Why fair tax isn’t just charity, it’s good business 📈 | Kieran Jones (Freethought Group)

And they think innovation happens just because it's for the goodness of humankind. And it isn't. You know, innovation happens a lot of the time because somebody had an idea that can make a lot of money. And it's about making money. I talk about being socially responsible and things, but I do this job to make a living because I want to make good money and I want to succeed in life. And so tax impacts that. I'm not going to take my super amazing idea that I might have and do it in a place where I'm going to get taxed half of it. That would be a silly financial decision ultimately, wouldn't it? If you could. And you go somewhere where it's gonna work better for you, I think.

This week's Millennial Master is Kieran Jones, CEO of the Three Fort Group, who's proof that success doesn't always come from rapid-fire growth. Starting his first business as a teenager in Scotland, Kieran built his career on sustainable scaling and ethical values. Today, he runs a global hosting business with thousands of happy clients, a remote team spanning 3 continents, and a reputation for exceptional service. In this episode, Kieran shares why playing the long game beats quick wins, how ethical business practices can drive loyalty and growth, and his honest take on tax innovation and why the UK needs to do more to support entrepreneurship. This episode is brought to you by Offware. Gym memberships Gift cards, free coffee, and pizza Fridays. Well, these staff perks just don't cut it anymore. That's why OffWork gives your team something they already love— travel. They can book their own flights, pick their own hotels, and plan the perfect getaway, all with the travel fund you set up for them. It's super easy. Just set the contributions and Offwork handles the rest. Better time off means less burnout, more motivation, and happier employees. Give your team a perk they'll actually love. Check out Offwork today on offwork.com. Millennial Masters is proudly sponsored by Jolt, the UK's top web hosting service. Whether you're launching a WordPress site, Or scaling up a custom app, every great project needs a reliable home. That's why Jolt has hosting plans starting at just £3.95 a month, with unbeatable deals on domain registrations too. Why Jolt? It's a no-brainer. There's no waiting around with support within 30 seconds on live chat, your site stays live no matter what with over 99.99% network uptime. And you can also pay with Bitcoin or American Express, so you can rack up those points too. How good is that? Sign up today and enjoy your first 3 months free. Head to jolt.co.uk to get started. Kieran, welcome to Millennial Masters.

Thank you for having me.

So you started your first business back in 2013 as a teenager designing websites. What got you into that so early? And how did you find your first clients?

Well, no, I mean, it was even earlier than that. I was a teenager, but 2003. So I show my age a little bit there. It was, what did I get my first client? It was, I lived in Scotland at the time, I was still at school and a friend needed a website. I think he decided he was going to walk across America, if I recall, raising money for a drug rehab charity at the time. He needed a website, so I built him one and here we are. Somehow or other, here we are. So yeah, it all spiraled from there really.

Did you go to college or did you take any courses for your web design or was it something that you learned by yourself through the magic of the internet?

No, I learned it by myself. No, no formal training at all. I mean, I've always played with it, you know, with coding and with building websites and things. It wasn't even— I'm trying to think back. I don't think I even used the internet. I remember having a really big, thick PHP book. I used to read a book, work out how to do things, and read up on it. Very old school. These days I just Google or ask the AI how to do something. But back in the day, it was HTML and books. And coding. I built a pretty good website. He was able to post little updates and videos from his walk. And yeah, I think it was well received. I remember it. I remember it well. I remember following it and giving updates as he trekked across. So it was an interesting first start in there into the proper web design.

And if I'm right, you then later joined forces with a friend to also host websites for your clients. Who you were designing websites for, right?

Yeah, no, exactly. Shortly after I built that first website, I started, um, hosting some email and domains when people didn't really have their own domains. I mean, back in the day then, people used to have their, their NTL World address or their Virgin Media, or not Virgin Media, it didn't exist in 2003, but all those people, not even Gmail, not even Gmail, before Google, before 2003, I can't even, before Google it might be, but it was early days, um, you know, so I, I started encouraging my aunts, uncles, parents. We got our own domains registered and we set up email. I think it was my first sort of account. I think it was a reseller account with 3ForSP. I think they're still around, but it was early days of Plesk control panel, like very early days of Plesk. And we hosted that. And then you have friends or a builder or a friend who need a website or a church. Churches are a good source of, of business if you attend a church or somewhere.

So Listen up, people, that's a good tip.

