£25M Exit to Startup Failure - How do you know when to quit?

Welcome to eight and nine Figure Mentors, the podcast that helps you get to know the people who start, grow and exit 8, 9 and 10 figure businesses. In this episode, I'm joined by Ashley Friedlein. Now, Ashley's an incredible entrepreneur. He started, ran and then sold econsultancy, selling it to Centaur Media for £25 million. He then went on to found a software startup called Guild. Now Guild actually recently shut down. It didn't work. And this experience of both starting a successful business that went on and was sold and then also starting a business that failed has given Ashley a really great perspective about what does and doesn't work in entrepreneurship and business. I sat down with Ashley in London recently to grill him and get under the skin to find out what key moments and decisions from his career we could all learn from. So I hope you enjoy this episode with Ashley Friedland. Ashley, you ended up selling e consultancy for 25 million. Incredible result. Congratulations, of course. But how did it start and what made you decide to start that business?

It started, I guess as what you'd now call a side hustle. So I was working at a digital agency back in the kind of late 90s in the dot com boom and subsequent bust, and it was clear to me that we were all kind of making up as we went along. You know, I mean, this was very early days, things were evolving very quickly. I mean, they still are obviously now, but I. There were no books, there was no courses you could go on. The, you know, the, the industry news was news rather than sort of best practice, how to do email, Internet advertising, content management, whatever. And so I wanted, I guess just to sort of learn and progress in my own career. I thought, how am I actually going to find out and learn about this stuff? I thought, well, actually talking to my peers, other people like me doing a similar job would be the best way to learn, you know, not just what works, sometimes more interesting and importantly what doesn't. And so it set it up as a sort of web based community, essentially a peer group. No business model. You know, it wasn't meant to be a business ever. It was just something I did for fun. And I used to remember getting up at 5 in the morning, go to the office, work from 6 till 9 on e consultancy, do the agency day 9 till 6 and then work sort of 6 till sort of 10 or 11, but with no. Yeah, no, no. Thought that I was actually going to make money out of it. But anyway, so, you know, then a few years later there's a dot com crash. The Agency sort of shrank down a lot. I went to the south of France, wrote a book etc and then came back and this website had been ticking along, this community growing and it had an amazing bunch of people on it, decent levels of traffic and I thought well this, maybe I should, you know, what I'm going to do with myself. Maybe I should turn this into a business.

That's amazing. So it didn't feel like a risk to you I think you said when we spoke earlier.

No, that's right. I mean I think there's a whole lot. It's interesting, you know people tend to think that entrepreneurs are big risk takers. I don't actually necessarily agree with that. Some might be more or less so but actually I think most entrepreneurs are surprisingly conservative or in some ways, you know they worry about cash and things like that. So I don't think entrepreneurs necessarily are kind of risk takers but it's certainly at that time for me I was married but had no children. We had a sort of flat in London that we could rent out. There was the job market this was after the kind of dot com crash was pretty dead so there was not much happening. So I base and I didn't have a job so I had to. I didn't have sort of that much to lose to be honest. Yeah. And and also I had only two as me, my co founder Matt and then we had two angel investors who are my former bosses at the agency who put in some money to get it going and actually I put in, I think it was a 70000 pound salary out 160000 pound investment. So most of the money they were putting in was going on paying me what was you know, back then. I mean even now that's a pretty good salary but back then that was quite a lot really and so I basically said I'm not prepared to take a risk on my salary essentially. Wow. So which you know it was kind of different really. I mean very different from then subsequently kind of what's happened with Guild and things. But the. So, so yes but, but I there I did or we did give away 49% of the business for that 160,000 back then which turned out for them in the end to be a very good investment.

Yeah. So they would have made what 12 and a half million or so on that something.

Yeah, I worked out I mean also because you got even then EIS relief and so you get 30% back and so if you. And then you get the gain is capital gains tax Free. So I think it worked out over 100 times. Yeah. What they put the money in, they got back. But I don't, you know, I, I certainly don't resent it. It couldn't have happened without them. And I think you know, you, I could say now a little bit naive or a little bit over generous with the equity which you know, by all kind of normal accounts I probably was. But on the other hand I was just, you know making. I didn't really even have a business plan. I had no team, I had no proven experience. I mean it was a pretty risky thing arguably for those two angel investors at the time.

Yeah. So but even though you took investors and you brought an investment, you still, this was still a, I guess an old school business in that you're targeting profit straight away. Right. This wasn't a, you didn't intend to keep raising and keep raising. This was just the sort of capital to get it started.

Yeah, that's right. I mean and I guess that's, I knew nothing about the whole kind of VC or p. Or kind of high more sort of highly leveraged kind of models. It's so I guess it just partly just didn't occur to me. I think also this was after the dot com crash so sort of a lot of the easy money had gone, you know, so in the time when people were raising tens of millions to leave their banking job in the city to go and do something or other in 98, 99, well that was, had gone really. So there was no kind of easy capital around I don't think. Also we had, because we'd been running this, the website for sort of three or four years as this side project. We had a, you know, traffic, we had a user base, we had some content, our search rankings we you know, did really well on, on a sort of SEO almost by accident it was the early days of SEO really but loads of great inbound links and you know, because we were early to market all this digital marketing stuff and so that, that was like a magnet then for more traffic and things. And so you know again in hindsight we were starting off with quite a few of the sort of assets advantages which you might otherwise need money to build up over time. And you know, so the domain been there for three, four years or something kind of gradually, you know, up. So, so yes was, I mean I when we started. So we had this 160 grand which was basically to last us a year we thought with a lot of that going to me and then a bits of Other money for some bit of marketing, bit of content and half another person. So when we started it was me plus a part time, what other person? That was it. And we were had free offices because we were sort of sharing with somebody we knew again X from the agency, so some free office space. So it was very much bootstrapping I guess as you call it now. I don't know if that existed at the time but BS and you know, subsequently we will get onto Guild maybe it's a very, very different kind of approach but. So yes, econsulting was basically profitable from month one.

Right.

Grew the old fashioned way off the back of profits over the years, you know, sort of 10, 12 years in the end before we actually sold.

And how do you, how do you look back on that? Like you said, we'll come back to Guild later on but how do you look back on that model now? Because a lot of people when they're starting up today, their immediate thing is, well, one of my main jobs as a founder is to constantly raise money. Do you look at that and say that's just a different model. Do you look at that and say it's better or worse?

Like I think, I mean, I don't there's any easy answer, but there's different business models require different sorts of funding probably. So this E consultancy is a media business sort of fundamentally about content and then there's revenue streams around subscriptions, membership, events, training, advertising and things and you can do those as you can an agency or consultancy with very little upfront costs or not too many upfront costs and be profitable quite quickly. What's harder is scaling it or be or being you. The profit margins are maybe less than if you've got a tech product. The challenge with, you know, a tech product small, you need to put probably quite a lot of capital in to create the intellectual property. I think people say, oh, and these days, you know, the barriers have come down. It's so easy, everything's in the cloud. That's kind of true, but it's true for everyone. So it's like, and everyone expects, you know, you know, Amazon, Apple, Google levels of functionality and customer experience and stuff. So I actually think it's got harder in some ways. And so doing a tech product you can see why there might be an argument to you need to go big quickly because it's an arms race and that's the game you have to play. But I guess the advantage of a, you know, business which is geared for profit more from the outset is once you get to break even or profit. You've basically got choices, you've got, you've got time. I mean you can again and it depends on the market and the sector. Sometimes you've got competitors coming quickly and so you have to either set up or raise yourself or buy them or so it depends a bit on the sort of state of the market. But with E consultancy, you know, again hindsight, whether it was luck or great shrewdness on our part but thought that because after the dot com crash and so end of the 99, 2000 it was almost like business went oh that Internet thing's gone away now. I mean you can't believe that now. But it was like that, it was like that was a blip like you know, and whereas I thought, and I thought wonder this is massive. It's just, you know, it's a cyclical market thing but actually underlying Internet is going to grow, it's going to power commerce as well as communications and networking and things which of course is what happened. But we had five years maybe of pretty much no competition doing what we were doing and indeed we had a membership. So a paid kind of content model from about 2002 which was way ahead of like at that time it was, you know, the received wisdom was information wanted to be free. It was an ad funded model and you know, and I thought at the time and actually it's lucky I hadn't come from a media publishing background arguably because I'd have thought well that's the way to do it was a lot. Well no, we need to just create content that's good enough that people are prepared to pay for it. Yeah. As what happened then that becomes a recurring revenue stream with renewals and that's a good bedrock for doing other stuff like events and training. And now that's quite normal. You know, look at all the newspapers, the FT walls and even the mail. I think you know, is doing paid subscriptions and stuff. But we were doing that 20 years ago and at the time it was kind of everyone thought we were crazy and so luckily it turned, turned out quite well and when we came to sell that was part of the, you know, the journey or part of the story is like oh okay, you guys got into sort of subscriptions and some of these sort of high value things before anyone else did.

