Kieron James on Contracts, Revenue, and Optimal Exits

In this episode, I’m talking to Kieron James, who has built and sold more than half a dozen businesses throughout his extensive career. He’s a fascinating guy to talk to and I really enjoy capturing and going what are the things that you’ve learned along the way about increasing the valuation? What are the things you’ve learned about that can influence earn out and just what you wish you’d known before around building your business and exiting so that you can exit on your terms? It’s a great conversation with Kieron James. Hope you enjoy the episode.

Welcome to the podcast that’s dedicated to helping business owners to prepare for exit so 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 Kieron James. Kieron is a bit of a veteran and he’s one of the guys who started. He must have been well informed right from the very beginning.

He tells me he’s built and sold nine businesses with a partner and always with an exit in mind. So, Kieron, welcome to the show and thanks for joining me now.

Thanks for having me, Darryl. Pleasure to be here. Yeah, nine, it’s actually with the co founder, nine, probably personally. So between the two of us, we’ve been working together for 25, 30 years now, personally, probably about half a dozen in total. Started young, obviously, I’m not. I started at school.

Naturally.

No, no, no. So, yeah, it’s kind of an odd route because my career started in teaching, funnily enough, and then went to run a training institute in the Middle East. This would have been about 98. They asked me to put together some marketing materials for this training institute, just delivering vocational training out there. And they said, would you do a PDF? And I said, well, it’s 1998, should we not be thinking about the Internet? So that was my first venture into anything, was actually building a web design business when probably me and the rest of the world were doing the same thing.

So in your first venture, so you already had a career before that. So clearly you must have been young, they must have been teaching some entreal skills at school, which is a bit different. So Kieron, that first business, so where you were doing some Internet design type stuff, when you started that, what was your mind? Did you have a vision? Did you think, well, get out of it, well build this, well make a fortune, well sell it in a couple of years? Or what was going through your mind with the plan for that business?

I would say with that one that was probably the one that I absolutely wasn’t. But it quickly became apparent to me that that was a route that I wanted to take going forward. So the reason I hadn’t thought about it then was that, like many people doing that, it just was a route to making some cash, really, to earning a living. So we set up, I think, fairly rapidly I realised the amount of time that I was spent dealing with clients as opposed to getting paid, that’s not really the two things weren’t commensurate. And there was obviously quite a long gap between starting a job and then getting the cash in the, in the account. You know, when you thought you’d finished, you’d end up then going backwards and forwards and can you move this here and change the color of that and have this page? And whatever. Part way along that, that journey, I was also registering domain names. And that’s how my colleague and I, my co founder of these numerous businesses, subsequently, he was running a business doing domain name registration. And it struck me at the time that that was such an easier kind of route to revenue because you build it, it’s then a completely automated tool that people go on, they register domain name, hey ho, we get paid. So that’s how I actually ended up exiting that business. So that wasn’t an exit to an external buyer, it was my co founder saying, look, we wanted you to come and join this domain name registration business. What will it take? What if we buy your web design business, absorb that into another web design agency that we also run, and you come and work on the domain names business. So, yeah, it was definitely not at that stage thinking about future exits.

Yep. And it’s good to look back like that because I think that’s what a lot of business owners do. They sort of fall into a business of being self employed. And some will always be self employed, and they’ll have 5, 10, 15 helpers even. But the business still revolves around them. And you mentioned the term lifestyle business, which is often a term used, and some of them have the ability to go, yeah, okay, well, I move out of my product and move out of being the key person. If I keep employing people and going, well, let me manage my pricing. Let me get really clear around what our proposition is. What is it we sell and what problem are we solving and how do they pay for it? And if I get you to do this part, I get you to do this part. And some people have a vision and they go, well, this is what it can look like. I got a really big idea of the problems that we can solve. And if we go on solving that problem for a lot of people, here’s what the business could look like.

And to me, that’s just my really simple way of looking at purpose. A lot of we see in business textbook, you need a purpose, you need a vision. To me, a purpose is just, well, what’s the problem we need to solve? What’s the need out there in the marketplace? And then the vision is just, well, if we do that, what’s the potential we have of what could this business look like?

And if we’re going to solve that problem for a lot of people, what could this business, or what does this business need to look like to fulfill its potential? And I think a lot of us in our first business, we might pick that up and do it intuitively over many years, or some of us exit and merge and start to go, okay, well, there was an experience, okay, what do I need to do differently next time round? And you’ve been through that iteration process so many times, so I need to stop talking and ask to share what you learned on that first one and what you applied to your second one and just keep rinse and repeat that process.