That's it. Churches, social clubs, all those captive audiences, you see, and they don't know how to build websites often. So it's, it spiraled from there. And I remember having, upgrading from a reseller account to a dedicated server. And I think there comes a point, I think anyone who runs a web hosting company will know this, there comes a point when you're now doing half your time administering servers more than you are selling things or doing websites. And that's not necessarily an area of expertise of mine. Like, I'm pretty capable, but there comes a point when technical know-how has got out of hand. So my friend Edward, at the time, we went to sixth form together, we studied computer science together. So I asked him for help, and him and his housemate Matt were starting a business. They were trying to decide what to do. They had a bit of tech stuff in mind, some community Wi-Fi stuff they were thinking of. And so I said, well, how about, you know, you help me do internet stuff, do hosting, because I've got no idea what I'm doing here. This server is, is a lot. It spiraled from there, really. I mean, Edd's got so much technical know-how that, you know, that made a huge difference and meant we could grow much, much faster.

So that was back in the early years of the internet as we know it today. How did you scale from a tiny, tiny startup to servicing hundreds and now thousands of clients across the world? That was, that was quite a big leap. What was the turning point for your business?

It's a big leap, isn't it? It's a really hard leap as well in our industry. I think any industry to make is that leap from being a little side hustle, a little business, you know, at the time I was running this business. While I was at university. I was studying psychology, I was at university. My colleague Edward had a full-time job working for an insurance company. And so this was very much a side hustle. And we made it work. We got more servers, we learned about how things like transit worked and routers. Somewhere we still have, in fact, at the weekend, we found our first ever router that we used. It's still in the office. I think it needs a glass box. And it's this tiny little router board. Anyone who's ever used those back in the day when you had to build them, to buy a case and a board separately. This thing is labeled Free Thought Router QoS, and it was back when we only paid for 10 megabit of transit, and we throttled it down to 10 megabit to avoid overages. I mean, the idea of 10 megabits of transit now, it's unthinkable. I think one server would use many thousands of times that. How did we scale? And actually, a huge part of our growth in the early days comes down to acquisitions. Which is a weird thing for a small business to say, but we did a lot of acquiring of little, little sole trader resellers who were struggling to make that leap into their own servers and infrastructure. And that's, that's a really tough leap as well. The expense is high. So we sort of leapfrogged a bit by acquiring smaller hosts and using their customers, obviously, to kickstart things a bit.

How did you fund these acquisitions for your growth? Did you take in investors or was it through funds and revenue that you were already generating through your initial business?

Yeah, entirely self-funded. Up until extremely recently, we've been very debt averse and pretty risk averse as well. So we've grown very steadily. We've not gone for rapid, unsustainable growth. We've been a slow, steady tortoise and hare, like Mario. And I think that's paid well because it means we have really solid foundations. So. We funded it through money we'd earned through sales, through not selling stuff, through throttling our connectivity to 10 megabit, through using refurbished servers and keeping things lean. And ultimately, not having staff. We made it work despite having just the two of us. And actually, up until last year, almost, it was still just myself and Edward. And until we rolled Host Lincoln into our company, it was just, just the two of us. We were making, we had Nick as well, actually, I shouldn't ignore him. We had essentially the two of us doing this for decades, you know, getting to where we are. Customers are happy, big customers are happy, and slowly growing and acquiring businesses. So, um, slow and steady definitely wins the race, I think, to some extent.

So Jolt, as people know it, or Host Lincoln, as, as you mentioned, was the merger you've on in 2023. How did that opportunity come about and what made it the right move for you?

I mean, we've known Matt for such a long time. Uh, not so much, I haven't known him as much, but certainly, uh, Ed has, we've known him, he lives obviously in Lincoln where Ed lives and I went to university in Lincoln, so I'm from the city sort of. Uh, I think it was a case of strength in numbers. Our industry is one that is not so much growing. Actually consolidating makes more sense at this point in terms of maintaining growth and sort of momentum. Merging with Matt rather than acquiring as we have before, this would be a first time we've given up equity, for example, but actually makes a lot of sense. It gave us, it gave us a lot of things we didn't have in terms of, um, Jolt is a more agile consumer-facing brand, whereas Free for Internet is more of a sort of bespoke, high-end sort of host. It's a different style of hosting. So it works really well because you've got different ends of the market within the same group of companies, but we can then draw on each other's strengths. Jolt has our solid sort of technological network that they can now rely on, and we gain their amazing staff and their sort of agile way of doing business, which doesn't work in the Freethought brand, but allows us to do things in Jolt and then roll that out to the rest of the group. So It's, it's, it's a good way of doing it. I think it just made sense.

Hosting is like many other industries, including media, dominated by giants. How are you navigating your way through a world dominated by giants and still succeeding? What sets you apart?

