisition.

598
00:35:07.643 --> 00:35:08.103
Exactly.

599
00:35:08.123 --> 00:35:09.825
We've got 30 targets lined up.

600
00:35:10.245 --> 00:35:12.948
If we buy all 30, we're a billion market cap.

601
00:35:13.128 --> 00:35:19.994
And so when we see those kind of two variants, that's a company that we want to get involved with and take them public.

602
00:35:20.014 --> 00:35:22.317
Public company is almost like a like a haltco.

603
00:35:22.837 --> 00:35:23.577
Yeah, exactly.

604
00:35:23.597 --> 00:35:23.797
Yeah.

605
00:35:23.997 --> 00:35:24.217
Yeah.

606
00:35:24.638 --> 00:35:29.799
And, and then we always look at listing it before most people would.

607
00:35:29.979 --> 00:35:40.903
So when they're quite small, and then doing the lion's share of the growth on the capital markets, because once you're already listed, it gives you huge credibility to do acquisitions, huge credibility to attract the best talent.

608
00:35:40.963 --> 00:35:42.903
Yeah, it just opens doors.

609
00:35:43.203 --> 00:35:51.366
You can win, you can win, you know, government contracts, corporate tenders, all that kind of stuff as a public company much more easily than you can as a private company.

610
00:35:51.766 --> 00:35:57.652
So we list on a junior exchange first, we grow quickly, and then we go back to a main market later on.

611
00:35:58.333 --> 00:36:07.202
And obviously, you know, NASDAQ or New York Stock Exchange is the end goal, but you don't want to be a small cap on those exchanges because the institutional depth doesn't exist.

612
00:36:07.803 --> 00:36:10.744
The investment banking community is a bit sharky at that level.

613
00:36:11.624 --> 00:36:20.788
So you want to get to a point where you can have, you know, a tier one bank as your sponsor, that you can use proper brokers, that you've got proper institutional availability.

614
00:36:20.808 --> 00:36:28.730
So we are actually taking a couple of American companies right now, public in Europe, where they will be much more respected at their size.

615
00:36:28.830 --> 00:36:29.811
As opposed to trying to compete.

616
00:36:29.851 --> 00:36:32.972
As opposed to trying to compete with NASDAQ, get bigger and then come back.

617
00:36:34.132 --> 00:36:37.595
And then you don't have the SEC and all the other things to deal with while you're going through.

618
00:36:37.615 --> 00:36:38.295
Then it's expensive.

619
00:36:38.315 --> 00:36:39.376
It's an expensive thing to do.

620
00:36:39.396 --> 00:36:39.876
Well, exactly.

621
00:36:39.916 --> 00:36:41.978
This is the other point, actually, is the legal cost.

622
00:36:42.058 --> 00:36:51.444
So I always say, you know, the thing that costs you 100 grand in New York costs 20 grand in London or two grand in, say, Germany.

623
00:36:51.544 --> 00:36:53.826
They haven't figured out how to price it yet.

624
00:36:54.887 --> 00:36:56.468
So there's like a legal arbitrage.

625
00:36:56.648 --> 00:36:57.648
Do you recommend...

626
00:36:59.150 --> 00:37:05.111
The average individual that joins the Harper Club, they're obviously very ambitious.

627
00:37:05.492 --> 00:37:07.472
Are they entrepreneurs?

628
00:37:07.512 --> 00:37:08.972
Are they people that have failed businesses?

629
00:37:09.052 --> 00:37:10.813
Is it like a whole gamut of individuals?

630
00:37:10.933 --> 00:37:11.733
Yeah, it's a real mixture.

631
00:37:11.793 --> 00:37:14.254
I'd say it's probably like 70% to 80% entrepreneurs.

632
00:37:14.934 --> 00:37:19.835
And they're either running a business now or they've run businesses in the past and sold them or whatever.

633
00:37:20.195 --> 00:37:21.436
And then we have a little bit of corporate.

634
00:37:21.496 --> 00:37:25.397
We have a little bit of ex-veterans and things like that that come and join us, who actually do really well, by the way.

635
00:37:26.418 --> 00:37:27.458
Good at following orders, I guess.

636
00:37:30.599 --> 00:37:35.181
But yeah, we have a really diverse kind of mix of people, but it's weighted heavily towards, obviously, entrepreneurs.

637
00:37:35.381 --> 00:37:36.842
And they're either...

638
00:37:37.762 --> 00:37:45.208
trying to buy a business instead of doing a startup again, but most of them are trying to buy a competitor or trying to expand an existing business through acquisition.

639
00:37:45.608 --> 00:37:56.956
And that might be to add a regional office in a different location or add a different product line or perhaps attract talent that's working for another company right now that they want to get into their organization.

640
00:37:57.237 --> 00:38:00.959
I want to ask one thing that I want to talk about acquiring competitors because that's interesting.

641
00:38:01.580 --> 00:38:05.183
But just for somebody who's listening to this right now, there's like levels to this game.

642
00:38:05.883 --> 00:38:09.526
I don't, do you recommend that somebody tries to take a company public?

643
00:38:09.546 --> 00:38:09.846
No.

644
00:38:09.986 --> 00:38:11.147
No, that's my point.

645
00:38:11.227 --> 00:38:11.967
Yeah, so.

646
00:38:12.168 --> 00:38:14.289
The first time we did it was disastrous.

647
00:38:14.309 --> 00:38:15.170
I mean, it was so hard.

648
00:38:15.450 --> 00:38:20.954
So what is like level one, level two, level three, and how much, how many reps should they put in at each level before they should move to the next level?

649
00:38:20.994 --> 00:38:22.655
I mean, the first thing is it depends where you are.

650
00:38:22.815 --> 00:38:26.938
You know, if you're running a business, then I'd probably recommend trying to grow that business by using acquisition.

651
00:38:26.978 --> 00:38:30.481
Because at the moment, you probably have one engine on the plane, which is sales and marketing.

652
00:38:30.641 --> 00:38:34.143
And we can stick another engine on the plane, which is buying competitors.

653
00:38:34.244 --> 00:38:37.126
So that, you know, two engines is better than one engine.

654
00:38:37.146 --> 00:38:38.647
So you will grow much faster.

655
00:38:39.688 --> 00:38:43.992
And also with a lot of businesses, actually, you find that there's a plateau that they really struggle to break through.

656
00:38:44.012 --> 00:38:58.085
And acquisition can be a great way of leapfrogging that kind of desert that people get stuck in, you know, and create some, you know, once you've started to plateau to get that growth back, acquisition can be great at doing that.

657
00:38:58.145 --> 00:38:58.365
Yeah.

658
00:38:59.246 --> 00:39:03.007
It depends where you're starting as to as to what level you kind of start at.

659
00:39:03.047 --> 00:39:08.069
But typically, if you're a business, you either want to acquire more businesses that look like you.

660
00:39:08.209 --> 00:39:10.870
So a horizontal acquisition strategy.

661
00:39:10.890 --> 00:39:15.472
So if you're a real estate agent, it's buying more real estate agents.

662
00:39:15.792 --> 00:39:18.593
If you or you might want to vertically integrate.

663
00:39:18.893 --> 00:39:19.514
into your business.

664
00:39:19.554 --> 00:39:29.228
So if you're a real estate agent, you might want to buy a scaffolding company or a facilities management company or a letting agent or something that integrates with your business and allows you to, yeah, target it in a different way.

665
00:39:29.248 --> 00:39:33.654
So, I mean, like, if you are, you could, if you do a roll-up, you could buy, like, a marketing agency?

666
00:39:33.954 --> 00:39:34.615
Yeah, absolutely.

667
00:39:34.695 --> 00:39:38.657
Actually, marketing agent, we have a lot of marketing rollups in the Harbour Club community.

668
00:39:38.777 --> 00:39:39.898
It's one of those industries.

669
00:39:40.339 --> 00:39:44.401
I think the top 200 marketing agencies in the world are all rollups.

670
00:39:45.942 --> 00:39:47.704
So they've gone through acquisitions?

671
00:39:47.724 --> 00:39:48.324
Yeah.

672
00:39:48.444 --> 00:39:52.487
And the top WPP, which is the largest marketing agency in the world, is 2,600 companies.

