Exit Strategies for Entrepreneurs: Insights from Jamie Waller’s Journey

Welcome to the podcast that’s dedicated to helping business owners to prepare for exit so that you can maximise the valuation and then exit on your terms. This is the Exit Insights podcast presented by Succession Plus. I’m Darryl Bates-Brownsword and today I’m joined by Jamie Waller. Jamie, hey, thanks for joining me on the show. You’ve got a great background and experience of actually, well, exiting more than one business successfully, which is a great story to share.

Why don’t you just, I guess, give us a little bit of a background. I always like guests to introduce themselves rather than me read off a script because I know you’re going to tell us the important stuff around your background and the highlights that matter. So when did you start your first business?

And we’ll take well, thanks for having me first, Darryl. And yeah, I mean, as with most entrepreneurs, I guess there was some sort of early, very early business type activity as a child. But age twelve I set up a bike repair little stand outside a sweet shop, actually a curtain making shop which was above a sweet shop in Bethnal Green. I grew up in Bethnal Green in east London, which was quite an entrepreneurial place anyway, you know, full of market traders, drivers and builders and stuff. But also, you know, I grew up in a two bedroom flat above a shop, relatively poor neighborhood, which meant the reality was that the only way you were to get out of Bethnal Green was to make money and be successful. And the quickest way to do that was work for yourself. On top of that I was dyslexic, which means the opportunity for me to get an education, get a job were quite low.

But my first sort of toy in with business was around age twelve. But at 16 I left school without any qualifications. I set up my first business cleaning people’s windows. I’ve sold that business for about 6000 pounds in the back of a classified ads newspaper a year later because I hated it in the winter. The summer was great.

You got to carry around these ladders and you know, be manly and clean windows and shorts and a t-shirt. In the winter it was terrible. The manliness didn’t really add up. And actually while I was doing my window cleaning, I used to clean the windows of a shop on the main road in Woolwich, called Woolwich Road and the shop had a disused piece of land next to it. So I negotiated with shop owner that if I continued to clean his windows on a weekly basis that he would let me set up camp there and start selling cars.

So I guess my first real business was a car sales yard in one age, at age 16 or 17. And it was great business. I was making a couple of thousand pounds a week, which, you know, back in 1997 was a lot of money. And unfortunately that business came to an abrupt when transport for London were given devolved hours over London. So they came along and painted double red lines outside, which meant that nobody could stop to view any cars.

And as such I went from sort of hero to zero in a few weeks, which was a bit disappointing. But a few weeks later I set up another business and I ran that business for twelve years, sold it for tens of millions of pounds, set up another one six days later, sold that for over 10 million pounds. And Australia in New Zealand.

I’m just sitting here, I don’t know if I’m bewildered or I’m just thinking the energy of this guy and the creativity and the drive to just go, well, I’ll just start this, I’ll turn it into a business, I’ll create something, I’ll make a few bucks or a few quid, I’ll, yeah, I’ll sell this one. Made a few grand out of that because I don’t like working in the winter in this job, so I’ll sell the business.

Whereas a lot of those types of businesses owners walk away from. And then he says, oh, well, yeah, I’ll do this business. And that one evaporated from under me, so no worries. Well, this one I’ll build this business. And there you go.

And as I’m speaking and as I’m listening to you, I’m reminded of my uncle in Sydney, I guess, very similar background. He came from a real working class, working rural new South Wales. Started life as a butcher, bought the premises, created several butcher shops, got to the point where he got bored and couldn’t expand it anymore. Got into taxis, had a fleet of about ten taxis, had a skip business and similar there. And then he finally got into real estate and set that up for his kids.

But the flip side, and I don’t see this in you, is that he got his business to a stage where they were always very owner dependent and he never figured out how to extract himself from key roles and having the business always dependent on him because he was the best at everything. And he got to the point where he was just exhausted, where every business, because he couldn’t extract, extract himself out of it. And then so he sold the business. And my sense is, as an outsider looking in, I don’t have any privy information is that he could, if he’d been able to extract himself from the business, being dependent on him or relying on him to make all the decisions, he would have been able to sell them for a whole lot more.

