Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / 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.

Transcript

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. · Success Story with Scott Clary

• 0:00
  You've done hundreds of acquisitions.
• 0:01
  Where did this love for buying businesses start?
• 0:03
  I fell into it by accident.
• 0:04
  I was in the telecoms industry in the 1990s.
• 0:06
  Everybody started acquiring everybody else.
• 0:09
  So I realized, actually, you can do this.
• 0:12
  You just need to figure out the way to do it.
• 0:13
  How does somebody do that successfully, understand the business with never working in that industry?
• 0:18
  To start with, I would do something you do have some understanding around.
• 0:21
  And there's a number of reasons for that.
• 0:22
  People do business with people they like, know, and trust.
• 0:25
  And to get to that position, you have to be credible.
• 0:27
  Today's guest is Jeremy Harbour, an entrepreneur, investor, and expert in mergers and acquisitions.
• 0:33
  He is the founder of Unity Group and The Harbour Club, where he teaches entrepreneurs how to buy, fix, and sell businesses.
• 0:40
  In this conversation, we're breaking down how to acquire businesses, structure deals without large upfront capital, and the mindset behind successful acquisitions.
• 0:49
  One of the ideas that you speak about a lot is the deal is in the structure.
• 0:53
  Explain what that means.
• 0:54
  Structure is everything.
• 0:54
  You name the price, I'll name the structure.
• 0:56
  What you're trying to do is you're trying to balance risk between the buyer and the seller.
• 1:00
  If a person is selling their company for a million dollars and you pay them a million dollars, you have all the risks.
• 1:04
  Small businesses are incredibly risky.
• 1:08
  MyFitnessPal is a success story partner.
• 1:11
  Now, everybody wants more energy.
• 1:13
  Everybody wants better sleep.
• 1:15
  Everybody wants to feel sharper during the day, to not hit that wall in the afternoon where your brain just checks out.
• 1:21
  And people try a lot of things to get there.
• 1:22
  So new routines, new supplements, better sleep habits, more coffee, less coffee, all of the above.
• 1:28
  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.
• 1:35
  It's not the most exciting answer,
• 1:37
  Nobody's making a viral reel about eating lunch, but food is a foundation, right?
• 1:40
  Your energy, your sleep, your weight, your recovery, how you perform at work, how you feel when you get home.
• 1:46
  It's the one input that touches everything else.
• 1:49
  Now, the problem is that most people have no idea what they're actually eating.
• 1:52
  They have a general sense.
• 1:54
  They can say, I eat pretty healthy.
• 1:55
  Okay, but how much protein are you getting?
• 1:58
  And how does that break down across your day?
• 2:00
  Are you eating enough in the morning?
• 2:01
  Are you stacking everything at night?
• 2:03
  Those details matter a lot.
• 2:05
  And you can't answer those questions without logging what you eat and looking at the data.
• 2:09
  And that's why I use the MyFitnessPal app, because you log what you eat and it shows you exactly what's going on.
• 2:15
  Your macros, for example, that's just your proteins, your carbs, your fats.
• 2:18
  those are broken down by grams.
• 2:20
  And on premium, it breaks those numbers down by meals.
• 2:22
  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.
• 2:31
  It runs on what you give it right now.
• 2:33
  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
• 2:48
  in the afternoon.
• 2:49
  Now the food logging.
• 2:50
  This is where a lot of people think it's gonna be a whole thing.
• 2:52
  It's not.
• 2:53
  For example, I can say what I ate out loud.
• 2:56
  There's a voice logging feature and it's done.
• 2:58
  Or I can scan a barcode of something I ate, two seconds.
• 3:01
  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.
• 3:08
  And MyFitnessPal has the largest food database out there.
• 3:12
  So whatever I'm eating is already in it.
• 3:14
  And it remembers what I eat regularly.
• 3:16
  Also, it connects with over 40 fitness apps and wearables.
• 3:19
  So everything goes into one spot.
• 3:22
  All of my health, wellness and nutrition.
• 3:24
  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.
• 3:37
  The answer is usually in nutrition.
• 3:40
  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.
• 3:47
  So do yourself a favor.
• 3:48
  Go to podcast.myfitnesspal.com and use code Scott.
• 3:52
  That's S-C-O-T-T, all uppercase.
• 3:55
  That gives you 15% off MyFitnessPal Premium.
• 3:58
  One more time, that is podcast.myfitnesspal.com.
• 4:01
  Code Scott.
• 4:02
  That's giving you 15% off MyFitnessPal Premium.
• 4:11
  Jeremy, you have taken close to 100 companies public.
• 4:14
  You've done hundreds of acquisitions.
• 4:16
  Where did this love for buying businesses start?
• 4:19
  Yeah, really random because it's not something that you naturally think of as an entrepreneur.
• 4:23
  I mean, we're surrounded by startup stories.
• 4:26
  Everyone's doing a startup.
• 4:27
  I think startup is your kind of rite of passage to entrepreneurship.
• 4:30
  It's where everybody kind of,
• 4:32
  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.
• 4:39
  You know, there's your team and how you motivate your team and how you attract the best talent.
• 4:43
  There's marketing.
• 4:44
  And of course, there's like a million different hacks around marketing and it's a constantly moving landscape.
• 4:50
  And then there's sales, like how you turn those interested people into actual customers.
• 4:55
  But you never think about that kind of fourth lever of, or lever, I guess, as you'd say.
• 4:59
  Yeah.
• 5:00
  For actually acquiring a business.
• 5:02
  And for me, it was just I fell into it by accident.
• 5:07
  I was in the telecoms industry in the 1990s.
• 5:09
  And the telecoms industry in the 90s expanded very, very quickly until the market was kind of saturated.
• 5:15
  So there wasn't any greenfield business out there.
• 5:17
  So everybody started acquiring everybody else.
• 5:20
  And for me, the reason I didn't think about acquiring anybody is I didn't know what I was talking about.
• 5:25
  And I didn't have any money.
• 5:26
  And then loads of people tried to buy me and they had one thing in common.
• 5:29
  They didn't know what they were talking about and they didn't have any money.
• 5:31
  So I realized, actually, you can do this.
• 5:34
  You just need to figure out the way to do it.
• 5:37
  So I kind of had my eyes open just because I was in this very acquisitive industry.
• 5:40
  So this first business in telecom, that was more of a traditional play where you built a business from scratch.
• 5:45
  Exactly.
• 5:46
  Yeah.
• 5:46
  So I started it.
• 5:47
  Yeah.
• 5:47
  Started it with like 50 bucks and got my first customer and then, yeah, grew from there.
• 5:52
  And yeah, it was it was an organic growth story until it wasn't.
• 5:56
  That experience of building a business from scratch, because most people listen to this podcast.
• 6:01
  I would say the the main proponent of of.
• 6:05
  acquiring a business that people know would be a Cody Sanchez.
• 6:08
  Outside of, and now Jeremy Harbour, but outside of both of you, most people are looking to start businesses from scratch.
• 6:14
  That is the first thought when they think entrepreneurship.
• 6:16
  That's the first thought that I had.
• 6:19
  You built one from scratch.
• 6:21
  you didn't fall in love with that process?
• 6:23
  You decided to never do it again?
• 6:24
  Yeah, no, I think it's for mugs.
• 6:26
  I think that, you know, I describe it as the blood, sweat, and years.
• 6:30
  You know, this energy and this stuff you have to put in the beginning.
• 6:33
  I mean, funnily enough, we were talking about this a few days ago where I said, you know, people start businesses for freedom.
• 6:39
  They want time freedom and they want financial freedom.
• 6:41
  And then they start a business that takes away all of their time and all of their money.
• 6:45
  And they create like a prison for themselves and they haven't had a vacation for years because you do have to...
• 6:50
  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.
• 6:57
  You have to literally go all in or it's not going to work.
• 7:00
  And so I think you only have so many times in your life you can do that.
• 7:04
  I have this useful life idea, which is the first 20 years you're pretty pointless because you're figuring stuff out.
• 7:09
  The last 20 years, you're pretty pointless because you're getting up five times a night to pee.
• 7:13
  So what's the gap in the middle?
• 7:14
  You know, is it like 30 years, 40 years that you have that you're really on it?
• 7:18
  Well, I was running that telecoms company for 10 years.
• 7:20
  How many times do you want to do that?
• 7:22
  So, you know, the business I bought, the first business I bought was 13 years old.