Right. It's a great example of using I guess an outsider's perspective on a problem and coming up with something that's actually really valuable.

No, it is kind of weird that on the one hand I Always think if you're going to do something, it's good to do it in an area, you know, well, and particularly, you know, maybe in an industry which you work in, which is what I did. I mean, when I built a consultancy, it was essentially for myself. So I was working an Internet agency going, oh my God, how do I do this SEO thing? Or what am I to believe? And then I'll go and find some other people and ask them. And you know, but it was, it was to help me really. Initially it wasn't meant to be a business. But then you found, oh, there's lots of other people like me who want this kind of, you know, peer groups and this content and things. So. So, yeah.

And then the next big, I guess, life event around E consultancy was your decision to sell Centaur. What stage was the business at when you decided to sell and why was that the right time for you?

I think it's a combination of factors, I suppose, because we had taken, I think they would say there's only four shareholders, me, my co founder, two angel investors who also the board. We always felt, I think, that we wanted to sell, but we just didn't have any particular time horizon or really any particular valuation sort of targets. It was more when it felt right. I think for me personally, you know, I felt that it was, you know, there were some things I was less excited about because they were kind of repeat, okay, it's that event again this year and stuff. And so I enjoy the kind of early stages, the ideas, building the proposition, taking it to market, getting the feedback and things. But when it comes to sort of it's about scaling it or industrializing the kind of thing, personally I just think I'm sort of less excited, energized and probably therefore less good at that. So there's a bit of that creeping in that I've been doing it for 10 years and thinking, okay, you know, so maybe feeling a sort of bit tired or say a bit less excited, we'd gone international. So there's a few things we wanted to do. We wanted to get to a million in profit, EBITDA profit, just because we'd. Psychologically, that sounded good, good, and, and that buys, as you say, buys you options. Like if you didn't have to sell that, you can afford to invest quite a lot in new product development if you've got a million quids worth of profit. So we want to get to that. And also for acquirers, we'd heard that, you know, it costs for a big issue, you know, Acquire it costs them the same amount of effort and time to buy a business that's doing 10 million profit as it is 1 million or you know, so they'd rather have the slightly bigger profit ones rather than 100 grand one or whatever. So that was a sort of yardstick. We wanted to do international so we had London headquart quarters but we had offices in New York, Dubai, Sydney and Singapore. I mean some of them quite small but we wanted to show essentially be able to tell a story. I mean also just I personally was interested in doing business in some of these other countries. You know it's very interesting culturally technically. You know, when we started say it had the office in Singapore, we did events in Shanghai and things. It was if you were looking at mobile or aspects of social media, mobile commerce, social media that like Asia was way ahead of the US or Europe. So when we were talking about trends, for example, it was good to be able to look at that globally kind of thing and go oh, this might be coming further down the line because we can see in China or whatever it is, Japan how it's happening. So yeah, we wanted to go international and then it was really just a sort of market, you know, we started to get interest as in sort of. And I always think ideally if you're selling you want to have people coming to you. If you're approaching them, you're already losing. Which yeah, I did have that experience of with Guild luckily. But so yeah, we were just getting inbound stuff without, without trying. And then there was the whole sort of was it 2007 and 8 kind of financial crash and things and that impacted media businesses like Centaur who became to us because the advertising kind of marketing market died a bit of a death. And so all of a sudden and there was the Euro issue with Greece and all this sort of stuff. So these companies were going, we need to get out of like ad funded kind of models into subscriptions and other kind need to not rely on single just the UK or Europe as our market. We need to go more global. Digital is actually a thing after all. We need to get more into digital. And so literally we were like tick, tick, tick all these things. And so we were hot property. And I suppose that just meant that the stars kind of aligned and we thought look, we can either, you know, sell or I guess if we were being even more ambitious we could raise money and bought other people and scaled it more. Which is often, you know, the accusation of British entrepreneurs sell out to the Americans or whatever. Whereas you know, other Others, they do go just bigger and bigger and bigger. But we did sell and in the end, I mean we had lots of, you know, genuinely lots of interest. And so we had genuine competitive tension which obviously helped kind of push up the price or at least help us negotiate the terms of the deal. Because we actually offered a five year earn out. We were prepared to do a five year earnout which is kind of a long time and don't do that because you'll fall out with it and it'll be a nightmare. Yeah, but we were still to stay, still enjoying it and we still believed in the growth and the profit growth. So we sold it on a multiple of EBITDA, which is sort of 12ish times EBITDA, which is for media business a lot. Technology business is not so much. But a subs data business is kind of still the case. They sell 12 to 15 times. And you know, we were at a million EBITDA at the point of selling and we thought in five years time we'll be at 5 million or 10. And we were genuinely believed that was possible. And therefore you thought, well, we're going to get 12 times 5 million on the kind of back half of the deal then good, but we're up for it as long as we said we only do the five years if we basically, although you own us, you have very little control over us. Like we're, we can make all our own decisions, we can stay in our own offices, our own IT all our hiring, firing and our budget, basically you have very little control with. So we could retain our sense of independence but while still having actually sold, you know, got some money up front and some further down the line, that's in the end we got bought out after two and a half years or something. So it didn't ever go that long.

And then choosing an acquirer. So you mentioned you had lots of offers and I don't think the offer that you went with was necessarily the highest value. So what was part of your decision around that?

Yeah, it was again a number of things where there were a couple of offers we had, for example, which were a higher upfront amount. So for example, and quote me exactly on these figures, but say we got. Well, we had one offer, I can say, which is for 20 million up front. Right. But that was it, you know, and we'd just walk away and, and that was quite tempting because it's very clean.

That'S a huge multiple.

And you know, the other one, we're looking at sort of 12 million ish and then maybe some more down the line. So it's like, you know, bird in the bush versus two in the handle, whatever the bushes in the hand, 20 in the hand. So yeah, so that was kind of tempting but I say because we genuinely believed in our ability to grow, we thought actually no, we could do better if we wait. As it turned out we did. Not that much better to be fair. And given that was two and a half years, you could say, well the extra 5 million you probably got was, was it worth it, you know, for two and a half years work? I don't know. Yes, I think so. But other factors were we wanted to be a sort of bigger fish in a, in a smaller pond rather than so some of the businesses. So for Centaur for example, we were quite a big acquisition. Like we made a difference PLC but a small PLC as a Class 1 transaction which means it's kind of a quite a big deal for them.

Yeah.

And they, you know, therefore cared about us because it materially affected their share price and all that kind of stuff. And there's some downsides to that because they're crawling all over you and it's like all quite intense. Whereas if you're a rounding area and a big company's thing they're like oh whatever. But we would rather be have that, we'd rather matter I guess, rather than be just some say some tiny thing in a massive. And so some of the organizations we were talking were huge American businesses where we would have been tiny. And I also having had the foreign offices, I didn't fancy being up late at night or early in the morning speaking to the, you know, the US overlords or reporting back and things just, just didn't fancy. I'd rather ideally have a business acquirer who was UK based just so that then that kind of. It was easy in London based, easy to have that, you know, that kind of contact. And then yeah, there was some where, you know, their plans for the business were very different. So some were going to strip away some parts of the. Some were going to fire everyone and do X. Some were really only interested in the data, some interested in the events and you know, so there were various ones where you can looked at that and thought oh that's going to be painful, not much fun say. But whereas with Centaur it felt like a kind of right balance of the level of attention, the level of importance to them, the level of opportunity, the fact they're a UK based company, etc, etc, which kind of just in the end felt like the right route to go and I don't regret it. I think it was actually.