Absolutely. So actually it was the second into the third, I think, that I learned, because the first one was, it was genuinely an employment offer and the route to making that employment offer work, which was, well, let’s just buy this business and clear that out of the way.

So the terms for that and the negotiation was pretty straightforward. Also with someone that I’ve been working with for a long time, we’d known each other professionally in a number of areas, but it was the second one that really was the key to moving forward and getting everything thought through and prepared. It still happened incredibly quickly. So the second major one was we’d kind of gone out of that area and into telecommunications, and we were approached a number of times, and I’m guessing a lot of small business owners get this increasingly now through LinkedIn. We’re interested in buying your business, and most of them you just regard because they probably aren’t.

I think now with AI bots, you get those all of the time, and it’s not even a genuine offer. Them, no one’s really looked at the business and they’ve just seen whether they get some engagement. So this is going back probably 2012, and we had a number of emails from a us based company that was saying, look, we’re interested in talking to you, and I was just disregarding them. It wasn’t a negotiating play. It was just literally, I wasn’t thinking about it.

I thought the time wasn’t quite right, and they got more and more persistent, and then they. I think we were their 37th acquisition. This was a Nasdaq listed business in the state. So really super slick process in terms of knowing how this was going to work. That was the preparedness, I think the lessons that really set me up for all of the future ones, because we learned enormously from that process.

Sure. Do you know how you got on their radar, Kieron?

I think we got on their radar because we were incredibly good at search engine optimisation in terms of what we were doing. That’s always been the strengths. All the businesses that have been involved in right back from the web design have been zeros and ones, I think with one exception, when we had a venture into doing some vegan products again time, this is 20 years ago online, the rest of them have always been zeros and ones.

So, you know, build it, try and create infrastructure and so on. That’s completely scalable from day one, but doesn’t cost you a fortune from day one. So that idea of scalability in data centers was always really important to us before we moved everything into the cloud. So, yeah, we were, we were doing SME based services around telephony. So it’s things like call management systems.

So if you wanted small business, you wanted calls to go to voicemail out of hours, but during the day you wanted maybe a hunt group. So three or four employees could receive the call, an inbound customer call. So it was that kind of thing. And we work really, really hard on positioning ourselves very well on Google. So I think we really hit their radar because they were doing searches for products that some of the companies they already owned were doing.

And we were constantly kind of knocking them off position one and down to position three and so on.

Right, okay. So you’d raised a profile that you’re pretty good at what you’re doing in the SEO space, and this is the business where you learned a lot. So I’m going to dig a little deeper here, if that’s okay. So they kept persisting and what was it about their persistence?

Did they start talking numbers? Did they convince you that they’re really serious about this and that you’ve gone, oh, hang on a sec, there may be something in this. What was it that convinced you to start communicating back?

I think there were a couple of things. One was the seniority of the person that was emailing increased as the emails came. So that was something. LinkedIn Washington really helpful because we were able to do a little digging there and find out what, you know, what they were doing, what they were up to as an individual, also as the, as the company. I think they then dropped a couple of names of recent acquisitions that we were familiar with in our space, but in other, I think in other European countries rather than the UK. So, you know, it got us to thinking, well, you know, they do know the stuff, they know what we’re talking about and they’ve been in this space for a while. And so I think that was all really, really important.

And then there were the usual, I guess, typical US, but the usual kind of sales elements to that as well, which became increasingly appealing from not being something we were necessarily thinking about right now. It was actually, we could probably do this deal reasonably quickly because we’re very, very skilled in this and have it concluded in a fairly short timeframe. So that had its merits and appeal as well.

Okay. And so you respond and start going into dialogue. What was the first, I guess you mentioned you learned a lot. What was the first aha moment at this stage when, because you weren’t thinking of exiting, so you weren’t even thinking about, hey, well, I need to make this attractive. You’re just building a business at this stage. What was the first aha moment?

