Brokers, Bankers & Big Engines

Welcome back to Building Resilient Futures. I'm Aryan Vedhara, and this is episode 3, Brokers, Bankers, and Big Engines. In this episode, I'm joined by Darren Selig, the founder and executive director of JBR Capital, the UK's specialist lender for high-value cars. Darren's journey takes us from engineering to qualifying as a chartered accountant to the trading floor of Lehman Brothers before being made redundant and deciding to take the leap into entrepreneurship. We'll explore how he identified a niche in luxury car finance, what it really takes to understand your customer, and how persistence, resilience, and the ability to pivot define long-term success. Get ready and strap yourselves in for episode 3.

So if you could give me a brief background on your history and your career.

Of course, it's a pleasure to have you here. My name is Darren Selig, I'm the founder and head of JBL Capital. My career and education really started all the way back. I did a 4-year master's in engineering. Once I, um, finished my engineering degree, uh, I wanted to get a business qualification to combine with it, and, um, I decided to become a chartered accountant like my father was, and so it's what he always wanted me to do. So I managed to get myself a job with KPMG in London, studied for 3 years, qualified as a chartered accountant, um, but I decided that a career in auditing wasn't really for me. I decided then to follow actually what a lot of my friends were doing, which was going into the city, going to work for investment banks. And so I applied for jobs. I had at that point no clue at all what investment banks did, how they were structured, or how you would make money. I managed to get myself a job at Lehman in their back office finance team in expense management, and it was incredibly boring. I just then decided to start looking around the bank, spending my time to work out what disciplines were in each area. You had investing banking, you had equities, you had fixed income, and I decided that equity research would be a really good place to be. Um, and I specifically targeted the capital goods team, which was the team that wrote research reports on large engineering companies. So it was a great way to combine the engineering I did at university and the accounting skills which you needed to build all the financial models and all that kind of stuff you needed to be an analyst. So I started making a beeline for the XU research team, made a really big nuisance of myself until eventually a role came available. And I think, quite frankly, they just gave me the job to shut me up. I think I drove them completely mad. And there I was in equity research from, oh, a long time ago, 1996 until September 4th, 2002. September 4th, 2002, I remember it very well. It was the day I was made redundant from Lehman Brothers and possibly one of the happiest days of my life. So quite strange to say a happy day when you're made redundant, but actually I wasn't really enjoying it very much. And to be frank, I wasn't very good at it. There were a lot better analysts in there than me. And in retrospect, they probably did me a favor. But at that point, I decided that I didn't really want to go back into the investment banks, and I really wanted— at that point, I had aspirations to go and carve out a career, a business for myself. So I came home, I told my wife, I'm not going to go and look for a job, I'm going to go and start a business. At which point she was freaking out. And she's like, we have a 6-month-old baby, what are we going to do? You just need to get a job. I said no. So I started looking around, I started looking at property, types of business, property investment, property management, development. Don't think it was really me. And then a friend of mine, an old friend of mine from Newcastle actually, who was working in banks in asset finance, he called me and he said, listen, I'm thinking of leaving the banks. All the banks are making all their sales team redundant. That's trend, all the salespeople are becoming self-employed brokers. Okay, I'm looking for someone to start a brokerage with. I don't want to do it by myself. Do you fancy doing that? I had absolutely no idea what that meant at all. So we met for a coffee, we had a chat, said, okay, let's give it a go. And that was it. And that was the start of my career and trajectory in funding cars.

And from that point, did you start JBR Capital immediately from that point, or was there a journey of failure before success.