It's a really good question actually, because the hosting industry is full of huge companies. We're talking like billion-dollar hosting groups, and, and they own brands that we're all familiar with. People on tier 2 host on 123reg or GoDaddy, and they're all the same company. We have people say, I'm going to move from 123reg to GoDaddy or whatever. They're the same. You're moving from one part of the same group to another. What sets us apart from that? Ultimately, we are all selling the same thing. There's only so many ways to sell domains and hosting. So what actually sets us apart, and that's something that we've worked on a lot. And I think the thing we rely on most is that those huge companies just aren't very good. You're not going to get customer service, you're not going to get the personal care, you're not going to ring up and have someone recognize your voice and know, oh, it's you, how are you doing? You know, you moved house, did that happen? And you get that with us because whilst we have a lot of customers, we have many thousands of customers, we remember. It's part of our whole business identity is about providing truly exceptional customer care. And we have this whole style guide, which is titled "Be Exceptional." That's everything we do is about our support being exceptional, going above and beyond. If someone needs your email doing, don't just send them to a guide on how to configure Outlook. Get on the computer and help them, talk them through it. The staff are there. They need help. And that makes a Big difference, because you end up being frustrated, stuck on the line with some remote support person or whatever, a big company. They don't know who you are. They don't understand the problem, or they're not going to take the time because they're driven by unreasonable targets or something. Our target is just to be amazing. And we survey our customers. I think in the— I should have looked it up to check, but in the last report I saw, 100% of customers would recommend us to a friend or colleague. So 100% NPS, you can't really argue with that. I think last time we had an audit from one of our ISO auditors, I had to evidence it because they didn't believe me when I said we had no complaints. They didn't believe me. I was like, well, we're good. We don't have complaints. We don't upset our customers. They are happy. And I think that's what, what else can you do? Hosting, it's domains. You know, you have to set yourself apart by experience, by customer, or values as well. It's a huge part of what we do in terms of how we conduct business and what's important to us as a business.

So how big is your team now servicing thousands of customers across the world?

I think we are 24 strong now. I think we're in 3 continents, in like 5 countries, 6 countries, I lose track. Yeah, so we're, we're a lot bigger than we were 18 months ago. So we're, we're now 24 strong, I think, in the last town hall. So quite a lot bigger, but still very efficient. When I took other hosts, you look at like revenue per head, we're doing pretty good in terms of efficiency, in terms of getting revenue and not having hundreds of staff for the number of customers.

There must be certain challenges with managing a team spread out across 3 continents, working remotely to a certain extent. What did you find are the keys to managing remote teams effectively?

You'd think it would be a challenge. And honestly, when you ask the question, I think, oh wait, what have we done? I don't think I've done I haven't done anything special, to be honest. I think we encourage a work environment that's fun, that's relaxed, that's respectful. And I think an element of autonomy. I have this conversation with my team and with managers, like support manager or whatever, like, oh, can I do this? Can I do this? I'm like, yeah, knock yourself out. I'm not going to tell you how to do your job. Like, I'm interested in the output, not really how you do it. So, if our support staff are delivering support, so long as we're responding to tickets in a timely manner, we're answering the phone, we're delivering live chat. I don't, I've never had a reason to worry about the remote working. And many of our remote workers are based in Ukraine, so they have huge amounts of challenges of their own, and yet they never miss a blip, they never miss a step, like they are incredible, um, and just get the job done. Tickets are answered, things are dealt with, customers are incredibly happy. There's not really any issues. We chat a lot, there's an awful lot of talk on our Teams channel. We used to use Slack, but we switched to Teams, so it's a bit more threaded and a bit more manageable. And we encourage sharing fun, you know, I share pictures of my daughter's pumpkin carving, or rather my pumpkin carving, with the team. We have a bit of back and forth. We had some northern lights the other day. We shared pictures of northern lights out of our windows. It's about being relaxed. I've been trying to set up a gaming night because I fancy playing Unreal Tournament or like Counter-Strike with the team. So I'm hoping we can get them to play some games. So I think that's important., and you just want to be relaxed, respect people, trust them. Working remotely is no different from office. There are lots of companies out there that seem to be dragging their staff back to offices, and I just don't understand because I don't really think it affects productivity. I think it means a lot to staff to be able to have a little bit of flexibility in terms of being at home. They can get deliveries, they can pop out to a doctor's appointment, or it's just nicer, isn't it? It's cheaper. There's so many benefits.

There must be some challenges though, especially when you have a big part of your team operating from an active war zone, like you said. What's your reflection on that?

It was interesting when Joel joined the group and we're like, right, we're going to manage this and we have processes, we have our like ISO certifications, we have to do risk assessments and stuff. And I've never had to do risk assessments for like air raids and missile strikes and things before, but actually. It didn't require a huge amount of thought, because the team are so— it doesn't really come up. You'd think it would come up all the time, and it doesn't. They're just getting on with work. You know, you wouldn't know day-to-day, talking to them, that anything was wrong. The other week, one of the team couldn't join our weekly leadership call, because he had a power cut. There was no power. His batteries had run flat. It happens. It's probably one of the only occasions I can think of where actually the war has impacted our staff or operations, and it didn't impact customers in any way. It hasn't. We think about it, obviously. We support the team as best we can. We make sure they've got what they need. If there's anything, I'm always saying, if there's things you need, then tell us and we'll do what we can to help you. We support our staff when they've relocated as best we can, when they've had to— some of them are in different countries now, in the Netherlands or in Spain, and so we we help them as best we can with that. But honestly, the Ukrainian people are astoundingly resilient. You know, people talk about heroic World War II Britain. They've got nothing on Ukrainian people, as far as I can gather. It's very impressive. I would love to visit and see the country because everything I hear sounds amazing. And I obviously can't at the moment, but I look forward to being able to one day.

