How to break the glass ceiling as an entrepreneur by swapping equity with a listed company.

Are we ready?

Ready. Born ready.

Born ready. I have the absolute pleasure to have Callum Liang with me today. Callum is joining us all the way from Singapore. Callum, hi. Thanks for joining us again.

It's great to catch up again.

He says again, because Callum and I knew each other back in the mid-'90s, back in Singapore, I think, wasn't it? When we were all running internet. Yeah. Where we were spring chickens running internet businesses. And Callum has been an entrepreneur for many years and very successfully. And he's going to talk to us today about the group that he's built, which is listed UK company, and he's built an amazing listed vehicle out of a number of other companies. Callum, tell us about MBH Corporation and how you've got that business noticed and listed. Yeah.

So very simply, MBH was a solution to a problem that I'd had as a small business owner. I think you've come across in your realm as a small business owner that even when you are a successful small business, you tend to face a glass ceiling. You can't, as a small business, you can't win the big contracts because you can't win the big contracts. You remain a small business. It's difficult to attract good senior staff when you're a small business. You don't have the resources of a big company. And then what tends to happen, successful small businesses get sold to bigger players in their industry. And the problem with that is that invariably you have to go along as part of that deal. So they're normally like a 3-year or a 5-year burnout. And the problem with us entrepreneurs is we just don't make very good employees. And so we're just not very good at being told what to do, especially when it comes to our own baby. And you've been in this industry long enough that you've seen scores, I'm sure, of entrepreneurs that have been acquired by WPP and Publicis and Omnicom and others and have been spat out, quit in disgust 6 months later or fired from their own company. And it just seemed like that's not a very good solution if you've spent the last 10, 20 years of your life creating value for others. And so the idea of agglomeration, this particular company MBH, is that we find good, well-run, profitable small businesses. They swap their private equity for public equity, but the founder keeps full control over their business. So it's their brand, it's their hiring and firing, it's their culture. They don't need to run anything past anyone. They just carry on running the business. As they always have. But they're part of this amazing collaborative of other entrepreneurs that now have a vested interest in their success and they have a vested interest in other people's success. And they've got this stock so they can go out and they can give stock incentives to staff and they can go and do their own acquisitions. Yeah, it's just a, it's a very, you know, I was saying to you earlier, I know I'm incredibly lucky. I just get to hang out with cool, successful business owners from around the world and then try and share their stories with investors. So it's a lot of fun.

You are a successful entrepreneur because in Singapore you've built a business really out of an idea. And yeah, having been in those conversations with big companies and you're on a 5-year earnout, and more than one of my friends who sold a company didn't get the final year's earnout payment. So a great solution, but sort of communications perspective, Callum, you've also built a listed company without all of the sort of investment bankers and all the entourage that hang onto those vehicles. Can you just tell us then, have you been building really amongst those 3 audiences? Because you've got the potential companies to buy into, you've got your investors, and you've got the ones you've bought into. Do you want to just share what have you been doing to build the brand and get noticed? Yeah.

So I think something that you are delving deeply into is this idea of personal branding. And it's something that I've been working hard at. And I think I had that reticence that a lot of people have about not wanting to put themselves out front and all of that sort of stuff. And then I realized a number of years ago how much time it saves you if you are well known. And I realized that if somebody, if you've written a book, for example, or even just written an article or you've been on a podcast or somebody's read your blog post, if you have a meeting with someone and they've already heard about you and read about you, half the sales is done. They already know what you're capable of. They already know your values. And so you can get straight down to talking about logistics, which is a much more interesting conversation than when I was a younger entrepreneur, the amount of coffee meetings I used to go to and then spend the first half hour trying to convince them that I was worthy of their time. And of course, the worst person to sell yourself is yourself.

Yeah.

Once I embraced that idea, then I did invest in things like putting together a book. I put my first book out called Progressive Partnerships about 5 or 6 years ago. And I've done numerous attempts. And one of the ones that we've been talking about previously is I realized that one of the best ways to build my brand was to help other people build their brand and support other people. And so I put together a platform to showcase entrepreneurs that are doing cool things but are not currently featured by the media. Because one of the other things I discovered about the media is they all say they want to break new stories and find hidden talent, but actually what they want to do is just wait till somebody else has done it and then copy what somebody else has done. What I discovered is that if I can give somebody their first published interview, put that on our platform, then very often it's much, much easier for them to then go and get other media interviews. And yeah, It just gets progressively easier. It kind of snowballs. And so yeah, we've got a platform called enterprisezone.cc and we've published more than 2,000 interviews with great entrepreneurs from around the world and it's kind of built up.

Yeah, that's a really smart idea as well. And now you were telling me as well, Callum, that you've built a very nice sort of model in terms of who does the work to get noticed, recognizing that for those entrepreneurs, the value you are bringing is the platform and the distribution. So for many people, including me, I'm interviewing people and going down that path of content creation. You've done it a bit differently and quite smart. I think I'm going to learn some lessons from you. Just share with us your sort of workflow as well.