Yeah, I bet. I mean, I’m naturally very lucky in that sense that I’m dyslexic. Dyslexics are famously very good at delegation. Is that right? I’d never made that link. Yeah.

So, you know, it might be that I’m just really good and learn to delegate myself, or it might simply be that I was born. I’ll accept it. And you’re right, it’s enabled me to build. I mean, today I own two separate businesses, trade in a bunch of countries around the globe, employing a few hundred people. You know, the last time I’ve been to either of those offices is, you know, I’ve not been more than four times this year.

So, you know, I can be able to run my businesses from arm’s length, and I think it’s better for them. When I’m needed, I’m called upon or if I believe that I can add value. But what I don’t want to do is employ a bunch of really expensive people and then tell them what to do. You know, if I wanted to do that, I’d employ a bunch of 26,000 pounds a year people, but I’m not. I’m employing executive teams and chairmans and FD’s and CFO’s, and it’s just really important for their own sense of well being to give them, give them the power to do the job.

And without doubt, that’s not always easy because you do sit at an arm’s length sometimes going, I wouldn’t have done that. I would have done this. I know this. I know that you need to coach people through the delivery rather than just.

Tell them, so can we dig into that? Because I don’t want to gloss over that critically important point, like you said. Well, the first and the first thing I picked out is you said, hey, look, I’m not just employing basic, cheap people, I’m recruiting senior educated people who are management team caliber people. And so I need to trust them, is what I heard. And you said, well, sometimes they do things that I’ve gone, well, I wouldn’t do it that way. But as the owner of the business, how do you not jump in and sort of meddle, which a lot tend to do, and you mentioned that you’ve got to adopt a coaching mentality.

So how do you, if you employed a marketing manager and you had been doing the marketing yourself for a while. How do you hand over that position and go, right, you’re now the marketing manager in my business. Do you give them a brief, how do you do that handover? And how do you get them to the point where you’re both happy with them in the role?

I think, I mean, it sounds cliche, but, you know, you’ve got to set some boundaries. So, you know, any business with a real brand and missing statement, et cetera, should have those boundaries ingrained within it. So, you know, so you can step in and criticise when people step outside of that remain. I’m just trying to think of a live example. I mean, I’ve been doing some stuff around with Virgin Galactic recently, but you think about the Virgin brand. You know, the Virgin brand lends itself to the London marathon or did for x amount of years.

I’m sure that if Richard Branson was sat at home and got the message that that had happened, he didn’t need to make any phone calls. If the virgin brand lends itself to the priory rehab clinic across the UK, I think he might go, ah, hang on a second, where does this. That’s, that’s not the, that’s not the guardrails I’ve put up. I need to know more. And I think if you set those guardrails, then it becomes acceptable for you to dive in and firefight and don’t.

Let’s, let’s remember I did a business course once at Glenfield University, and there was a great chap there who led the course called Mark Polly, and he said, you know, the problem with young entrepreneurs is they all want to be like Jackie Chan. Whenever there’s a problem, they want to go in a room and go resolve everything, because they love the feeling of look at me. And it’s really important to, even when you do step in, you’ve got to step in as the coach, as the wise one, to try and get them back within the guardrails and don’t step in to resolve. But I talk about it like it’s easy. It’s not.

And I’m 45 and every year I get a bit better at it. So, you know, I want to be honest to your listeners and viewers. I don’t have all the answers, but it’s something you also have to work at every single day. Yeah, actually, I’ve got a problem going on in one of my businesses at the moment. I’ll be completely honest with you.

In October, the CEO of this business presented an idea to me and I said, it won’t work. And these are the reasons why, which is really odd for me. Normally I would sort of let it go, but I just knew that this was a bad idea. And I. He wasn’t listening because he had got himself so prepared to present this to me.