673
00:39:54.288 --> 00:39:55.388
They, they've done 2006.

674
00:39:55.629 --> 00:39:58.630
Yeah, they've done 2600 acquisitions.

675
00:39:58.950 --> 00:40:02.551
The next, the second biggest is Publicis in France, Rollup.

676
00:40:03.111 --> 00:40:07.072
Densu, Rollup, Omnicom, Rollup, all the biggest agencies in the world are Rollups.

677
00:40:07.792 --> 00:40:08.813
Most people don't know this.

678
00:40:09.133 --> 00:40:14.054
Most people look at Publicis and they think, oh, they just grew that from zero to.

679
00:40:14.214 --> 00:40:15.895
When you see it, you can't unsee it.

680
00:40:16.255 --> 00:40:20.639
So I now read business books and realize everyone's a dealmaker.

681
00:40:21.059 --> 00:40:25.843
Like all the people that I used to think were startup entrepreneurs made all their money doing deals.

682
00:40:25.943 --> 00:40:36.511
You know, from Richard Branson to whoever you can think of, there's a deal in there that was the tipping point to their success, either from a capital event from an exit, which recapitalized them and enabled them to go on and do something else.

683
00:40:36.531 --> 00:40:39.994
I mean, Elon Musk sold PayPal, capitalized him, enabled him to go on and do business.

684
00:40:40.774 --> 00:40:43.256
you know, all the other stuff that he's done.

685
00:40:43.276 --> 00:40:49.642
So there's either a capital event or an acquisition that completely changed the game and moved the whole business in a different direction.

686
00:40:49.662 --> 00:40:52.164
And every single entrepreneur story is actually a dealmaker story.

687
00:40:52.444 --> 00:40:58.749
Because if you grow the way that most people think a business grows, it's just slow and painful.

688
00:40:58.869 --> 00:40:59.410
It is, yeah.

689
00:40:59.590 --> 00:41:00.531
Blood, sweat, and years.

690
00:41:02.545 --> 00:41:11.356
Acquiring competitors, interesting strategy, obviously a little bit different than vertically integrating businesses that will support your growth.

691
00:41:11.396 --> 00:41:16.582
But if you acquire competitors, like acquiring competitors is just like literally just acquiring companies in the same vertical as you.

692
00:41:16.602 --> 00:41:17.423
Yeah.

693
00:41:18.464 --> 00:41:22.709
How do you do an acquisition properly and not screw it up?

694
00:41:23.169 --> 00:41:24.891
Because so many people screw up acquisitions.

695
00:41:25.092 --> 00:41:26.493
And the thing that made the company special.

696
00:41:26.713 --> 00:41:28.115
The first thing is remember what you're buying.

697
00:41:28.515 --> 00:41:30.638
You're buying the inertia that they've created.

698
00:41:30.758 --> 00:41:33.141
You're buying the goodwill that they've created in their business.

699
00:41:33.261 --> 00:41:38.266
And what most people do is they buy it and then fuck all of that up by changing everything.

700
00:41:38.907 --> 00:41:42.971
They change the name, they change the management, they change the way they do.

701
00:41:43.131 --> 00:41:51.379
And so don't respect what it is that you're actually acquiring, which is the goodwill and the inertia that they've created over the years for their business.

702
00:41:51.620 --> 00:41:56.304
And so actually, WPP, for example, keeps all of those brands independent.

703
00:41:56.645 --> 00:41:59.467
Because if one of those brands fucks something up, they can get rid of it.

704
00:41:59.548 --> 00:42:01.570
It doesn't poison the WPP brand.

705
00:42:02.930 --> 00:42:04.711
But it still contributes to revenue while it's there.

706
00:42:05.092 --> 00:42:06.172
Exactly.

707
00:42:06.252 --> 00:42:09.354
So leverage that brand that you've bought and let it carry on.

708
00:42:11.295 --> 00:42:14.097
Yeah, don't interfere too much with how they do things.

709
00:42:14.157 --> 00:42:17.739
Just because you do stuff in a different way doesn't mean that you're superior to them in some way.

710
00:42:17.779 --> 00:42:21.661
You try and get the best practice out of both sides of that equation.

711
00:42:22.501 --> 00:42:25.743
And the other big thing I see is people doing top-down marketing.

712
00:42:25.823 --> 00:42:30.205
delegation or top down changes through businesses, small businesses are very fragile.

713
00:42:30.345 --> 00:42:32.527
If you piss people off, you have no value left.

714
00:42:33.047 --> 00:42:36.349
So if you want them to change stuff inside the business, get them to come up.

715
00:42:36.449 --> 00:42:38.450
If it's their idea, it's amazing.

716
00:42:38.550 --> 00:42:39.990
If it's your idea, it's terrible.

717
00:42:40.070 --> 00:42:41.811
So always make it their idea.

718
00:42:42.432 --> 00:42:51.576
I'm going to, I'm just going to think, is there, is there, I want to, I want to do more mindset topics in a second, but are there other key things that really hit with your content around acquisition?

719
00:42:51.596 --> 00:42:54.238
Because we've gone through like a high level, a lot of different ideas here.

720
00:42:54.642 --> 00:42:57.444
Yeah, I think that you touched on it earlier about the sourcing side.

721
00:42:57.465 --> 00:42:58.605
How do you find the opportunities?

722
00:42:58.646 --> 00:43:02.429
And yeah, we kind of said you're doing this shortlist and spending your time reaching out to them.

723
00:43:02.549 --> 00:43:03.550
I guess we kind of covered that.

724
00:43:03.970 --> 00:43:05.852
Yeah, we can go deeper on that.

725
00:43:06.112 --> 00:43:08.574
I don't know what you want to gate versus what you want to talk about.

726
00:43:09.255 --> 00:43:14.599
I want your audience to get tons of value so that they feel like they can actually go and do something with this.

727
00:43:14.659 --> 00:43:16.741
Because, look, it's a really daunting topic.

728
00:43:16.921 --> 00:43:19.283
But like I say, once you've seen it, you can't unsee it.

729
00:43:19.324 --> 00:43:21.025
So when you look behind the curtain, you're like, what?

730
00:43:21.025 --> 00:43:21.345
Wow.

731
00:43:21.445 --> 00:43:24.127
Well, you know, I've even thought about this like for the podcast.

732
00:43:24.147 --> 00:43:28.110
I mean, it's fun to have a little podcast business, but how do you really grow?

733
00:43:28.230 --> 00:43:28.550
Is it?

734
00:43:29.470 --> 00:43:39.577
And we've spoken a few times about the opportunity for potentially content creator roll up type strategies, because as a single brand, you've got certain amounts of leverage.

735
00:43:39.637 --> 00:43:48.723
But as a group, you could really leverage that influence to do brand deals, to do influence for equity type transactions and stuff like that, because you bring a stable platform.

736
00:43:50.184 --> 00:43:52.145
of audience into a product, you know?

737
00:43:52.445 --> 00:43:54.266
So I know, so it's interesting.

738
00:43:54.847 --> 00:44:02.872
There's not many examples because for some reason, the people that understand acquisition and taking companies public, they're not the creators, more often than not.

739
00:44:03.012 --> 00:44:05.193
And also the market's dominated by bankers.

740
00:44:05.573 --> 00:44:07.935
And actually bankers really don't understand entrepreneurs.

741
00:44:08.415 --> 00:44:10.937
And so when they look at what I'm doing, they just tell me it's impossible.

742
00:44:11.737 --> 00:44:27.688
um so i even went to insead university which is an nba university famous nba university and uh one of their students was one of my students so one of their students had done a deal and had told their lecturer you've got to meet this guy jeremy he's fucking amazing you know so i go and speak to them and they go yeah that won't work

743
00:44:28.388 --> 00:44:30.750
I said, I've literally got thousands of people doing this every day.

744
00:44:31.251 --> 00:44:32.732
And I said, yeah, but it wouldn't work.

745
00:44:32.752 --> 00:44:35.514
You might get, you might be lucky and be able to do it once, but it's not replicable.

746
00:44:35.794 --> 00:44:40.699
I mean, like they're so blind to how entrepreneurs think.