• 7:27
  So I bought somebody else's 13 years.
• 7:30
  You know, I didn't have to run the marathon.
• 7:33
  I ran the last 10 yards and I got the medal.
• 7:35
  So I think when people look at the opportunity to buy a business, they think, oh, it's going to be too expensive.
• 7:40
  I'm going to screw it up.
• 7:41
  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.
• 7:49
  Maybe it depends.
• 7:50
  You get money from different places.
• 7:51
  Maybe some people do.
• 7:52
  So acquisition entrepreneurship is kind of catching on as a thing.
• 7:55
  Unfortunately, it's a little bit of like the blind leading the blind, because I think people have spotted that it Googles well.
• 8:01
  So they've developed a course trying to sell you on the idea and they they've never done deals.
• 8:05
  They don't know what they're talking about.
• 8:06
  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.
• 8:15
  They're trying to ram down your...
• 8:16
  So most people talking about this have not done it.
• 8:17
  Yeah, they either haven't done it or they've done it a bit, but haven't broken it down into a replicable system.
• 8:24
  And I think, like everything in business, it always seems really easy on the outside.
• 8:30
  And all of the challenges and everything else is in the execution.
• 8:34
  You know, nothing's as easy as it looks.
• 8:35
  No, of course not.
• 8:36
  So that first business that you acquired...
• 8:40
  how did you navigate it?
• 8:41
  Was it an object failure?
• 8:42
  Did it work out?
• 8:42
  How did you learn how to do this?
• 8:43
  But at that point, there wasn't anything online.
• 8:46
  Exactly.
• 8:47
  And it was a total and there wasn't a thing called acquisition entrepreneurship.
• 8:50
  I mean, it just didn't exist.
• 8:51
  And so basically, I found this company.
• 8:55
  So all these people were coming and pitching me.
• 8:56
  And that's what it was.
• 8:57
  It was a pitch for them to buy my business.
• 9:00
  And they would all come up with solutions that I didn't know I needed, but actually were quite compelling.
• 9:04
  And so I used to take the best bits of that and then go try it out on other people.
• 9:08
  Because in telecoms, you could literally have, you could have a meeting every day with someone trying to buy you.
• 9:13
  It was that, it was that busy.
• 9:15
  It was that popular an idea.
• 9:18
  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.
• 9:25
  So I would have all these meetings and...
• 9:28
  and learn from every meeting.
• 9:29
  It would take me further forwards in my own knowledge and experience.
• 9:33
  And so I went out and started pitching other business owners with the same types of ideas.
• 9:38
  And I found this company, it was 13 years old.
• 9:39
  They had about a thousand active handsets, which is what we were organically growing by in a year.
• 9:45
  So it was like a year's worth of
• 9:48
  customers in one go.
• 9:50
  The guy had a few motivations, and this is always really important.
• 9:53
  If they don't have a motivation to sell, they're not going to sell.
• 9:56
  I mean, if they don't have a reason to sell, you can't convince them.
• 10:00
  So his building was being demolished by bulldozers and they were turning it into apartments.
• 10:05
  So this created a bit of a ticking time bomb for him to do something with the business, either move or sell.
• 10:11
  He had this huge problem with one of his suppliers.
• 10:14
  They were constantly fighting...
• 10:16
  And it was his main supplier.
• 10:17
  Oh, it was like endless headaches in this guy's life.
• 10:19
  It was just like every day was a battle.
• 10:21
  And most importantly, he had like a shiny new thing.
• 10:23
  So he had another business that he was way, you know, everyone's always more interested in the new one than the old one.
• 10:28
  So he was just way more interested in this other business and just wanted a way to get out and do that.
• 10:33
  Now, he wanted a load of money up front.
• 10:35
  I wanted to pay him later.
• 10:37
  I didn't have any money.
• 10:38
  My choice was like pay my credit card or my staff.
• 10:40
  There wasn't like this, give this guy some money.
• 10:43
  So my position was, I can't, you know, I have to pay you later.
• 10:45
  His position was, I want it all now.
• 10:47
  And basically, our two ideas coalesced at the point where the bulldozers were about to knock his building over and he took my deal.
• 10:55
  So I put no money into the transaction.
• 10:57
  I grew by a year's worth of sales in an afternoon.
• 11:00
  I inherited 13 years of goodwill and brand and marketing.
• 11:03
  everything that he'd built over that 13 years.
• 11:06
  And yeah, it was just an epiphany.
• 11:08
  It was, you know, people always ask me, oh, how do you buy a business with no money?
• 11:12
  And my facetious answer is, well, you start with no money.
• 11:16
  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.
• 11:27
  So that first acquisition, no capital in, it was, but
• 11:30
  those three pieces that you just outlined.
• 11:33
  So they want to do something different.
• 11:36
  There's a meaningful event.
• 11:38
  And then there's just stress or de-stress in the business.
• 11:40
  Yeah, exactly.
• 11:41
  And to be honest, because this was my first one and I was really green, I didn't know what I was doing.
• 11:46
  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?
• 11:53
  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...
• 12:01
  But back then, there was a huge element of luck associated with getting that transaction done.
• 12:05
  But what was fascinating is two weeks later, I bought my second company.
• 12:09
  It was like a champagne cork popped.
• 12:11
  And all I could think about is how do I do this again?
• 12:14
  And two weeks later, I bought an IT company.
• 12:16
  And I just thought that was random, you know, like it just walked in.
• 12:19
  I've now coached thousands of people on how to buy businesses.
• 12:23
  And I see it again and again and again.
• 12:24
  They might take 12 or 18 months to buy their first business and they buy three all at once.
• 12:29
  It's kind of something clicks.
• 12:31
  Your confidence, your competence all collide.
• 12:34
  And suddenly it just becomes very easy.
• 12:36
  And that first business that you acquired...
• 12:40
  How come it was so successful after you acquired it and not before?
• 12:43
  Why couldn't he figure out these things?
• 12:45
  Yeah.
• 12:45
  So there was a number of aspects to this.
• 12:47
  The most important one is because we were in the same business, we didn't need any of his overhead.
• 12:52
  So he had a business that was making 12 grand a year.
• 12:55
  And for us, it would make a couple of hundred grand a year because we didn't have any of his overhead.
• 12:59
  We just bring his customers into our ecosystem and off we go.
• 13:02
  And that's not always the case, but that's a good opportunity if you see that.
• 13:07
  Exactly.
• 13:07
  And there's a lot of reasons why you might buy a company.
• 13:11
  So in that particular instance, it was to increase our customer base.
• 13:14
  So we were just growing customers with that acquisition.
• 13:17
  But we could equally do it to get a new product line or to open up in a new geography.
• 13:21
  I want an office in New York.
• 13:22
  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?
• 13:28
  And for people who are doing an acquisition in an industry they know nothing about.
• 13:32
  So you mentioned you purchased an IT company a couple weeks later.
• 13:36
  It's adjacent, but it's not telco.
• 13:38
  So how does somebody do that successfully, understand the business with never working in that industry?
• 13:44
  So the key thing, I mean, to start with, I wouldn't.
• 13:46
  To start with, I would do something you do have some understanding around.
• 13:50
  And there's a number of reasons for that.
• 13:51
  One is analyzing the business and understanding it.
• 13:53
  But the other one is actually your rapport with the business owner that you're buying from, which is really critical.
• 14:01
  You have to, you know, people do business with people they like, know and trust.
• 14:04
  And to get to that position, you have to be credible.
• 14:08
  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.
• 14:11
  So basically, yeah, it's helpful to do something you know.
• 14:15
  But once you've done a few deals, the credibility comes from the deals that you've done rather than the industry.
• 14:20
  So it's then easier to do deals in weird sectors.
• 14:23
  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.
• 14:30
  I've had a music school.
• 14:31
  I've had all sorts of things.
• 14:33
  Um, so yeah, you can do.
• 14:35
  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.
• 14:45
  It's more about whether or not you're going to be able to get the deal done.
• 14:48
  Yeah, it's more about the rapport that you build at the beginning, because actually business is fundamentally very similar.
• 14:53
  You know, at its base level, it's more money coming in than going out.
• 14:56
  Right.
• 14:56
  And often people lose sight of that.
• 14:59
  But ultimately, that's what it's about.
• 15:01
  And so business is business is business.
• 15:03
  And also...
• 15:04
  To a great extent, we want to be a shareholder, not an operator.