He’d been thinking about this for months. I’d been thinking about it for 6 seconds. And so we ended up after hours not agreeing. So I said, well, I’ll give it a go. Give it a go.

But this is why I don’t think it will work. So my understanding of that meeting was, I’ve authorised this, but on a trial basis. Give it a go. Actually, only last week did we unwind that. So that’s taken, you know, nearly eight months.

And that trial should have taken no more than eight days, in my view, because I knew it wouldn’t work. But he had got himself so entangled into. But it will work. I’ll adapt it. I’ll do this, I’ll do that.

Now, not every business has eight months. Yeah. So I think it’s important for listeners and viewers to realize that it is circumstance based, too. You know, if you’re a sub million pound turnover business and, and you need to get stuff done, then you know what, being Jackie Chan a few days a week might just be the right answer. Don’t beat yourself up about that.

Well, that’s a really important point because as you’re saying, it relates to the context, the stage of the business. If you’re still less than ten people, then you probably have to be Jackie Chan or Superman or go in and rescue. But once you get beyond about ten people, which is the point where you need to start thinking about a management team, you’ve got to adapt for transition from that entrepreneurial savior role to a management team and a more of a constructive, structured, led team, which is hard for a lot of business owners. It is.

And, you know, I think business owners get a lot of flack for it. But let’s not forget, you know, employing people isn’t an easy task. And when a business is 10, 20, 30, even maybe 40 to 50 people, most of the employment decisions are still being done by the business owner. The entrepreneur, even if they’ve got a HR person or something else, is doing the interviews that the business owner is pretty much making those decisions. And like it or not, you will still have some idiots. You know, you will, out of 30, 40 people expect five or six idiots.

So you’re going to have to jump in and resolve it. You can’t just keep putting up guardrails because they’ll just jump straight over them. And the one thing that we all do badly is we don’t get rid of people fast enough.

Yes.

So we carry on putting out fires, we carry on getting in there like Jackie Chan. We carry on doing the work ourselves until eventually people drive us so insane that we then get around to getting rid of them. But especially entrepreneurs, you know, they’re notoriously terrible at confronting the situation of dismissing people.

Yeah. Jamie, picking up on something you touched on earlier, you talked about, hey, you need to have guardrails if you’re going to employ a management team. Give them some guidance, like, here’s your lane that I want you to stay in.

And you mentioned things like brand value, brand vision values, those type of things. So that’s a really important distinction that I’ve not heard anyone else talk about calling that guardrails and that documenting of your business model, your vision, your purpose, your values, etcetera, is part of the framework for guiding the leadership team in making decisions. In your absence, your role is to make decisions. And here’s part of the framework, let’s call them guide rails, rules of engagement. As long as you play amongst these rules and you use these values to guide you with your behaviors. And here’s the vision that we’re heading to as a business, as long as it keeps us moving in that direction, we’re good to go. So there’s a nice distinction that we’ve not heard before, which is a great ad.

It’s really important the decisions are made right, because if there’s one of you, when you first start out, you are single handedly making every decision every day. You might be making 50 or 60 decisions a day. If you then employ ten people, you’ve still only got the capacity to make 60 decisions a day if you’re solely responsible for them.

If you employ 1000 people, you’re still only able to make 60 decisions a day. It’s a sure way of going bust. So you have to delegate decision making as the business grows. And I think you’ve got to have that strong belief amongst everybody in the business that as long as it’s within these guardrails, it will never be criticised. The only thing that will be criticised is if you don’t make decisions.

But I have to say also, I’m a real strong believer in a hundred percent activity with 80% quality. So I’m 80% quality 100% of the time. Now, don’t get me wrong, that’s not a good strategy. If you’re running SpaceX you want 100% quality 100% of the time. You’re a brain surgeon. But it is business dependent, right?