747
00:44:40.719 --> 00:44:44.602
I was going to say there's one example of a creator roll up and I'm not going to have it

748
00:44:45.062 --> 00:44:52.312
I'm not going to remember what it is, but it was a whole bunch of kids' channels on YouTube, and it aggregated for, I think the exit was well over a billion.

749
00:44:53.493 --> 00:44:55.656
But not many creators do it.

750
00:44:55.796 --> 00:45:02.064
Not many finance people know how to communicate and build a creator network.

751
00:45:03.126 --> 00:45:13.176
This is where acquisition entrepreneurship really gets or has weight is because it's entrepreneurs dealing with other entrepreneurs and we get each other.

752
00:45:13.677 --> 00:45:16.320
We know how to communicate together and we know how to build value together.

753
00:45:16.440 --> 00:45:21.445
As soon as the banker gets involved, the kind of investment banking world's first entrepreneur.

754
00:45:21.645 --> 00:45:26.128
view is that the entrepreneurs are fucking liability and you've got to get rid of them as quickly as possible, you know?

755
00:45:26.369 --> 00:45:30.492
You can't do that in the creator business because the entrepreneur, the creator is the business.

756
00:45:30.512 --> 00:45:31.172
They are the business.

757
00:45:31.192 --> 00:45:31.873
Yeah, yeah.

758
00:45:32.013 --> 00:45:43.321
And so that's also key as to how you, you know, as a single creator, it's 100% risk, you know, whereas in a group of those things, you're, you know, effectively reducing that risk profile.

759
00:45:43.401 --> 00:45:44.402
I've been thinking about this a lot.

760
00:45:44.422 --> 00:45:46.944
I think it would be an interesting way to grow the podcast business.

761
00:45:46.964 --> 00:45:47.644
You turn it into...

762
00:45:49.445 --> 00:45:54.908
like a, not just an individual media company, but a network of sorts, but not just it.

763
00:45:55.889 --> 00:46:14.520
So how a lot of podcast networks work is they, they just, um, they take a percentage of ad revenue because they can, you know, they can go to a big advertiser, like, uh, like a, a new tonic that we're drinking or a shul and, and they can say, Hey, um, we have 10 podcasts with this audience demographic.

764
00:46:15.420 --> 00:46:17.922
we can give you... Give us some money and we'll promote your product, yeah.

765
00:46:18.202 --> 00:46:20.924
And then the individual doesn't have to find the advertiser themselves.

766
00:46:20.964 --> 00:46:21.705
But that's different.

767
00:46:22.085 --> 00:46:27.829
So the thing we're playing around with at the moment, we've got two companies that we're taking public right now, which we're going to tokenize some equity in.

768
00:46:29.270 --> 00:46:35.695
And the advantage with that tokenized equity is that it's much easier to then use that to incentivize things like influencer relationships.

769
00:46:35.795 --> 00:46:37.136
So you could effectively create...

770
00:46:37.976 --> 00:47:02.295
influence for equity deals where as they deliver they get the equity just dropped into their wallet basically so it kind of gives you a huge amounts of flexibility with with that kind of a play and it's I think that'll be a really exciting place because influence for equity at a big level has been working really well for ages you know but it the the creator economy can't really tap into it very well at the moment.

771
00:47:02.435 --> 00:47:04.095
No, it's like the A-list.

772
00:47:04.295 --> 00:47:04.576
Yeah.

773
00:47:04.736 --> 00:47:06.516
And if you do get equity, it's in some startup.

774
00:47:06.536 --> 00:47:10.037
So it's like 50-50, it fails, and there's no liquidity, and there's no, you know.

775
00:47:10.057 --> 00:47:10.997
This is what I'm in right now.

776
00:47:11.017 --> 00:47:16.098
Yeah, you're going to get some equity in some shitbox startup that might never sell or go public or whatever, you know.

777
00:47:16.118 --> 00:47:18.459
So it's like, yeah, so you're kind of working for free.

778
00:47:18.719 --> 00:47:20.099
I'm going to go in a different direction in a second.

779
00:47:20.119 --> 00:47:25.961
I want to ask some just questions about, like, how your mental models that you apply to your life and your businesses and whatnot.

780
00:47:26.081 --> 00:47:29.842
That'll be helpful to people because you play at such a high level, and you're aggressive and very ambitious.

781
00:47:30.662 --> 00:47:32.223
which is a very good thing.

782
00:47:32.744 --> 00:47:41.731
But before we go there, I want to just give somebody who's listening right now, who's never acquired a business, I just want to give them the first place to go.

783
00:47:41.951 --> 00:47:43.873
Like, where do you find your first business?

784
00:47:44.173 --> 00:47:48.637
We already sort of made fun of BizBuySell and all the other marketplaces, which I'm sure...

785
00:47:49.637 --> 00:47:50.657
It is garbage there.

786
00:47:50.777 --> 00:47:59.840
The first thing is take the pressure off yourself that every conversation has to be a deal and just be a student of the industry.

787
00:47:59.980 --> 00:48:01.460
So go out and meet business owners.

788
00:48:01.900 --> 00:48:04.761
Go out and meet the business owners who own the businesses that you'd like to own.

789
00:48:04.941 --> 00:48:06.502
There's a lot of words in there.

790
00:48:07.802 --> 00:48:13.605
Yeah, but just invest that time in going and meeting those people and pick their brains and try and understand what's going on.

791
00:48:13.966 --> 00:48:19.068
And what you'll find as a happy side effect to that exercise is that you'll see the stars start to align.

792
00:48:19.088 --> 00:48:20.729
You'll see the guy that needs to retire.

793
00:48:21.029 --> 00:48:24.831
You'll see the young, hungry, ambitious team that want to grow by acquisition.

794
00:48:24.872 --> 00:48:26.392
You'll see these different things.

795
00:48:26.412 --> 00:48:28.113
And you'll just go, fuck, that one goes with that one.

796
00:48:28.173 --> 00:48:29.354
And that one would go with this one.

797
00:48:29.634 --> 00:48:31.915
And they want this and they want that.

798
00:48:32.115 --> 00:48:34.677
And you'll see how things can start to fit together.

799
00:48:35.418 --> 00:48:39.864
You just have to put yourself out there and make yourself a bit of a key person of influence in that space.

800
00:48:40.044 --> 00:48:48.677
And we've got entrepreneurs, sorry, we've got members in the Harbour Club who have really nailed the particular niches that they're working in, you know, to a point where...

801
00:48:49.527 --> 00:48:51.228
Other businesses that want to sell just come to them.

802
00:48:51.248 --> 00:48:53.629
So we've got a guy who only buys franchises.

803
00:48:54.169 --> 00:48:59.731
And now if you ring up a franchise and say, you say I'm thinking of selling my franchise, I'll go and speak to him.

804
00:49:00.311 --> 00:49:02.132
He's the go-to person for buying franchises.

805
00:49:02.152 --> 00:49:03.373
And he bought 12 so far.

806
00:49:03.653 --> 00:49:08.094
We've got another one that buys trades, businesses, plumbers and painters and decorators and that sort of stuff.

807
00:49:08.134 --> 00:49:10.175
And he's all over LinkedIn promoting that.

808
00:49:10.215 --> 00:49:12.596
And again, he's become a go-to person.

809
00:49:12.616 --> 00:49:16.818
He has no experience in that industry prior to buying his first company in that sector.

810
00:49:17.558 --> 00:49:25.720
Um, and you know, I was speaking to one actually this morning while I was waiting for my Uber to come here, one of our delegates was came outside to say hi and he's in architecture.

811
00:49:26.140 --> 00:49:38.763
Um, and, uh, so he's bought a bunch of architecture businesses and he got contacted by pin and Farina, you know, the, uh, Ferrari designers, um, because they basically were looking for somebody that knew how to acquire architects.

812
00:49:39.144 --> 00:49:42.064
And he like, he has a profile where he's bought architects.

813
00:49:42.084 --> 00:49:43.785
So bang, come and see us, please.

814
00:49:43.805 --> 00:49:44.505
We want to talk to you.

815
00:49:45.425 --> 00:49:45.706
Yeah.

816
00:49:45.766 --> 00:49:52.230
So, you know, that positioning yourself as an M&A person in a particular space can have real dividends.