It's mainly because I'm lazy.

Smart. Just very smart.

Now I think, so actually the original one came about when I was, I had this idea of, I had some really cool business owners in my network that I wanted to show. And I reached out to a platform and I offered to interview these entrepreneurs for this platform. And this particular platform, their biggest challenge was they didn't have enough content. And so I had proposed to them that I would publish an interview once a month, and they came back and they said, would you be open to once a week? And I jokingly said, what about once a day? And they said, yeah, that'd be great. And I went, oh yeah, that's a lot of work. Yeah. But what I realized was that, okay, if you are going to do that, I didn't have time to do that. I was running companies and doing other things. I had a day job. So if I was going to do that, I had to get smart about how I systemized it. And originally I used a lot of virtual assistants, so I would have automated email setups and virtual assistants and people. It was the same questions and people would go into a Google Doc and just fill in the answers and upload their photos and virtual assistants would do everything. So I, again, I wouldn't actually be involved until the interview was published and then I'd get to read it. And those people would also recommend other entrepreneurs that they thought deserved good content. Now, actually with the no-code movement, there's a lot of great systems out there. I actually ended up getting automated an awful lot of it. So we have these interviews that get published every day. And then last summer during sort of the lockdown boredom, I launched a little mini podcast or a micro podcast. And it's just entrepreneurs answering one question. And the one question is, tell me about a time that you overcame a challenge in your entrepreneurial journey and what you learned from it. But again, I send them to a webpage, they fill in their details, they upload their web and their photos, and then there's a button that they press and it's just, it records up to 4 minutes of their content. And as soon as they can rerecord if they don't like it, and then when they hit submit, that just goes to my audio editor who tops and tails it and publishes it. And then it gets broadcast out through a whole network. Again, it's a very lazy man's Absolutely, Callum.

I think that's absolutely brilliant. Would you care to share what's the platform that enables people to just log on and then record and share? Is that like a Loom style or? Yeah.

So the one that I found really good that I'm using at the moment is Jotform, which is a little bit like a sort of Google Form, but on steroids. It's just a lot more options to it. But yeah, there's so cool platforms now and tools. I mean, part of the danger is that you can get lost in the technology and spend days exploring it. So I tend to find something basic that works and then build it from there. But yeah, Jotform is what I'm using at the moment and it's very effective. There's a bunch of different options on it that I haven't explored loads, but it does, it also allows automated email sequences and fires off so they can recommend 3 other people and that fires off an email sequence and all of that good stuff, which is great while it's working. And then a year later something goes wrong and you have to go back into it and you can't remember what you've done or how it all ties together.

But now what we started to do is my VA records with Loom all the different processes that we've got, because as you say, you create a process, do it once, set it, and then You have to go back 6 months later and we can't remember, you know, how we configured the auto sequencing tool. What about the investor relations? Because the sort of profiling the entrepreneurs, I love that idea. Brilliant. But you've got IR work to do and having managed an IPO in Singapore before, it's a very different kind of business IR, isn't it? How are you managing the share price communications? Because if you've got multiple companies, in the portfolio for the investors, that's a harder beast to understand, isn't it?

Yes, it is. And I won't pretend that I'm being anywhere near as effective with investors as I am with entrepreneurs. I've found it's a very different mindset. Very different mindset. So for example, I thought, look, a really easy way to build a network of investors is just to replicate what I've done with entrepreneurs. I'll create a platform for investors, profiling investors. That would be interesting. You ask an entrepreneur to recommend 3 entrepreneurs that deserve more limelight, they will give you a list 10 long. You ask an investor to recommend someone else and, oh no, I'm not going to do that. It's a very different mindset. And so I think that's, I've had to change my approach a bit, but the flip of it, Is that one of the advantages that we've got at MBH is I don't run any of these companies, so I don't have to worry about clients and staff in the individual companies. I've got the time to focus on the investor relations and on the media. And so we can put together a lot of content. And I think that really does give us a huge advantage. Genuinely, my heart goes out to CEOs of small companies that go public because it's really, it's a full-time job. just dealing with investors and these people already had full-time jobs.

Investors and the analyst community advise the investor community. That's another make or break community.

Yes, it is. And I think one of the other things, and we've been doing this now for 6 years, there's a lot of nonsense. There's an awful lot of, it's like in any industry, I guess it's when you come into it, most people don't have any experience of the public markets, so they tend to get fleeced by advisors that will tell you that you have to engage these very expensive IR people, and a lot of it's just nonsense and that they do a really poor job. I'll give you an example. We, one of the, I won't name them, but they are one of the most high-profile investor relations companies in the world, and they gave us a proposal and just one part of their proposal was to build our social media for 3 that this particular part of the proposal was €3,000 a month. And for €3,000 a month, they would publish 3 articles on LinkedIn for us. Now we had to write the articles, but they would publish them on LinkedIn for us. And that was €3,000 a month.