Yeah.

But in the businesses that I own and operate, that’s. That’s my strategy. I want to keep moving forward. Progress is much more important to me than.

Yeah, yeah, and that’s a really good point because. Yeah, we. Yeah, some of the excuses I hear is, well, no one can do it as well as me. And we go, is that okay? Like, he’s 80% good enough to get it right, and then if you can come and add an extra 20% later as you’ve learn more and evolve, maybe, or is it just not required to get the result that. That we’re looking for either for ourselves as a business or for the client?

I mean, the bias that we all have about ourselves. And also, my 80% quality might be somebody else’s 100. So I have to accept that. I think it was an 80% quality decision. They think it’s 100%. I was watching one of the election debates on tv recently, and it appeared to me at the end of the debate, I thought, I would really like to have sat here with somebody who had voted for the last 15 years for the opposite party, because they would have seen a complete different tv debate because of our natural bias towards what we want to get out of it. And that’s the same with decision making. So even it’s really difficult to accept. But when you think, okay, well, I wouldn’t have made that decision.

So it’s an 80% quality decision. The likelihood is it wasn’t an 80%. The likelihood is it was a 90%. And so was the last ten decisions you made. You just don’t see it that way.

Yeah, look, I’ve had the conversation with people in the past, and I’m going, look, just imagine you’re that little triangle on your GPS unit. When it’s stationary, you can change direction and it’s still not moving. So it doesn’t matter what direction you’re not moving. If you’re moving in a direction, you’re making progress. Now, once you realise you’re in slightly going in the wrong direction, you can change direction.

And then as long as you’re still moving forward and you slightly change your direction, your course improving. But as long as you’re moving, you can make those adjustments and keep getting better and better and better. But if you’re not moving, if you’re stuck in the headlights and you can’t make a decision and you’re not doing anything, it doesn’t matter how perfect the decision is, if you’re not actually moving, you’re not going to go anywhere and make progress.

And that making lots of decisions does that. I mean, I’m a sailor and I’ve sailed across a couple of big oceans. And if you were to have a GPS attached to one of my boats coming across the Atlantic, that takes 20 odd days. It does not go in a straight line. You know, it goes with the wind to one side, a wind to the other side, a wind to the other side. And there are a number of these decisions. Some of them are made once a day because you’re fortunate enough to have the trade wind. Some of them are made seven or eight times a day. But what does happen is progress is made, and eventually you reach the other side.

And what we can see is that you ended up in the direct, in the destination that you set for.

Yeah.

So you knew where you were going and you got there and did you dig? Okay.

Talking about that, actually, it’s a really, really good analogy. I mean, every business that I’ve ever been involved in, we start with a three headline strategy, which is, where are we now? Where do we want to go, how are we going to get there? And the only uncertainty in that is how we’re going to get there. We absolutely know where we are now. That’s a really easy one, right? That’s a two hour workshop. Where do we want to go? It might take us a day to get everyone aligned on that. How are we going to get there?

I mean, don’t spend too long on that one, because the only truth in that is that it will be wrong from 24 hours after you started. It’s where we now, where do we want to go? How are we going to get there? Once you’ve got everybody aligned on, you’ll make progress towards that space and the destination might change, let’s face it.

And where do most people spend most of their time?

Yeah, exactly on the middle bit about, I made a few acquisitions in life, too. And it’s really interesting when you inherit a business and a management team and you see the way they work, this intense worrying about what the competition are doing, and this intense worrying about copying the competition or outmaneuvering the competition, and I’m like, oh, please, just stop. Turn off all those Google alerts that are trapped in your competitors and stop following their LinkedIn accounts. What do we want to do? Where are we going to go? And let’s focus on that.