817
00:49:52.351 --> 00:49:58.295
So it seems like the answer is when you're starting this and you're trying to figure it out, don't be too transactional.

818
00:49:58.475 --> 00:49:59.496
Yeah, exactly.

819
00:49:59.536 --> 00:50:01.257
Never say you're out there buying businesses.

820
00:50:01.277 --> 00:50:03.079
Just go out and do the research first.

821
00:50:03.519 --> 00:50:08.343
And then, of course, you know, I always say if you want to learn about this stuff, follow me on Instagram.

822
00:50:08.383 --> 00:50:10.964
If you want to learn what to do with the money, follow my wife on Instagram.

823
00:50:10.985 --> 00:50:11.085
Yeah.

824
00:50:12.706 --> 00:50:14.709
And that's why she has 20 times more followers than me.

825
00:50:15.450 --> 00:50:17.092
So she gets the influencer game, yeah.

826
00:50:17.132 --> 00:50:18.033
Yeah, yeah.

827
00:50:18.053 --> 00:50:21.598
So everybody's way more interested in what you do with the money versus how you make it.

828
00:50:21.618 --> 00:50:23.400
Yeah, but you have to learn how to make it first.

829
00:50:23.541 --> 00:50:24.502
Exactly, exactly.

830
00:50:24.522 --> 00:50:25.543
Yeah, yeah.

831
00:50:25.583 --> 00:50:28.948
I want to understand, because you were, were you always entrepreneurial?

832
00:50:29.308 --> 00:50:29.548
Yeah.

833
00:50:29.588 --> 00:50:34.552
So when I was seven years old, I picked all the flowers in my mom's garden, stuck them in jam jars and tried to sell them outside the house.

834
00:50:34.932 --> 00:50:38.014
So you never got a job ever?

835
00:50:38.074 --> 00:50:38.654
I've had jobs.

836
00:50:38.714 --> 00:50:39.415
I've had loads of jobs.

837
00:50:39.435 --> 00:50:39.555
Yeah.

838
00:50:39.575 --> 00:50:43.858
Because as an entrepreneur, there are occasions when you can't afford to eat.

839
00:50:45.319 --> 00:50:46.840
Or you're sick of packet noodles, you know.

840
00:50:48.700 --> 00:50:50.841
What was the biggest bet you've ever made on yourself?

841
00:50:51.541 --> 00:50:51.961
Oh, my God.

842
00:50:52.881 --> 00:50:57.122
I mean, I'm persistently always betting on myself.

843
00:50:57.222 --> 00:51:02.204
I mean, and you have to as an entrepreneur, you kind of have to just do it.

844
00:51:02.244 --> 00:51:04.604
And the funny thing is, is that people call it risk.

845
00:51:04.644 --> 00:51:06.105
And I don't see it as being risky.

846
00:51:06.145 --> 00:51:09.405
I see that the opposite, you know, not doing it is the risk.

847
00:51:09.425 --> 00:51:11.366
Yeah, it's like not pushing...

848
00:51:11.866 --> 00:51:12.646
forward is the risk.

849
00:51:12.746 --> 00:51:19.648
I actually gave a presentation, I was invited to come and speak to retiring senior military people in the UK.

850
00:51:19.748 --> 00:51:28.951
And it's people from the Army, Air Force and Navy that were passing out retiring, you know, having been, you know, generals or admirals or whatever, whatever it was.

851
00:51:29.291 --> 00:51:36.853
And they had a guy speaking about going into NGOs and charities, they had a guy speaking about going into corporate life, and they have me as the token entrepreneur, you know,

852
00:51:37.313 --> 00:51:43.479
So I tell my entrepreneurial story and this general puts his hand up and goes, that all sounds a bit risky, old boy.

853
00:51:43.799 --> 00:51:50.085
And my answer was, you spent your entire career being fucking shot at and you thinking what I'm doing is risky.

854
00:51:50.666 --> 00:51:51.767
You don't see it as risk at all.

855
00:51:51.887 --> 00:51:53.028
No, of course not.

856
00:51:53.068 --> 00:51:53.969
The risk is not doing it.

857
00:51:54.629 --> 00:51:55.790
The risk is regret.

858
00:51:55.891 --> 00:51:59.814
The risk is being 80 years old and going, fuck, I wish I'd done more with my life.

859
00:51:59.894 --> 00:52:02.717
Where does that come from, though, when so many people don't look at risk that way?

860
00:52:03.132 --> 00:52:03.972
I don't know.

861
00:52:04.072 --> 00:52:06.953
I think, A, I grew up in a family where entrepreneurship was an option.

862
00:52:07.053 --> 00:52:11.054
So my dad was a farmer and farmers naturally are entrepreneurial.

863
00:52:11.074 --> 00:52:15.616
They have a seasonal business, so they have lots of side hustles and shit, which I was always participating in.

864
00:52:15.636 --> 00:52:20.137
My mum ran a little beauty salon and I didn't get pocket money.

865
00:52:20.177 --> 00:52:21.717
I could work in either of their businesses.

866
00:52:22.058 --> 00:52:26.939
But I went to a school where all of the kids basically could only see two pathways.

867
00:52:27.259 --> 00:52:29.420
It was I work for the government or I work in corporate.

868
00:52:29.860 --> 00:52:29.980
And

869
00:52:30.700 --> 00:52:36.084
It was kind of, it was weird for me that there wasn't this kind of third door, which is do whatever the fuck you want.

870
00:52:36.625 --> 00:52:39.327
And for me, it was just so obvious that I would take that door.

871
00:52:39.907 --> 00:52:41.148
And for them, they just didn't see it.

872
00:52:41.708 --> 00:52:42.789
It was like it didn't exist.

873
00:52:43.069 --> 00:52:45.711
And it was, yeah, it didn't make any sense to me.

874
00:52:46.192 --> 00:52:50.415
It's interesting because entrepreneurship was not always so sexy.

875
00:52:50.795 --> 00:52:51.255
No, it wasn't.

876
00:52:51.275 --> 00:52:51.536
Yeah.

877
00:52:51.796 --> 00:52:53.216
When I was growing up, there was like two.

878
00:52:54.117 --> 00:52:56.779
So yeah, I mean, it was Richard Branson or Anita Roddick.

879
00:52:56.839 --> 00:52:57.299
I'm British.

880
00:52:57.339 --> 00:53:01.381
So they were the only two kind of famous entrepreneurs in the UK at that time.

881
00:53:02.002 --> 00:53:03.342
Noom is a success story partner.

882
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883
00:53:06.324 --> 00:53:07.785
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884
00:53:08.165 --> 00:53:08.966
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885
00:53:09.286 --> 00:53:16.470
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886
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887
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888
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889
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890
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891
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892
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893
00:53:45.697 --> 00:53:46.977
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894
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895
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896
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897
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898
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899
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900
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901
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902
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903
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904
00:54:06.760 --> 00:54:12.041
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905
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906
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907
00:54:16.322 --> 00:54:26.476
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908
00:54:26.977 --> 00:54:30.101
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909
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910
00:54:32.703 --> 00:54:34.224
Now you probably know NetSuite already.

911
00:54:34.244 --> 00:54:40.445
It's a software that a ton of companies use to basically manage everything, their finances, their inventory, their HR.

912
00:54:40.485 --> 00:54:41.665
It's just all in one place.

913
00:54:41.885 --> 00:54:43.886
Now they just came out with NetSuite next.

914
00:54:44.086 --> 00:54:46.786
This is the AI version of all of that.

915
00:54:46.806 --> 00:54:51.427
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916
00:54:51.767 --> 00:54:52.668
It gives you the answer.

917
00:54:52.948 --> 00:54:58.649
It keeps you up to date on all the things you need to know about your company and your business without you having to go digging for them.

918
00:54:58.889 --> 00:54:59.469
And it has these

919
00:54:59.629 --> 00:55:04.511
AI agents that take care of all the routine work in your business that eats up everybody's day.

920
00:55:04.791 --> 00:55:09.612
Now, the bigger picture here is that AI is starting to change how teams actually work together.

921
00:55:09.913 --> 00:55:13.674
It's happening incredibly fast and most companies don't have a plan for it.