You said you're a believer in doing the right thing. From paying fair tax to paying the living wage. Why is this so important to you and how do you make it a priority in business?

Doing the right thing should always be important, surely. To me, it seems logical. Lots of companies out there don't do the right thing, or they do things that are okay. Not, you know, you'll say, oh, it's not, it's not illegal. We're paying tax. We've we've avoided, whichever one's not illegal, we've done the right, you know, we've reduced our tax bill, we've reduced our tax liability. The likes of large coffee chains and online retailers like to, like to not pay tax in the UK. It's, and they're not breaking the law. They're operating within our tax regime, but that doesn't make it okay. I think it's really important. We have our Fair Tax Mark accreditation. We publish our profit figures, we publish what percentage of that gets paid as tax, we justify things like R&D claims. I'm not interested in reducing tax bill. I think it's, um, I think it's a socially responsible thing to do. You know, we talk in this country about the NHS and about social care, and we see, you know, you know, we saw the King the other day in opening a food bank, and it— that's madness. It shouldn't exist. It's our responsibility as a profit-making company to contribute to the societies that we operate in because we are successful, and it's only right in a modern society to share in that success by paying our staff correctly, by contributing to charitable work, or supporting our staff, or, or indeed just paying tax because those tax pennies pay for things like welfare and the NHS and all sorts of other stuff. It's not to say the government always spend the money correctly, but We've done our best, we've done the bit that's correct. I think that's important, and our customers value it. We, quite a while ago, we had Ethical Consumer magazine audit us and talk to us about everything we do in a business. I think they rated us 17.5 out of 18. I think we lost half a point for carbon offsetting. That means a lot to our customers because they know that we are a nice company to work with. They can call us up and we're going to know who they are. They can trust us to give them legitimate advice. We're not going to be like some of those large hosts who— oh, you've got a question? Oh, you need to buy this SSL cert. Oh, you need to buy this extra backup service. Oh, you need to buy this or this or this. You want a transfer provider? Yeah, here's a cost to get your EPP code. That's not okay. That's not— it's not necessary because actually I think taking an ethical stance to business is more profitable than not. I think it resonates with our customers so much that actually they like it. More people come to us and value us because of it. Some people want our ISO 9001 certs, they want to see we have Cyber Essentials, and they want infrastructure and stuff. But then a lot of them are like, they know that we're trustworthy, that we are someone they can— and I think that's important, especially when you're spending a lot of money on something critical to your business. So yeah, I don't think it's necessarily a decision we made to be ethical as such or socially responsible. It just happened because why would you not be a nice company and nice people?

Speaking of tax, is there then a threshold that you think we would cross and the UK would stop being a competitive country for people setting up businesses? And here I'm referring, for example, from moving the corporation tax from 19% to 25%, uh, recently. It's, it's quite a jump. And we're going to see from a different government now another series of tax increases. How do you think that makes the UK competitive and attractive to other businesses and entrepreneurs?

I don't know that it does. I'll be honest, whilst, you know, I don't want to get into politics necessarily, I think the tax regime is important. I think that removing incentives to start business or to innovate is a mistake, crippling our small businesses, with business rates on properties or removing or reducing like entrepreneurs relief or business asset disposal relief as it now is. I think there's a mistake because why would you start a business here when you could start one somewhere else? I think it's telling as well. If you look at, if you look at stock exchanges in the UK or versus America, our stock exchanges are dominated by old industry of oil and gas and materials and all these things. And then you look in the US, they're dominated by Meta and Facebook and people like that. It's like, oh, where is the innovation happening? It isn't here. It should be here because we have lots of skilled people, lots of universities. We have all sorts of interesting things happening. We have people, you know, building space-based industry. And I think they're trying to launch rockets from Scotland and stuff and all things like this. But where are the businesses starting? It's bad enough that we impacted our trade with the EU, which is going to stifle innovation. But now we're going to tax people for starting businesses. I had conversations the other day and we're saying, well, one day, what, you know, if we want to exit this business, if I want to do something else, I'm now going to be taxed much higher. Can I avoid it? There might be mechanisms to avoid it, I don't know. And it's trying, isn't it, for a company like ours who's saying, okay, we want to pay a socially responsible level of tax, but then if the government is making it so actually the level of tax they're setting isn't socially responsible because it's stifling development in our society, then It's a little bit tricky, isn't it? We want to do what we're told, but then we don't agree with the tax regime, but we operate in this country, we have to pay the taxes that we owe. But if someone was interested in what I had to say, I would certainly be saying to them, no, we shouldn't be doing this. We should be giving tax breaks to new business, to technology, to innovation. We should be making R&D easier to do, more tax advantageous. We certainly shouldn't be making me as a business owner think, well, 'What do I do when I start a new business? Is it going to cost me? Is it even worth it? Or do I maybe, instead of doing this, do I look at private equity and stuff like that rather than growing like an old-school homeschool business like I have? I've started from very scratch versus a more formal way.' It's— I don't know, it doesn't seem like it's a good idea to me. I do think that they should do more to encourage that, and they're not They talk about teaching STEM in school, and that's amazing, and we want to encourage that. But what are they going to do with those skills? They're all going to move to America or Europe or Germany or Middle East or— I have a brother who's just moved to the Middle East for lots of reasons, but tax is a huge driver in that. So it makes no sense. We should be making more effort to encourage innovation.