That’s. There’s a great tip. Jamie, what I’d like to do now, if it’s okay, is you’ve sold a number of businesses already and you’ve got, and you’ve said, I think the first one was 6,000 pounds for the first window cleaning business and the last couple for tens of mil. What I’d like to ask is what have you learned about you’ve sold a number about what makes a business sellable? What have you learned what makes one business sellable and others that you weren’t able to sell?

Well, obviously it depends on the circumstances. Obviously if you don’t want to stay there, then you’ve got to be redundant before. You’ve got to make sure that there’s a sufficient management team in place that will be left behind with that business. That’s sort of key.

The one fundamental thing is that you’re leaving growth and there’s two things about that. Nobody ever goes bust by taking a profit. And I’ve seen lots of my friends wait because they think next year numbers are going to be. Next year’s numbers are going to be better. Next year’s numbers are going to be better because they want maximum amount of output when they sell.

When I sold my first significant business, which we sold for about 40 million quid, that business is now, you know, that we sold that in 2017.

It’s now probably worth 70 or 80 million, maybe even a bit more. That’s good news. That’s good news for the person that’s buying it. It was good news for me because I was able to exit at a reasonable period. But also what it does, and this is a real important one for those younger listeners and viewers.

If you are expecting to then go back into the business world and do other stuff, you want to really make sure that you protect your personal brand and that is that when you sell businesses, they do well. I’ve got a few friends that go around to networking events and dinners and they have five or six glasses of red wine and they celebrate how look what happened. I sold it and two years later it was, you know, the turnover was down by 50%. They royally messed it up. That is nothing to celebrate.

You must, you absolutely must sell a business that has progress left in it and is able to do what you say it can for the new owners coming in that.

Yeah. And that sort of takes us back to the earlier part of the conversation we had, didn’t it, around owner dependence. Like you said, make yourself redundant in the business. And if the business has a management team or a leadership team that’s driving the business forward, the business is exit ready because it doesn’t need you anymore.

You’re redundant, it’s owner dependent, all of those things. If the business doesn’t leave, you and that leadership team have got a pattern now of growing the business on their own. There’s every reason that should continue with the new ownership, right? And if that happens, then you, your personal brand is that you set that up really well.

And what you’re suggesting, I think is the only reason that a business would collapse. So like occasionally there’s a market conditions, but if the owner didn’t leave it in as in good a shape as it could be, and that seems to just feed egos, which is..

It’s doing nobody any favors. But I mean there’s so many people on the sort of found or exit circuit that celebrates it and I just personally I find it disgusting. I want to be able to sell a business and say there’s another five years of growth that I’ve planned in this business and this is what it looks like. And as such, I want you to buy me on a bit of that growth. I don’t want to buy me on today’s numbers.

I want you to buy me on next year’s numbers.

Yeah, but to do that they need to trust you. And the first acquisition, the first sale is very much on a trust basis. But I knew when I sold my first business, age 36, that I would probably do two or three more. So when I sold my first business, I think I had between eleven and 14 bidders.

When I sold my second, I had more. We’re probably going to be doing a transaction on one of our assets next year and I would hope that I’ll get 25 bidders because what I’m giving the buying world private equity trade, public limited companies is I’m giving them more certainty and the best way to get maximum value. It’s basic economics. It’s supply and demand. You just want more demand.

So if you get two bidders, it’s not great. If you get 200 bidders, you’re probably going to get a great price for your business. Now I don’t think anybody gets 200 bidders, but you get what I’m trying to say.

Yes.

It’s really important to have people want to come to the business, to the table. And for advisors, obviously it makes the advisors job a lot easier to be able to send out an IM saying.

And by the way, here’s a bit of history of the founder and the businesses, how they’ve tracked since..

All of his businesses in the past have gone on and continued on the growth patrons after he left. Its a great.

I’m sorry to interrupt you there, but it also means you’ve got to behave yourself. You can’t go and set up your next business and take staff from your first business. You can’t set up your next business and take clients from your first business even when your restrictions are over. So my restrictions from my first big sale in 2016 ended in 2019. I could have gone after the CEO, the CFO, etcetera, etcetera. I will not employ any of their staff.