922
00:55:13.934 --> 00:55:14.594
NetSuite does.

923
00:55:14.874 --> 00:55:20.376
They have a free guide called Aligning for the Agentic Era, how AI is changing everyday work.

924
00:55:20.516 --> 00:55:25.538
It breaks down how AI could reshape the way your whole organization works and what your business should be doing to get ahead of it.

925
00:55:25.718 --> 00:55:28.439
If I needed a tool like NetSuite, it's what I'd use and you should too.

926
00:55:28.699 --> 00:55:37.661
So if your revenues are at least in the seven figures, get our free business guide, Aligning for the Agentic Era, How AI is Changing Everyday Work at netsuite.com slash Scott Clary.

927
00:55:37.941 --> 00:55:41.642
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928
00:55:41.902 --> 00:55:44.323
That's netsuite.com slash Scott Clary.

929
00:55:44.423 --> 00:55:45.745
Monarch is a success story partner.

930
00:55:45.825 --> 00:55:46.546
Now, quick question.

931
00:55:46.686 --> 00:55:48.649
Do you know where your money went last month?

932
00:55:48.749 --> 00:55:50.491
Not roughly, but exactly.

933
00:55:50.591 --> 00:55:51.312
And most people don't.

934
00:55:51.512 --> 00:55:52.454
And I didn't for years.

935
00:55:52.514 --> 00:55:54.637
And that is most of our money stories, right?

936
00:55:54.717 --> 00:55:57.340
When we first start our career, we have one income and one account.

937
00:55:57.400 --> 00:55:58.462
And you can kind of wing it.

938
00:55:58.682 --> 00:56:00.925
But once you're running businesses, once you're investing,

939
00:56:01.225 --> 00:56:06.548
once you're carrying 50 different subscriptions that you stop paying attention to, winging it gets super expensive.

940
00:56:06.768 --> 00:56:07.789
Monarch fixed that for me.

941
00:56:07.869 --> 00:56:10.610
It is the personal finance app that tracks everything.

942
00:56:10.670 --> 00:56:14.752
So that means accounts, investments, savings goals, spending all on one screen.

943
00:56:14.872 --> 00:56:18.575
The first week I had it, it fired recurring charges I've been paying for months without realizing.

944
00:56:18.675 --> 00:56:24.398
And every single week, the AI recap tells me if spending spiked, if my net worth moved and what bills are coming.

945
00:56:24.418 --> 00:56:25.038
And I can just ask,

946
00:56:25.178 --> 00:56:27.641
Hey, can I afford this trip without touching my savings?

947
00:56:27.701 --> 00:56:30.824
And I can get a real answer based on my actual numbers.

948
00:56:30.924 --> 00:56:33.086
It is a financial advisor in your pocket.

949
00:56:33.346 --> 00:56:35.208
It costs less than an hour with a real one.

950
00:56:35.348 --> 00:56:37.130
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951
00:56:37.350 --> 00:56:41.935
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952
00:56:42.215 --> 00:56:45.719
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953
00:56:46.099 --> 00:56:46.960
You're very ambitious.

954
00:56:49.505 --> 00:56:50.927
Where did you develop that ambition from?

955
00:56:51.007 --> 00:57:01.018
So I always wonder, after an exit or after making meaningful amounts of money, what gets people to play the next game?

956
00:57:01.118 --> 00:57:02.820
Well, for the first one, I spent it all on a yacht.

957
00:57:02.840 --> 00:57:04.722
So that's quite...

958
00:57:05.022 --> 00:57:05.462
If you hear...

959
00:57:06.704 --> 00:57:07.804
Absolutely true.

960
00:57:07.824 --> 00:57:09.366
When I sold my first business, I bought a yacht.

961
00:57:09.386 --> 00:57:15.290
Yeah, it's the classic things you shouldn't do with your money, you know, like, yeah, but I've had five of them now.

962
00:57:15.310 --> 00:57:16.111
I'm on my fifth one.

963
00:57:16.171 --> 00:57:18.632
So it's not a habit I got out of.

964
00:57:18.712 --> 00:57:22.015
Have you ever calculated how much you've depreciated every single...

965
00:57:23.823 --> 00:57:25.785
No, I wouldn't want to do that.

966
00:57:26.686 --> 00:57:29.649
But to be fair, I bought a plane and that depreciates a lot.

967
00:57:29.689 --> 00:57:31.912
I mean, it's not the depreciation, it's the operating.

968
00:57:31.992 --> 00:57:33.093
Fuck me.

969
00:57:33.153 --> 00:57:35.715
That's another level of expense.

970
00:57:35.876 --> 00:57:37.718
Yeah.

971
00:57:37.818 --> 00:57:40.601
So assume that the plane and the yacht expenses are taken care of.

972
00:57:41.842 --> 00:57:43.704
What gets you going for the next thing?

973
00:57:44.405 --> 00:57:45.626
it's actually not material.

974
00:57:45.726 --> 00:57:53.033
I have everything material you could ever possibly want the cars, the watches, the boats, the planes, all of that shit is, is, uh, is great.

975
00:57:53.093 --> 00:57:53.574
It's wonderful.

976
00:57:53.594 --> 00:57:53.934
I love it.

977
00:57:53.954 --> 00:57:59.880
It's, you know, it's fun, but that isn't in any way motivating or, um, or anything like that.

978
00:58:00.000 --> 00:58:01.982
I think, um, uh,

979
00:58:02.042 --> 00:58:21.774
uh you're just uh so i'm i classify myself as a deal junkie um i really get off on the deal i really like the the the deal and whenever people say you know all the deals you've done what's your favorite one and it's always the next one which is spoken like a true addict you truly love the game you truly love this game

980
00:58:22.014 --> 00:58:24.595
So when I was a kid, I used to sell watches and jewelry.

981
00:58:24.755 --> 00:58:27.456
And I had a little market stall at the weekend from school.

982
00:58:27.516 --> 00:58:30.718
So the weekend, I'd be selling watches and jewelry.

983
00:58:31.098 --> 00:58:36.120
And when I got a sale, you get this little dopamine hit, like the little hair on the back of your neck thing.

984
00:58:36.180 --> 00:58:38.801
And it just brought a little smile to your face when you got a sale.

985
00:58:38.861 --> 00:58:43.763
And then I had my telecoms company, you know, where you'd sign up a customer and you get that, you know, it's a slightly bigger deal.

986
00:58:44.184 --> 00:58:45.924
So you get a slightly bigger buzz.

987
00:58:46.225 --> 00:58:49.486
And then you sell a company and it's like a really nice hit.

988
00:58:50.086 --> 00:58:51.568
So I want to do that again.

989
00:58:51.588 --> 00:58:55.052
And actually, it doesn't really matter if it's a buy or a sell.

990
00:58:55.752 --> 00:58:57.494
The dopamine hit is about the same.

991
00:58:57.674 --> 00:59:04.661
So that's probably why we're doing like a transaction a month because you're constantly trying to get that again.

992
00:59:04.681 --> 00:59:07.264
And it's just really fun because it's also...

993
00:59:08.525 --> 00:59:10.086
These are deals that other people aren't doing.

994
00:59:10.186 --> 00:59:12.346
So you've found a creative way of getting it done.

995
00:59:12.746 --> 00:59:15.527
And so creative problem solving is quite rewarding as well.

996
00:59:15.707 --> 00:59:20.069
So there's a lot of like mental reward that goes into the activity.

997
00:59:21.009 --> 00:59:25.690
And the financial reward is obviously was really, really important and becomes less important.

998
00:59:26.531 --> 00:59:34.013
I was wondering if your relationship with success, ambition, if it's changed significantly since when you were younger.

999
00:59:34.273 --> 00:59:35.434
Yeah, yeah, a lot.

1000
00:59:35.514 --> 00:59:42.739
So I think when you're young, there is a validation and necessity aspect to it.

1001
00:59:42.839 --> 00:59:46.121
So the validation is, as a young entrepreneur, nobody takes you seriously.

1002
00:59:46.141 --> 00:59:47.562
So you want to kind of fuck you moment.

1003
00:59:53.045 --> 00:59:54.246
And there's a necessity aspect.