Well, it's crazy is that someone somewhere must have paid that for them to feel that's a price they can get away with. But I guess if you're a CEO and you're spending shareholder money, Yeah.

And probably more not aware of it.

Yeah.

You and I probably spend a lot of time on LinkedIn connecting with people and we know the platform and how to use it. If you've never used the platform before and someone tells you, oh, it's critical that you post, you don't know, you don't know how to publish it, then they may be right. But it's, but yeah, the point is you can get very easily fleeced by a lot of the professionals out there. So we've had to unlearn quite a lot as well.

Yeah, I can see that. With your partner companies or investee companies, Callum, what do you do for them? Do they mark themselves under the umbrella brand of the group or do they really maintain their independence? Because that's a potentially interesting marketing point for those companies, isn't it?

Yeah, it is. So basically we leave it up to them. These are not startups that we're playing with. These are the average age of the companies in the group is about 23 years. So they're well-established companies. It always puzzled us that an acquiring company would buy a company because it had such a great entrepreneurial spirit and great brand and then rebrand it and destroy the entrepreneurial spirit. So basically, yeah, sometimes. See, basically what we say is when a company comes in, it is completely autonomous. It is completely independent. If they want to collaborate with other companies in the group, they're more than welcome to. If when they're pitching for business, they want to emphasize the fact they're part of this $100 million global PLC, they're more than free to do that. But if they also want to play the card of, look, we're a little boutique construction company that will, yeah, the founder will be here and available to talk to you, they can play that card as well. And it's actually, it's a really nice one because it means that At the market level, I can go out and talk to the market about, hey, we've got record profits and we're growing and it's fantastic and it's a great company to invest in. If we were all the same brand, that makes it very difficult when they're out pitching to clients, trying to squeeze suppliers for the best price. Whereas now, because it's completely independent, yeah, they've got that. And they're also kind of protected if another company in the group has a problem.

Yeah.

PR scandal or collapses, they're not going to be tarnished by that because there's, you've got that difference.

Yeah. So that's really nice. Gives them a lot of flexibility, doesn't it? What about the sort of communication from company to company? Do you facilitate investee company events? Because I can imagine there's a lot of synergy that can be extracted from all these companies within the group.

Yeah. So I'm always skeptical of the word synergy. Synergy is one of those ones that looks Shouldn't have used the word synergy.

Maybe that's showing my age.

No, but it's PR roots, probably. It's one of those things that looks fantastic in textbooks, but very rarely works in real life. But yeah, you're right. There's a lot of opportunities. And I think it's more about best practice. If you put a bunch of smart, successful entrepreneurs in a room together, there's, you know, just as we are sharing best practice here, it's you learn stuff and you apply things. So yeah, we have, we use a Slack platform. Everyone's on that. We do monthly Zoom calls that everyone jumps on. When there was, when COVID hit hard in the UK last year, we moved that to a weekly call because things were changing so rapidly and people were sharing. And look, for a lot of us, yourself included, I'm sure that the global financial crisis didn't seem that long ago. So it's still quite fresh. There was a lot of sharing about what did I wish I'd done sooner in that? And yeah, this is what we've, how we've just communicated with our staff and this worked and this we completely screwed up. Don't do it like that. And so there's a lot of that. Yeah. Communication and sharing. And yeah, we've got companies seconding their staff to go and work in other companies now and learn, which is great because it's very difficult to do career development in a small business for your employees. So it's nice to be able to No, I absolutely hear you.

Callum, having run a small or a number of businesses now in different countries over the last 25 years, I've always thought what you're offering is a fantastic opportunity for business owners. And if people want to find out more about you, how and where can they go and even do one of your 5-minute online Jotform podcasts?

Yeah. Look, if you're an entrepreneur, business owner, I'd love to speak to you. And probably the easiest thing is just reach out to me on LinkedIn. So I'm pretty active. there. I'm sure my email and stuff will be in the show notes as they always say, but cl@calumlaine.com usually gets to me. But yeah, LinkedIn's a good place to reach out. Mention Jim James and I'll send you a free copy of my book as well.

Oh, you make that sound so special, but I have spied that there's a free copy download on Enterprise Zone. Busted. But still say that you heard about it on the Unnoticed Podcast.

That's the Progressive Partnerships book, which is all about scaling your business, but I will share with them the Agglomerate book, which is all about small businesses joining together in PLCs.

Callum, thanks for joining together with me.

Thank you.

It's a real pleasure to think of you in Singapore, my other home. Thank you so much for joining me in the UK where I believe it's hotter today than it is in Singapore.

That's been great to catch up again.

Yeah. Lovely to chat. Thanks so much. You've been listening to Callum Lang, who's the founder and CEO of the MBH Corporation PLC, and I will of course include his details all in the show notes. And until we are together again, I wish you the very best of health, the best of business, and You keep on communicating. My name's Jim James. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Unnoticed Show.