There were a couple of things that I learned from that experience in terms of the valuation that we could get for the business that we’ve really tried to employ going forward. And this is always a really difficult one for small businesses scaling, which is you’ll very often acquire clients that suddenly elevate your business massively, but also end up taking a fairly large share of your revenue. That was one of the, its one of the hazards, you know, its one of those things you don’t want to turn anyone away, but suddenly when you’ve got two or three that are accounting for 30, 40% of your overall revenue, you recognise that can be a potential blocker or obstacle in terms of the value they extract. So I think we’ve always, since that acquisition, always had an eye on to keeping a broader balance of number of clients holding x amount of revenue. But I think that the real key in terms of the learning at that stage was how efficient they were. So again, to put that into perspective, we got a letter of intent on the 18 December. We concluded the whole thing with money in the bank on the 13th of Feb, which is, I think, by anyone’s standards, extraordinarily quick. And I think it was also, it was a good reflection on the team that we had most of the ducks in a row, but there are still three words that I use and often share with people when I’m talking to new founders about this kind of process, and it’s standardised, digitised and organised. And let me put that into some kind of context for you. Again, I’m going back to 2012, so, you know, a lot of the tools were existing, but we were doing things like digitising lots of paper documents. And I remember literally scanning contracts for things like water coolers and making sure they were in our data room and in our, in, sorry, not in our data room and so on.

So getting all of those into a format where they were readily accessible, if they were paper based, was really important for that process, the standardisation part of it. So, you know, paper documents, the digital standardisation is just making sure you’re using as you set up. And I would say this to any founder right from the beginning, whether you’re setting up a document space on Dropbox, if, or anywhere, Onedrive, wherever it might be, but standardise the approach, make sure all the folders are accessible to the people they need to be, and make sure all the file names follow the same kind of standard because it sounds like a really simple thing, but doing things like putting the date in year, month, day of the month, and then the file name after, it just makes organising that so much easier when you’re viewing those documents. So we really tried to insist on a standard nomenclature for everybody that was creating anything and uploading it to our shared space. And that really goes into the organised part as well, just making sure everything is there from day one.

So whilst we’ve got everything, we still need to pull it all together for them to do that analysis prior to the acquisition. And I think what we do now is we do that from the beginning. So I think you start thinking about exit literally the moment you either incorporate your business or create your partnership, if that’s what your plan is from day one.

Yeah.

And your customers, clearly.

Yeah. Look, we, it’s the quickest way to get control of your business and demonstrate that the business is not dependent on you. And the only way to do that is to document it because it’s the only form of evidence and it can be digitised and or, you know, not many people have a paper coffee nowadays.

Nowadays. Now the other thing I’d say in that area as well is that we all, as small business owners have this imposter syndrome all of the time thinking, you know, are we qualified to do this? And I think a lot of that’s born out of the expectation in our own minds that we have to be great at everything. And clearly, you know, nobody is. Typically, if you’re really great on the financial side, you might not be so creative.

Clearly there are exceptions, but maybe your, you know, your UI design is not front of mind if you’re a CFO. And I think one of the things that was said to me, and this took me years and years and years, but it was six words said by a finance manager to me when I didn’t know the answer to a question. And she said, Kieron, that’s what you pay me for. And it was suddenly, yeah, you’re right. This is also about bringing those teams in so that you can delegate that kind of thing effectively. And as you say, you’re not that key person. That’s absolutely critical to the business.

Yeah. So surrounding yourself with right people and building a leadership team around that, that can run all of the functions as you grow and scale it goes beyond the one or two founders into functional based management team. So we typically have a CFO or FD, or let’s call it financial skillset.

And then we need a marketing skill set to complement, bring in the demand for the product. And then there’s typically an operations type person as well, who runs the factory or the production of, of whatever your product delivery is. They’re the first three key roles I see. Is that the model you effectively unrolled?

100%, yeah, and absolutely. I mean, the CFO, my CFO now is the guy that I mentioned at the outset that I’ve worked with for all of this time. And we are completely yin and yam when it comes to this kind of stuff. We very, very different, which works very, very well. And again, I brought in a super operations guy a while ago to one of the early businesses. Now, funnily enough, my co founder of this current business is also my daughter, who’s come up through the ranks and is now our head of operations.

And again, very different skill sets. But my operations guy in the first telecoms business we pulled from actually one of our upstream suppliers who’d had an outage which had impacted on our customers, caused me complete pain. I remember being down on a train and I was drafting my furious response to going to this meeting, and he placated me within a couple of minutes. And he was so professional, so good and so clearly that it, you know, it was there. And then I thought, right when the opportunity arises, this is a guy I’m going to bring into the business. So again, very different approach. Very different. Very even keel and, yeah, but more.

Of a planner, you know, think things through. We need to do this. We need to do this. So really bringing that, those organisation levels and focus and discipline to keep everything together and sees the bigger picture. But people like that tend to need a vision or a direction from someone like yourself.