Well, the fact that you wanted to continue working in the business I think is a real testament to the acquirer that you chose. It's interesting you mentioned about the UK US thing. I was talking to someone recently who they sold a healthcare agency group to a huge USP firm and the main breakdown, the reason they had to leave in the end was because they were sick of being on really late west coast time calls. I know and it's those little practical things that people might not think about. But actually, you know, it sucks to.

Be on course every day at 11:00pm yeah, exactly. And particularly if you've, you know, often startups obviously you've, you've lived this notwithstanding remote working cove and stuff but you know, this intense very kind of peoplely close experience to get to where you got and you can sell to the point we saw was maybe 120 people. So it's not, not, not small but not big really either. And again it was at that stage where I knew everyone by name but I was starting to think I don't know who that person is there.

Right.

And also I'd had to had a policy up until near that point where I was part of the interview process of any new recruit like whatever level of seniority and things just because I wanted to, you know. But that becomes not really scalable at a certain point.

Yeah.

And we hadn't also grow although we'd grown quite quickly. It's not like a tech startup where sometimes if they're in hyper growth or in a scale up it's like, like doubling tripling staff and I mean it's, it's exciting but chaotic as well. Yeah. So Ekan says it was not quite like that. It wasn't quite that rocket ship.

Yeah but I can totally identify. I mean I, I sort of don't say got fed up but I realized that I wasn't the right person to run my agency when we got to about probably 70 because it just starts to feel as soon as like a big part of your day is change management.

Yeah.

Things I'm just like communicating messages to people. I just want to get stuck into stuff.

Yeah, you do it sort of managing people and money mostly after time and yeah as I say, you know business would be easy if it wasn't for staff and customers but I do. Yeah. I like I, I guess yes. This sort of the, the proposition, the idea, the kind of prototyping, the get it to market, the testing, learning get us Being in front of customers. Actually one of my investors who's now, I think I'll probably say it, he's, he's CEO of vml which is the WPP agency, massive kind of thing. But I was talking to him the other, you know what he's doing, he said I've. He's a brilliant salesman. He's called Yan, one of my invest angel investors and he's got back into, he said I've got back into pitching, you know like I'm kind of, I'm now back out there, you know, the prospects, client meetings, selling, essentially pitching and I'm really enjoying it, you know, because so long he'd probably his job would be more about, you know, structures and M and A and you know, finance stuff and people management hiring and things which is fine. Had some has to be done. It's super important but you do just miss that kind of energy and excitement of being at the coal face.

I did a pitch in London recently and compared to just working on spreadsheets, it's just a different energy, isn't it?

Yeah.

So good. So all right, so you sold a consultancy, you stayed on for two and a half years.

I'm still minorly involved actually.

You're still minor.

First. First person in, last person out.

Clinging on.

Yeah.

At what point did you decide to start Guild? Did you have any sort of break between sort of formally leaving and starting?

Yes. So I mean Gil, the company was I think incorporated in 2016, you know, started working on the idea and the product 2018, 2019 and sort of launched 2020. So it did evolved over a period of time.

Right.

And I think it's one of those, I guess most entrepreneurs every day have ideas and I'm sure, you know, ideas feel pretty easy, I mean execution somewhat harder but it's, it's sort of, it was one of those ideas that didn't go away. You know, you sort of kind of keep coming back to some ideas. You kind of wake up immediately next day and go that's a shit ide.

Glad I didn't start that.

I'm not going to do. That's just not me. It's a good idea but just it doesn't kind of energize me. Whereas the sort of Guild thing kept coming back and so it ended up. But I, I was, I spent a period of time where after the kind of ecosystem ended I went down to sort of half, two days a week. Ish. Right. And then I worked with Matt who is my co founder, he consultancy. He's the sort of tech, tech genius. He'd started a business, co founded business with his business partner Paddy called Ably which was a sort of as a real time data infrastruct, way above my technical pay grades. But I, you know, I knew obviously Matt well trusted him and so I became an early investor in that and I worked in the early days, about two days a week for Ably with them, right doing more sort of content marketing, commercially stuff. I was involved say as this angel investor and then the sort of seed round and then it's gone on to sort of series A and B and so I'm still investor there but not sort of day to day involved. I was chairman of the board for a little while so I was doing that for a number of years. Sort of half of my time while sort of mulling and Guild and tinkering around with that before it kind of then became the full time thing and.

That, that investment before we go into Guild. That investment's worked out really well, hasn't it for you?

Yes, yeah, phenomenally well, Much, much easier than being an actual entrepreneur as an investor. I mean it was, yeah it's, it was, I mean because of the eis. So I put in money get you, get you sort of 30 in fact it's even some of their SEIs. So 50 or between 50 and 30% back. And then in the case of Ably when it got to its series B it was valued over 100 million and some of the. I was the first external investor and so obviously the valuation I put in that was nothing like that. And the incoming VCs were happy to buy out kind of early investors. So it's a secondary as they call it.

Yeah.

And so I sold a chunk of my shares in that tax free because it's EIS capital gains and I had them on three years and something and so, so yeah, I thought there, I thought well this is, this is like, you know, very poor bastards are still doing all the work, built the value. The VCs don't pay out to the founders because they want to keep them in the business, keep them hungry as it were. You take a little bit of money but not much. Whereas you know, useless sleeping investors like me, they're quite happy to buy out. So yeah, why you can combine the yes returns on that with the fact it was tax free and on eis and all that kind of stuff. It was, it did, did fantastically well and it's still going, you know, I still have an investment in it as well. But yeah it's, it's. I've. I have a number of investments, some of which have done ex. Extraordinarily well, most notably ably some which are doing very well, some which have failed, some of which might fail, you know. So it's a bit of a spread really. I'm not sure I've cracked. Cracked the magic but. But yeah, I've had one big win at least. So that's good.

Well that's great, isn't it? And so you saw the investment side of things work really well. That's really great. I don't have to work day to day in the business startups of Mugs game and then you went into the startup. Right. So. So you mentioned that Guild was like the idea that wouldn't die. This is something that you just felt like you had to do. What did you, what did you spot when you started Guild?

Well, I suppose the. In the noughties and tens. Well post 2007 was iPhone I think wasn't it launched? Yeah, that and being in E consultancy is all about digital marketing and trends and stuff. Stuff. It didn't take a rocket science to see that mobile was a thing, you know and we don't realize that now. My children can't believe that there was world pre mobile phones but there was and so I thought oh this mobile thing is, is kind of obviously a big trend and it's not going to go away. And you can look at that and say the younger children, it's all kind of mobile stuff. And then. And so initially that was like mobile web responsive design type stuff. But then I'd also say well specifically mobile messaging which is a sort of different, you know, protocol medium experience. I thought well just like you know, email and then social media messaging is as a channel is surely only going to grow and, and not just be used with friends and family but for business communications and indeed transactions and saying looking at Asia where it's seen kind of WeChat which does everything and even WhatsApp in India for example you can do E commerce and all sorts of stuff on it. I thought well that's coming to the west and I, I guess my enduring broad passion across all these things has been about with econsultancy and Guild is about professional communities. So it's about bringing people, peers together who work on a particular area to share and learn from each other and you can do that in events, you can do that in training type stuff. I was particularly interested in how do you do that digitally and so it with econsultancy that was web based communities broadly then with an offline component. But I thought I'd seen WhatsApp groups in particular in the UK starting to spring up in business context. It might be senior leadership teams to start with. But then it started to be maybe prospects, maybe customers, maybe peer groups and things. And I thought okay, that's kind of interesting, I think that's going to continue to grow. But I thought, well, WhatsApp's not ideal for this. It's like a consumer messaging app. It doesn't have kind of any threading you can't see back in time. It's owned by Facebook Meta who have sort of ethical concern, data concerns about not GDPR compliant, all this sort of stuff. And I thought, thought, well, can I create in the same way you've got like Facebook and LinkedIn both arguably social professional networking that you could have WhatsApp and Guild. And Guild was just your professional kind of messaging experience and sort of group experience. And fine, you can use WhatsApp for the football team and friends and family and WhatsApp was getting just too noisy and overwhelming as well to also have work stuff going through it and at the weekends if I've got pings and tings on WhatsApp and it's half work, you know, I just don't want that. Yeah, so that was basically the kind of idea thought, well, can we, you know, well, let's go big, let's compete with WhatsApp and LinkedIn and Slack and whatever and create a sort of, you know, a messaging mobile, first messaging kind of type experience, but which is specifically for sort of professional groups and communities, had no advertising, no dodgy use of data, was a sort of freemium SaaS kind of model. We're going to grow like, you know, Trello, Dropbox, Mailchimp, sort of product led growth, etc. This is going to be nothing or massive.