1004
00:59:54.446 --> 00:59:59.748
I mean, you literally can't afford to buy a house, eat, you know, live, enjoy yourself and do the things that you want to do.

1005
00:59:59.808 --> 01:00:02.529
So those two things become really big drivers.

1006
01:00:02.689 --> 01:00:06.551
And then later on in life, there are, yeah, a different set of drivers.

1007
01:00:06.631 --> 01:00:13.954
And I mean, I've got kids, you know, so now lifestyle is very much prioritized.

1008
01:00:14.034 --> 01:00:19.276
I think we had this conversation before, which is start with the lifestyle and work backwards.

1009
01:00:19.356 --> 01:00:20.677
So what are the things that,

1010
01:00:20.917 --> 01:00:24.080
you know, you need to do to live the lifestyle.

1011
01:00:24.160 --> 01:00:26.262
And so travel is a huge part of that.

1012
01:00:26.282 --> 01:00:29.644
We travel every month and it's mostly non-business kind of travel.

1013
01:00:29.725 --> 01:00:33.588
So we want our kids to be well-traveled as well.

1014
01:00:33.608 --> 01:00:34.769
I think it's the best education.

1015
01:00:34.889 --> 01:00:36.510
So we drag them around with us.

1016
01:00:36.590 --> 01:00:47.700
Would you tell somebody who's just starting out, like if you could pass on that lesson to somebody who's younger, just starting out right now, something that you wish, you know, 20-year-old Jeremy would have known, what would that thing be?

1017
01:00:48.320 --> 01:00:48.680
Do you know what?

1018
01:00:48.720 --> 01:00:56.564
It's an interesting one because I think you don't want to change your path because you are a product of all your experiences, both positive and negative, you know.

1019
01:00:58.785 --> 01:01:04.127
But I mean, God, yeah, if I'd known what I know now 30 years ago, it would be insane.

1020
01:01:04.307 --> 01:01:06.148
I mean, I was lucky.

1021
01:01:06.388 --> 01:01:08.869
I got a lot of experiences quite young.

1022
01:01:08.949 --> 01:01:11.530
So when I was 10 years old, my 14-year-old brother died.

1023
01:01:12.091 --> 01:01:15.132
And that was a real, it wasn't your fault, it was okay.

1024
01:01:16.192 --> 01:01:24.697
That was a real moment of kind of we're mortal because as a kid you feel pretty invincible, right?

1025
01:01:24.717 --> 01:01:30.059
And then to have somebody very close to you die suddenly brings it home that it could happen to you at any moment.

1026
01:01:30.459 --> 01:01:33.221
And that gives a certain degree of ambition.

1027
01:01:33.661 --> 01:01:36.802
And what was weird is my grandmother was one of 14 kids.

1028
01:01:38.403 --> 01:01:40.224
So all my great uncles were dying as well.

1029
01:01:40.244 --> 01:01:44.906
So every year I was going to a funeral and then I'd meet 30 year old people that had never been to a funeral.

1030
01:01:45.267 --> 01:01:48.088
And I was like, fuck, I went to like 20 by the time I was 20.

1031
01:01:50.709 --> 01:01:56.752
And but I think that that constant mortality, I mean, it used to it used to affect me psychologically quite a bit.

1032
01:01:56.792 --> 01:01:59.934
Like I would literally wake up thinking I was dying and things like this.

1033
01:01:59.954 --> 01:02:04.056
I'd have like anxiety, panic moments, you know, about my own mortality.

1034
01:02:04.736 --> 01:02:05.918
But I think that was also a driver.

1035
01:02:06.538 --> 01:02:07.559
It was why I didn't finish school.

1036
01:02:07.599 --> 01:02:08.200
I finished school.

1037
01:02:08.300 --> 01:02:09.141
I left at 15.

1038
01:02:10.362 --> 01:02:12.124
I've got to get I've got to fucking get on with this.

1039
01:02:12.144 --> 01:02:13.285
Yeah, I'm going to die soon.

1040
01:02:13.585 --> 01:02:15.007
It's like.

1041
01:02:15.227 --> 01:02:18.190
And so that that was, you know, genuinely a motivator.

1042
01:02:18.210 --> 01:02:23.475
And by the way, I don't think I got rid of that kind of panic attacky thing until I was in my 30s.

1043
01:02:23.775 --> 01:02:25.137
It was it always used to haunt me.

1044
01:02:25.517 --> 01:02:26.338
It's so interesting.

1045
01:02:26.678 --> 01:02:27.899
So I know that.

1046
01:02:28.800 --> 01:02:35.399
Entrepreneurs have a chip on their shoulder is a huge, motivator is the wrong word, but it helps the drive.

1047
01:02:35.539 --> 01:02:36.462
It helps them become successful.

1048
01:02:38.910 --> 01:02:43.974
But this is just like an acute awareness of a finite amount of time on this earth.

1049
01:02:44.454 --> 01:02:46.156
It just, you didn't fuck around.

1050
01:02:46.236 --> 01:02:47.177
You just didn't waste time.

1051
01:02:47.337 --> 01:02:49.618
It creates insane amounts of impatience.

1052
01:02:49.699 --> 01:02:51.280
Yeah, I don't know.

1053
01:02:51.300 --> 01:02:54.723
That's not a lesson that I would ever want to impart on anyone.

1054
01:02:54.743 --> 01:02:55.343
No, it's not.

1055
01:02:55.543 --> 01:02:56.804
But it's an interesting idea.

1056
01:02:56.824 --> 01:02:59.306
But you can also have that realization without the pain.

1057
01:02:59.386 --> 01:03:01.388
I mean, I guess it's not as reinforced.

1058
01:03:01.508 --> 01:03:01.628
Yeah.

1059
01:03:02.348 --> 01:03:06.990
But you can have that realization that maybe we should treat every day as our last and one day you'll be right.

1060
01:03:07.290 --> 01:03:13.372
I think that's, no, this is stoicism, right?

1061
01:03:13.412 --> 01:03:15.913
This is the definition of what most stoics.

1062
01:03:15.933 --> 01:03:25.076
Yeah, and actually, because I'm kind of not traditionally educated, I've always been a follower of personal development education and stuff like that.

1063
01:03:25.116 --> 01:03:27.017
And stoicism was one of the things that helped me the most.

1064
01:03:29.217 --> 01:03:35.499
from, you know, the more contemporary books about it, right back to the kind of, you know, the essays of Marcus Aurelius and things like that.

1065
01:03:35.539 --> 01:03:42.740
Because in business, there's a lot of shit that gets thrown at you and you really have to sift through what's important and what's not.

1066
01:03:42.820 --> 01:03:46.221
And stoicism is a great lens to look at life through in that respect.

1067
01:03:46.321 --> 01:03:48.842
Because if you have something going wrong,

1068
01:03:49.882 --> 01:03:51.283
it can stop you from doing anything.

1069
01:03:51.303 --> 01:03:52.223
It can be paralyzing.

1070
01:03:52.863 --> 01:04:01.526
Whereas stoicism kind of filters you back to focusing on the things you can accept, the things you can change, you know, and, and yeah, dealing with those.

1071
01:04:01.786 --> 01:04:13.991
I think about, even in my own journey, like some, I, it's, it's interesting because you, you interview all these people and you know how you should act and you know, you should be more urgent.

1072
01:04:14.470 --> 01:04:18.493
But then in my day-to-day, I'll get distracted with shit that isn't important.

1073
01:04:18.993 --> 01:04:21.174
But I think that it's constantly being...

1074
01:04:22.695 --> 01:04:28.879
I know that some people have little coins they carry and whatnot just to remind them.

1075
01:04:29.119 --> 01:04:30.280
Those are alcoholics, yeah.

1076
01:04:30.540 --> 01:04:31.241
That's very true.

1077
01:04:31.741 --> 01:04:39.346
But there are Stoics or people that subscribe to Stoics and that carry a momentous mori coin that just reminds them that life is finite.

1078
01:04:39.386 --> 01:04:40.586
Just as a physical...

1079
01:04:41.727 --> 01:04:46.389
Was it Caesar that had the guy following him around telling him he was mortal?

1080
01:04:46.509 --> 01:04:46.969
Yeah, yeah.

1081
01:04:48.170 --> 01:04:48.730
Same idea.