Yeah. Not under the same ownership.

And that, that allows. Yeah, there’s a good point that allows you to maintain a good relationship with them. If you want to go and do it, they’ll go, hey, look, this guy sold us a business. Did really well. You start up a new business and if you’re looking for them to partner, client, what have you, you’re more likely to get a favorable response, aren’t you?

Well, the organisation that bought my first business was a multi billion organisation from Tokyo, and they happen to buy my second, too. And who knows, they might buy my third. So, look, you know, this is a marathon. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. And you don’t want to be making too many enemies on your way, not just for the sake of another thousand pounds, 100,000 pounds, or a million pounds profit. It’s just.

All righty. Hey, let’s tap in. Jamie, have you ever tried to sell a business and weren’t able to sell it?

No, I just begun. I’ve worked with advisors when I thought I wanted to sell a business and then not press go because I thought, something’s not right, but we’ve never started the process.

Okay. And. Okay, so that was a case if you just thought, yeah, your spidey senses were tingling and. r was it something, or something else?

You know, my advice to anyone who wants to sell a business is engage with good advisors, because advisors will work with you and you must listen to them. So, you know, it’s been. There has been an occasion where we’ve engaged advisors because we thought it was the right time to sell. And they’ve said, actually, we think seven or eight months time might be right for the following reasons, and you either take that advice or you don’t. And on that occasion, we took that advice, and I think they were right. Okay, cool.

So, having gone through several transactions, what I’m looking to extract is the key learnings that you found. You said, we discussed about what makes your business sellable is the fact that you’ve got a management team in place and you’re effectively redundant and the business keeps growing after you leave. We had that conversation.

Is there anything else that we can tap into to go, hey, look, how can you prepare your business? What are some of the things, what else can you have in your business that’s going to make it more attractive to be acquired, more sellable? That will just make that whole transition a whole lot smoother for outgoing owners?

I think the most value adding thing you can do, if you can find the money for it, is to do what is called vendor due diligence, which is to have one of the firms come in and do an external audit on you. So what they’re saying is that the information you’re putting out there in the IM is true, because again, I’ll keep coming back to this dial, but your job is just to get as many bidders to the table. It’s basic economics, and if you’re putting out an IM, a bunch of promises. When people bid, what they then need to do is they then need to spend a lot of money doing due diligence to try and evidence what you’re trying to sell. If you’ve had vendor due diligence done, and that might cost 30,000 pounds, if you’re a small company, up to 150 if you’re sort of tens of millions, it enables you to attract more bidders, because they’ve not only cut out the process and reduced the risk of you lying to them, but they’ve also managed to cut their deal costs, because you’ve got to remember, a lot of these organisations fail deals when they’re trying to.

So your deal costs are just put into a bunch of ten other deal costs that fail. So to buy your business, for example, might cost them, although it might only cost them 200 grand for your business, they might have had seven failed deals to get to that one, and they’re trying to recoup all of that money too. So vendor due to is a real if people can afford it, and I would almost argue that if you can’t afford it, it’s probably not the right time to press go. There’s an insight.

That’s a great tip there in itself. Jamie, get an external audit. Why? Because it reduces the risk of buying your business for everyone, which you’re going to attract more bidders, which at the end of the day, I think you’re touching on, hey, selling your business, it’s kind of just another deal. If I’m hearing you correctly, selling your business is just like selling your product, you’ve got to treat it like a deal. You got to reduce the risk or the friction for clients wanting to close that deal with you.

Yeah. It’s worth its weight in gold. And the big consultancies will tell you that it’ll pay for itself and you’ll go with it. Rarely, but it does, without a doubt.

Okay. And Ian, if I can just ask this about your experience, whether personal or commercial, in going through the transaction from the point of, let’s say, putting the business on the market or making the decision, the choice that you’re going to exit the business, the time is right all the way through the journey of completing the deal, and it’s no longer yours. You’ve done that several times now. What have you learned along the way? If there’s any big top level?