You're not the first millennial masters. Master to mention the Middle East and some of their financial incentives. But where do you see the next wave of innovation coming if it's not going to be the UK?

I mean, it's got to be where the money is, hasn't it? Now, we talk about the Middle East. I don't know if that's necessarily innovation in the Middle East or whether it's just a vast amount of money. But with money comes innovation. If you've got lots of money, if you want to do something astronomically expensive, but cool, you need money. So you're either going to go to North America where there's lots of it, or you're going to go to— where else is there money? It's going to be the Middle East, isn't it? I don't know if there's innovation in the Far East. I presume that China and Japan have innovation. I don't know much about that. But to me, it's going to be where the money is and where the tax regime makes sense. You're not going to invest millions and millions of dollars developing some AI thing or whatever the next leap is beyond that if 40% of that's going to be taken by the taxman. Why would you do it? It makes no sense. You would obviously do that innovation where it's good. It's fine for university, you know, innovation at universities makes sense because they're not driven by profit. But when you want to make a profitable innovation, you want to commercialize that, You can't do that in a university. You've got to sell it somewhere. You've got to do it in a way that makes money. Ultimately, it's very nice, you know, perhaps that's what they think when they set tax regimes. They think innovation happens just because it's for the goodness of humankind. And it isn't, you know, innovation happens a lot of the time because somebody had an idea that can make a lot of money. And it's about making money. You know, I talk about being socially responsible and things, but I do this job to make a living because I want to make good money and I want to, I want to succeed in life. And so tax impacts that. I'm not going to take my super amazing idea that I might have and do it in a place where I'm going to get taxed half of it. That would be, that would be a silly financial decision ultimately, wouldn't it? You'd go somewhere if you could, you'd go somewhere where it's going to work better for you, I think.

So have you considered moving shop? Elsewhere, or maybe opening a new business elsewhere outside of the UK?

No, no, I haven't. You know, we, we've spoken about the need to form businesses if we needed to operate in a certain regime. I chatted with, as I mentioned, my brother moved to Middle East, and I chatted with him about doing business in Middle East, and we might have to form a company there to do that because of the regime they work within. But no, I don't think I wouldn't personally be able to move country. I wouldn't want to. One day, a long time ago, I dreamt of sitting in a square in Spain, dripping sangria, sipping sangria on my laptop. I could work from anywhere. I don't need to be in this office here. I don't. But I wouldn't. We never thought about moving elsewhere, certainly not for tax reasons. The only reason we'd form another company would be because we had to. Maybe it becomes necessary for our staff in Ukraine to be employed with a Ukrainian entity, or maybe we want to capitalize on an opportunity in the Middle East, say, and so we need a company there to do that. I don't know, but the majority of our operations are here in the UK, and it is what it is. Tax regimes will change, and they may change again. Who knows? Changes by the day.

Speaking of change and innovation, you mentioned AI, the big buzzword right now, and AI is transforming industries everywhere. Do you see it as an opportunity or a threat, both for businesses and the workforce?