Failure before success. You've got to have lots of failures before you find the right version. JBR didn't come till 2015, and here we are in 2003. So there's a 12-year period run-up towards getting to, to JBR. And in fact, we started an asset finance brokerage. So that's actually called London Asset Finance. Very innovative name. We did asset finance and we were in London. That's where the name came from, really. Quite as simple as that. And we started a finance brokerage. We were middleman between customers and lenders, and we were a matchmaker, we put people together. And we were covering the general asset finance market, so plant machinery, trucks, trailers, lorries, cars, wheeled assets, and we were working with around 20 to 25 different lenders, and we were trying to find customers through various distribution channels that we had, and a lot of direct customers But given we were in London, we're in the Southeast of England, we came across a lot of business owners, company directors, sole traders, just highly paid, high-earning individuals, maybe in, in the City, City of London down the road. Um, and they all loved cars and they all bought very expensive cars and applied to finance them. So we actually fell into funding cars. Rather than go looking for it. And it became very apparent, um, very, very quickly that it was quite a lot of fun to fund cars, you know, a car. And more to the point, we discovered that, uh, you— if you funded £100,000 on a car, that's like the same as doing 10,000-pound transactions on a, I don't know, forklift truck. So being quite lazy, economics worked very well to focus on larger transactions of cars of passion, assets of passion, a bit like what you see behind you, away we came. So in a very, very short space of time, we quickly got a name for ourselves as being one of the go-to places as a broker to fund cars. And during the early 2000s, there were really very few brokers in the market that specialized in cars. And if you compare that today, The market is very, very saturated. There's a lot of brokers chasing the same deals and it's really, really competitive. Back in the 2000s, not so many. There was maybe 4 or 5 of us that were the big names and we were all doing all the transactions. So in a way, we were lucky. It was a— we spotted a niche and it was, it was easy to, to look good in those days. But your question is what came before JBR. So we ran the finance brokerage for around 10, 12 years. And really, once you got to around 2006, 2007, I was looking at the market and I was thinking about how we operate as a broker, as the middleman, and it was a very frustrating place to be. As I said, it was quite an embryonic market, and lenders who operated in, in our space didn't really understand two things. They didn't really understand the, the types of customers that we're funding, which are high-earning individuals and high-net-worth individuals. And some of these, some of those profiles of those customers are really quite different to a typical consumer. They, they have multiple income streams, multiple bank accounts, and they structure their taxes differently to, to your eye, or, you know, the normal man in the street. So sometimes they can have complex structures and earning streams and lenders sometimes struggle to understand them, and actually their processes don't allow them to understand them. They don't really want to spend the time on manual processes. Everything was moving to becoming automated, auto-decisioning. So if you're, if you're of a, a profile that didn't conform to an automated scorecard, then the computer wouldn't understand you. And if the computer doesn't understand you, the outcome is going to be a decline, not an acceptance. And then the second reason was that So that's the customer. A lot of lenders don't understand customers, and then the other thing is they don't really understand the asset. They don't understand specialist cars. So, you know, these are cars, if you think about it, Ferrari today produced 10 worldwide, McLaren 5,000 cars worldwide, whereas someone like Ford or Toyota are producing millions and millions. Cars. So these are very niche specialist assets. Sometimes, you know, you'll get, you know, Fagan Farron will produce something like a 675LT, or Lamborghini, they'll do something like an Aventador SVJ Roadster. And, you know, this is coming to an underwriter in a bank who understands excavators and cranes and lorries, and then the Gossamer Venkstall SVJ Roadster. What on earth is this? I don't know what this is. I don't know how to value it today. I don't know how to value it in the future. So the easy answer for an underwriter is to say I don't understand it, so it's a decline. So two things made me look at how do I become a lender. Clearly someone else could do better. Maybe I could do better. Maybe we could build a business that could do better, provide better service to these customers who are generally misunderstood. They're not poor credits, they're not bad credits, not people that you wouldn't want to lend money to. They're by definitely people you should be lending money to if you actually spend the time to understand them and the cars and the assets they're purchasing. So for me, it was all about, you know, kind of getting frustrated that a lot of the transactions that we had would get declined and thinking, well, if only there was a specialist lender who'd spent the time to understand them and the cars, wouldn't that be great?