Yeah, I think the biggest thing I learned is that you should plan for your own exit. I think what most entrepreneurs do is they plan for their business, exit it really well. Do vendor due diligence, put the team in place, appointing the right advisors, but they don’t consider what they might do afterwards. And that was a real difficult one for me. You know, I sold the business and wasn’t quite prepared for what next. And that’s an interesting one. I went off and started an executive MBA, which for a dyslexic with zero education, is quite difficult.

I found that too difficult, obviously, within a few months and dropped out of that and I set up my next business, which I sold. But again, I hadn’t learned first time round. I sold my second business and was then like, well, what am I going to do a few weeks? Well, about six or seven weeks after selling my second one, I started my third. So you’ve got to understand now. I understand now that my future is, I love creating businesses. If I sell a business, the likelihood is I’m going to start a new one. If you don’t have that plan, what you don’t want to do is become what a good friend of mine says. You don’t want to become rich and irrelevant. You don’t want to be hanging out at all the networking events going, oh, yeah, no, I used to do this because nobody cares. They only care about what you do now. So do really, really plan for that?

Yeah, and we’ve seen that as well. So I’m really glad you bring that up because I’ve just seen deals fall over because the owners just don’t know what they’re going to do next. And it all of a sudden becomes real that if you go through with this, you’re going to be out of the business.

What are you going to do? And if they haven’t got a clear vision, and these are entrepreneurial people, so entrepreneurs are action people. Like we were talking earlier, they need to know what they’re going to do next. If they’ve got a vision of what they’re going to do next, it’s going to go through. When they they don’t, they get stuck and they’ll find a reason for the deal not to go ahead. And even at a subconscious level.

There you go. There’s a business idea there. I mean, you know, ideas are cheap, but execution is expensive. I know, but I’ve. Just. As you were speaking there, I was thinking, well, I wonder why corporate finance advisors don’t partner up with an organisation that could help with that, because it does create deal failure. So when you appoint a corporate finance advisor, I wonder if it’s like, have you thought about doing some, you know, in an old world, all the corporates used to call it retirement planning. My father in law was the CFO of GSK. He had 18 months of retirement planning where he met with a coach once a month and really got himself ready for it. And he’s living the best retirement ever, actually, I think he’s in Nepal right now, so, you know, he’s really enjoying life. But entrepreneurs don’t do that, and they’re probably the people that need it most. Well, you’ve.

Look, I couldn’t agree more. And it’s something that we’ve, you know, we do the exit planning, so we touch on that. We talk about getting the owners ready, have make sure that the business is exit ready when the owners are ready to exit. And with the numbers that work is the key thing, that the three areas that we think are most important, and they’re the areas that we work on. We don’t do the corporate finance, but. Yeah, you’re absolutely right that those two should be working hand in hand.

Okay. So we’ve touched on some of the learnings along the way and that you’ve got to prepare for exit. You know what you’re going to do next. What are you working on at the moment? Jamie, you’ve sold a couple of businesses.

You’ve already mentioned that you’ve got a couple of businesses on the go that, my words, you’re basically running them via remote control. What else? And you already mentioned that you need to keep active and your action more than sit back. What are you focusing your effort and energy on at the moment.

Actually, I’ve just finished writing my second book. So I published my first book in 2019 called Unsexy Business, which was about how you don’t need to be an inventor to create a business. You can simply do something that already exists, but slightly better. You know, think coffee shops, think taxi companies, etc., etc. Where we featured twelve entrepreneurs and their stories ranging from Duncan Ballantyne down to a local suite retailer, discount suite retailer. And my second book, which has just gone live in the last few weeks for pre order, is the dyslexic Edge, which has just been amazing.

