The K Economy: Shortcuts to Capitalising on a Post-Pandemic World with Founder/CEO at Huggg, Paul Wickers #11

After all, all art is experience.

Hello and welcome to this episode of The Company Doctor, in which we'll be dissecting what it takes not only to survive, but to thrive as a business in the throes of a major global crisis. We're very lucky to be joined by Paul Wickers, CEO of Hugg, the platform that makes it simple for businesses to send gifts at scale, helping them to reward their teams and retain their customers with a human touch. He has a fascinating story to tell about the evolution of Hug during these recent trying times and plenty of experience and wisdom to impart to those facing similar challenges. So that's quite enough out of me. Gary, Paul, over to you.

If I give you, say, the analogy of, say, a painter who paints Hug.

Well, hi, Paul. Thank you so much for joining us on this episode. We're really excited to have you with us today.

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Oh, pleasure. Now, really looking forward to it because the topic today is the K-Economy: Shortcuts to Capitalizing on a Post-Pandemic World. And God, it's been a great 18— well, 12 to 18 months. So lots to talk to you about, and I'm really interested to talk to you about Hug and I think a lot of people, you know, will be really interested to find out. So I thought maybe a good place to start is if you could just quickly introduce yourself and the company, that'd be really great.

Sure. Yeah. So I'm Paul. Wickers. I'm the CEO of Hugg and the original founder of Hugg. I had a previous background as a banker but decided one day to go and try my arm at the tech startup world. And Hugg is a gifting platform. So what we do is we make it ridiculously simple for businesses to send gifts either to their staff or to their customers, to the point of full automation if they need to.

Fantastic. And I did try it myself, and I managed to get, yeah, I bagged some brownies, so thank you for that.

They were great. Yes, you get those on sign-up as a way of demo.

And also, what I really liked is basically when I interacted, you sent me a LinkedIn request, and that's how we got connected. So I really like the engagement. But there's a bit of interesting background to how you got the company started. What made you start this business? Because you've moved from leveraged finance in banking to something very different. So what made you do this?

Yeah, it's— I would like to have a more like fun, cool story to this, but I'll just tell you the truthful one, which is I used to do mergers and acquisitions deals. So I would fund the debt element of a buyout or an IPO or a company buying another company. And I did that for a long, long time. Very rewarding, challenging job. But one of the things that I once looked at the funding for was in the— it was in the gift card sector, was in the, uh, the greeting card sector rather. And there was part of leveraged finance is essentially figuring out how to take fairly long-term debt risk on a company where you're expecting your money to come back as a bank no earlier than 5 years out. So you have to make some assessments of what the market might look like in 5 to 10 years, generally speaking. And it didn't make sense. There was something that didn't make sense in that deal, which was that the greeting card industry was an industry that required somebody to write something down with an actual pen and put an actual stamp on it so that it can be sent from one place to another. Didn't make sense that that industry was continuing to grow and hadn't been disrupted yet. But there was something more interesting underlying in the way that the psychology works of greetings and gifting and so on and so forth that was actually retaining that as, uh, what maybe could be viewed as being a very non-digitized industry, right, for digitization. But it just never had been. So every time e-cards, e-gifts, so on and so forth had been launched, they hadn't really worked. E-gift card, uh, greeting cards, that is, they hadn't really worked. So I had a moment where I was trying to figure out what might disrupt that so that I could populate the 'what might disrupt that' part of our credit papers and our assessment. And I came upon the idea of what if you could make a really inexpensive, similar price thing as a greeting card, digitally enabled, so that you could send something digitally, but it still had that same impact on the recipient. And the figure— and the, the idea of an app where you could get a cup of coffee sent to somebody, effectively you pay for it, they go and collect it, was the core of us coming on this journey to build a gifting platform.

Well, that's what I really like. So, I was listening to you being interviewed somewhere else, and you were talking about almost like texting your friends a coffee or real emojis that sent as a gift. So, I think it's very inventive. I like that. I love the idea. The thing that's interesting for people listening to this is, you know, we've been through a pan— well, we're still in the pandemic, But I want to take you before, now you started your business, I think you got going roughly 2017, so you're quite a new business. Yeah. I think what would be useful, we'll get to the pandemic in a minute, but let's not go there yet. Tell us what the key things you did to get your business started. I appreciate how you got, why you got started, but what sort of things did you do and what were the biggest things that kind of moved the dial for you to get moving?