And when you started JBR Capital, did you go through a fundraising round? Did you have a co-founder to join the journey with you?

Yes, I did. I did. Actually, it's interesting because I get to the point there of talking about the frustration and actually the desire and want to potentially look at going through that transformation from being a broker where you're just the middleman to becoming the lender, becoming the principal. Funny enough, I didn't have spare £30 million in my back pocket to be able to get a business off the ground. So I started looking at, well, how could you possibly go about that? And actually the first port of call was actually— well, it wasn't actually JV Art, was that there was a precursor to that, which was a joint venture with Investec, with Investec Asset Finance. The reason for that was I started looking for a partner, I started looking for another bank that didn't have any exposure to this sector, that weren't actually operating in this sector, and then go and convince them this would be a brilliant sector and funding line to go into, rather than start from scratch. And cut a long story short, we entered into a joint venture with Investec. We were supposed to bring sales, distribution, knowledge, expertise, and the bank would bring the operational platform so processing, underwriting, and running the contracts, live contracts in life, and in fact all the direct debits, that kind of thing, from customs on the loans, and operate the loan book. So it seemed like a really good arrangement, and it was a good arrangement for a few years, and there were certain things that weren't working within that joint venture. So I started JBL Capital, I went, I brought in a good friend of mine at that time who was a very well-seasoned CFO to start to the fundraising. So we started looking for equity for the business and the senior funding. You've got to be prepared for a lot of rejection because the majority of people will just say no. Actually, the stock answer is, this looks like a really great idea, looks like the market doesn't have enough places to market, come back when you've kind of proven it and you got off the ground. We actually just need— we need to help to get off the ground, not come back later. So we spent a lot of weeks and months trawling the streets of London, and with a lot of rejection, a lot of café visits, sitting with your head down thinking, what do we do next? Is this ever gonna get anywhere? Like all these things, you need a bit of luck, but you do need to put in all the hard yards and all the effort. And everyone says the right place and the right time, but I'm a big believer of you need to put yourself in the right place at the right time. So no meeting is ever a waste of time. You know, you'll find that in your career, you'll go to lots of meetings, meet lots of people, you think, why am I wasting my time on this meeting? I'm busy doing something else. You should always make the effort to go where possible because you just never ever know what's going to materialize either then or in the future. Future. There's so many times that things have happened down the line, years later, from a meeting or in a chance encounter from years earlier. And you'll see over the course of your life how, um, all these meetings and all these contacts and relationships that you build over time come to help, um, come to fruition, sometimes years and years later, just when you, you don't expect it. Um, and, and that's what I've found. So anyways, the, the, the bit of luck that we had was that we got invited to meet some folks down at HSBC through an introduction actually from a chap called Stephen Halstead, who ended up joining the business as the Chief Operating Officer. And he was in a different venture as a CFO, and he suggested, why don't you meet these people at HSBC? They've helped me raise money in a different venture. Off we trot, and we, we give this presentation to the global head of asset-backed lending, um, who turned out, um, by the way, to be a big petrolhead who absolutely had a passion for cars. And there we were with nothing more than a 30-35 page PowerPoint deck, which we'd refined over time. You know, it wasn't a bad deck, it was a decent deck, but we were essentially a new start business with not a huge track record. I mean, we did have track record. I had 10, 12 years as a finance broker in the sector and had 2 years' data from a joint venture that I had. So there we were in front of the global head of asset-backed lending. He turned out he had a passion for cars and absolutely loved the idea. He said, I've got to do this, and he sponsored it all the way through all the committees and we managed to get approved a £60 million facility, securitisation facility, with them on the assumption we could raise the equity and get going. Once we had the senior funding in place, it became a whole different story on raising the equity. All of a sudden, people were willing to start investing and giving equity, and actually we raised commitment of £30 million of equity from a PE firm called Cabot Square Capital, who invested in the business, and that's how we got on our way. So we raised £90 million with not a lot more than a 30-page PowerPoint presentation. A lot of guts for that, as they say.