• 15:08
  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.
• 15:17
  Because if you started it, you did everything in that business from day one.
• 15:21
  And you're ingrained in every part of the DNA of that business.
• 15:24
  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.
• 15:31
  And then any operational stuff, you can choose whether or not you get involved in it.
• 15:36
  If you're an expert in that particular part of the business.
• 15:39
  Much easier to work on a business you've acquired than it is to work on a business you've started.
• 15:44
  When you look at opportunities, so somebody is listening to this, they're excited about this.
• 15:48
  They think, okay, I'd love to be a shareholder.
• 15:50
  I don't necessarily want to be an operator.
• 15:52
  Is there a place where like in terms of revenue or size that you have to start at?
• 15:56
  Yeah.
• 15:57
  Below a million dollars is a job.
• 15:59
  Yes.
• 15:59
  Okay.
• 16:00
  And that's probably moved up in the last few years.
• 16:02
  It was probably below half a million dollars, you know, in 2020 or somewhere like that.
• 16:07
  And now, yeah, below a million dollars is a job.
• 16:09
  Now, buying a job isn't necessarily a bad thing.
• 16:12
  Buying a job is great if you don't have a job.
• 16:15
  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.
• 16:25
  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.
• 16:32
  Whereas buying a business that's doing less than a million could be a shortcut to getting that experience.
• 16:37
  And it also gives you a platform business to go and acquire other things.
• 16:40
  It is much easier to buy a company when you have a company.
• 16:44
  Um, so, because again, it's that credibility gap thing.
• 16:47
  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.
• 16:57
  One of the ideas that you speak about a lot is that the deal is in the structure.
• 17:02
  So explain what that means.
• 17:04
  So for somebody coming in first time buyer, you said before your first deal, you didn't put any cash in.
• 17:10
  So let's assume that people have no idea how to structure a deal whatsoever.
• 17:14
  They've never done this before.
• 17:16
  They're thinking, OK, how does somebody buy a business with with no cash at all?
• 17:19
  It doesn't make any sense to me.
• 17:21
  Let's walk through all the different opportunities, but then also taking it a step further.
• 17:25
  And where do you find some of these opportunities?
• 17:28
  You're absolutely right.
• 17:29
  Structure is everything.
• 17:30
  You name the price, I'll name the structure.
• 17:32
  You're basically, what you're trying to do is you're trying to balance risk between the buyer and the seller.
• 17:36
  If a person is selling their company for a million dollars and you pay them a million dollars, you have all the risk.
• 17:42
  And small businesses are incredibly risky.
• 17:44
  You know, if they lose two customers or two staff members, the dynamics, the economics change completely.
• 17:50
  So it's a volatile asset class.
• 17:52
  So the first thing I would say is you should not borrow money and buy a volatile asset.
• 17:55
  It's like mortgaging your house and buying Bitcoin.
• 17:58
  And there's a lot of people that would do that, but they shouldn't.
• 18:00
  Well, this is what SBA loans are and personally guaranteed.
• 18:03
  So don't do SBA loans.
• 18:04
  Don't do bank loans.
• 18:05
  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.
• 18:13
  So you're betting your house.
• 18:15
  You're taking that money and you're giving it to your star employee so they can leave.
• 18:20
  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.
• 18:27
  And that's a very toxic mix of things to do.
• 18:31
  So what you want to do is you want to shift the balance of that risk the other way.
• 18:35
  And instead of doing a leverage buyout, you want to leverage business owner.
• 18:39
  You want them to support you in the transaction so that they get to the financial goal that they're headed for.
• 18:43
  They get their million dollars.
• 18:45
  but you get to a more asymmetric risk profile.
• 18:48
  In other words, you don't have the downside, but you still have the upside in the transaction.
• 18:53
  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.
• 19:09
  If you're not giving them what they want, then they're not going to sell to you.
• 19:12
  For that particular deal,
• 19:15
  How often does a business owner actually say, I'm okay with not getting cash right now?
• 19:24
  Because they're making money in their business right now.
• 19:26
  They're pulling out a salary from the business.
• 19:28
  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?
• 19:36
  So if they're not going to get a million now, do you have to offer them more later?
• 19:39
  Like, how do we actually incentivize?
• 19:41
  So basically, it's no money down doesn't mean no money.
• 19:43
  That's the clear.
• 19:43
  That's the first thing, you know, you're not like ripping anybody off or getting anything for free.
• 19:49
  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.
• 19:59
  And you have to remember, anyone buying a business, that business has to pay for itself.
• 20:05
  If you borrow money from the bank, the business has to pay the bank back.
• 20:07
  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.
• 20:12
  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.
• 20:17
  So every business is self-funded in its acquisition.
• 20:21
  It's just how you structure that self-funding.
• 20:24
  And so...
• 20:25
  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.
• 20:37
  And that mostly is just the secret behind this is finding the person who's willing to do that.
• 20:42
  Yeah, exactly.
• 20:43
  And the good news is that the universe of businesses that are for sale is like a triangle.
• 20:50
  There's a few big ones at the top and there's thousands of small ones at the bottom.
• 20:54
  And the universe of people who can buy those businesses is the opposite.
• 20:58
  There's one guy at the bottom who can buy the hundreds of thousands of them.
• 21:01
  And there's loads of people that can buy the big ones at the top.
• 21:04
  You get into private equity, family offices, et cetera, et cetera.
• 21:06
  So, it's a buyer's market at the bottom.
• 21:10
  There are not many people that can buy those businesses.
• 21:11
  And also, those businesses, by the way, are not ready to sell.
• 21:14
  So, if any serious buyer did look at them, they all look shit.
• 21:19
  So, they've got personal stuff running through the accounts.
• 21:21
  They haven't got, you know, they're not auditable.
• 21:23
  They don't have proper processes in place.
• 21:25
  They don't have a data room.
• 21:26
  They're just not ready to be sold.
• 21:29
  So, that gives us a huge advantage.
• 21:31
  Yeah.
• 21:31
  in that there aren't many natural competitors to us in that space.
• 21:35
  So I keep hearing about this wealth transfer.
• 21:39
  Like all these older business owners are now retiring.
• 21:43
  They're looking to sell their businesses or to not work in them anymore, not even, you know...
• 21:48
  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
• 22:12
  And so we're really getting to the end of it.
• 22:14
  And unfortunately, what tends to happen is business brokers overpromise them on what they can get for their business.
• 22:19
  They try and sell it for a couple of years at that price.
• 22:22
  And of course, nobody buys because the business is not prepared to sell.
• 22:25
  The people that could buy that business don't want to pay that sort of money.
• 22:29
  So they lowball or they come up with silly deal structures that aren't win-win.
• 22:36
  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.
• 22:44
  I literally had one not long ago.
• 22:47
  It was a guy selling solar panels, which you'd think actually is like a modern style business, right?
• 22:51
  And his speciality was selling these like camping ones, you know, so for charging your phone, boiling a kettle stuff when you're camping.
• 22:58
  They were doing $10 million a year.
• 23:00
  Most of it was online through a web shop and they had a physical presence as well.
• 23:05
  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.
• 23:10
  So he advertised it for $2 million.
• 23:12
  Nobody was buying it because the margins were really tiny on it.
• 23:15
  And they wanted to retire.
• 23:18
  His wife had already moved to the overseas home that they were due to retire in.
• 23:22
  And he was stuck in this city working because he thought he was going to get this two million for selling it.
• 23:27
  And so after two years, he hasn't sold it.
• 23:29
  He hasn't lived with his wife for two years in his retirement years.
• 23:32
  You know, there's a precious time when you might not have much left.
• 23:37
  And so basically his URL came up for renewal.
• 23:40
  He just didn't renew it.
• 23:41
  He was over it.
• 23:42
  Yeah.
• 23:42
  Just let the URL expire that was generating 10 million of sales a year in solar.
• 23:48
  Let the URL expire and just move the problem.
• 23:50
  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.
• 24:02
  Is this whole industry a relationship industry?
• 24:04
  And I'm asking that because...
• 24:07
  I don't think the best deals are on biz buy sell.
• 24:09
  Exactly.
• 24:09
  No, they're not.
• 24:10
  And they're not with brokers.
• 24:11
  Well, I was going to say, it doesn't sound brokers are doing anybody any good.
• 24:14
  Usually.
• 24:16
  How do you market anything, right?