Well, I'll first just put my hands up and say I'm a first-time founder. So one of the things that I did was make many of the new, mistakes that first-time founders make. I mean, I just— I, I didn't get everything right at all.

People will love that, by the way.

Yeah, well, I just learned— like, I'm, I'm— where I am now is the sum total of all of the learnings from the previous few years. But we have a marketplace model. We take somebody else's supply and then make it technologically possible for it to be bought by somebody. Yeah. And we make that market But marketplace models are very hard to start because you have the chicken and egg problem of supply versus demand. You need to procure both because you can't create any one of them for yourself in isolation. And we had an extra special horrendous version of that because we also had this third party, which was a recipient. So I'll just describe what I mean there. Like, Uber would have been a tremendously difficult company to start. But at least you can start with some riders in Denver and some drivers in Denver. You at least can look in the same city for both sides of your marketplace and start on a geographical perspective. What we couldn't do was that. We, well, we did, but it wasn't really sustainable. We started in Bristol, but of course, once somebody sent to their friends in Bristol, they want to be able to send something to their friends in London and Newcastle, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and now Paris, Milan, like we just, we had this third party that meant that we couldn't start a marketplace model regionally. So the other way that you normally start a marketplace model is to tighten it down to a particular vertical. And we couldn't really do that either. A typical vertical would be Amazon started by having books. And it just became amazing at selling books. But when it's gifts, you need to give people choice because they otherwise run out of use cases. So we had a very, very hard flywheel to get moving in terms of a marketplace model. And it took a lot. I suspect a lot of other businesses tried and failed at this particular problem many, many times over.

Paul, what, what high-level thing did you do to kind of move the dial and to get through that?

The high-level thing that we did was concentrated regionally first. And then constructed the story that articulated what I just articulated accurately enough and convincingly enough, because it is logical, to enable a venture capitalist to put their hand in their pocket and fund the next stage of it. The other thing that we did was we realized that we couldn't launch with a product that a large brand wouldn't be able to get on board with, because that was the only way of making the supply side of it scale. Quickly. So we didn't MVP our first product, we actually built a pretty good first version of the product. And it was because of that, that we were able to really get the ball moving on some chains, although they still took quite a long time. But we recognized that we couldn't go as scrappy as you would normally go. And that was one of the biggest things that we did to move the dial.

Okay, that's really good to know. And then if you think again, pre-pandemic, so you had like 3 years roughly, Yeah. Did the business go in the way you wanted it to go in those 3 years?

Not really. The major thing that we did was we got some— the first thing that we did was we released the product and we had some success. But when we tried to scale that out, we found it a lot more difficult than we'd assessed. But we grew the team too fast. So we underestimated where our— how fit our product was for the market and grew out the team too fast, thereby giving us a problem of not fast enough traction for the cost base. So the cost base was growing faster than the traction and progress was, and that became quite a— well, it became a very difficult problem for us to then deal with. And fundamentally what we did was we tried to scale a business that didn't have product-market fit.

Yeah, so how did you overcome that? I mean, you obviously did. What did you do to overcome that? It'd be useful for people to hear that.

Yeah, we did. Well, we had to do what many— what happens many times is we had to extend our funding round with our existing investors, and they were very supportive in doing that. Fortunately, we decided that we were solving a gifting problem for B2B more than we were for B2C. So at that point, we'd had a plan to do both, but we realized we didn't have the capital or the team size to be able to do both. So as soon as we got the first large chains on board, we were able to focus instead on B2B. And we had a lot— we were a lot better at, at the B2B game than the B2C game because our starting point was just a bit— it had a lot more learning to it.

Yeah.

So we extended our seed round, focused on B2B, and that caused us to start to really make it work. But then we got hit by COVID.

Yeah, so hold the COVID thought. Before you get there, one of the things I found really interesting about you guys is that you're talking about the mechanics of things, but also one of your secret weapons seems to be your people and your hiring approach. I thought it was quite interesting. Apart from hiring— you talked about hiring your sister-in-law as a co-founder at the beginning. There was some reason behind that. I'd be interested to know what that is. But also you're very focused on having the right types of people.

Tell us about that. Yeah, so we, we, we actually believe that our brand is important and that you can only build a brand that is honest and true to itself if you hire people who have a personality type that accords with that brand. So in general, we're very careful to look for people to have the right fit for the brand. And that doesn't mean a particular type of person, it just means a particular type of personality, right? So I would describe the company's people as being demanding of each other and performant, but where they still have to, and like, and they enjoy each other's company, they enjoy being together and winning together. And, you know, sometimes we all lose together as well.