You worked with a bank, you partnered with a bank, and you were invested by a private equity firm. What advice can you give for someone who maybe is a first-time entrepreneur who is trying to raise that money, and how difficult is it to be in a room with these senior people?

It can be quite intimidating, so you've really got to know, you've really got to understand your numbers. You need to build financial models, model it all out. PFirms especially like to model everything. If you don't know your numbers, you can forget it. First meeting we get, Goldman Sachs of all people. We got absolutely ripped to shreds, I think it's fair to say. So it was actually a very good learning curve. We came out of there and we thought, okay, I think we need to do a lot more homework here and, and get out, get our act together. So, you know, you need to produce a very slick presentation, it needs to be all over your numbers, but ultimately, if you have a great idea and a great business, it's that passion and drive that comes through. So investors want to see that you're very passionate about it, and more importantly, that you truly believe in, in whatever it is that you're pitching— your idea, your product, your market, customers you're going to serve. Because ultimately, investors aren't backing businesses, they're backing people, they're backing management teams. And what will win your investment is if you can prove that you're a credible management team. And because if you're a credible management team and they believe in you, they will believe that you'll be able to build your business with them and be successful. People should always bear that in mind.

Launching JBR Capital in 2015, you had just a small team and only personal recognition, but you financed £500 million in the next 5 years. What were the biggest and earliest challenges that you faced in gaining that initial momentum?

So we started off having got the investment, £30 million of equity commitment, spent over time, from Capital Square Capital, the initial £60 million from HSBC, sign here, sign here, and, um, had spent by that point 15 years or so, which is a short time, 15 years, building up knowledge, experience, expertise, but more importantly distribution and networks, and knew how to originate and knew where to go and get business from most dealers, whether they're large franchise groups like HR Owen. We've always done a lot of work with, with people like HR Owen, Sydney Group, Dragon, Lithia now, and a wide range of independent dealers who tend to be single-site family-owned businesses. So I knew how to get business from dealers. I had a big bank of customers that came to me directly as a broker. I'd obviously not worked originating business from the broker market before because I was a broker, they were my competitors. So here I was, you know, um, Pritchett and Gamekeeper, and now having to go to the broker market as well, who were all my competitors, some that were good friends, some that were less friendly, should I say, and convince them now we're on different sides of the fence and that we all need to work together. But here we were, raised money, 11 people, huddled around a few computers in a small office in Hampstead, um, and raising the money is hard enough, so now you're kind of on your way now, and we know how to distribute, we know how to originate business to get us going, but what we didn't have at this point and had never done before was have an operational platform which we could process loans. Because if you remember, as a broker, you originate loans, you propose those into another lender, they will say yes or no, and then you're writing those loans on their documentation, which paid out with their money, and they service their loans on their platform. Now we're going to have to build a platform to process loans. So Having no experience myself, or that small initial team, in running an operational platform, I'd say that was the biggest hurdle, the biggest challenge that we faced to get going.

And now, 10 years later, you have done over £1 billion worth of car finance. Yeah, so, hopefully, full, yeah. In 2022, you predicted that affordability concerns wouldn't hit luxury car sales. Now with interest rates and living cost pressures, how accurate were those predictions and has anything changed?

I'd say it's highly accurate. One thing I can tell you about the luxury sector is, you know, it's dominated by affluent people, high-earning individuals who are in well-paid jobs or are high net worth individuals, so have significant assets as well if you're in that category. And in the 25 years that I've operated in the sector, it's not a sector that you will see a similar lending to prime customers, more or less. It's not a sector where you see generally large arrears issues or default issues, loans that go wrong and end up in termination repossession situation. If I go all the way back to the global financial crisis, 2007-8 time, and what you saw is luxury car prices, values fall by around 25% pretty quickly, and then you saw those values firm up around 6 to 9 months later pretty quickly. So it came down, values came down quickly, and then got back to where they were within about a 9-month period. But in our little niche world, it wasn't, wasn't a problem.