• 24:18
  You figure out who your addressable market is and you go and contact them in some way, shape or form.
• 24:24
  It's exactly the same with this.
• 24:25
  If you decide you want to buy HVAC companies in Florida,
• 24:29
  There is a finite number of HVAC companies in Florida.
• 24:31
  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.
• 24:42
  And it's those relationships that will turn into deals.
• 24:45
  And the traditional M&A approach is to get a corporate finance company to write them a letter.
• 24:52
  which says, hi, we're a big corporate finance company and our client's buying HVAC companies at the moment.
• 24:58
  Although, I mean, if you know an HVAC owner, they've had 50 of those letters this week and they just ignore them.
• 25:03
  It's like fucking noise.
• 25:04
  It's like when dental offices are doing DSOs with private equity and yeah.
• 25:08
  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.
• 25:15
  We have to go to brokers.
• 25:17
  We have to go to guys because the sourcing doesn't work.
• 25:19
  We write to them all the time.
• 25:20
  They never reply.
• 25:20
  And it's like, yeah, of course they don't.
• 25:23
  You need to be, it's about an individual relationship.
• 25:27
  You need to reach out to them everywhere, on LinkedIn, by letters, by whatever.
• 25:31
  And you need to find them, speak to them.
• 25:33
  And don't say, I'm trying to buy your business.
• 25:35
  Let's have a meeting.
• 25:36
  Say, I'm thinking of rolling up HVAC companies in Florida.
• 25:39
  I'd love to pick your brains.
• 25:42
  Then you're pandering to their ego.
• 25:43
  Oh, you're the expert.
• 25:44
  Please educate me.
• 25:45
  Teach me.
• 25:46
  Because this is their baby, too.
• 25:48
  They don't want some, this cold, heartless thing to come in and take it.
• 25:53
  This New York hedge fund or whatever.
• 25:54
  No.
• 25:55
  And like, I mean, some of them really do care about not only their business, their employees, what's going to happen.
• 25:59
  Are you going to, you know, deconstruct it and sell it for parts after?
• 26:03
  Yeah.
• 26:03
  I mean, often also with a lot of those baby boomer things, they've made their money.
• 26:07
  They've got their holiday home.
• 26:08
  They've got their yacht.
• 26:08
  They've got all the stuff they want.
• 26:10
  Now it's just a safe pair of hands for the business.
• 26:13
  And actually, with the economy as it is at the time that we're recording, things are a little bit tougher at the moment.
• 26:18
  You've had inflation, interest rates are up.
• 26:21
  It's a fairly constrained environment.
• 26:22
  So they kind of recognize this is not the ideal time to be selling it.
• 26:26
  but they don't get to choose the time because they're getting really old.
• 26:29
  So now it's more about that, like you say, the safe pair of hands.
• 26:33
  And sometimes it's, you know, keeping the company name because it's their family name.
• 26:38
  You know, it's on the side of a building.
• 26:40
  Everybody drives past every day and it's part of their legacy.
• 26:43
  So things like that are often more important to them than, yeah, getting a few hundred grand on day one.
• 26:51
  versus the same price, but over a period of time.
• 26:54
  Life at the Speed of Play is a success story partner.
• 26:56
  Now, this is a book by Mark Pincus, the guy who founded Zynga.
• 26:59
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• 27:01
  I met him in person, and Reid Hoffman wrote the foreword, calling him one of the best idea people in Silicon Valley.
• 27:07
  The book is Life at the Speed of Play, Launch Products People Love.
• 27:10
  About 170 pages.
• 27:12
  It's already a national bestseller.
• 27:14
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• 27:15
  or figuring out whether an idea is actually worth going after before you put serious time and money into it.
• 27:20
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• 27:22
  And he's repeatedly built successful businesses.
• 27:24
  On top of that, you can read it in a weekend.
• 27:26
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• 27:29
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• 27:34
  That's $16 each.
• 27:36
  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.
• 27:41
  someone who needs to push, whoever.
• 27:43
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• 27:46
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• 27:48
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• 27:50
  People always ask me how I have time to track what I eat, pay attention to my nutrition when I have a daily podcast.
• 27:56
  I have a weekly podcast, I have a newsletter, I run a marketing agency, my days are super full.
• 28:00
  But honestly, that's exactly why I have to do it.
• 28:02
  See, when you're running that many things, when you are a high performing person, you cannot afford to have your energy be inconsistent.
• 28:09
  Food is a foundation for everything, for energy, for sleep, for weight, for recovery, for performance.
• 28:13
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• 28:16
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• 28:16
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• 28:19
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• 28:26
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• 28:29
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• 28:30
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• 28:37
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• 28:54
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• 28:57
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• 29:00
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• 29:04
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• 29:06
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• 29:13
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• 29:17
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• 29:31
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• 29:33
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• 29:40
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• 29:45
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• 29:49
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• 29:55
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• 29:59
  I want to understand a little bit more about your story.
• 30:03
  So those numbers I was talking about at the beginning...
• 30:08
  You've done hundreds of acquisitions, taking over 100 companies public.
• 30:12
  Nearly 100, yeah.
• 30:13
  How does somebody simultaneously manage all of these companies?
• 30:18
  I don't know what your infrastructure is like.
• 30:20
  I don't know if you have thousands of employees, but you seem to be relatively lean.
• 30:24
  Yeah, we're pretty lean.
• 30:26
  We're a small business.
• 30:27
  We're based in Singapore and Dubai, and it's mainly legal and financial kind of resource.
• 30:34
  But we don't manage these businesses.
• 30:36
  Not a single one.
• 30:37
  Every single one, you found a business that has a great operator or you found a way to hire one.
• 30:42
  Yeah, we're shareholders.
• 30:43
  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.
• 30:49
  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
• 31:13
  acquisitions because pretty much everything was distressed.
• 31:15
  So even if you're trying to find a solvent one, you end up finding distressed deals.
• 31:19
  But I was, yeah, I went through a phase of literally just buying companies for a dollar.
• 31:24
  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.
• 31:32
  And it's about 50-50.
• 31:34
  So half of them, you could rescue half of them, you couldn't.
• 31:36
  And the ones you could rescue, you could make six or seven figures on the exit.
• 31:40
  And the ones you couldn't rescue, it cost you nothing.
• 31:42
  It was opportunity cost, maybe.
• 31:45
  And it's just a lesson at the end of the day.
• 31:46
  Exactly.
• 31:47
  Yeah, yeah.
• 31:47
  You figure out what works and what doesn't work.
• 31:49
  So I don't do retail anymore because I bought a few retailers.
• 31:51
  So over time, like not everything has worked out.
• 31:54
  Yeah, of course.
• 31:55
  Yeah, yeah.
• 31:55
  No, I mean, hey, look, it's entrepreneurship.
• 31:57
  Nothing works.
• 31:58
  It just seems like the volume.
• 32:00
  seems incomprehensible to somebody who speaks to individuals who do one at a time.
• 32:04
  Yeah, I was really lucky in the telecoms industry was so acquisitive.
• 32:08
  I had this baptism of fire in terms of people trying to buy me.
• 32:11
  That was unusual.
• 32:12
  And that gave me a very rapid education in that space that doesn't really exist in any other industry.
• 32:17
  So the fact I was in that industry gave me that kind of rapid education.
• 32:20
  And I think that's a very rapid education.
• 32:21
  And then when I sold that company, like 10 years later, we arrived in the global financial crisis.
• 32:28
  So now all of a sudden, just as I'm doing distressed acquisitions, I can have 10 meetings a day.
• 32:32
  Well, if I wanted to do distressed acquisitions today, I might get one a week.
• 32:36
  So again, I had this baptism of fire because everything was distressed.
• 32:40
  So I could have as many meetings as I wanted to.
• 32:43
  So again, it was fortuitous.
• 32:44
  It was lucky that I was right place, right time, right skill set to be able to capitalize on that.
• 32:50
  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...
• 32:59
  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
• 33:25
  What complexities are added when you take it?
• 33:27
  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.
• 33:33
  And I think most people will be like, okay, oh my God, taking a company public, what the fuck is going on?
• 33:36
  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.
• 33:43
  Yeah.
• 33:44
  But outside of that, it's like IR and hands off, really.
• 33:48
  Yeah, absolutely.
• 33:48
  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.
• 33:57
  And actually, it's a terrible way to raise money and it's a terrible way to exit.
• 34:01
  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?