Yeah, I mean, I was, I was reading that, you know, diversity is at the core for you, and you even run job ads through some kind of software that looks for unconscious bias.

Yes, although I wouldn't say that we get this right still at all, and it would be wrong for me to say sitting here that we get this, that we really get this right. We really care, but we, like many other businesses, have a long way to go on that. And actually, we, like many other businesses, do use these sorts of things in order, in order to do this. But yeah, hiring, you know, hiring is just one thing that we've had to really, really learn how to do. It's something I had no idea actually how to do coming into this. And most recently we've actually, you know, brought somebody on board to do the hiring for us because we're leveling up in terms of how we do that. And we need to be able to do that more scalably.

And you'll have to hug in the office?

No, I mean, that's pre-pandemic. That was pretty contentious, but I think now that would be, um, —for both of us.

And just tell, sorry to be nosy, tell me about the sister-in-law. Why was she key to be your co-founder? You were really keen on having her in.

Yeah, so my, I started a business like pretty late. I wish I'd done it in my early 20s, but I didn't. So by the time I came to running the business, starting a business, I had, you know, family, kids, mortgage, all those things that make it really hard to, A, take giant risks, and B, take giant, you know, pay cuts potentially. So the way that I actually started this business at the outset was I had an idea, I was able to grab some investors to fund the first phase of the idea, but the first phase of the idea was really using external development agencies to build out a product which, as I described before, couldn't really be an MVP, couldn't really be super scrappy. So we did that externally at at the outset, but I continued to work throughout because I needed to get it to the stage where it could then sustain me being able to hop out and take a salary so that I could live, rather than being living hand to mouth on— it's known as ramen poor, isn't it? If you can only eat ramen, that's, that's what you start a business on. But I just didn't have that option. So the way that we did it was, because I was only able to— because I had to continue to work actually for in excess of a year in the end whilst we started this business. The one person in my life who was the best equipped to come with me on this journey, but who had at the time— not now, but at the time— had fewer of those commitments and was my sister-in-law. So I just, I asked her if she would come and do it with me, and she did, and the rest is history.

The rest is history. But you know, this story is great because a lot of people listening would like the idea of being in their own business. You know, we're gonna talk about pandemic in a minute. Some people would really like the idea, but they don't know, they can't take the risk. And I think what you did, what you've explained is you de-risked it, which is really interesting.

I did de-risk it, yeah. Well, however, I now know that I didn't really de-risk it. I got away with it. But one of the riskiest things you can do is have half a foot in a pool of water. Sometimes you need to jump right in, and that actually could have killed us. So me doing that and not moving fast enough on an idea, Actually could have killed us, got away with it, but it could have killed us.

So, and if you had the chance to do it again, would you do the same or something different then?

If I had the chance to do it again, I'd have done it when I was 22. Right.

Okay. But would you have taken the same risk? Would you have done the same thing of being half in it?

Yeah, it was just necessary. There was no way I functionally had no other way of doing it. So actually in the end there was no other way of me doing that. Okay. I would now know an entirely different way of starting a business where you can actually take a lot of the risk out of it.. But you have to be a second-time founder to be able to do that, really. I don't really believe that you know enough the first time.

I certainly didn't. And that's part of the reason of having the podcast. We want people to know that there's another way. And let's go to the pandemic. So, you know, you're getting your business going, you know, obviously you've had all the ups and downs. I think you called it running new businesses like a line graph, extreme peaks and troughs going up and down all the time. Yeah. But when the pandemic hit, what did you think was going to happen and what did happen?

That's a very good question. When the pandemic hit us, by that point we had all of our— remember, all of our gifts are, were at that time, they were things that you would collect from a physical location. The idea was about experiential, often edible gifting. So it's something that you collect from a physical location. And at that point we have 1,300 locations live and we were about to put another 2,000 live with a large chain. In the space of 2 days, all of them were closed. So we lost everything on our supply side, was closed. So we therefore had a 100% revenue impact. We had nothing to sell. And we actually were at the point of just raising a little bit more financing that was going to see us through. When I talked about extending the financing, some of that wasn't closed yet, but that part was coming from external investors. And all investments basically stopped at that moment in time, including those ones, understandably, because everyone who was about to give us funding had a million and one other problems in their existing portfolios.

Yeah, so everyone was in a panic at the same time.