1082
01:04:48.770 --> 01:04:50.130
Well, I think that there's...

1083
01:04:50.550 --> 01:05:00.734
Listen, there's different lessons for different people at different stages of their journey, but for a lot of people who are listening to this, they are very ambitious and they're taking on too much and they aren't filtering.

1084
01:05:01.615 --> 01:05:07.317
And the lack of filtering and the shiny object syndrome and the taking on too much and saying no to nothing...

1085
01:05:08.337 --> 01:05:12.922
is actually, even though when they started, they had the urgency, it slowed them down.

1086
01:05:13.062 --> 01:05:13.222
Yeah.

1087
01:05:13.763 --> 01:05:23.793
And I think that they have to recalibrate and reset and have that same urgency that they had when they needed to quit the job or needed to pay their month's rent or whatever it is.

1088
01:05:23.933 --> 01:05:25.775
And over time, they forget that urgency.

1089
01:05:25.795 --> 01:05:25.915
Yeah.

1090
01:05:25.935 --> 01:05:30.657
Yeah, no, focusing down and niching what you do, I think is very important.

1091
01:05:30.677 --> 01:05:37.160
And it's something I, you know, when I'm speaking to my delegates, I always talk because they say, oh, I wouldn't mind buying this or this or this.

1092
01:05:37.260 --> 01:05:38.601
And I'm like, I can pick one.

1093
01:05:39.021 --> 01:05:44.683
Focus on that because you will be, you know, way more successful down a narrower channel.

1094
01:05:44.983 --> 01:05:50.626
But it's definitely a do as I say, not as I do thing because I also, you know, get distracted and go in weird directions sometimes.

1095
01:05:51.186 --> 01:05:55.308
How did you get over that fear of mortality?

1096
01:05:55.468 --> 01:06:00.371
Like I say, I remember still having those kind of anxiety type panic attack things into my 30s.

1097
01:06:00.411 --> 01:06:01.712
And I don't know why it disappeared.

1098
01:06:01.832 --> 01:06:07.135
I don't know why it stopped, but it just kind of stopped.

1099
01:06:07.295 --> 01:06:12.919
But I still have the sense of urgency, just not the mental disorder that goes with it.

1100
01:06:15.536 --> 01:06:18.920
One other idea that you've brought up, which I think is very interesting.

1101
01:06:19.941 --> 01:06:27.188
You've said on, I was watching a couple of podcasts that you've done, looking back at your group of companies, you said, I didn't create any wealth.

1102
01:06:29.252 --> 01:06:32.396
That's a wild, that's a wild idea.

1103
01:06:32.476 --> 01:06:33.737
From running the businesses, you mean?

1104
01:06:33.757 --> 01:06:34.037
Yeah.

1105
01:06:34.117 --> 01:06:39.924
So I think this was, you know, I was, I bought that telecoms company.

1106
01:06:39.944 --> 01:06:46.351
Then I bought that IT company and I basically went on this charge and I ended up buying, so I had the original telecoms company.

1107
01:06:46.371 --> 01:06:48.313
I bought 11 companies over 18 months.

1108
01:06:48.993 --> 01:06:55.802
So we went from like a million and a half in revenue pounds, this is like 30 years ago, to like 13 and a half million in 18 months.

1109
01:06:55.942 --> 01:07:04.073
So it's like this huge uptick, but I was now running 12 companies, and I was taking money out of all of them every month, like retainers and things like this.

1110
01:07:04.613 --> 01:07:07.074
But the money that you earn is just the money you spend.

1111
01:07:07.494 --> 01:07:11.575
In fact, I think it's Oscar Wilde that says a man that lives within his means lacks imagination.

1112
01:07:11.635 --> 01:07:16.817
So basically everything you earn, you spend and you don't create any wealth.

1113
01:07:17.097 --> 01:07:21.359
And it was only when I sold a company that I realized, fuck, you don't make money running businesses.

1114
01:07:21.379 --> 01:07:22.459
You make money when you sell them.

1115
01:07:22.899 --> 01:07:27.021
It's the capital events that actually create the financial freedom.

1116
01:07:27.061 --> 01:07:28.601
Because, I mean, there's two aspects to it.

1117
01:07:28.621 --> 01:07:31.362
When you sell your first company, you're selling it for money.

1118
01:07:31.902 --> 01:07:33.723
And the side effect is you also get time.

1119
01:07:34.483 --> 01:07:38.764
And you don't realize you get the time, but actually entrepreneurs don't have time or money.

1120
01:07:38.964 --> 01:07:41.425
So if you have time and money, you have like a superpower.

1121
01:07:41.965 --> 01:07:44.726
Now, your superpower can be used for good or for evil.

1122
01:07:44.966 --> 01:07:47.627
And I see a lot of people use it for evil.

1123
01:07:47.647 --> 01:07:52.969
They get divorced, they get a sports car, they become alcoholics, you know, they go down some, you know, weird path.

1124
01:07:52.989 --> 01:07:56.870
They do another startup, but they fund it with all their money and they don't act smart anymore.

1125
01:07:56.910 --> 01:07:57.390
Exactly.

1126
01:07:58.706 --> 01:08:02.188
But if you use it for good, you can put that money to work.

1127
01:08:02.288 --> 01:08:06.551
And actually what you find is that you'll make more money from the money than you did from the business.

1128
01:08:07.271 --> 01:08:09.513
So everybody says like, oh, I'll just put a manager in.

1129
01:08:09.533 --> 01:08:10.833
I'll just take the money every year.

1130
01:08:10.913 --> 01:08:13.755
It doesn't work like that because one, business is very fluid.

1131
01:08:13.835 --> 01:08:16.537
So, you know, marketing is changing all the time.

1132
01:08:16.617 --> 01:08:18.017
How things work is changing all the time.

1133
01:08:18.037 --> 01:08:21.800
So you put a manager in, you can just watch it slowly glide to the scene of the crash, basically.

1134
01:08:21.820 --> 01:08:22.360
Yeah.

1135
01:08:22.640 --> 01:08:46.457
And the money that you sell it for deployed into investments will generate more income than you could realistically take out in cash because the, you know, the multiple of EBIT, let's say the multiple of profit, the cash component, you'd have to leave working capital behind, you have taxes, you have all of these things that mean that, you know, half a million of EBIT might only be a hundred grand a year that you can actually take out in cash without killing the business.

1136
01:08:46.898 --> 01:08:49.440
Whereas that half a million of EBIT, you might be able to get like two million, you

1137
01:08:50.240 --> 01:08:55.262
for an exit and you can easily make a hundred grand from 2 million deployed, you'd probably make double, triple that.

1138
01:08:55.362 --> 01:09:02.865
So, so that was a, that was a massive realization that the right time to start a business is now because everything can change.

1139
01:09:03.705 --> 01:09:06.146
Google could do it for free tomorrow and you're fucked.

1140
01:09:06.326 --> 01:09:10.368
So de-risk, get the capital deployed and have a, have a truly passive income.

1141
01:09:11.489 --> 01:09:12.690
that works while you're asleep.

1142
01:09:13.070 --> 01:09:21.680
And then you have this superpower of being financially and time free to go and do other things, which for me was buying and selling more businesses.

1143
01:09:22.160 --> 01:09:25.564
But you don't believe in lifestyle businesses?

1144
01:09:26.064 --> 01:09:28.107
No, because I think everything changes.

1145
01:09:29.327 --> 01:09:32.628
And everything has been changing for the entire time I've been an entrepreneur.

1146
01:09:32.668 --> 01:09:35.869
But right now, everything is changing even fucking faster because you've got AI.

1147
01:09:36.009 --> 01:09:37.810
You've got insane amounts of disruption.

1148
01:09:37.830 --> 01:09:39.170
You've got insane amounts of competition.

1149
01:09:39.190 --> 01:09:40.471
You've got global instability.

1150
01:09:40.491 --> 01:09:43.192
You've got all this crazy shit going.

1151
01:09:43.272 --> 01:09:43.992
Yeah, just take the money.

1152
01:09:44.012 --> 01:09:44.892
Just de-risk.

1153
01:09:45.332 --> 01:09:45.713
Invest.