Having interacted with a lot of affluent earning and high net worth individuals, what themes and similarities do you see between that class?

They're all barking mad. I say that, say that in jest. A lot of similarities. They're very focused, driven people who are generally entrepreneurs. The demographics of our customers are a lot of them are either entrepreneurs or heavily weighted into real estate, either real estate being their primary business, you know, they've built up property empires, or real estate is a secondary business. So they've built up a lot of buy-to-lets on the side whilst they've got their normal day job. They're very entrepreneurial, think on their feet. They're deep thinkers, risk takers, but very calculating and very, very shrewd, very tough. But a lot of resilience, a lot of resilience. Customers are very resilient and very tenacious. So these kind of people will keep going, going, going until they find success or find, or do what exactly what it is that they, they want to do. But they're a lot of fun. So if you talk about just SIFT's level, how they operate with us, they love their cars, they're very passionate about them, but they are, they are a culmination of, for some of them, years of hard work and labor until they get success. It's like a, it's like a bit of a trophy for some of them, and so it's a bit of a prize. There's often no rhyme or reason at all as to why they overnight will want to change from a Ferrari to a Lamborghini, red car to black car, from that Porsche. So they don't tend to keep their cars very long.

And having run a business, you've obviously done a lot of hiring. What are the key traits you look for in a young person when you are interviewing them or looking through a CV?

Someone turns up is a good start. No one wants to go to an office anymore. You know, I think the same characteristic stands out today as they've always done, you know, make yourself known, you know, be present, make sure you get in front of the right people. You'll be quite strategic about, you know, where you go so you can get in front of senior, senior people. Everyone's indispensable, but you've got to make sure that you get noticed and recognized. How do you get a good job and how to get in? Things like internships, great things to do, lots of network, and you've got to go and meet a lot of people. I still think it's a people deal with people world despite technology.

And the high-end auto landscape is changing very quickly. The increase in the number of hypercars, EVs, boutique car brands, and a more— a growing number of crypto wealthy buyers. How is JBR adapting its lending approach for these emerging segments?