Guess what?

Yeah.

And when you pitch it like that, when you set the vision for it, I'm thinking this is great, I would sign up for that immediately. But. And yet it's just being closed down. So.

Yes.

What, what happened? And, and then the next question is, and when did you realize that it needed to be closed down?

Yeah, I haven't yet, I suppose done a full kind of retrospective. I keep meaning to try and you know, maybe write a sort of a blog post or whatever article about, you know, sort of what went wrong or what might have gone better and maybe that would be good therapy or I, I don't know. Or maybe I Don't know if I know the answers yet. There are lots of things which went right, so, like the team was great. The product, I think was great. The shareholder investor experience, Touchwood was great. Even though they lost their money, our customers liked it. Great renewal rates and things like that. So there was lots that was good about it. It. I think the. The two things, I guess, which were particularly hard, one of which is obvious. Well, maybe slightly less so. The obvious thing is that competing with WhatsApps turns out to be quite hard. Yeah. And I knew, and everyone knows that really, that, you know, taking on these essentially monopolies, like taking on LinkedIn, is. Is hard. And we know that changing people's habits is really, really hard. Even so, you know, there's that thing about if you up against something where there's a habit and an incumbent, anything new needs to be 10 times as good or different. It can't just be a bit better because there's a lot of people. Well, WhatsApp's good enough.

Yeah.

Why do I need another app? I'm not sure I want another app and kind of I've got to check that or when it's on the fifth swipe screen, I've got notifications turned off and stuff. So getting, you know, just trying to create repeat usage and obviously if you're running a group or community and it's engaged, that's great. If no one's engaging, it's not so great. So that is not surprising. I mean, we knew, to be honest, that that was going to be a challenge. And it was and it is. And I think in the different messaging apps in different countries that are more or less dominant. And Interestingly, in the US, WhatsApp's nothing like as dominant as it is in say the UK or Europe or India and other. Other and Middle east. But then you go say China and switchat and you know, Japan, it's different and Korea is different. So there are different sort of dominant apps, but they are basically monopolies. And I don't. It is. And so. So now, yes, I'm starting to think about new ideas. I'm thinking about ideas. How do I just use WhatsApp rather than the business API? But anyway, that's a for another day to say, okay, give up and kind of go with it. But so, yeah, I think that was one thing that was always going to hard to kind of create new habits and bed them in. It was also the opportunity because if could do that, it's a massive defensible, wouldn't it it's like, well, if Guild had become the. Everyone goes, well, that's the business messaging out that we. Everyone uses. That's like, like massively valuable. So that's our crazy ambition that we could actually achieve that. We did arguably in the UK in certain areas, marketing, hr, we had clusters of people where you got the sense that everyone thought that everyone was on. On Guild because there happened to be a few hot clients clusters. So if we'd managed to scale that, you would have got any more of a feeling that, oh, Guild's just the one you use, never quite got there. Sadly, the other big factor, which is probably less obvious, it was probably a bit of a blind spot. Having said, you know, earlier that I think it's good to create businesses in an industry, you know, well, because you genuinely know the language, you know the people, you know the pain points, you know the trends and stuff and you are the target market. For me, who had, you know, with E consultancy and other things thought that why wouldn't any of everyone want to create a professional community or a professional network or group and. And it isn't that hard to run one isn't. It's kind of bleedingly obvious why you'd want it and how to do it as like. Turns out though, that's not true. Like, actually to. For business to buy into investing time and or resources into creating some kind of community with their prospects or customers is not a line item in the budget yet. Yet, you know, like, and I think of it maybe a bit like social media or even the Internet, frankly. I remember digital days, we'd go to business and go, you need a website ago. Why would I need one of those? You know, and now that's unthinkable. Same with social media. It's like early days that do we really need to be on that? So I, I thought community would be like that. And I do think there is a trend now away from public social media back towards more private curated quality control groups. But a lot of them are on WhatsApp still. It turns out not everyone's convinced that they need to have some sort of professional community and actually there is a skill and an art or a science in being a good community builder manager.

Yeah.

And there aren't. That's not a job function that exists in most companies still.

No.

So it's either it's early days or it's just a very small market actually, or smaller than I'd hoped it would be.

Obviously taking the decision to shut down Guild, that was a decision. But you Must of seen it coming. Running a business is really hard. Starting a business is really hard. I'm thinking about that illustration of the, the miners who's chipping away at the rock and decides to turn back just before they get to the diamond. How did you decide that this was the right decision versus we just need to keep pushing. We're almost at the diamonds here.

Yeah, I think it is, it's a tough decision and I do, I think sometimes there's what risks being a slightly dangerous myth or, or piece of best practice which is you've just got to keep going. Because I think you hear the case studies about where some business pivoted and like slack and, or whatever and it almost failed but then they just kept going or tried something different and all of a sudden it worked out. You don't hear about the kind of 99 out of 100 where that didn't happen and, or, or someone, you know, broke their mental health, their marriage, their, where they lost their home because they carried on when they should have stopped mining actually. How do you know the difference between the two? Well, that's a bit tricky I guess, isn't it? But I suppose with Guild there are a few things that the heart the hardest. Well, that it was hard for a while where I could feel like I think this just isn't working. I mean you're looking at data usage, growth rates, you know, revenue, you know, the time to say, to make the sale, all sorts of things. I thought these metrics aren't. Well, they're not good enough to take to vc, that's for sure. And the next stage would have been Series A, you know, on the journey that we were on. Yeah. So I thought, well that's obviously got cash and financial implications. Like if we, if we can't improve these metrics then we're not going to be able to raise the money full stop. So that's just a reality check.

Yeah.

And then you're gonna decide what could you raise more angel money? Could you pivot to just being a smaller profitable business? Because we'd only had angel investors so we didn't have any sort of institutional VC or P type pressure to kind of necessarily grow at all costs. But it's a sort of period where you sort of, I could feel, think this isn't working. But to my investors or to the staff and to customers and selling, you can't show, you can't feel, you can't show that because it's demotivating or not, you know. Yeah. So there was a Period where I felt it was kind of hard where you're kind of showing one face but feeling another other. Yeah. And then I guess just coming to, you know, we did try some, not like full on pivots, but we did try different things. They worked a bit, but not enough. There were some decisions, routes we could have gone down like going enterprise software or going ad funded, which we just didn't want to, we didn't actually think would work or work that well. Didn't fit with our original vision. We just didn't want to do it even if it might have worked. So I think, yeah, the hard thing was basically coming to realization that it wasn't working out out. I had to kind of admit that to the kind of shareholders and things and, and the staff, not to customers at that stage, I guess, and then kind of make a plan. Well what we're going to do and you know, the sort of obvious or simple answers were let's see if could we find a buyer to, you know, take it on and if they've got lots of scale and reach, maybe they can do what we had failed to do. Which we tried that and failed also at that didn't manage to find a buyer.

Right.

So for a number of reasons. But I think once, I think the hard thing was when it, there's lack of clarity, like you're living in a slight limbo of you're not sure. But once you sort of made a decision, you know, and we had a path and said, okay, we're going to spend six months trying to, you know, sell a business and we can't do that, we're going to kind of wind it down. And so once we had a kind of a plan then and also we have, have managed, you know, I wanted to not just go like bust overnight. We could have done, we could have in theory kind of carried on trying until you fall off a cliff. You're just like, you've got no money left. I didn't want to do that. And so we did, you know, we gave all our customers 6 months notice at least that we were going to be. We're trying to sell the business but it could close down and therefore they might want to migrate somewhere else. You know, we have at the, you know, point of closing, no creditors. So we didn't actually run out of money. Money we sort of, so it was fairly gracefully touch woods kind of wound down which was important to me. Firstly my personal reputation, just you know, sense of sort of integrity and doing the right thing by staff and customers. And investors. So. And weirdly, you know, I've learned a lot about voluntary liquidations and you know, insolvency staff and law legal and assets and you know, like any of these things like opening foreign offices like I did with E consultancy, I'm not sure I'd do it again. And even at the time it was hard, but I still. It's a learning, you know, a learning experience and I sort of feel then, well, if I'm talking to other entrepreneurs or even doing things like this, it's sort of, it's almost just as interesting to talk about failures as success or, you know, the things that people don't normally talk about but where, you know, the realities of winding down a business and different ways that that can be done and what tax, you know, so you don't hear about those things so much. So in some weird way I think, well, you know, know it's good to have gone through it wasn't the plan. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it. But still, you know, you can then empathize, I guess, better with people in similar situations. Yeah, you know, there's lots of entrepreneurs at the moment. That's the whole tech world. Obviously he's had a sort of harder time of, of of late. There are probably still a lot of businesses that are sort of bleeding out at the moment or eking a living, frankly. It's tough, you know, it's a very.