• 34:08
  They inherited it.
• 34:10
  And then 220 of the remaining 300 took their companies public and built their wealth on capital markets, including all of the big ones.
• 34:19
  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.
• 34:29
  So it's a really well-trodden path.
• 34:31
  But none of them took their companies public and spanked all their stock into the market.
• 34:36
  They were long term with their approach.
• 34:38
  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.
• 34:47
  So they have to have a clear path.
• 34:48
  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.
• 34:57
  These guys can get to a billion market cap with the organic structure that they're currently adopting.
• 35:02
  Or it has to be a very predictable acquisition strategy.
• 35:05
  You know, so, OK, we've got through acquisition.
• 35:07
  Exactly.
• 35:08
  We've got 30 targets lined up.
• 35:10
  If we buy all 30, we're a billion market cap.
• 35:13
  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.
• 35:20
  Public company is almost like a like a haltco.
• 35:22
  Yeah, exactly.
• 35:23
  Yeah.
• 35:23
  Yeah.
• 35:24
  And, and then we always look at listing it before most people would.
• 35:29
  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.
• 35:40
  Yeah, it just opens doors.
• 35:43
  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.
• 35:51
  So we list on a junior exchange first, we grow quickly, and then we go back to a main market later on.
• 35:58
  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.
• 36:07
  The investment banking community is a bit sharky at that level.
• 36:11
  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.
• 36:20
  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.
• 36:28
  As opposed to trying to compete.
• 36:29
  As opposed to trying to compete with NASDAQ, get bigger and then come back.
• 36:34
  And then you don't have the SEC and all the other things to deal with while you're going through.
• 36:37
  Then it's expensive.
• 36:38
  It's an expensive thing to do.
• 36:39
  Well, exactly.
• 36:39
  This is the other point, actually, is the legal cost.
• 36:42
  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.
• 36:51
  They haven't figured out how to price it yet.
• 36:54
  So there's like a legal arbitrage.
• 36:56
  Do you recommend...
• 36:59
  The average individual that joins the Harper Club, they're obviously very ambitious.
• 37:05
  Are they entrepreneurs?
• 37:07
  Are they people that have failed businesses?
• 37:09
  Is it like a whole gamut of individuals?
• 37:10
  Yeah, it's a real mixture.
• 37:11
  I'd say it's probably like 70% to 80% entrepreneurs.
• 37:14
  And they're either running a business now or they've run businesses in the past and sold them or whatever.
• 37:20
  And then we have a little bit of corporate.
• 37:21
  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.
• 37:26
  Good at following orders, I guess.
• 37:30
  But yeah, we have a really diverse kind of mix of people, but it's weighted heavily towards, obviously, entrepreneurs.
• 37:35
  And they're either...
• 37:37
  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.
• 37:45
  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.
• 37:57
  I want to ask one thing that I want to talk about acquiring competitors because that's interesting.
• 38:01
  But just for somebody who's listening to this right now, there's like levels to this game.
• 38:05
  I don't, do you recommend that somebody tries to take a company public?
• 38:09
  No.
• 38:09
  No, that's my point.
• 38:11
  Yeah, so.
• 38:12
  The first time we did it was disastrous.
• 38:14
  I mean, it was so hard.
• 38:15
  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?
• 38:20
  I mean, the first thing is it depends where you are.
• 38:22
  You know, if you're running a business, then I'd probably recommend trying to grow that business by using acquisition.
• 38:26
  Because at the moment, you probably have one engine on the plane, which is sales and marketing.
• 38:30
  And we can stick another engine on the plane, which is buying competitors.
• 38:34
  So that, you know, two engines is better than one engine.
• 38:37
  So you will grow much faster.
• 38:39
  And also with a lot of businesses, actually, you find that there's a plateau that they really struggle to break through.
• 38:44
  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.
• 38:58
  Yeah.
• 38:59
  It depends where you're starting as to as to what level you kind of start at.
• 39:03
  But typically, if you're a business, you either want to acquire more businesses that look like you.
• 39:08
  So a horizontal acquisition strategy.
• 39:10
  So if you're a real estate agent, it's buying more real estate agents.
• 39:15
  If you or you might want to vertically integrate.
• 39:18
  into your business.
• 39:19
  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.
• 39:29
  So, I mean, like, if you are, you could, if you do a roll-up, you could buy, like, a marketing agency?
• 39:33
  Yeah, absolutely.
• 39:34
  Actually, marketing agent, we have a lot of marketing rollups in the Harbour Club community.
• 39:38
  It's one of those industries.
• 39:40
  I think the top 200 marketing agencies in the world are all rollups.
• 39:45
  So they've gone through acquisitions?
• 39:47
  Yeah.
• 39:48
  And the top WPP, which is the largest marketing agency in the world, is 2,600 companies.
• 39:54
  They, they've done 2006.
• 39:55
  Yeah, they've done 2600 acquisitions.
• 39:58
  The next, the second biggest is Publicis in France, Rollup.
• 40:03
  Densu, Rollup, Omnicom, Rollup, all the biggest agencies in the world are Rollups.
• 40:07
  Most people don't know this.
• 40:09
  Most people look at Publicis and they think, oh, they just grew that from zero to.
• 40:14
  When you see it, you can't unsee it.
• 40:16
  So I now read business books and realize everyone's a dealmaker.
• 40:21
  Like all the people that I used to think were startup entrepreneurs made all their money doing deals.
• 40:25
  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.
• 40:36
  I mean, Elon Musk sold PayPal, capitalized him, enabled him to go on and do business.
• 40:40
  you know, all the other stuff that he's done.
• 40:43
  So there's either a capital event or an acquisition that completely changed the game and moved the whole business in a different direction.
• 40:49
  And every single entrepreneur story is actually a dealmaker story.
• 40:52
  Because if you grow the way that most people think a business grows, it's just slow and painful.
• 40:58
  It is, yeah.
• 40:59
  Blood, sweat, and years.
• 41:02
  Acquiring competitors, interesting strategy, obviously a little bit different than vertically integrating businesses that will support your growth.
• 41:11
  But if you acquire competitors, like acquiring competitors is just like literally just acquiring companies in the same vertical as you.
• 41:16
  Yeah.
• 41:18
  How do you do an acquisition properly and not screw it up?
• 41:23
  Because so many people screw up acquisitions.
• 41:25
  And the thing that made the company special.
• 41:26
  The first thing is remember what you're buying.
• 41:28
  You're buying the inertia that they've created.
• 41:30
  You're buying the goodwill that they've created in their business.
• 41:33
  And what most people do is they buy it and then fuck all of that up by changing everything.
• 41:38
  They change the name, they change the management, they change the way they do.
• 41:43
  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.
• 41:51
  And so actually, WPP, for example, keeps all of those brands independent.
• 41:56
  Because if one of those brands fucks something up, they can get rid of it.
• 41:59
  It doesn't poison the WPP brand.
• 42:02
  But it still contributes to revenue while it's there.
• 42:05
  Exactly.
• 42:06
  So leverage that brand that you've bought and let it carry on.
• 42:11
  Yeah, don't interfere too much with how they do things.
• 42:14
  Just because you do stuff in a different way doesn't mean that you're superior to them in some way.
• 42:17
  You try and get the best practice out of both sides of that equation.
• 42:22
  And the other big thing I see is people doing top-down marketing.
• 42:25
  delegation or top down changes through businesses, small businesses are very fragile.
• 42:30
  If you piss people off, you have no value left.
• 42:33
  So if you want them to change stuff inside the business, get them to come up.
• 42:36
  If it's their idea, it's amazing.
• 42:38
  If it's your idea, it's terrible.
• 42:40
  So always make it their idea.
• 42:42
  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?
• 42:51
  Because we've gone through like a high level, a lot of different ideas here.
• 42:54
  Yeah, I think that you touched on it earlier about the sourcing side.
• 42:57
  How do you find the opportunities?
• 42:58
  And yeah, we kind of said you're doing this shortlist and spending your time reaching out to them.
• 43:02
  I guess we kind of covered that.
• 43:03
  Yeah, we can go deeper on that.
• 43:06
  I don't know what you want to gate versus what you want to talk about.
• 43:09
  I want your audience to get tons of value so that they feel like they can actually go and do something with this.
• 43:14
  Because, look, it's a really daunting topic.
• 43:16
  But like I say, once you've seen it, you can't unsee it.