Yeah, so where we were at the start of the pandemic was we were fairly, like, low on runway because we were expecting to top up, and we were in a position where everything was closed. Wow. So I— we were in about as bad a position as you could, could be.

And when you heard about the pandemic and the lockdown, when you were thinking about overnight, the first night, did it happen in the way you expected it to happen, the bad stuff?

Um, yeah, it was as bad as we thought it would be. As you could dream of. Yeah, yeah, basically. Yeah, all of those— there was like a weekend where I think I spent 12 to 15 hours reading news websites to try and really figure out what was happening and how bad it was going to be. And the conclusion I'd reached by the time I went in on the Monday morning was, this is quite possibly a completely existential threat for us because of the confluence of circumstances.

So the only way is up from this point.

The only way was up. Well, the most likely— honestly, the most likely outcome at that moment in time may well have been that we just would have ceased to exist. But we managed to make a few moves over a few days that saved us, and ultimately—

Let's talk about that. So let me ask it in a way so we can kind of take that goodness that you've done and the turnaround that you made. So, you know, part of this podcast is about the K economy, and the K economy is the downside of the Ks, people that are down and maybe out. 'cause some people have had a better COVID than others and some people just can't work. And the upside of the K is like the V-shaped economy that hopefully comes back at some time, like travel has in the UK as an example. Tell us what you did to navigate through this and come out the other side to accelerate through the pandemic firstly.

Maybe that's a good place to start. Okay, yeah. So I have to really describe this literally with what happened inside of a week because it was— Good. In terms of sliding doors moments in a business, it was, it was really that. So on the Monday, we realized that we needed to fundamentally put some sort of rescue plan in place. And unfortunately, the first measure that we had to take was on such short runway was that we had to find severe cost cuts. Yeah. The entire team was amazing. They completely understood why. And what that really entailed was we got rid of all of our office space. Some people were going to be homeschooling anyway, so they were able to reduce their hours. Some people unfortunately had to be placed onto a redundant— or rather, their roles had to be made redundant so that we went down to a skeleton team. The idea was that as a bare minimum, we should go down to a skeleton team to make the runway as long as possible, the cost base as low as possible, and maybe we could 'Actually, maybe we can just hibernate this out.' That was the— it's a ride the storm, very basic, very basic plan.

Is that before, uh, before the furlough or just at the same time as the furlough?

Yeah, so we act— we act— we had to act so quickly that we announced redundancies the day before the furlough scheme. Okay. And then I sat at my desk listening to Rishi Sunak at 5:00, 5:30 on that Thursday announce the furlough scheme. And I have to admit, I was crying because I felt like what he was announcing was going to save us from having to actually go through with it the next day. And I'd asked my colleague to actually hold back on all the letter issuances because the rumors came out that there would be an announcement. And then everyone got the dictionaries out and looked at what furloughing meant. And the reality was for us that because there was absolutely no certainty whatsoever over when the cash flow would actually come in to pay for the first furlough claims. We felt that we probably wouldn't even have enough cash to be able to get to that point, right, because it was so uncertain. So we did still have to follow through on the Friday. That's not the end of that story, but I'll leave that bit there. Great.

So, well, not great, but difficult, right?

Yeah. So during that week, about half of the staff were affected by this. Some degree of the rest of the staff had reduced their hours. I did what I could to my own pay, and we got rid of offices. And overall, we managed to take 70% of the cost out of the business in a 2-day period, which extended our runway to— still not great, but better than it was. We also, in the middle of that week, by complete chance, happened to hear about an issue that was bubbling up inside of schools that were about to be closed at the end of that week, whereby there are a massive number of kids who are fed by the state under the Free School Meals program. And what that basically means is that they get given a hot, nutritious lunch every single day that they're at school. There are 1.7 million children eligible for that scheme. And for an alarmingly high percentage of those, it's actually their main source of nutrition and their only source of hot food. That's incredible, isn't it? It's a horrible, horrible— unbelievable. Exactly. I had no idea that this happened. So we found this out, and the reason we found this out was because the brother of one of our staff members had a conversation with our team member that evening, and he works in a school, and he spent all day going around supermarkets trying to get gift cards because the teachers, the school leaders, were panicking that those kids couldn't go home to a house that had no food in it and no money. So they were using their own budgets to fund gift cards to give to those kids. And we realized that as the possible only scalable method of actually replacing free school meals we could actually make this happen at scale because our platform can carry a gift card every bit as much as it can carry a gift. So what we did is we, in the middle of that week, we'd announced redundancies, but on the same night, the rest of the team that was staying back started to retool the platform for this entirely new use case that would at least be helpful for someone in the pandemic. So we changed all the tone of voice. We changed all of that because it would have been inappropriate to say, hey, here's a lovely thing when it's actually here's a welfare. Hey, here's a lovely thing. We changed all of that tone of voice and we got all the supermarkets on board and we're able to completely transform our platform to be able to serve that use case. So from start to finish, we started to serve schools.