1154
01:09:45.833 --> 01:09:51.374
What's your message to entrepreneurs who their identity is so wrapped up in their business?

1155
01:09:52.115 --> 01:09:53.375
They have hesitation to sell it.

1156
01:09:53.635 --> 01:09:54.455
It's like their baby.

1157
01:09:55.056 --> 01:09:56.056
How do you wake them up?

1158
01:09:56.465 --> 01:09:57.685
Well, look, it's a choice.

1159
01:09:57.705 --> 01:09:58.605
It's up to them entirely.

1160
01:09:58.725 --> 01:10:04.646
You know, if they don't want the financial freedom, they can just carry on, you know.

1161
01:10:06.387 --> 01:10:16.888
Yeah, but my advice would be, look, I've seen hundreds of people that had opportunity to sell their business, didn't take it, and it went to zero.

1162
01:10:18.089 --> 01:10:20.209
It's happened again and again and again and again.

1163
01:10:20.269 --> 01:10:25.450
I can think of one right now who was offered 18 million pounds for their company and two years later it was bankrupt.

1164
01:10:26.480 --> 01:10:40.513
Um, so, you know, um, there are many, many people who've regretted not taking, not taking the capital and, uh, and de-risking, um, you know, and yeah, uh, you don't make money running businesses.

1165
01:10:40.533 --> 01:10:41.414
You make money when you sell them.

1166
01:10:41.434 --> 01:10:41.954
So yeah.

1167
01:10:41.974 --> 01:10:42.194
Sell.

1168
01:10:42.675 --> 01:10:45.497
If people want to connect with you, um, what's your social website?

1169
01:10:45.517 --> 01:10:45.938
Where can they go?

1170
01:10:45.958 --> 01:10:46.058
Yeah.

1171
01:10:46.293 --> 01:10:52.018
Yeah, so like I say, you can follow Jeremy.Harbour on Instagram if you want the how to make it.

1172
01:10:52.038 --> 01:10:55.781
And you can probably follow Simona.Harbour on Instagram if you want to see how to spend it.

1173
01:10:56.121 --> 01:10:58.343
So the lifestyle side of things.

1174
01:10:59.083 --> 01:11:03.447
But no, so Harbour is spelled H-A-R-B-O-U-R.

1175
01:11:03.487 --> 01:11:05.608
It's the British spelling.

1176
01:11:06.509 --> 01:11:07.490
It's our language, I guess.

1177
01:11:07.530 --> 01:11:08.491
That's just how we spell it.

1178
01:11:08.811 --> 01:11:10.652
I'm Canadian, so we also spelled that way.

1179
01:11:11.513 --> 01:11:17.338
So, yeah, so you can do, yeah, I think it's actually harbour.jeremy, not jeremy.harbour, yeah.

1180
01:11:17.399 --> 01:11:19.921
So harbour.jeremy on Instagram is the one with the blue tick.

1181
01:11:19.961 --> 01:11:22.103
If it's trying to sell you crypto, it's not me.

1182
01:11:22.223 --> 01:11:25.106
And if people want to join Harbour Club, what do they...

1183
01:11:25.306 --> 01:11:30.631
If you go to harbourclubevents.com, the main website, there's actually a button you can click at the top.

1184
01:11:30.651 --> 01:11:34.794
I think it says free course, and we'll send you an email every day for 21 days.

1185
01:11:35.775 --> 01:11:44.901
with video content, articles, all sorts of different things, activities that you can do that will basically give you a broad grounding in the concepts of this for free.

1186
01:11:45.382 --> 01:11:52.267
And we actually released that course for free because it's better than pretty much all of the paid courses that are out there at the moment.

1187
01:11:52.307 --> 01:11:57.010
And we just thought it was a bit of a fuck you to all the people that were trying to ride the course creator wave.

1188
01:11:57.050 --> 01:11:58.271
The course creator wave, yeah.

1189
01:11:58.291 --> 01:12:04.455
So we thought we'd poison the well and just give away something that's way better than they might be paying for.

1190
01:12:05.456 --> 01:12:09.059
And then, yeah, from that, you'll get a good idea because, do you know what?

1191
01:12:09.459 --> 01:12:10.961
It's polarizing.

1192
01:12:11.201 --> 01:12:15.365
Some people will go through that content and go, I can absolutely see myself doing this.

1193
01:12:15.405 --> 01:12:16.366
This is what I want to do.

1194
01:12:16.726 --> 01:12:19.749
And other people will be going, oh, that scares the fucking crap out of me.

1195
01:12:19.969 --> 01:12:22.371
I'm going to stick to sales and marketing.

1196
01:12:22.431 --> 01:12:22.952
And that's fine.

1197
01:12:23.332 --> 01:12:24.033
It's not for everyone.

1198
01:12:24.353 --> 01:12:26.915
Last thing I'd like to ask, you've given over a lot.

1199
01:12:26.935 --> 01:12:29.036
You've had an incredible life, very successful entrepreneur.

1200
01:12:29.917 --> 01:12:34.720
If you could just pass on the most important lesson you've ever learned to your kids, it doesn't have to be business.

1201
01:12:34.780 --> 01:12:35.681
It can be a life lesson.

1202
01:12:35.721 --> 01:12:36.942
But what would that lesson be and why?

1203
01:12:37.182 --> 01:12:46.789
Yeah, I mean, look, taking your own path, I think, because there's a lot of people influencing you as you grow up to take particular directions.

1204
01:12:46.889 --> 01:12:48.010
And I think just having...

1205
01:12:48.630 --> 01:12:52.433
Yeah, choosing where you want to go and just doing it, I think is really, really important.

1206
01:12:52.453 --> 01:12:55.036
And I was lucky enough to be allowed to take my own path.

1207
01:12:55.096 --> 01:12:57.698
And funnily enough, this is a longer answer than you wanted, probably.

1208
01:12:57.738 --> 01:13:05.505
But funnily enough, I thought the reason I was allowed to leave, because both my parents were the first in their families to get degrees.

1209
01:13:06.285 --> 01:13:24.854
to finish education basically and so I thought there was a lot of pressure on me to go get a degree, go to university and all that kind of stuff and I thought the reason I was allowed to leave school young was because my brother had died and so they were like oh fuck just let him do what he wants but actually I had a career I only found this out years and years later I had a careers guidance counsellor

1210
01:13:25.734 --> 01:13:29.178
that told my parents that they should just let me go and do whatever I wanted to do.

1211
01:13:30.580 --> 01:13:39.590
And the reason was he'd spoken to like 30 kids who'd all gone, and I'd bent his ear for two hours about my business plan.

1212
01:13:39.770 --> 01:13:42.833
And he said, yeah, I've never met a 13-year-old that knows what he wants to do.

1213
01:13:42.853 --> 01:13:43.914
I think you should let him go do it.

1214
01:13:45.375 --> 01:13:55.160
And my mom told me that like decades later, you know, like, it's like I just completely had this idea that it was, I was being let off because my brother had died, you know, and it was like, but no, it wasn't at all.

1215
01:13:55.660 --> 01:13:56.801
Jeremy, I appreciate you coming on.

1216
01:13:56.881 --> 01:13:57.601
Thank you so much.

1217
01:13:57.941 --> 01:14:06.925
And I think that the last thing I just want you to tell the audience, because there's a lot of people who are very ambitious who listen.

1218
01:14:06.945 --> 01:14:10.787
Some of them started companies, but some of them are just at the beginning of their journey.

1219
01:14:11.527 --> 01:14:20.851
and they haven't taken that first leap, they don't have the courage yet to bet on themselves and to live a life that is actually authentically theirs, what's your advice to them?

1220
01:14:21.311 --> 01:14:22.212
What's the worst that can happen?

1221
01:14:22.952 --> 01:14:27.214
The worst that can happen is you get old and regret having never done any of these things.

1222
01:14:27.614 --> 01:14:34.797
The thing I learned, because my first business went bust, and the thing I learned was that I thought I was walking this tightrope, and that everything was scary, and that everything was scary.

1223
01:14:35.257 --> 01:14:37.920
And when I fell off, the tightrope's only six inches off the ground.

1224
01:14:38.260 --> 01:14:42.225
So if you know the tightrope is only six inches off the ground, why not fucking run?