• 43:19
  So when you look behind the curtain, you're like, what?
• 43:21
  Wow.
• 43:21
  Well, you know, I've even thought about this like for the podcast.
• 43:24
  I mean, it's fun to have a little podcast business, but how do you really grow?
• 43:28
  Is it?
• 43:29
  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.
• 43:39
  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.
• 43:50
  of audience into a product, you know?
• 43:52
  So I know, so it's interesting.
• 43:54
  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.
• 44:03
  And also the market's dominated by bankers.
• 44:05
  And actually bankers really don't understand entrepreneurs.
• 44:08
  And so when they look at what I'm doing, they just tell me it's impossible.
• 44:11
  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
• 44:28
  I said, I've literally got thousands of people doing this every day.
• 44:31
  And I said, yeah, but it wouldn't work.
• 44:32
  You might get, you might be lucky and be able to do it once, but it's not replicable.
• 44:35
  I mean, like they're so blind to how entrepreneurs think.
• 44:40
  I was going to say there's one example of a creator roll up and I'm not going to have it
• 44:45
  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.
• 44:53
  But not many creators do it.
• 44:55
  Not many finance people know how to communicate and build a creator network.
• 45:03
  This is where acquisition entrepreneurship really gets or has weight is because it's entrepreneurs dealing with other entrepreneurs and we get each other.
• 45:13
  We know how to communicate together and we know how to build value together.
• 45:16
  As soon as the banker gets involved, the kind of investment banking world's first entrepreneur.
• 45:21
  view is that the entrepreneurs are fucking liability and you've got to get rid of them as quickly as possible, you know?
• 45:26
  You can't do that in the creator business because the entrepreneur, the creator is the business.
• 45:30
  They are the business.
• 45:31
  Yeah, yeah.
• 45:32
  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.
• 45:43
  I've been thinking about this a lot.
• 45:44
  I think it would be an interesting way to grow the podcast business.
• 45:46
  You turn it into...
• 45:49
  like a, not just an individual media company, but a network of sorts, but not just it.
• 45:55
  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.
• 46:15
  we can give you... Give us some money and we'll promote your product, yeah.
• 46:18
  And then the individual doesn't have to find the advertiser themselves.
• 46:20
  But that's different.
• 46:22
  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.
• 46:29
  And the advantage with that tokenized equity is that it's much easier to then use that to incentivize things like influencer relationships.
• 46:35
  So you could effectively create...
• 46:37
  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.
• 47:02
  No, it's like the A-list.
• 47:04
  Yeah.
• 47:04
  And if you do get equity, it's in some startup.
• 47:06
  So it's like 50-50, it fails, and there's no liquidity, and there's no, you know.
• 47:10
  This is what I'm in right now.
• 47:11
  Yeah, you're going to get some equity in some shitbox startup that might never sell or go public or whatever, you know.
• 47:16
  So it's like, yeah, so you're kind of working for free.
• 47:18
  I'm going to go in a different direction in a second.
• 47:20
  I want to ask some just questions about, like, how your mental models that you apply to your life and your businesses and whatnot.
• 47:26
  That'll be helpful to people because you play at such a high level, and you're aggressive and very ambitious.
• 47:30
  which is a very good thing.
• 47:32
  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.
• 47:41
  Like, where do you find your first business?
• 47:44
  We already sort of made fun of BizBuySell and all the other marketplaces, which I'm sure...
• 47:49
  It is garbage there.
• 47:50
  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.
• 47:59
  So go out and meet business owners.
• 48:01
  Go out and meet the business owners who own the businesses that you'd like to own.
• 48:04
  There's a lot of words in there.
• 48:07
  Yeah, but just invest that time in going and meeting those people and pick their brains and try and understand what's going on.
• 48:13
  And what you'll find as a happy side effect to that exercise is that you'll see the stars start to align.
• 48:19
  You'll see the guy that needs to retire.
• 48:21
  You'll see the young, hungry, ambitious team that want to grow by acquisition.
• 48:24
  You'll see these different things.
• 48:26
  And you'll just go, fuck, that one goes with that one.
• 48:28
  And that one would go with this one.
• 48:29
  And they want this and they want that.
• 48:32
  And you'll see how things can start to fit together.
• 48:35
  You just have to put yourself out there and make yourself a bit of a key person of influence in that space.
• 48:40
  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...
• 48:49
  Other businesses that want to sell just come to them.
• 48:51
  So we've got a guy who only buys franchises.
• 48:54
  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.
• 49:00
  He's the go-to person for buying franchises.
• 49:02
  And he bought 12 so far.
• 49:03
  We've got another one that buys trades, businesses, plumbers and painters and decorators and that sort of stuff.
• 49:08
  And he's all over LinkedIn promoting that.
• 49:10
  And again, he's become a go-to person.
• 49:12
  He has no experience in that industry prior to buying his first company in that sector.
• 49:17
  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.
• 49:26
  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.
• 49:39
  And he like, he has a profile where he's bought architects.
• 49:42
  So bang, come and see us, please.
• 49:43
  We want to talk to you.
• 49:45
  Yeah.
• 49:45
  So, you know, that positioning yourself as an M&A person in a particular space can have real dividends.
• 49:52
  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.
• 49:58
  Yeah, exactly.
• 49:59
  Never say you're out there buying businesses.
• 50:01
  Just go out and do the research first.
• 50:03
  And then, of course, you know, I always say if you want to learn about this stuff, follow me on Instagram.
• 50:08
  If you want to learn what to do with the money, follow my wife on Instagram.
• 50:10
  Yeah.
• 50:12
  And that's why she has 20 times more followers than me.
• 50:15
  So she gets the influencer game, yeah.
• 50:17
  Yeah, yeah.
• 50:18
  So everybody's way more interested in what you do with the money versus how you make it.
• 50:21
  Yeah, but you have to learn how to make it first.
• 50:23
  Exactly, exactly.
• 50:24
  Yeah, yeah.
• 50:25
  I want to understand, because you were, were you always entrepreneurial?
• 50:29
  Yeah.
• 50:29
  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.
• 50:34
  So you never got a job ever?
• 50:38
  I've had jobs.
• 50:38
  I've had loads of jobs.
• 50:39
  Yeah.
• 50:39
  Because as an entrepreneur, there are occasions when you can't afford to eat.
• 50:45
  Or you're sick of packet noodles, you know.
• 50:48
  What was the biggest bet you've ever made on yourself?
• 50:51
  Oh, my God.
• 50:52
  I mean, I'm persistently always betting on myself.
• 50:57
  I mean, and you have to as an entrepreneur, you kind of have to just do it.
• 51:02
  And the funny thing is, is that people call it risk.
• 51:04
  And I don't see it as being risky.
• 51:06
  I see that the opposite, you know, not doing it is the risk.
• 51:09
  Yeah, it's like not pushing...
• 51:11
  forward is the risk.
• 51:12
  I actually gave a presentation, I was invited to come and speak to retiring senior military people in the UK.
• 51:19
  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.
• 51:29
  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,
• 51:37
  So I tell my entrepreneurial story and this general puts his hand up and goes, that all sounds a bit risky, old boy.
• 51:43
  And my answer was, you spent your entire career being fucking shot at and you thinking what I'm doing is risky.
• 51:50
  You don't see it as risk at all.
• 51:51
  No, of course not.
• 51:53
  The risk is not doing it.
• 51:54
  The risk is regret.
• 51:55
  The risk is being 80 years old and going, fuck, I wish I'd done more with my life.
• 51:59
  Where does that come from, though, when so many people don't look at risk that way?
• 52:03
  I don't know.
• 52:04
  I think, A, I grew up in a family where entrepreneurship was an option.
• 52:07
  So my dad was a farmer and farmers naturally are entrepreneurial.
• 52:11
  They have a seasonal business, so they have lots of side hustles and shit, which I was always participating in.
• 52:15
  My mum ran a little beauty salon and I didn't get pocket money.
• 52:20
  I could work in either of their businesses.
• 52:22
  But I went to a school where all of the kids basically could only see two pathways.
• 52:27
  It was I work for the government or I work in corporate.
• 52:29
  And
• 52:30
  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.
• 52:36
  And for me, it was just so obvious that I would take that door.
• 52:39
  And for them, they just didn't see it.
• 52:41
  It was like it didn't exist.
• 52:43
  And it was, yeah, it didn't make any sense to me.