I’d agree. I’d agree. Yeah. They are very much the doers, you know, and every organisation needs those because, you know, to put those processes in place, it’s okay having the vision, but you need someone to implement them and that’s that. It’s a different mindset from, from my point of view. Yeah. So we’re thinking big picture and you can get some tension there as well because they’re obviously the people that are obviously thinking a lot about the potential obstacles as you roll things out.

So one of the, one of the hazards of being a founder and being keen to exploit new opportunities is there’s a tendency, particularly with small business, that agility can actually make you go too fast, too quickly. So having someone who’s in the operational headspace is really great to think about, you know? Yeah, but have we got enough bandwidth? Have we got enough service? But have we got enough whatever it might be, do we have the appropriate regulatory permissions in place? You know, there are all sorts of things to be thinking about.

Okay, so am I hearing an entrepreneur? Are you an entrepreneur, one of these people who’s got a million ideas going through your head all the time and dare I say, almost changing direction every day going, we need to do this, we need to do this. And every day there’s a hot new idea. And am I hearing you say that what people like me, like you need is a really good tempering person who says, no, hold it.

Yeah, there’s a thousand great ideas there, but here’s the two that we’re going to run with and to make it work, if we’re going to get leverage out of those ideas, we need to do this, this, this, this, and think it through it. And you need to slow down and, you know, go for a run, Kieron, or just get out of my way for a while, while we just run with this and we’ll implement it when we get stuck. We’ll tap into you for the next big idea. But, and, but what you’re saying is that you really value that tempering, slowing you down type of person that just makes sure that everything is done properly and well, standardised, digitised and organised.

Completely. And I think that’s a whole team. It’s not just the ops, your CFO role to play in that. In terms of how you’re going to resource this, what’s the revenue stream look like? How quickly is it coming in? So, yeah, I think. I think the ideas, but that said, I would also, I’d say these ideas from a business perspective have come from every aspect of every area of the business, in terms of the people in it.

And we really want to make sure people don’t feel that they’re siloed and that their approach is not going to be heard if they come up with great ideas. Some of the best ideas we’ve had for the business, business ideas, commercial opportunities have come from our head of technology in both businesses. In the current one, in payments and also in our telecoms business, we developed an entire product and an entire new business was born out of that through our tech guy coming in and saying, I’ve got a really great idea about zero, three numbers when we were doing the telephony service and we could do conference calling on it and not charge the customer and you just go, that’s absolutely genius. But then, as you say, it’s having the team to think what the implications then for the rest of the business, the other opportunities and so on. And yeah, I think everyone’s got a role to play.

Okay. So just capturing that from thinking it through. A lot of businesses, I hear, and even the ISO type of systems, when it comes to systemising the business, they’re always very much focused on systemising the operations. So we’re always producing the same thing consistently, repeatably, reliably, and so the customer will get what they expect. Are you also suggesting, and what I’ve seen a lot of other business owners talk about is going well, actually, we, we’ve got the leadership team, we’ve got the CFO, we’ve got marketing, we’ve got operations who the core of our leadership team. But we’ve also systemised our leadership methodology. And some of them talk about processes like EOS or scaling up with Kieron harnish. Have you experimented or dabbled with systemising your leadership approach to marching towards your big picture?

Not yet, but I think it’s something that we will consider doing that in terms of the scale up at the moment, it’s probably less systematic. I mean, all of the thoughts are in place in terms of what we do from an operational point of view. But you’re right, I think that does tend to lead a lot of the other stuff. So we have this issue on the payment side where you want to make sure that everything you’re doing is simple, fast and secure. That’s clearly really important with payments, but then how scalable is it? So we’ll give a lot of thought to things like, well, we know the amount of data that we’re processing for a telephone call is probably significantly more than it would be for a payment, which is something that you’re not holding in in play for several minutes at a time. So technically that’s pretty straightforward. But in terms of the approaches to the management team training, we’re still in that small business kind of mind, which we’ll need to venture out of fairly quickly. Probably post funding is the time that I’ll be starting to put those things in place. And I think that’s when you can also, having the flexibility and the agility when you’re really small is great as long as you say you don’t go off in 27 directions and don’t do anything. I think you really need to make sure you retain that focus.

But it’s the point where you’re starting to get meaningful feedback from a meaningful number of customers that you can scale up in terms of product and marketing and so on. Because without that critical mass of customers giving you the feedback on what the product looks like, then I think it’s quite hard to do.