The truth of the matter is that this is a very very traditional business, and despite all the changes in this industry, there isn't much change. The only change you tend to see in motor finance is at the volume end of the market, so where a typical loan size is £15,000 to £20,000, which is not our market. It's all, um, high automation, no human interaction, self-serve, So you, the customer, do everything yourself. It's a digital journey in the main. So in the volume market of car finance, it's all about never having to talk to anyone, self-service, all digital, happy days. In our segment, despite the change, the types of vehicles that you may start to fund, and there's, as you said, there's lots of kind of bespoke niche brands coming out, and there's EV. For our segment, what customers value more than anything is service. They value personal service. For us, it's all about building a kind of concierge service, personal service, something that's unique experiences. So we're trying to build, we try to become kind of the centerpiece of the enthusiast car community. So we feel like we're an enabler within that community for people to fund their passions. And this is kind of our little tagline, is fund your passion, which is a play on the words of your and our passion. So we don't go out doing hard sell. Oh, here's a finance example, and you know, you could pay X amount per month. We're all about, we're here, we understand you, we're part of your community, we understand your cars, we understand you. And so when they come to fund their car, they naturally come to us, whether that is a tip, you know, combustion engine, an EV, whether it's an enthusiast car of £50,000 or whether it's a hypercar of millions of pounds. And we've done plenty of loans on hypercars. Behind you got, you know, beautiful picture of, you know, LaFerrari. So you've got a car in the middle which is my favorite car of all time, Enzo F50. These cars are 2, 3, 4 million £2 million each. We've lent more than that on some cars. We've done cars like McLaren F1 GTR, which at the time was an £18 million car. Mia Pulpa's at around £3 million. In fact, I think I funded more Enzos in this country than anybody else. I've done Enzos since 2003. I think I funded 22. I counted all the chassis numbers up, all the different Enzos I've done in my time. You know, and, and we've done niche brands. There's always new niche brands coming out, things like, um, Koenigsegg, for instance. In fact, we did a last month Koenigsegg Jesko. That was a 3.5 million pound amazing car. So there's, um, there are lots of niche brands out there, and there's, there's, there's new ones coming all the time. So we talk a little bit about EV. That's an interesting one because obviously the government has all its targets and to move to EV by 2030, 2035. But remember, the date keeps changing. In our segment, the only EVs that we really come across are Teslas, which for us, a bit hit and miss, I think. Tesla, you either love them or hate them. I'm not a massive fan. Can-Am, which is an amazing car, but there's a lot of them around now. I'd say in the secondhand market, they are classified as a really good buy right now. Values have fallen a lot, and you've got to remember we're still really in the early phase of EV. There's a long way to go in, uh, you know, EVs. And there's definitely a question mark as to whether EV, electric vehicles, will be the dominant alternative fuel source. There's other, other things that will come to market, and it may not actually be electric cars that's the way forward. So people are buying them now, well, it may seem like that's where it's going. Still, I would consider them as early adopters. So we've got Teslas, we've got Taycans, um, and then you've got hybrid— the hybrid technology. You've seen hybrids being used in a lot of hypercars, and that comes all the way down, um, from F1 into hypercars and then into the normal supercars. That technology comes all the way down. So, um, not masses amount of EV cars in our market, but obviously the, the one that is obviously a fantastic perfect for our customers is a Rolls-Royce Spectre, which obviously is a, you know, a full EV. And if you think about it as a Rolls— what do you want as a Rolls-Royce customer? You want speed, torque, and, and, uh, silence, you know, noise. It ticks a lot of boxes there. So we have a lot of customers who've bought Spectre.

And you had industry background when you identified your niche. How would you say difficult that was to find that niche, or did it kind of land in basket.

Life and your career is just iterations, iterations, and iterations. And that doesn't work. Okay, so now I've done right. Iteration, iteration. There's a constant journey of trial and error and mistakes, um, and refinement. So you've got to be prepared to fall over and make mistakes for things to go wrong. But ultimately, to be— I think to be successful, you've got to find the one thing that you're really good at, and then become the absolute best at that. The best version of yourself, the best at that, and the best in the market. And then you're gonna win.

For someone who did a degree that doesn't directly affect what they do every day, or it does maybe, can you tell me about how important do you think a degree is and what specifically you study and determine your career path?

That's a really good question, and I love that question. So, well, if you're going to be a doctor or a dentist or something, a vocation like that, then your degree is going to be very relevant, and you couldn't do that job or that career, um, without it. It's going to be really, really hard, um, to do so. Um, now I did an engineering degree. It was predominantly mechanical engineering. It was called materials process engineering, believe it or not. It was a combination of lots of different types of engineering along with materials process, process engineering, and I would see a lot of factories and see how processes work. Whilst I didn't follow a career in engineering because I decided it wasn't going to be for me, I didn't know it wasn't going to be for me until I did it. And actually, I got a lot of practical experience while I was at university because I was a sponsored student, so I got sponsorship internship from a company called Davey McKee, which was a heavy engineering company in Sheffield where I was. And to do the course that I did, you had to be a sponsored student in industry. So I spent a lot of time working in industry, and actually, whilst I really enjoyed the academia of engineering, um, I didn't enjoy the practical working side of it. And actually really helped me formulate the opinion that I didn't want to be an engineer, um, whilst it's still a great career for lots of people. It wasn't for me. You know, you can take transferable skills like that and say, well, okay, now how do I build a process to process loans? From one end of a process to the other, it's still a process. So there's lots and lots of transferable skills, but really it's the discipline about what it teaches you, how to think and how to approach problems and problem solve. I had a, you know, I really appreciate everything I did, Coming to your question on should you go and do a degree and go to university, that's a, that's another big question. I'm probably not the best person to, the best place to answer that properly, but what I will say is university is for some people and not for everyone. Um, you know, back in my day there were far less people going to university than there are today. There's more people going to university now than ever before, but there are many routes and you can, you can build a very successful career, equally successful if not more successful by not going to university. There's lots of apprenticeships, as in, say, accountancy, for instance. You can do accountancy now by— through the apprenticeship route without going to university. Going to university is really expensive and you end up with a lot of debt, but there's great personal life experiences to be gained by going to university. So what I'm saying is there's, you know, you can get to the same place, just a different way, and everyone, you know, should look at all the options and choose what option works best for you as an individual. I, you know, to be successful in business doesn't mean you have to be the, the best academic either. I've seen lots of my friends have done, built phenomenal businesses, and who were not very academic. In fact, if you look at them, you're thinking, how are they going to survive in life? And they go on and build huge businesses and, you know, are very, very successful. Because they're very entrepreneurial and they've just got a knack for business. And often academia and business acumen don't go together.