I think that, yeah, I could see that many businesses would think of it as a threat. And I think that in the same way that innovation threatens most businesses, I was chatting the other day about how annoying video streaming services are because they have stuff locked into one or the other. I wish they'd catch up with music and just put all of it everywhere because it'd be so much simpler. And those industries did not respond well. To innovation. AI is interesting because AI threatens, not threatens, because it's supporting, I think, but it is somewhat of a threat to tradition or traditional ways of working or thinking to all industries. Yeah, that's it. You know, it's a huge impact and it's transformative, not even just to business, just to the human race. Like, it's astounding what AIs are capable of. And I use AI all the time for all sorts of things. You know, when I was preparing for one of our external audits for ISO, we were transitioning schedules. And so I gave the AI the old, the old, you know, Statement of Applicability, the new one. I'm like, right, compare these, tell me which ones don't conform and give me a to-do list. And it went through the spreadsheets, it compared it, it told me exactly what I needed to do. What policies are missing, what had to be updated, and I just work through. If we're missing a policy on something, the AI can write it for me to start, or at least give me a starting point, and we can then work from that. The improvement to efficiency is huge. But I do think as well, it can improve service. You know, we are trialing AI at the moment in our support functions in order to better summarize tickets. We're not using it to answer customers. I wouldn't, I wouldn't do that at this point, but we use it to summarize tickets, tell us what's happening. It's, it's only just today finished learning from all our ticket history. So I've not given it much of a test yet today, but you know, it's, it's imported all of our documentation, all of our ticket history. And so when a customer emails, we can, we can summarize it, can make suggestions to our agents on what the problem might be or what the reply might be. Or it can identify issues that they might miss, particularly if language becomes— not that our staff struggle with language, but it can, it can help fill those gaps in knowledge or understanding or pick up stuff that you may not have noticed, which I think is, is an improvement to customer care, personally.

Any other uses or industries you see AI disrupting next?

Disrupting. I mean, yeah, customer care is the obvious thing. I mean, personally, the biggest thing I use AI for, and I don't know if this is a good use for it or not, but it's never let me down. It's really good at food and drink suggestions. Sommeliers are in trouble because I'll tell you, wine suggestions from the AI are spot on. I give them pretty good. I buy the wine. I'm like, right, I really liked that one. It tasted like this. I thought it was, you know, sweet or it's dry. This, I enjoyed this. This is the meal I'm having next. Can you suggest something? And it's like, why don't you try these? You liked these wines from New Zealand. You liked this wine. And then it knows from a previous conversation that I typically shop Asda or Sainsbury's and it pops up. It goes, oh, they sell this in Sainsbury's. It knows. That's amazing. It makes a huge difference there. It can also make a difference for people who need help in terms of accessibility. I think there's a huge potential there for helping people with comprehension. If they've got any sort of brain injury or if they've got a learning difficulty or anything really like that, AI is able to really help people comprehend what's happening, summarize things, summarize problems or what to do next to help them through all sorts of stuff. So I think there's, there's a real potential to empower customers in terms of their rights or what they can get. Like, it's very easy to write a really well-written complaint letter. With the help of an AI. If you want it to quote all the legislation or help you understand what's happened in something, or even just summarize something you've read. My partner's reading a, uh, reading a, reading a book and she was saying it's complicated. So she asked the AI to summarize this bit of the book and it tells her what's going on. If you're reading a complex book, that's pretty, pretty cool.

Which models are you using or have trial?

I almost exclusively use ChatGPT, which I think is the 4.0 model it's using at the moment. It's amazing. I mean, given that it feels like only a year or two since we first were introduced to ChatGPT and what it can do now. Voice mode, my daughter who's 6 absolutely loves advanced voice mode in ChatGPT. She'll chat away. It remembers that that she likes swimming and that she goes to Rainbows and it remembers and asks her, how was your tennis lesson this week? It's, it's kind of creepy, but also cool. It's, it's all contained within that. It's like, it's weird because we're used to voice assistants like Siri, which are useless. Yeah, it's not great at all. ChatGPT is like this little robot friend who just knows everything. The other day I was like, right, I've got some soft cheese and I've got some Baileys. We've got to be able to make something with this. And I am now the proud owner of a half-eaten Bailey's cheesecake, and it's incredible. It just created a recipe for me. It created a PDF, even put a little picture of what it thought it should look like for me. It's very impressive.

I have tried it as well for recipe suggestions, telling it what you have in the cupboard, and it's coming up with some pretty good stuff. But from my experience, if you ask it to adjust a recipe to certain quantities, That's when it fails. It's still not doing very well with math.

No, no, it's not very good at maths. If you, uh, yeah, if you ask it to make an adjustment and suddenly you end up with a, you know, a metric ton of macaroni cheese or something, or, uh, if you've, if you've asked it, if you're feeling like you want a bit of a party mood and you maybe photograph your alcohol cabinet, it's pretty good at suggesting cocktails, but occasionally it gets the quantities slightly wrong. And so you end up with a cocktail that's a little bit too strong, perhaps.

Where things have happened.

Sometimes it gets a bit— exactly. Sometimes it gets a little carried away on the overproof rum, you know.

You mentioned you have a daughter and you started your business as a teenager. So you'd be able to reflect on balancing work and family life, which is quite a challenge for most entrepreneurs. How do you manage it?