Sure, sure. Yeah. You need the feedback. Okay. So we’ve talked about a number of things from, you know, documenting your systems, getting your leadership team in place, knowing where you’re headed, and begin with the end in mind type of mindset. If we capture, I guess, over the career you’ve had, Kieron, where you’ve added several businesses now and then exited them, what’s the key learning that you’ve got that you’ve gone, hang on. Once I agree to sell the business or exit the business, here’s what I know I need to have done in advance from learning from those first couple of experiences. What is it that you know that, hang on, before I exit the business, I need to have this in place. This in place. This in place. What have you gleaned there?

I think a couple of things, actually. A lot of them go. They do go back to the beginning, which is thinking about who you’re going to exit to, if you can. And I know that might change along the way, even things like legal jurisdictions. I mentioned we exited to one Nasdaq company. We actually exited to two Nasdaq businesses over the last 20 odd years.

So, again, from a legal perspective, what does that mean if you’re dealing with California law as opposed to English law, having a good team of lawyers that you can depend upon? We’ve used the same guys for our exit now for all of the exits, because they’re super dependable. They’re really, really great. So I think thinking about that can be very important. Thinking hard about the cap table from day one is really important. But everyone says, don’t give away too much at the beginning because you’ll regret it through future funding rounds and so on. But I even think with that, there’s a balance, and let me give you an example of that. When we were launching one of the very early businesses, I literally had no cash. I’d come out of work and started, and I had a great idea, or at least I thought it was a great idea, but I didn’t have the technical ability to build it, and I didn’t have any money to pay anyone to build it. Probably couldn’t have got a loan based on an idea, not even a huge amount of market research at that stage.

So I gave somebody, it was 5%, I think, of that business, to do the building work, and then subsequently bought that person out of the business. Now, both parties were really happy with the arrangement because the point at which he was bought out. The amount of coding, if he charged me for it, would have probably cost me four or five grand at the time. Maybe he ended up getting substantially more than that for the work that he’d done. He was very happy.

We were very happy. We couldn’t have launched the business without it. So I think cap table is really important. But everyone says, don’t give away too much, don’t give away too much. Do what feels right and something that you can live with, paperwork, definitely make sure all that’s in place.

Make sure you’re thinking about the scalability for sure. And then I think the cool thing, again, learned from experience, is always think about what you want personally from it and where you’re going next. Is this your retirement fund? Is it enough to get the kids through college, whatever it might be, or care for an elderly relative? As long as the things that you want out of that, just like anything else you’re comfortable with, then you’ve got a good deal.

So we had one where we, and I’m sure this was completely planned with 2020 hindsight, where we went to sign all the paperwork on a Friday. Friday, got to 04:00 p.m. on the Friday afternoon, and suddenly there’s a call coming in from the US saying, one of the guys here isn’t quite sure about this. Can we think about it over the weekend? You then get the email coming through over the weekend and we want to.

We’re going to check the price a little bit because of X, Y and Z. And you go, right, I’m walking away. Your head’s saying, I’m walking away. They’re not doing this at this stage. And you have a conversation with a colleague and they’re saying, but think about what you want from this.

Is this still a satisfactory outcome for me? Is this going to be a life changing sum of money or is it going allow you to do that next thing? And, you know, again, giving that time to pause, think, reflect and go, actually, it’s still a great deal. And maybe that was a negotiating tactic from the outset. We never intended to pay you that much. We were always going to do this. Who knows? But I think that’s critical. It’s like, what is it you want from this?

Yeah, look at the big picture, not the process.

Completely, completely.

So, working with that, Kieron, what have you learned over the several businesses about the things? In your experience, are there any things that influence valuation more than others from a buyer’s perspective?

Yeah, contracts, if you can get them, for sure. So contracts with all your customers.

Ideally recurring revenue is great if you’re in our space, and I don’t mean specifically payments, but anything that’s ICT, information communication technology. If you can be selling your product all day long and it’s completely scalable and you’ve thought about how you minimise those touch points but still keep your customers happy, I think all of those things are really, really important that you’ve got something that kind of you’ve built the machine, that’s what you’re really trying to do. Certainly in the, in the IT space, I built something that’s going to make the product or service easy to find, easy to onboard, easy to use with as few touch points as possible. That becomes completely scalable as long again as your technology is right. And I think that for me has been the main lesson from day one, from that second acquisition is always be thinking about that.

Are we easy to find, are we easy to onboard and are we easy to use? If I get those three things right, the rest is pretty straightforward.

And moving on from that just a tad. So they’re the things that improve evaluation is the way you structured your product and is it easy for clients to get on board and do they stay with you a long time? I guess as well, they’ll influence valuation.