And a quickfire round to finish. What is your favorite high-end car that you've brokered?

That's easy. It's the one behind you. I've already mentioned this. It's the Ferrari Enzo. So, and the reason for that is when I started financing cars in 2003, that's when the Enzo first came to market. Cost in those days £495,000, which was still an extraordinary amount of money. Even in 2003. They made 399 of them only, although there's only 398 because one caught on fire in the factory and burned to the ground. Um, and I funded 22 of those, um, in my time, which if you think of, uh, as a percentage of 398, that's quite a high percentage. And these cars now trade in hands today around £3.5 million. So if you were lucky enough to have one and hold on to you would have made an enormous amount of money. And not only made an enormous amount of capital growth, it's tax-free because there is no capital gains tax on cars.

What is a car that you think is currently sitting at a great value?

At a great value? Well, um, so if you take, for instance, uh, a Porsche Carrera GT, there's plenty of those. Um, those first came out 10, 10+ years ago. They were about £300,000, something like that. They're now over a million, £1.25 million, something like that. And they stuck around £500,000, £600,000 for quite some time. And everyone used to say, oh, that car will be a million pounds one day. And, and it did. It just took a— got stuck and then off it went. And I think the one that's, I'd say, in a similar position is a McLaren P1. McLaren P1 they came out with £900,000 to £1 million. It's not that much more than that now, 1.25, 1.3, or something like that. Uh, apparently just put out the W1, which is the, the next, next iteration of a really the P1 of their hypercar. And I think now the W1's here, I think what's just based on the P1, I think, uh, they're undervalued for where they are. I think I think that one's going to go. I've got a lot of customers now looking around for P1s for that reason. But we're talking in, you know, stratospheric hypercar world where it's a very privileged view.

One-line piece of advice for your 25-year-old self?

Win the lottery. Uh, for my 25-year-old self, that's a good question. I would say, got one life, there's no action replay, no second chances. So make sure that when you're on your deathbed in 120 years' time that you have no regrets in life, um, as a person, in everything that you do, and also in your career, business. Be bold, take chances, don't play it safe. Um, opportunities will pass you by. I get a lot of people saying to me, you know, I never had the opportunity, and those things don't happen to me. I don't believe in that. I think You create your own luck. You need to put yourself in front of opportunities and try really hard, and opportunities will present themselves. You've just got to be able to see those opportunities, and you've got to be able to be brave and go for it. And, you know, what's the worst that can happen? It doesn't work out, and you just pick yourself up and then you go again.

And finally, if you weren't doing finance, what would you be doing?

I'd be sitting on the beach. If I wasn't doing finance, I honestly have no idea what I'd be doing. My God, I've just done finance for so long. If I wasn't doing finance, I probably would have gone into property development. I quite enjoy property development. I could see myself doing that. Bit too late now.

Thank you very much for your time.

Pleasure, anytime.