Brave decision, I think, think to shut something down because like you say, the, the sort of accepted wisdom is, well, Elon Musk says it's like eating broken glass and staring into the abyss. That exactly sounds like my situation. So therefore I'm just like Elon, like guy me, and I'm just gonna keep grinding it out. But to, to say to the team, I mean, can you remember when you sort of told the team that we're going to be shutting this down and how did you feel about.

About that? Well, it's a fairly negative analogy to think of like a car crash in slow motion. But it was sort of like as you could see, a potential endpoint and then so everything would have things. I think we, I mean we're only sort of small team. So it was sort of 15 at its height. I don't know which five were the sort of developer team based in Poland. So it was never like a lot of people and we had. Everyone was, you know, it was. Everyone kind of knew what was going on. We had, you know, obviously weekly kind of trading and update meetings and everyone knew we were missing the Our targets. I suppose what they didn't necessarily know is, well, what is the implication of that? You know, and, and, but I think I exactly. We were kind of honest like we say, in terms of. I knew that we had, you know, enough cash in the bank, for example, to pay their salaries for even despite not hitting our targets for a certain time. But yeah, I think it was, it was known in the business say that we weren't doing as well as we'd hoped. What, you know, at the point where that. And I suppose that, you know, if we had sold the business, there were some with sort of share options or, you know, where it could, that could have been a good outcome for them.

So.

Yeah, I don't ever remember that being a. I can't remember a specific. You know, sometimes it's the all hands meeting. Yeah. The big announcement, good news, we've been acquired or something. It's like, oh, it's not usually good news. But anyway, it wasn't. I don't remember a sort of point in time like that. It was more sort of ongoing discussion and then. But there did come a point where we had to start letting people go and you know, which is never easy, but I don't think it was a surprise to anyone. And for some of them, like in the wind down period at the end where we were trying to sell, you know, a couple of people we said, well, you know, we need to conserve cash to give us this sort of Runway time to try and sell. And therefore, you know, we can't afford to pay you past June or whatever. Or can you go to halftime or become a contractor and just do two hours a week or you know, just. And then they, I think understood the reality of that.

Yeah. Looking back on the whole sort of guild experience, is there anything that you would do differently knowing what you know now?

Well, I don't, I guess overall I don't regret it is is is the main thing I. And it's like that Jeff Bezos regret minimization framework thing. I would have regretted not doing it.

Yeah.

I think. And so even the fact that it didn't work out as planned is a shame, but it's not. But I think I would have been really, really annoyed with myself or it have been kind of maybe chewed on my mind if I thought I never did it and then seen someone else do it and think, damn. So yeah, I don't regret doing it in terms of doing things differently. Again, I don't regret like say e consultancy was, you know, smallish but profitable media Two angel investors, that was it, multiple revenue streams and before that and it was a media business before that I worked in an agency say which is a selling time basically and people econsulting was selling content wrapped in various ways a bit more scalable but still whereas with Guild I wanted to do a business model that was product, single revenue stream SaaS and ideally mobile focus because it was different from the other business models and things I'd been involved with and I wanted to think well because I'd lucky been made the money from E consultancy I could afford to risk saying I might as well go big like you know, if I can get an investment and why not dream big, what's the worst that could happen happen. So as that's come to pass but you know, so it's. Would I. I'm glad we didn't, you know some of the pivots we talked about say going to add fund and model. I, I don't regret not you know, giving that a go and things I might, you know, maybe we should talk again in a year's time when something else has popped out and is doing exactly what we did except it's doing fantastically well like ah, it was a matter of timing. Yeah it might be a matter of timing as much as anything like one person but I think maybe he was right. He said well a, you should have tried because we didn't try for the US market really not initially. Partly from my experiences of E consultancy where you know US is the graveyard of many UK businesses and I'd seen how hard it was as a small brand in the US to make any indent in that market. So I thought I'll worry about us later, let's just focus really on the UK and Europe. But you know this person's view is like it's something like that if you essentially are talking about trying to compete with WhatsApp or LinkedIn even in a small way you've got to go to the US market and you should be. Should have raised 30, 50 million, not 3 million. Like yeah, that might be right actually. I mean so. But I'm not unfortunately or clearly not Elon Musk Grade sort of a self delusional. I'm sort of, yeah self deluded to a degree and self confidence but didn't have that ambition apparently already so that might have been the right thing to do. But I mean you know I could say that if, if I was doing it differently in the sense that you know, something that could have survived arrived. We raised over 3 million and if we had, you know, certain. There's phases you go through where I've seen this in other startups. I mean when you just raise a load of money you just, it's very hard not to start spending it and actually there's pressure from investors to like, well if you're giving the money then you clearly, you need it, you should be spending it so you hire more expensive people. But then you become a bit in, in. Unless your sort of sales are keeping up, you kind of eat into your money quicker, you become efficient, you inefficient, you become a bit lazy because you've got the money there in the bank and so you might as well spend, send it. So now if I sort of look back and think, well I could have made that money last a lot longer. I could still be sitting on, you know, I mean Guild was revenue wise was up to about 20 grand a month when we closed. Actually I could run the business on pretty much break even at that but with hardly any staff and hardly much tech in, you know, could have just, it could have survived but it would have been like a sort of cockroach. I mean it would have been or zombie thing that, you know, I just think, well, well what I can string it out for another three years and by that stage we would have underinvested, the competitors would have moved on and things, well, that I'm not sure. And you know, do the other people. You want to say here's what, here's the, here's what I'm selling you is three years of grinding it out in the hope that something might change, you know. Well, that's not really much of a strategy or something to get too excited about. But I still, I say don't yet quite. But I should or we, the shareholders still have the tech. I mean it's been kind of multiple and I'm still half hopeful that, you know, either with some new crazy idea will come out and think I could use that for that or someone else will come along and go, ah, we spent two million quid in five years building actually very good sort of messaging and networking infrastructure that it would, you know, that someone. We might find a home for it yet. Yeah, but we'll see.

It sounds like you're, you're very much at peace with it despite these what ifs, sort of what if we'd raised more, what if we'd gone to the US but you seem to be very, very at peace with the decision, which I think is, is really important.

Yeah, I mean I Suppose it's, you know, it's happened over quite a while, like a year really. At least a year. And so sometimes it's felt, you know, harder than others. But say, but having some sort of clarity, say, and also say not so things that I regret is, is helpful in that. And I suppose starting. Although I'm kind of trying hard not to start another business quite yet, that, that I am. It's. I've had a bit more time now to play around with or meet up with people, have conversations, you know, AI is something which I sort of could talk a little bit about. But recently now I've actually had a chance to start playing with it and like, oh, this is kind of quite exciting actually. And so it's. So, yeah, I suppose I just sort of feeling a sort of positive energy of new potential. Yeah. As opposed to, you know, the sort of number of years where you sort of grinding out doing kind of sales or kind of watching the money or, you know, putting on a bit more of a show than you'd kind of like, you know. So that's, that's quite, that's more emotionally draining.

Well, there's, there's a huge opportunity cost, isn't there, of running a business which maybe hasn't demonstrated the product market fix? I guess you've seen real intense product market fit with E consultancy and dramatic growth, particularly towards the end.

Yeah.

Contrasting that with Guild. And I guess you could look at this and say, well, if I was an investor in Ashley.

Yeah.