• 52:46
  It's interesting because entrepreneurship was not always so sexy.
• 52:50
  No, it wasn't.
• 52:51
  Yeah.
• 52:51
  When I was growing up, there was like two.
• 52:54
  So yeah, I mean, it was Richard Branson or Anita Roddick.
• 52:56
  I'm British.
• 52:57
  So they were the only two kind of famous entrepreneurs in the UK at that time.
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• 56:46
  You're very ambitious.
• 56:49
  Where did you develop that ambition from?
• 56:51
  So I always wonder, after an exit or after making meaningful amounts of money, what gets people to play the next game?
• 57:01
  Well, for the first one, I spent it all on a yacht.
• 57:02
  So that's quite...
• 57:05
  If you hear...
• 57:06
  Absolutely true.
• 57:07
  When I sold my first business, I bought a yacht.
• 57:09
  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.
• 57:15
  I'm on my fifth one.
• 57:16
  So it's not a habit I got out of.
• 57:18
  Have you ever calculated how much you've depreciated every single...
• 57:23
  No, I wouldn't want to do that.
• 57:26
  But to be fair, I bought a plane and that depreciates a lot.
• 57:29
  I mean, it's not the depreciation, it's the operating.
• 57:31
  Fuck me.
• 57:33
  That's another level of expense.
• 57:35
  Yeah.
• 57:37
  So assume that the plane and the yacht expenses are taken care of.
• 57:41
  What gets you going for the next thing?
• 57:44
  it's actually not material.
• 57:45
  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.
• 57:53
  It's wonderful.
• 57:53
  I love it.
• 57:53
  It's, you know, it's fun, but that isn't in any way motivating or, um, or anything like that.
• 58:00
  I think, um, uh,
• 58:02
  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
• 58:22
  So when I was a kid, I used to sell watches and jewelry.
• 58:24
  And I had a little market stall at the weekend from school.
• 58:27
  So the weekend, I'd be selling watches and jewelry.
• 58:31
  And when I got a sale, you get this little dopamine hit, like the little hair on the back of your neck thing.
• 58:36
  And it just brought a little smile to your face when you got a sale.
• 58:38
  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.
• 58:44
  So you get a slightly bigger buzz.
• 58:46
  And then you sell a company and it's like a really nice hit.
• 58:50
  So I want to do that again.
• 58:51
  And actually, it doesn't really matter if it's a buy or a sell.
• 58:55
  The dopamine hit is about the same.
• 58:57
  So that's probably why we're doing like a transaction a month because you're constantly trying to get that again.
• 59:04
  And it's just really fun because it's also...
• 59:08
  These are deals that other people aren't doing.
• 59:10
  So you've found a creative way of getting it done.
• 59:12
  And so creative problem solving is quite rewarding as well.
• 59:15
  So there's a lot of like mental reward that goes into the activity.
• 59:21
  And the financial reward is obviously was really, really important and becomes less important.
• 59:26
  I was wondering if your relationship with success, ambition, if it's changed significantly since when you were younger.
• 59:34
  Yeah, yeah, a lot.
• 59:35
  So I think when you're young, there is a validation and necessity aspect to it.
• 59:42
  So the validation is, as a young entrepreneur, nobody takes you seriously.
• 59:46
  So you want to kind of fuck you moment.
• 59:53
  And there's a necessity aspect.
• 59:54
  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.
• 59:59
  So those two things become really big drivers.
• 1:00:02
  And then later on in life, there are, yeah, a different set of drivers.
• 1:00:06
  And I mean, I've got kids, you know, so now lifestyle is very much prioritized.
• 1:00:14
  I think we had this conversation before, which is start with the lifestyle and work backwards.
• 1:00:19
  So what are the things that,
• 1:00:20
  you know, you need to do to live the lifestyle.
• 1:00:24
  And so travel is a huge part of that.
• 1:00:26
  We travel every month and it's mostly non-business kind of travel.
• 1:00:29
  So we want our kids to be well-traveled as well.
• 1:00:33
  I think it's the best education.
• 1:00:34
  So we drag them around with us.
• 1:00:36
  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?
• 1:00:48
  Do you know what?
• 1:00:48
  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.
• 1:00:58
  But I mean, God, yeah, if I'd known what I know now 30 years ago, it would be insane.
• 1:01:04
  I mean, I was lucky.
• 1:01:06
  I got a lot of experiences quite young.
• 1:01:08
  So when I was 10 years old, my 14-year-old brother died.
• 1:01:12
  And that was a real, it wasn't your fault, it was okay.
• 1:01:16
  That was a real moment of kind of we're mortal because as a kid you feel pretty invincible, right?
• 1:01:24
  And then to have somebody very close to you die suddenly brings it home that it could happen to you at any moment.
• 1:01:30
  And that gives a certain degree of ambition.
• 1:01:33
  And what was weird is my grandmother was one of 14 kids.
• 1:01:38
  So all my great uncles were dying as well.
• 1:01:40
  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.
• 1:01:45
  And I was like, fuck, I went to like 20 by the time I was 20.
• 1:01:50
  And but I think that that constant mortality, I mean, it used to it used to affect me psychologically quite a bit.
• 1:01:56
  Like I would literally wake up thinking I was dying and things like this.
• 1:01:59
  I'd have like anxiety, panic moments, you know, about my own mortality.
• 1:02:04
  But I think that was also a driver.
• 1:02:06
  It was why I didn't finish school.
• 1:02:07
  I finished school.
• 1:02:08
  I left at 15.
• 1:02:10
  I've got to get I've got to fucking get on with this.
• 1:02:12
  Yeah, I'm going to die soon.
• 1:02:13
  It's like.
• 1:02:15
  And so that that was, you know, genuinely a motivator.
• 1:02:18
  And by the way, I don't think I got rid of that kind of panic attacky thing until I was in my 30s.
• 1:02:23
  It was it always used to haunt me.
• 1:02:25
  It's so interesting.
• 1:02:26
  So I know that.
• 1:02:28
  Entrepreneurs have a chip on their shoulder is a huge, motivator is the wrong word, but it helps the drive.
• 1:02:35
  It helps them become successful.
• 1:02:38
  But this is just like an acute awareness of a finite amount of time on this earth.
• 1:02:44
  It just, you didn't fuck around.
• 1:02:46
  You just didn't waste time.
• 1:02:47
  It creates insane amounts of impatience.
• 1:02:49
  Yeah, I don't know.
• 1:02:51
  That's not a lesson that I would ever want to impart on anyone.
• 1:02:54
  No, it's not.
• 1:02:55
  But it's an interesting idea.
• 1:02:56
  But you can also have that realization without the pain.
• 1:02:59
  I mean, I guess it's not as reinforced.
• 1:03:01
  Yeah.
• 1:03:02
  But you can have that realization that maybe we should treat every day as our last and one day you'll be right.
• 1:03:07
  I think that's, no, this is stoicism, right?
• 1:03:13
  This is the definition of what most stoics.
• 1:03:15
  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.
• 1:03:25
  And stoicism was one of the things that helped me the most.
• 1:03:29
  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.
• 1:03:35
  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.
• 1:03:42
  And stoicism is a great lens to look at life through in that respect.
• 1:03:46
  Because if you have something going wrong,
• 1:03:49
  it can stop you from doing anything.
• 1:03:51
  It can be paralyzing.
• 1:03:52
  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.
• 1:04:01
  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.
• 1:04:14
  But then in my day-to-day, I'll get distracted with shit that isn't important.
• 1:04:18
  But I think that it's constantly being...
• 1:04:22
  I know that some people have little coins they carry and whatnot just to remind them.
• 1:04:29
  Those are alcoholics, yeah.
• 1:04:30
  That's very true.
• 1:04:31
  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.
• 1:04:39
  Just as a physical...
• 1:04:41
  Was it Caesar that had the guy following him around telling him he was mortal?
• 1:04:46
  Yeah, yeah.
• 1:04:48
  Same idea.
• 1:04:48
  Well, I think that there's...
• 1:04:50
  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.
• 1:05:01
  And the lack of filtering and the shiny object syndrome and the taking on too much and saying no to nothing...
• 1:05:08
  is actually, even though when they started, they had the urgency, it slowed them down.
• 1:05:13
  Yeah.
• 1:05:13
  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.
• 1:05:23
  And over time, they forget that urgency.
• 1:05:25
  Yeah.
• 1:05:25
  Yeah, no, focusing down and niching what you do, I think is very important.