A really poor sleep schedule is probably a must. It is difficult. Absolutely. I think I'm lucky in the sense that I start my business really young. So by the time I had a daughter, I'm already in a position where the business is somewhat self-sustaining and it doesn't matter if I'm away from my desk. Like I'm quite able to go and do school run or pick up go with my partner and take her to tennis. And so I'm able to do those things. I'm extremely fortunate that I've grown the business to a point where I can do that and be quite flexible. Um, it is difficult to manage those things sometimes. On days when I've got to do school run and stuff, and I've got to cram in some meetings, or something needs my attention, or say last week where I had board meetings and then other stuff happened, I got to the end of the week, I'm thinking, I haven't done anything. This week. I don't feel like I've achieved very much, but the company has cracked on. Everything's happening. I'm assured that everything is fine. So it is a challenge. I think managing work-life balance is difficult. I think probably I would encourage anyone who is starting a business to really remember that though. It'll be all too easy to start a new business and then start a new business and forget about your family.— or forget about work-life balance. Actually, your family is really important to keep you grounded and happy and well-adjusted. And if you're spending every second of every day working, you're going to miss really important stuff. And that's so important. I said to one of our directors, who's expecting a baby any moment, and I was saying to him, we've got to get this stuff handed over. I said, I don't want you working in those early weeks and months because you don't get to do it again. And you don't get to do the childhood again. It is important to try and remember why you're doing this. It is a sense of achievement for yourself, but equally you want to provide for your family. There's no point providing for your family if they forget who you are in the process. So it is difficult, but everyone I think has to find a way to balance it, because otherwise you're going to miss the stuff that's really important and you're not going to maintain a balance. You're not going to keep track of what's actually important. Like the success of your business is important, but not as much as your family is. So that's sort of my view.

Talking about balance and productivity, as you brought it into discussion, what habits or routines help you focus and to stay productive when family life and the business and people on 3 continents all require your attention?

I'm not always that good at it. I think probably it's important to remember we're not great at everything. I think, I think something that's quite important is not— is remembering you don't have to do everything. You rely on the people you've hired. And if your business is at a point where you've got staff, then trust them. As we've grown, it's been a bit of a learning curve over the past 18 months to to remember that we have people who can do this. When I'm talking to our tech support manager, and he's asking me what to do, and I'm like, "No, I trust you to do it. Like, I don't need to micromanage this." My colleagues are slowly learning how to delegate to their teams. And that's important, because if you try and do everything, you're going to do everything badly, I would argue. And you're going to end up stressed about everything, and you're not going to feel like you've achieved anything. So, you're trying to do everything, you're trying to do everything, Well, your staff aren't going to like you because you're micromanaging, and no one wants a micromanaging boss. But also, you know, you're not going to feel very accomplished because all these tasks you've done a little bit of, opposed to doing the things that only you can do well. Lately, I've been trying to focus very much on outcomes. Like, we have meetings. I'm trying to make sure the meetings we do have a purpose, that there is a defined purpose of that meeting so that at the end of it, we've done something. We haven't just chatted away about some cool bit of tech and then not actually done anything. We've just wasted like 5 people's time just to have a good chat about something. There was a meeting today that I got invited to, and I was like, do I need to be in this? Like, sounds like a really technical meeting about object storage or something. Doesn't really seem like I've got much to contribute there. "just let me know what happens if you need something." And I think that's important. I don't, I don't need to be involved in that. It's nothing to do with me, really. If you trust people to do the work you assign them, then actually you're going to save a lot of brainpower to focus on the stuff that's meaningful, so that you felt like you've made a meaningful impact in your day-to-day work and the business. And it means then you've got the brain space to relax occasionally. And turn off. I'm practicing more at turning off. I've configured my focus modes on my phone so that at 5 it shuts things off, apart from my really urgent stuff. Obviously, staff know how to reach me if there's an emergency. And I think that's important, to force yourself not to work all the time, because it's so easy to work all the time. The other thing I like to do is to-do lists. I love a good to-do list. My colleagues don't like that I insist on using pen and paper to write them down, but I do quite enjoy ticking stuff off. Yeah, I think that's important. Some of my colleagues, they talk about having too much to do, being overworked, pulled left, right, and center. I'm saying to them, "Okay, well, what have you got going on?" And the problem is, if you've got 1,000 small jobs, the only real process you've got in your brain is going to be, "There's too much." But if you can write it down, if you can work out what you've got, what depends on what, what is high priority or not, it's manageable. It's there. It's out of your brain and it's on paper. It's the same as, you know, doing— you know, people do therapy and they write down stuff that's upsetting them and then they burn it or whatever. You've got to write it down, get it out of your head into your to-do list or into ClickUp or Asana or whatever tool you want to use, Monday or whatever. And then it's not in your brain anymore and you can you can focus, you can figure it out, because otherwise it's gonna rattle up around in there and just stress you out. So I love a to-do list. It's satisfying.

How do you figure it out? How do you prioritize what's important?

How do I do it?

What's your system or your framework?