So I’ve been traveling around the world interviewing some amazing dyslexic entrepreneurs. So Charles Dunstan from half owned warehouse, Paul Orphaner from Kinko print, both of them started their businesses with very little capital. 115, 125,000 pounds, one $5,000. Both of them sold their businesses for over 2 billion. But also Kelly Hoppin from Kelly Hoppin designs from fussy deodorants who appeared on Dragons Den and secured investment, Theo Perfetis.

So we’ve interviewed all of these people about their dyslexia and really told their life stories within one chapter around what do you believe is your superpower from dyslexia? But also what were the achilles heels moments? How tough was it? And how do you believe that your dyslexia has led to your success? There are some great stories in there.

There’s also some great things around certain exits. You know, think Carphone warehouse. Carphone warehouse. You know, could you imagine a company called Carphone Warehouse today? No.

But Charles was genius at selling just at the right time. So there’s a lot of nuggets in there about planning for exit, when to exit, what people did after exit, and what life is like. So that’s been. That’s been my, my last 18 months project and I’ve loved every moment of it. And for three years prior to that, I set up the Princess Trust Enterprise network, which has been amazing.

So I spent a three year term there as chair, which is around less advantaged people, set up, build and maybe one day exit their own business.

Alrighty, so the book’s now released, or is it on Amazon?

On Amazon. All major formats across both the US and the UK. It’s for pre order now, the release dates the 12 September. So, yeah, if anybody has not just an interest in dyslexia, but the book also. My co author is Doctor Helen Taylor. We also take away what dyslexic thinking looks like and give those tips to non dyslexic readers. So how you might think like a dyslexic to succeed in your own personal life or business.

Ah, using the dyslexic advantage as a lever.

Exactly.

Brilliant. Hey, so look, we’ll put links to that in the show notes. So if anyone wants to get a, get access to Jamie’s book, it sounds brilliant. I think I’d definitely benefit from using some dyslexic thinking, even though I think I, I just wonder if I am myself because I’ve always struggled with similar things.

I’ve just never been tested. But if it is, it’s not bad. So, Jamie, look, I think that’s wonderful. I love your energy, I love your ability to keep going and just the creativity to just keep popping up new business ideas and then just get going again is remarkable. The whole time we’ve been having this conversation, I’ve been looking out there and going, look, he’s.

And for those who can see or watching the YouTube video of this, Jamie’s got a massive, it’s got a beautiful panoramic view behind him, behind a massive glass, I don’t know, window, I guess it is. And I’m sitting here wondering, I bet he pays someone to clean that window rather than he does it himself.

Absolutely. That is quite funny. When we moved into this property, it was just two years ago, and you’re right, there’s loads and loads of glass and it all overlooks the river, so it’s quite an important room, which means that the glass needs to be cleaned very frequently.

And my wife said, oh, I found somebody’s recommended a good local window cleaner and stuff. And I said, well, how much is it? I think it was about 85 pounds for the house, just the outside. And I said, no, no, I’ll do it. My wife said, what? I said, I’ll do it. I was a window cleaner and she was like, oh, Jamie, please, let me just employ the window. You’ll never do it. So I went onto Amazon and I spent a about 600 quid on, you know, the best kit you could buy because I’m now going to clean my windows once a week and I did it once and I have to say I did a terrible job at it. So we do have a window cleaner, he doesn’t come weekly because that’s far too expensive, but he does come once a month and he is a lot better cleaning windows than I ever was.

That’s brilliant. Jamie, it would be remiss of me to ask, I’ve really enjoyed this conversation with you, but are there any final tips. What’s the key message? What would you love listeners to take away as keynotes from our conversation today?

I think really, really think about yourself when planning for exit. Don’t put all of your energy into the business because life without purpose can be a really unhappy one. So that is my number one tip. But also, just plan well. Don’t be greedy. Leave something on the table for others. And remember that nobody goes bust making a profit.

Jamie Waller thanks for sharing your exit insights with us today.