• 1:05:30
  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.
• 1:05:37
  And I'm like, I can pick one.
• 1:05:39
  Focus on that because you will be, you know, way more successful down a narrower channel.
• 1:05:44
  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.
• 1:05:51
  How did you get over that fear of mortality?
• 1:05:55
  Like I say, I remember still having those kind of anxiety type panic attack things into my 30s.
• 1:06:00
  And I don't know why it disappeared.
• 1:06:01
  I don't know why it stopped, but it just kind of stopped.
• 1:06:07
  But I still have the sense of urgency, just not the mental disorder that goes with it.
• 1:06:15
  One other idea that you've brought up, which I think is very interesting.
• 1:06:19
  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.
• 1:06:29
  That's a wild, that's a wild idea.
• 1:06:32
  From running the businesses, you mean?
• 1:06:33
  Yeah.
• 1:06:34
  So I think this was, you know, I was, I bought that telecoms company.
• 1:06:39
  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.
• 1:06:46
  I bought 11 companies over 18 months.
• 1:06:48
  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.
• 1:06:55
  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.
• 1:07:04
  But the money that you earn is just the money you spend.
• 1:07:07
  In fact, I think it's Oscar Wilde that says a man that lives within his means lacks imagination.
• 1:07:11
  So basically everything you earn, you spend and you don't create any wealth.
• 1:07:17
  And it was only when I sold a company that I realized, fuck, you don't make money running businesses.
• 1:07:21
  You make money when you sell them.
• 1:07:22
  It's the capital events that actually create the financial freedom.
• 1:07:27
  Because, I mean, there's two aspects to it.
• 1:07:28
  When you sell your first company, you're selling it for money.
• 1:07:31
  And the side effect is you also get time.
• 1:07:34
  And you don't realize you get the time, but actually entrepreneurs don't have time or money.
• 1:07:38
  So if you have time and money, you have like a superpower.
• 1:07:41
  Now, your superpower can be used for good or for evil.
• 1:07:44
  And I see a lot of people use it for evil.
• 1:07:47
  They get divorced, they get a sports car, they become alcoholics, you know, they go down some, you know, weird path.
• 1:07:52
  They do another startup, but they fund it with all their money and they don't act smart anymore.
• 1:07:56
  Exactly.
• 1:07:58
  But if you use it for good, you can put that money to work.
• 1:08:02
  And actually what you find is that you'll make more money from the money than you did from the business.
• 1:08:07
  So everybody says like, oh, I'll just put a manager in.
• 1:08:09
  I'll just take the money every year.
• 1:08:10
  It doesn't work like that because one, business is very fluid.
• 1:08:13
  So, you know, marketing is changing all the time.
• 1:08:16
  How things work is changing all the time.
• 1:08:18
  So you put a manager in, you can just watch it slowly glide to the scene of the crash, basically.
• 1:08:21
  Yeah.
• 1:08:22
  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.
• 1:08:46
  Whereas that half a million of EBIT, you might be able to get like two million, you
• 1:08:50
  for an exit and you can easily make a hundred grand from 2 million deployed, you'd probably make double, triple that.
• 1:08:55
  So, so that was a, that was a massive realization that the right time to start a business is now because everything can change.
• 1:09:03
  Google could do it for free tomorrow and you're fucked.
• 1:09:06
  So de-risk, get the capital deployed and have a, have a truly passive income.
• 1:09:11
  that works while you're asleep.
• 1:09:13
  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.
• 1:09:22
  But you don't believe in lifestyle businesses?
• 1:09:26
  No, because I think everything changes.
• 1:09:29
  And everything has been changing for the entire time I've been an entrepreneur.
• 1:09:32
  But right now, everything is changing even fucking faster because you've got AI.
• 1:09:36
  You've got insane amounts of disruption.
• 1:09:37
  You've got insane amounts of competition.
• 1:09:39
  You've got global instability.
• 1:09:40
  You've got all this crazy shit going.
• 1:09:43
  Yeah, just take the money.
• 1:09:44
  Just de-risk.
• 1:09:45
  Invest.
• 1:09:45
  What's your message to entrepreneurs who their identity is so wrapped up in their business?
• 1:09:52
  They have hesitation to sell it.
• 1:09:53
  It's like their baby.
• 1:09:55
  How do you wake them up?
• 1:09:56
  Well, look, it's a choice.
• 1:09:57
  It's up to them entirely.
• 1:09:58
  You know, if they don't want the financial freedom, they can just carry on, you know.
• 1:10:06
  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.
• 1:10:18
  It's happened again and again and again and again.
• 1:10:20
  I can think of one right now who was offered 18 million pounds for their company and two years later it was bankrupt.
• 1:10:26
  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.
• 1:10:40
  You make money when you sell them.
• 1:10:41
  So yeah.
• 1:10:41
  Sell.
• 1:10:42
  If people want to connect with you, um, what's your social website?
• 1:10:45
  Where can they go?
• 1:10:45
  Yeah.
• 1:10:46
  Yeah, so like I say, you can follow Jeremy.Harbour on Instagram if you want the how to make it.
• 1:10:52
  And you can probably follow Simona.Harbour on Instagram if you want to see how to spend it.
• 1:10:56
  So the lifestyle side of things.
• 1:10:59
  But no, so Harbour is spelled H-A-R-B-O-U-R.
• 1:11:03
  It's the British spelling.
• 1:11:06
  It's our language, I guess.
• 1:11:07
  That's just how we spell it.
• 1:11:08
  I'm Canadian, so we also spelled that way.
• 1:11:11
  So, yeah, so you can do, yeah, I think it's actually harbour.jeremy, not jeremy.harbour, yeah.
• 1:11:17
  So harbour.jeremy on Instagram is the one with the blue tick.
• 1:11:19
  If it's trying to sell you crypto, it's not me.
• 1:11:22
  And if people want to join Harbour Club, what do they...
• 1:11:25
  If you go to harbourclubevents.com, the main website, there's actually a button you can click at the top.
• 1:11:30
  I think it says free course, and we'll send you an email every day for 21 days.
• 1:11:35
  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.
• 1:11:45
  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.
• 1:11:52
  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.
• 1:11:57
  The course creator wave, yeah.
• 1:11:58
  So we thought we'd poison the well and just give away something that's way better than they might be paying for.
• 1:12:05
  And then, yeah, from that, you'll get a good idea because, do you know what?
• 1:12:09
  It's polarizing.
• 1:12:11
  Some people will go through that content and go, I can absolutely see myself doing this.
• 1:12:15
  This is what I want to do.
• 1:12:16
  And other people will be going, oh, that scares the fucking crap out of me.
• 1:12:19
  I'm going to stick to sales and marketing.
• 1:12:22
  And that's fine.
• 1:12:23
  It's not for everyone.
• 1:12:24
  Last thing I'd like to ask, you've given over a lot.
• 1:12:26
  You've had an incredible life, very successful entrepreneur.
• 1:12:29
  If you could just pass on the most important lesson you've ever learned to your kids, it doesn't have to be business.
• 1:12:34
  It can be a life lesson.
• 1:12:35
  But what would that lesson be and why?
• 1:12:37
  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.
• 1:12:46
  And I think just having...
• 1:12:48
  Yeah, choosing where you want to go and just doing it, I think is really, really important.
• 1:12:52
  And I was lucky enough to be allowed to take my own path.
• 1:12:55
  And funnily enough, this is a longer answer than you wanted, probably.
• 1:12:57
  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.
• 1:13:06
  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
• 1:13:25
  that told my parents that they should just let me go and do whatever I wanted to do.
• 1:13:30
  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.
• 1:13:39
  And he said, yeah, I've never met a 13-year-old that knows what he wants to do.
• 1:13:42
  I think you should let him go do it.
• 1:13:45
  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.
• 1:13:55
  Jeremy, I appreciate you coming on.
• 1:13:56
  Thank you so much.
• 1:13:57
  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.
• 1:14:06
  Some of them started companies, but some of them are just at the beginning of their journey.
• 1:14:11
  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?
• 1:14:21
  What's the worst that can happen?
• 1:14:22
  The worst that can happen is you get old and regret having never done any of these things.
• 1:14:27
  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.
• 1:14:35
  And when I fell off, the tightrope's only six inches off the ground.
• 1:14:38
  So if you know the tightrope is only six inches off the ground, why not fucking run?