Is this in a week, Paul?

Yeah. So we'd done all of that inside of a week and then we spent an extra few days changing the tone of voice because we felt that that was appropriate whilst we got the first schools up and running. Wow.

Who said you can't move fast, right?

You can move fast if you need to. If you need to, you can move quick. If you're in a small business, you can move quick. If you're in a big business, there's layers of bureaucracy that stop you from moving at all. So that's what we did. And then the next week we started to serve our first schools. And then within about 4 days, the government announced the big national scheme that they'd actually been working on for about 5 weeks. So we pushed all of our schools over to that. And said, there you go, there's a national scheme now, it was lovely to help, come back to us if you need us, blah blah blah. That national scheme had wide press. I'm not going to go into any of that, it's pretty well known in the UK. Now what happened in the interim period was over that weekend we also were approached because of what we'd done. We were approached by the British Red Cross who'd seen in the press that we'd done this stuff for schools. And they— and, and back then you may remember that nobody could get a supermarket delivery slot.

Yes, I do remember. No toilet paper either.

There's nothing. Yeah, well, there was loads of it in people's garages, but there were people sat at home who couldn't get— go out because they were sheltering, shielding, I think it was called at the time. Um, they were shielding and they couldn't get a supermarket delivery slot and maybe didn't know anybody who could go shopping for them. Horrible situation for lots of people. The British Red Cross stepped in and said, we've got 30,000 volunteers and another 70,000 reserve volunteers, but we've got no secure method for somebody at home to be able to to place a shopping list order and pay for it such that we can dispatch a volunteer to do it. And we put our heads— they asked us if we could help them with it and we put our heads together. We managed to ship a full working solution of that in 12 hours, get back out to them fully working. And one week later we ended up signing a partnership with them. So from one, from day 1 to day 10, we'd basically gone from— we'd shaved a lot of cost out of the business. We'd taken a look at the furlough scheme, decided we still couldn't use that because of the cash flow uncertainty. We then retooled for schools, been kicked out of— not kicked out, just the schools, the schools thing had gone away. We couldn't help there anymore, but then gone live with a solution for the British Red Cross with a partnership. And the sum total of all of that meant that we then went back to investors a couple of weeks later, existing investors, and said, look, this is the situation we're in. This is what we've done, this is how we're going to move forward. And they effectively, they turn— our lead investor just turned around and said, look, you could have rolled over, it could have been game over. Well done on what you've done. And they put their hands in their pockets and gave us what would have amounted at that time to approximately 18 months of runway. Right, fantastic.

Let me, let me just pause you there because we're short on time and I want to get the, the next bit of the story. So, you know, you've just shown pivoting in action, amazing creativity and speed, which is, you know, amazing. And also that speed and activity led you to other connections, which is important. Yeah. Talk to me about, you know, the kind of— how do you push through now? So you've kind of— you've got the investment, gave you the runway. How do you— if you think about that, the V-shape, we're trying to grow and accelerate through the pandemic. Yeah. So you get some head of steam on that. What do you advise people to get ahead of that V-shape so that they can get ahead of the curve and get out the doldrums?

Sure. Well, what we effectively did was we did what we needed to do to survive. So you've got to shore that up first. You've got to get yourself a little bit of breathing space. And that's what— that's how we did that. We then, we took an inward look at the business and said, right, what does this business look like inside of COVID How can it survive if COVID never, ever, ever goes away? Because then you'll hedge your business by making those moves. So our version of that was we need products that can get delivered somewhere that doesn't rely on anywhere being open. So we put one person on that, just that entirely. We fixed a whole load of things that weren't right before that we needed to because we had a bit more time. So we rebuilt the platform and created a different, like a different model, a different pricing model associated with that. And where we ended up then was with that supply move and some of the other things we did in the product. We ended up with a hedged business, a business that would be okay when life is normal again, but is also okay when life is not normal again. So we should have been on the downside of the, of the K, but we ended up saying what's actually beneficial inside the COVID environment so that we could also hedge it. We also went on off the back of all of that work that we'd done. It caused us to spot a market use for our product that we would never have come to or would have taken us many, many years to realize.. And we now serve tens of thousands of children and thousands of schools and dozens of local authorities with voucher, a use case that we never had known about before, to the point where, you know, and we charge supermarkets and other retailers to take part in that, to the point where we've actually become profitable now. I think it's a great thing to do.