I'd want you, you know, quickly identifying the stuff that's the next E consultancy and grows with. With that sort of scale.

Yeah.

And anytime you're spending just sort of maintaining something or keeping it flat or, you know, just move on to the next thing. Quick, go, go to the next one. So I suppose there's an opportunity cost component there as well for you.

There is, but. Yeah, I mean, and I can think, well, that's seven years where, you know, what did I get for, you know, and I hadn't paid myself anything during Guild either. Right. So seven years of time and money, essentially lack of, you know, other things that might have been making money or earning say again, I, I don't regret that. And also if you take something like my ably investment which came really good, that's like the opposite. That's like freakishly, arguably freakishly good luck or, you know, I mean, it's, that was a sort of reverse opportunity. I mean it was something that came big from nowhere. Lisa, as far as the amount of time and effort I put into it. So, you know, there's. We win some, you lose some. I guess a bit. I think the. Again it's like, well, why did he consult? You know, I, I like to think sometimes, you know, I have a good understanding of, you know, the future, I guess, or seeing trends maybe that other people haven't and you know, and with econsultancy that was things like the Internet is going to get be a bigger thing, which sounds so bleeding obvious but at the time really wasn't. Or that people might pay for content. They seemed counterintuitive but turned out to be correct. But then, then I think, well, if I. Then I look at Guild, I think with Guild I was or am correct about the, you know, the growth of mobile and the growth of messaging, about a desire for more kind of, you know, private spaces rather than just the sort of Twitters and LinkedIn of this world and sort of public social media. I think there is. So I think there's some other things I was right about, but obviously not everything otherwise would. Wouldn't have turned out as it has.

So now you've, you've got that experience, incredibly valuable experience, I guess, seeing sort of both sides. What next? Where do you go next? And you sort of hold yourself back to let the dust settle first or.

That's sort of my plan. I mean weirdly and I've. I've talked to and even been tempted to do podcasts or books about sort of exited entrepreneurs and, and how they do or don't. How they manage that kind of period, maybe the first year or two after they exit a business. And it's a sort of different, maybe emotional journey for, for different individuals. But I. Some people I talked to and this feels sort of. It works for me. They said don't try and make too much of a plan. Like don't just don't do anything much or try and resist. Don't say yes to everything because it's so tempting. Oh, more time now. I'll go, yeah, I'll do that, I'll do that. Yeah. They said no, just take maybe three or six months to try. You know, maybe have sort of conversations and do bits and pieces and. But then there's. Yeah, just, just don't. And I. Although, I mean it's interesting with, with Guild and Indie, with ably, which are SaaS businesses, they're rightly very data driven, you know, performance optimization, tweaking the machine. It's about creating machine, whereas my agency days and even consultancy more about content about sort of marketing in terms of slightly more creative I guess. And so I appreciate the benefits of sort of quantitative driven metrics, target driven kind of machines but I just don't enjoy it as much as some of the people. Humany messy, emotional, creative stuff. I think that's, that's kind of the truth. And so, but so for me personally as well, some people have, you know, watch analyzing everything that they do. They say by Christmas they want to do this and by February I want to invade you to investments and that works for them. Whereas I find that a bit like draining kind of the thought of that. So yeah, to answer your question, no, I don't have a plan. But that, that is my plan to not have a plan plan. But then everyone else, I say, they say I'll give you three or six months and you'll start feeling bored or you'll come across something. And so yeah, maybe there's certain things I think that I don't want to do. Like I don't really have much interest in being a non exec director. I mean I think it's a great thing to do. But I don't really want to be a consultant. I don't, I do bits of advising and mentoring but not, I don't want to be a coach because everyone seems to be. I mean it's fine, it's good. I've had. Did have a business coach for a while but. But no, don't want to do that. So, so yes, I've got a sort of. My kind of plan is also say to have lots of conversations and there is, I don't know if you said but there's. Sometimes you just feel excited about something and sometimes you feel like emotionally drained and it's not clear why. I don't know yet what those criteria are but I can at least be emotionally honest enough to go. I had a meeting the other day. I thought the guy was talking about business idea. I thought this is a great idea, it could make a lot of money. But I, I'm not at all interested in it. Like doesn't excite me. I. This would be, I'd find this really debilitating to work on even though I think you might make a lot of money out of it. And so I mean, I guess that's a bit with that whole thing about entrepreneurs just follow their passion. But it's, you know, where it sort of seems easy to kind of work hard or whatever because it's something you want to be doing. So, so I need to figure that out. I mean I'm doing you know, bits of personal, I'm doing some writing, creative writing, writing short stories at the moment. My wife's a writer and so I've sort of partly been inspired. What's a personal challenge? I'm playing guitar again a bit and you know there's all the sort of personal bits but professionally yeah see what to get excited about.

Yeah, that's interesting. So I, I've spoken to a lot of people on this show about the moment after exit and some of them describe immediately going into depression depression or this being the most difficult time of their lives. But for you it doesn't seem to be like that. It's almost like for them my perception is that their identity is so synonymous with their business that when they sell or exit the business they have an identity void and they don't know what they are anymore. But I don't get that sense with you.

No, I think that's true that I've, I mean I do love business and all this entrepreneur stuff but I, I, I sit in my head I think it's, it's not that important really in the end compared to say family, personal relationships, health. So to me it's a bit like a game in a way and I want to win at the game and I like the game. You prepared to invest in the game but it's still not everything, you know and so in with E consultancy or with Guild I don't sometimes you would say they're like my baby. It's like no, like and, and, and when I saw it E Consultants like someone's paid, paid fair money for it. We have an agreement let's you know, that's is what it is now it's not to say I care about my own sort of personal reputation integrity and if I have been involved in creating brands I would like to think that they don't you know reflect well on, on me to some degree or you know, but, but then it's a realistic, you know. So with E consultancy there's a period where, where well after the earnout to some degree even during the earnout but after the earn out like I don't run this business any, it's not mine, you know and if they, the new owners want to do X I might tell them I'm not sure that's a good idea or not but it's your business so if you do whatever you want to do so, so yes I do have a like fondness and some lots of sort of good memories and things but I don't Know, certainly didn't feel any sense to. I mean with the E consultancy sale, there was this earn out anyway. So mentally it was kind of more of a continuation really. And Guild, if anything, it's felt relief sometimes more than depression. As in it's a sort of positive lifting of, you know, sort of energy which had felt like kind of a grind. Was then sort of stunned. Then you can open new avenues, new opportunities and things. So I think it was a positive thing actually. Really not a negative thing. But that hadn't worked out so well. So it's made it different.

I really want to ask you about relief, actually, because strangely, my wife likes watching MasterChef and we were watching it last night and one of the contestants who went out said they felt a sense of relief.

Yeah.

And it reminded me of. This is a completely different scenario. But often when people have been running like a Ponzi scheme or a scam or something that's becoming more and more and more stressful and they talk about when the police show up at their door, they feel a sense of relief because the struggle is over. And I thought about the MasterChef person last night, like they. That it had been such a struggle for them.

Yeah.

And although if you ask them, do you want to go through? They'd probably have said yes. But actually when they got. You're out.

Yeah.

Relief was such an interesting experience. And you've just mentioned relief there. So is that.

Yeah, no, I think it's. I say that tension way. I mean, living a lie is maybe putting it a bit strongly, but where you are projecting one thing but feeling something else is emotionally kind of quite tiring. So in my case it was, you know, that, you know, Guild still had a positive future. There were lots of spots of hope or causes for optimism or there was this new feature coming out which would change everything. There was this big new client win which would change everything. And then having to think. But it hasn't really, has it? You know, and that living with that kind of tension is. It's like, I guess if one had secrets or a lie you were suppressing thing is, is hard. That I think is kind of emotional then. So the relief is like that's gone. Yeah, it's now it's out there, you know, I mean that's, you know, like therapy, I guess, isn't it? You know, you're sort of get it off your chest and it's like, oh, now I don't have to pretend anymore, you know. So I think that's in the case of Gill, they say, say the times where he's sort of pushing, push, pushing the rock and all that kind of stuff, trying to kind of maintain, try these different things, they're still not working out. I think that was, you know, that was hard over a period of time. And you do that for, you know, you can do that for short chunks of time, but with. It sort of starts to feel like years. It's like. So, yeah, I don't think it's surprising in that sense that it's a sort of sense of relief or in that kind of, you know, your Master Chef example.