What about from an owner’s perspective when you do the exit, are there any things that you’ve learned that influence whether you can, I guess, walk away or get most of your money upfront or as opposed to earn outs, are there any things about the business that go, well, this is great, we’ll give you this valuation. But Kieron, we need you to hang around and make sure this happens over the next two years. And it’s dependent on certain criteria. So we want to remove as much as possible earn out type requirements. You can hang around and stay for two years if you want, but it’s the valuation hinged or attached to earn out that I’m looking to explore here.

And I think that’s all based on as much empirical evidence you can get that demonstrates that there’s no good reason why people are going to move away from the model that’s been presented over the last three, four, five years, whatever it might be. If you, you’re showing the growth, you’re showing the growth in numbers. I think the contractual bit is quite important. And I know again, that depends on the service sector in whether you have those long term contracts. But if you’ve got the contracts in place and you’re giving no good reason for customers to churn then I think that speaks volumes.

So for me, it’s all about the past and demonstrating that you’ve built that it’s scalable and that curve’s not going anywhere, I think that can be backed up with a lot of externality work that you’re looking at. Is the regulatory scape changing? Is the market change? I mentioned telecoms earlier on and the move away potentially from voice to more app based interaction with phones. So be looking at that all of the time.

But I think it’s that balance, having a good, solid, well dispersed base of customers that are on recurring contracts with you that you can still demonstrate that you’re bringing in new business all of the time. I think think it all feels very, very straightforward and obvious if you’re running a business. But I know not necessarily as we had those three customers that we were delighted to welcome on board until we got to that point when we’re thinking, damn, that’s a lot of revenue.

And I guess the awareness is there that it’s all very obvious now that you’ve done it half a dozen times. For all the business owners out there who are on their first journey, shall we say, and they’re still in the thick of it, it’s sometimes harder to extract yourself out and have a look from the outside in of going, how would a buyer be looking at this business? How would they be evaluating it?

And I think the other thing just very specifically around that is if you’re only submitting your annual accounts once a year, make sure you’ve got a lot of management information reporting that’s going on on a monthly basis. So you can be sharing that with potential acquirers as well because, you know, they may be talking to you, you know, potentially 17 months after your last accounts were filed. So they’re looking at pretty historic. So you want to be able to, you know, just point them to the direction of, you know, his last months and the month before and the month before all of that. And again, those are the kinds of disciplines that sometimes fall to one side if you’re in the middle of it all.

And I guess that’s, that’s one of the things that comes back to, we talked about exploring a management information system or, or management systemisation that would include being on top of your financials and reporting progress in real time and making adjustments because we’ve got the reporting in place. So, Kieron, look, I know it’s been a bit of a whirlwind tour and conversation today, and we’ve scanned across so many businesses and really a significant volume of experience there. I’m going to ask you, is there any way you can condense what you’ve learned over half a dozen or so experiences for business owners out there who are going, wow, okay, so if I could capture the. And distill what Kieron’s learned from so many experiences, what’s the key thing you’d love business owners to take away from your journey and our conversation today,

I used to describe this in a couple of different ways, but you mentioned purpose before, and I think it’s, don’t confuse passion with purpose, that they are two different things. Or the other way that I often said this or describe this is to be passionate and dispassionate in equal measure. What do I mean? You can have an immense amount of passion for something because a lot of business owners start a business because it’s something that they love doing. You know, maybe it’s a hobby or an interest that they’ve got and they think there’s a business opportunity here and there may well be a business opportunity, but you’ve always got to be dispassionate about the numbers when you’re looking at them.

And again, that goes back to the purpose. If you feel like your fantastic idea for a business isn’t quite working, do you need to pivot? Do you actually need to just give up and do something else? And that might sound really harsh, but don’t just keep cracking along with it. I mentioned the physical product, the vegan stuff that we did a long time ago.

There was a period we just thought, you know, we’re actually, we actually had too much demand, bizarrely, and we couldn’t fulfill it and it was really becoming problematic and we just thought, no, we can’t make this work. So it’s a move on. Huge passion in the product, but actually, in terms of what we were doing, it was difficult for us to operate. So I think that’s really, really key. Don’t believe because it’s your idea, it’s necessarily everybody’s shared passion and there’s a huge demand for it and be prepared to make changes.

Awesome. Brilliant. Kieron, look, I really do appreciate you sharing your insights across a span of businesses. Thanks for sharing your exit insights with us today.

Thank you. My pleasure.