The other thing that stood out for me, Paul, to be honest, because I've used the service, is, you know, part of your goal was to text your friend a coffee. Now you can send the coffee, not physically, but the voucher so someone can get it. I sent my PA some brownies and they can choose a delivery to come at their own time, which I really like. So in a way it feels like it's much more natural. It is like texting emoji or a gift to someone.

Well, that's it. Yeah. I mean, what has actually happened is that it's sped up digital adoption. So one thing that people can do is look for industries that would have taken a lot longer to get digital adoption going., and they are suddenly behaving like early adopters because technology is suddenly something that they're looking for. But also look for what we looked for, were what are new problems that now exist because of COVID For us, it was if I'm a HR, working in HR and I sent gifts before, I could put them on someone's desk. If I'm doing it now, I can't because everyone's at home. So what is the problem there and how do I solve that? New problems arise out of this, and if you solve problems, you can grow great businesses.

That's great, you know, and this is a really inspiring story. You know, a lot of people have been— had a really, you know, torrid time over the last 18 months. And so my last question, because we're a bit short on time— I could talk for hours, by the way, so this is so, so interesting— if I was in the doldrums, I've come out of lockdown and their job's a bit of a risk, and I'm, yeah, I'm thinking of starting my own business What advice would you give me apart from not doing it? What advice would you give me? I think I'm in the doldrums. I need to do something. What would you say?

If you're in the doldrums and you need to do something, you know, you're actually in a pretty good position to start a business. And the reason for that is because you can either start a business when you've got absolutely nothing to lose or when you've got something to gain that is really like inherently driving you. Or when you are really up against it and it's really your only option. And the reason why those 3 motivators, it has to be one of those 3, is because the actual job of moving from an idea to executing on a business is such a steep curve in terms of it gets really hard really quickly that you have to be very highly motivated in order to not give up. And most businesses fail because they never even get to product-market fit. Founders give up. It's way harder, way harder than you think it is. It's going to take longer. It's going to impact your life way more. It's going to impact everyone around you a lot more than you think. Everything you think about it, you've underestimated. But if you're in that position where you've got nothing else to lose, or you've got a a situation that requires you to really do this, then you're in a jam. It will, it will actually make you incredibly creative and scrappy, and that's exactly how you need to be.

Well, that's fantastic, and you've absolutely demonstrated that if you need to, you can. The turnaround and the pivoting you did in that time, yeah, save the business, is, is inspiring. So listen, Paul, thank you so much for joining us on this episode. I think you'll help a lot of people. I'm very motivated by what you've covered. I'm going to hand you on to George. He's going to talk to you about your musical taste. Yeah, yeah.

Paul, thank you so much for that. It was, you know, it was exactly as Gary says, very inspiring. You're an excellent speaker. And you talked about some of the key dramatic moments in the evolution of Hug, you know, that 10-day pivoting odyssey. You know, that alone sounds like a real journey in itself. So my question is, has there been a soundtrack to this process? Or, you know, going back to your previous role as well, is there a, are there a couple of tunes that have kept you going, you know, through the tough times or helped you celebrate the good ones?

There's definitely been a soundtrack. And because we've been working at home so much and I'm a big earphones wearer, actually to block out kid noises in my house, my house is like menagerie/nursery, lots of kids and animals. So I wear earphones a lot, and I'm actually like a kid of the late '90s and Ibiza dance music and all of that. So I actually listen to very loud house music whilst I'm working, which would seem pretty unproductive to some people, but it's not to me. So I've listened to an awful lot of music. Generally speaking, I would have a preference for DJs and DJ mixes rather than individual tracks, but I'm going to pick a couple. One of them is Stardust, Music Sounds Better With You, because that reminds me of very, very happy and relaxed university days and that sort of music genre. Excellent. The second one of those is not from that genre, but I really love listening to disco music. And my personal view is that Chic and Nile Rodgers are the best music producers ever. And so I'm going to go with Everybody Dance by Chic. Great.

Two excellent choices and an excellent guest. So, Paul, thank you very much again. Gary, thanks to you. And thanks to you all for listening.

Thank you.

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