I think that could be really encouraging to people who are watching or listening who maybe have that, that feeling inside of. I'm not sure this is. But they don't yet have the, the, I guess the clarity to, to end things.

Yeah, I mean, obviously this doesn't. I mean, this is about things in life general, isn't it? I mean, this could be. Not necessarily startups or just entrepreneurs, but anyone and often people in big businesses, you know, friends who are law partners, extremely successful and wonder, you know, but they're miserable or something, or should I leave? Should I do this? So it's not, I think it's not justice of the world of sort of startups and things, but it's about, about, you know, I get the particularly challenging thing for entrepreneurs is going back to your set of miners and the diamonds and things. Is this nagging feeling because, you know, the message might be, look, if it's getting really hard or difficult, well, do something else. It's like, well, that's easy to say, but hey, I've got investors, I put all my money in this, the house on the line, how I'm going to get another job. I've been doing this for six years, so I might as well do it for another one year and it might come good, the market might change. I mean, there's 101 ways you can persuade yourself that, that it. Things could get better. Or you might. If only, like you read in all the hearing, all the podcasts, if only you kept going, you would get to the diamonds. I say, and you might.

This is the challenging thing, isn't trouble, isn't it?

But some people probably destroy themselves in the process, you know, and so it's like, well, was it worth it even if you did get to the diamonds? Maybe not.

Yeah, that's really interesting.

Yeah. I mean, I was also very fortunate, I think, that, that because I'd done well with E consultancy and ably, kind of quite luckily, but Financially I was secure really. And I suppose because e consultancy had gone well I could think well you know, I've had one success or you know, I can't be a complete loser. You know, I can't get it wrong. So you sort of, maybe subliminally you sort of think it gives you some confidence. You say okay, this one didn't work, that one did. You know, that's kind of normal.

Let's talk about work ethic then. So you've had a startup which has grown a lot and you've sold and then you've had a startup which has been more challenging. Both of those situations can be immensely hard work. So how has your I guess work life balance changed over the years and particularly you know, as you've had children and things like that. Because I think that's something that business owners, founders, entrepreneurs can find quite difficult.

Yeah, I think, I don't know whether it has some slightly controversial views on work life balance or I don't even particularly not sure I like the phrase even that much but. And I guess the reason is that the to me work life balance sort of implies it sort of says don't work too hard. Don't sort of sacrifice your risk your personal life in some ways because you're working too hard at work. And that sort of suggests work is bad and not good and personal life is, is all fun fun. And I just don't, I don't think that's true. I mean there's, there's plenty of you know, work stuff which is good fun and there's plenty of personal life stuff which isn't fun at all. So, so when you. I can talk about finding a balance which makes you happy. Yes. But I would say with. Yeah without doubt in my career the per. My personalized much be much more challenging than my business life.

Right.

And I mean without it as obviously there's a lot of sort of personal details in that but my father six years, seven years ago and died died of a form of Alzheimer's. My mother in law and my mother had. Both now have Alzheimer's and it's, it's, it's bad. It's really. And some. And so a lot of those things in that it's like much easier than raising money or do it. You know, I mean so, so I think it's. Yeah, it's, it's not, it's thinking about, you know, what's right for you and getting, trying to get that balance right and that might be working all the hours that God sends Because you've got no wife or children and you want to just do that or it might be that, yeah, you're a risk of overworking out and you need to step back a bit and things. But I think it's not, it's not a sort of binary say. I think work life balance has been seen as don't work too hard, you know, kind of thing. Whereas I, I'm not sure I necessarily agree with that. I think it depends on, you know, you're, you say I've being a father, you know, to two young girls, being a husband, being a son, you know, but managing various aspects of that is harder, I think because it's a bit more kind of emotional. Whereas business is. Business say I sort of see it like a game almost where. So yes, I, I think I would say I found it more challenging doing that stuff. And, and the truth is like, you see like with young children, like it's easier to be at work than it is at home with young children, I'd say.

Yeah.

So it's like we talk about work life balance when the children are young. I went to work to have some balance, you know, to try to have some peace and quiet, you know, so it's like it's. And I think people may be honest about this sometimes actually.

Yeah.

So I think the hard thing could be you only one, being at home when you want to be at home, work. So yeah, I think it's nuanced. I also think that, you know, I say, which is sort of controversial in the businesses that I've invested in and that's usually in early stage and usually really I'm investing in the person a little bit, the opportunity or something, but mostly in the person. I don't want them. If work life balance means them not working very hard and being obsessed about the business, I'm probably not going to invest. Like I had to say, I'm, you know, if I in email the, you know, found or CEO investor of a business I've invested in and that they reply late on a Friday or early on a Sunday morning. I see that's a good sign. And, and, and I always think I shouldn't be saying that because you say.

No, yeah, that's a don't, you're not allowed to have that opinion these days.

Don't do it, you know. You know, and it's your mental health and well being and I do believe in that also.

Yeah.

But as I say, I think it's a new, you know, I want to see passion and hunger and the fact that they reply to me means they'll reply to the customers in a similar way and then they'll inculcate that into their staff. Now, it doesn't mean working all hours, doesn't mean not having holidays, it just means really giving a shit, basically, really caring. And so I don't want to see my. And you know, the people invested in break themselves completely. And sometimes I have had sentences saying, look, you know, it's great that you're doing this, but you're right, you don't push yourself too, too hard, but do push yourself quite hard. Because I'm an investor, you know, what I don't want to see is some like, oh, well, whatever, above.

Yeah.

You know, so it's a weird. It's a weird thing where I think. I mean, I don't see shorter sort of gambling and financial stuff. I don't meet many entrepreneurs, ones who've done well or badly, who sort of don't work really hard. Yeah, I just can't. I just, you know, I think it is hard, say all for balance, but as I say, what balance might mean to you. And by balance we kind of really mean. I suppose so, happiness, positive energy, you know, excitement and things like that. And then, you know, that for different people, that's different. That might be work, it might be sports or it might be family or where, you know, different things. But it's. Yeah, I kind of, I think, again, along with this slightly dangerous myth that you've just got to keep going and going and going and it'll somehow come good and you'll reach the diamonds and. Or that, you know, working too hard or being, you know, work, life, balance, you have to kind of is, I don't know, can be a bit dangerous.

Do you think it's possible to grow a successful company working nine to five, five days a week? Yes.

I mean, and actually, I would say I've never worked, like, I never worked that hard. If you look at it in terms of hours. I mean, I very rarely have worked at weekends. Evenings, Yes, a bit, but. But mostly because I wanted to. Really. Actually, actually, you. Sometimes at the weekend, you think, I've got some clear space, I can finally get around to thinking about that. Or as an entrepreneur. Not just as an entrepreneur, but, you know, you have things in your head, in your mind, you know, and it's buzzing. Doesn't mean you could wake up in the night or you'd be thinking about something. Sometimes I think that's a problem where it was where you take work home and you know, you can have that conversation where you think, you know, you're not properly present, where you're kind of looking at someone but you're not really listening because you're thinking about something else. I mean, but that doesn't have to work. That could be children, could be anything but. So one has to be aware of that. But it's quite hard say when you're running a business and there's all these opportunities, all these challenges and things that they're ticking over in your head.

Yeah.

Switching off, that can be quite hard. But I think then, you know, some people are morning people, some people are evening people and some people are weekend and some people need to go on a run to clear, you know, and again, it's sort of finding what kind of environment maybe works ideally for you. And then that's a negotiation of, you know, trying with your, your partner, with your investors, with your staff about how to kind of. But, but I never with you say, I don't work that hard even with guilds, you know, in terms of hours, like nothing like my youngest brother was a, a lawyer at Linklist, a lawyer now, but he was at Link Laters and he used to. Unless he did two all nighters every week, you know, and you were in every weekend. Definitely you earn a lot of money, but I mean it's, it's like you're a beck and call. I know a friend of mine seeing later is a banker. I mean earning a lot of money but, but has, that's like literally no life kind of thing. So I, I don't think it's always the case. Entrepreneurs work longer hours necessarily. It might be more intense at certain times but, but actually, you know, I, yeah, I'm not, I'm not like kind of crazy hours. I, I think also Joanna's getting a bit old as well. I just don't have the maybe physical emotional stamina that when you're younger.

Right.

And again, you know, it's like having young children where you had sleepless night nights, like broken sleep. Like now I think, God, I don't think I could do that again. But I did. Had you, had you to get through it, basically. Yeah. So again, I think some of this stuff, it's, it's slightly life stage related as well. So you know, getting old in theory, you have more wisdom and you can run a successful business because you get better at devolving decisions, devolving responsibility. You know, that's something I've been conscious of in the past where I've, I Just take on too much because I, you know, know that's the only way that it's going to get done properly or I don't want so and so to have to do it. The intersection of sort of one's personal life and business life and entrepreneurs is incredibly important. It's, you know, some. I think, as you say, it doesn't get talked about very much, partly because a lot of the personal stuff is personal, like necessarily be appropriate one to talk about it. But the two are massively related. Yeah. You know, I mean, they have to be in terms of your emotional state, your time, all these things. It's. They are a big factor, both one upon each other.

And I suppose as entrepreneurs, we have a certain number of decisions that we make over our life which have an outsized effect on the results that we generate. And I don't know about you, but I find it really difficult to make amazing decisions if I've been staring at a laptop screen for 14 hours or if there's some crazy stuff going on in personal life. We are organic being beings.

Yeah, yeah.

At the moment. So.

No, it's. It's kind of.

Yeah.

I mean, I've noticed, say since sort of the Guild or some more intense stuff, Iron Guilds now has sort of dropped away a bit. And I've tried if, you know, even the fact I've written these two short stories, they might not be very good, but I've. I find, and this is, I'm sure born out all sorts of research and stuff, but my kind of creativity is sort of happening despite me trying to, you know, like I. I'd be walking along a city where an ideas will come into my head, like in a way that just. They just arise kind of thing. And I don't think that would, you know, so when I was still working at Gil, whether it's on the screen or not, must be something there that's sort of blocking or channeling or sort of focus attention on kind of one thing only. Yeah. And then so in a weird way, if something's not working, ideally your temptation is to go at it and go at it harder and harder and more and more to try and solve it. Whereas actually probably the answer is to step back a bit or get someone else to have a look at it and go where you're looking at this all wrong or, you know, that kind of alternate kind of view and things.

Final thing I wanted to ask you about, this is something that we talked about when we spoke on the. On the phone. You're very Intentional about the relationships that you cultivate and the sort of network that you've built. I think you're probably more intentional about that than anyone I've spoken to. I wonder if you could just, I guess, give the audience a bit of a rundown on how you think about the people that you meet and how you cultivate and maintain those relationships.

I mean, as I said earlier, my. I guess the sort of overriding passion or interest, for whatever reason seems to have been these sort of, you know, professional communities, networks, groups, whatever you want to call it. And those can manifest as online communities, messaging groups, events, roundtables, all sorts of things.

Things.

But it seems to give me a lot of satisfaction to sort of bring people together to share and learn from each other. And I'm particularly interested in say, B2B or professional rather than consumer stuff. So it tends to be areas of knowledge or expertise people are learning and things and particularly, you know, emerging new stuff like AI or whatever, sustainability and things like that. Because it's like. I just find it, I suppose, intellectually maybe interesting, exciting and the sort of people aspect of. Of these kind of communities I just find quite rewarding. So I suppose, you know, I would be a. Networking's like tainted as a word, kind of. It's like. That's like go to an event and hand out your business cards and sort of move on quickly if someone's not interesting. I'm not like that at all. But I do say, like meeting people, exchanging ideas, putting them together with each other and things. So I guess I'm more sort of a connect with. And I've built. Where E consultancy was, you had over 100,000, well, 600,000 registered sort of users. Certainly at one point, you know, people in marketing around the world, you know, I just knew lots of people in the industry and kind of put them together and things just sort of enjoyed that. So it wasn't. It was useful for. I mean, particularly for E consultancy because I was needing to find speakers for events, for example, or awards, judges or someone to give a quote on a piece of industry research and they. Things. So my ability to know the CMOs of 50 of the FTSE 100 companies was important because they were useful, valuable relationships, directly or indirectly. So there was a sort of direct or what, you know, if I was thinking, why am I spending my time doing this? The truth is because I just sort of quite liked it and it seemed obvious to me that good things would come of it. The hard sort of numbers thing is, yes, we kind of won clients or kept clients or found sort of ways of generating value in terms of content, speaking things out of those people that I knew and then you know, after, because E consultancy was a sort of media business, community business and because I was often on stage or chairing meetings or roundtables and stuff, my network, it was like the business itself was a network of communities. So I ended up, I have got loads and loads of connections. They're getting older now as in like literally physically older, like and some less plugged into the kind of new generations of marketers as I should be or was then. But you know, that network then has subsequently been super useful. So with Guild, the investors, I have 42 investors and I think bar about two of them, all people are met by E consultancy, right. And most of them were people who, you know, were entrepreneurs, are entrepreneurs themselves and they built a business, an agency or whatever, a tech company and sold it and therefore in a position to invest. And the fact that I'd kind of known them and they respected me and or E consultancy meant that they'd at least answer my, you know, email or call or whatever ever. And as you know, actually it was relatively easy for me to raise that money say because hopefully my personal reputation, time I'd spent with them over the years, the success of E consultancy made it, you know, so that was very valuable, you know, to be able to sort of call in the favors as it were. But I, so I don't, I think I, I, I, I like to think I'm fairly generous in my time in as much as I do take meetings with people where I can't see the zoom any obvious valuable to me because they're more junior, for example but if I just like they're really passionate about something, I think I can help then that's a sort of rewarding thing to be able to do, sort of, you know, the giving back thing. But also I believe and this has happened that you know, the serendipity like you meet someone you think's not going to be there's no value and then all of a sudden there's a chance comment or they happen to know we find out their mother's so and so you've been trying to get hold of and like oh, and so I do believe in that, you know, know, sort of spending some time where other people, if they were power networkers will go, I know I calibrate and score people and I'm not going to waste you.

Don'T meet my criteria.

So I'm much more kind of Informal than that, I suppose. But I do have, I guess in the way that maybe when you said I'm intentional, where I feel maybe a bit more intentional is that I occasionally have met people in my career where for one reason, another I thought wow, you're really impressive, like really smart or really good at something. Something particularly if it's something which I'm less good at because there's a sort of complementarity then there and I sort of make a mental or sometimes actual note to sort of, you know, their details or to sort of follow up with them and because I'd like to work with them, you know, and I kind of. And I think they're probably going to be successful at whatever they do. And an example of that would be Matt, who is my co founder at E consultancy and Ably CEO of Abel. And I met him, you know, when I was working at an agency back in the late 90s. He was a contract programmer who came in for like two days to take over from someone else. And you know, I was working in a big ish agency, a couple hundred people at the time and we supposedly had all the, you know, best developers in, in London and he was leagues better than anyone that we had and, and as well as being sort of brilliantly technically he was very commercially smart and savvy and entrepreneurial, good with people and things. And I thought wow, this is someone I need to sort of. Even though he then left because he was a conversation contract programmer, I sort of kept his details and then when I had the idea for E consultancy I went to him and said look, I've got this idea and you know, but I need someone to build the website because I'm not a coder and stuff. And so he did that. So you know, E consultancy couldn't have happened really without him and then my investment in Ably couldn't have happened without the proceeds from econsultancy etc. So you kind of. There are, are individuals I think who can have a disproportionately big impact on your life. That might be a teacher at school or you know, but so I think yeah, in terms of some of that intentionality and even now I, you know, if you ask me and I again this might be something which I sense is for people who are a bit older, maybe second, third time entrepreneurs are just generally older when they ask about what they want to do, what would give them satisfaction. It's not necessarily, you know, be a billionaire or create a. They say I just want to work with good people. People, yes, because that's what gives you sort of pleasure and reward and as it happened usually does can lead to financial or other kinds of success. But given, you know, if you are depending on your work life balance but even if you're being very sensible, nine to five or whatever, you still spend most of your life at work, a lot of your life at work. So if you're going to do that, ideally doing it with people that you respect and kind of learn from and you know, feel, feel excited about, you know, for me and I think for a lot of people that says, you know, is super important.

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