Yeah, I, I like to do— it's interesting. You've got two options, I suppose. You can either have a day where you're going to focus on the stuff that's really important because you're accountant. Or someone is hassling you. So you need to do it because there's some pressing deadline. I am awful at deadlines, but nothing like a deadline to get me moving fast. Like, this office has been a tip for ages, but preparing for our chat today, it's tidy. I put a blind up earlier. You know, it's because of the deadline. You're well done. So I'm tidy because of you. So sometimes deadlines, I think if you set yourself a deadline, that helps. But also there's a sense of achievement needed. If you've got one task that's going to take you weeks, you are not going to feel like you've done anything. So I think it's important to intersperse it with little, little tasks. Back in the day, I worked for an American company a long time ago. Their Americanism, you know, low-hanging fruit. There is something to be said for low-hanging fruit. You knock off a tiny little task, oh, email that person that invoice, or find that that thing, or have a chat about Display Screen User Assessment, as I had earlier today. It was on my to-do list, and now it's ticked off. And it took like 3 minutes of my time, and something's gone off my list now. The easy stuff. Do the easy stuff on the list first, sometimes. Because then you can, you can reach lunchtime, you've ticked like 20 things off, and you're feeling great about yourself. And you're going to feel really good about then spending a whole afternoon making no impact at all to a big task. So that's my preferred way of doing it because I like the dopamine hit of ticking stuff off and then I can focus on something big.

What are some of the biggest leadership lessons you've learned on your journey so far? Now that I got you to look back a little bit, back to your teenage years.

What are the lessons I've learned? I think Probably one of the bigger lessons to learn, actually, even more recently, is that I'm going to make mistakes, and that's okay. I'm going to get it wrong. And that probably applies to our personal lives as much as it does work, but we are not perfect. No boss is perfect. No CEO or managing director or team leader, no matter where you are in that org chart, you're going to make mistakes, and you're going to mess it up, and you're going to upset someone or say the wrong thing. That's okay. Like, it doesn't matter. It's okay to upset people. I think the most important thing is being reflective on yourself and getting to the end of the day and going, okay, that went well, that I could have done better, or this, this I didn't do well at this. We had a board meeting the other week, and I went to the board with some proposals, and the response was, well, where's the forecast? Where's the model? We needed these numbers. I'm like, I'm really sorry, I didn't have time. Like, I know we need them. My bad. And I think just accepting that and being humble to some extent is a good thing. You can't be this all-knowing boss at the top of the org chart who always gets it right. And I think there's something to be said for just accepting you're going to get it wrong sometimes. So I think that's a super important lesson. I think the other thing I'd probably— whilst I said earlier about the risk-averse and the financial strategy help, I think, to be honest, there's something to be said, and something we're doing more of now, is occasionally you have to take a bit of a risk. You've got to take a leap. You can't just play it safe all the time. And I think as a company, we need to do more of that. And we are doing more of that. But I think it, it's a mindset change, isn't it? It's safe. It's comfortable. We can keep, keep doing cPanel, Plesk hosting, domains, easy, safe, sensible stuff all day long, and we can stick our head in the sand and ignore the changes in the industry, ignore AI, ignore, you know, the rise of, you know, SaaS solutions and stuff. But then we get left behind. And it is expensive to do the things, or scary to do those things, where you have to hire staff or develop something. But you kind of have to, because you're not going to get anywhere just selling the same thing everyone else does. You need to take some risks. I think Yeah, I think lately, you know, I'm learning that maybe we should have been more pushy, a little bit more aggressive in terms of coming up with new products or features, or even things like sales staff. Like, we, as a company, we've never done marketing or advertising, really. We do on Jolt's side, but from where I started, we've never done anything like that. We have no sales. We still, to this day, have no sales staff. Probably should get some of those, is our current thinking. Because I feel like we'd probably sell more if we had sales staff. But how? What do I know about selling sales staff? I don't. I've set up meetings with people who do. I've accepted that I don't know what I'm talking about. So I'll find somebody who does, and I'll rely on their expertise. And I think that's important. Acknowledge it or not. Accept that you have gaps in your knowledge and expertise and find someone, learn from them, read a book, watch podcasts. That's all, you'll listen to podcasts. Yeah, that's all you can really do, isn't it? It's, I think the sooner you accept that and then you better yourself as a business owner or a leader or, you know, just as a person.

So you touched there on continued self-development through non-traditional methods of education. You mentioned podcasts, you mentioned YouTube videos before. Are there any business books or non-business books that have really inspired you in business or changed your mindset recently?

Not really. I think I read lots of books. Matt is great at giving me books and I read loads of them and some of them are really interesting. I've really enjoyed reading about balanced scorecards recently and learning about how you can target and drive businesses based on like data. I've done a lot of reading recently on data, but reading is, for me anyway, reading is only so helpful. I need to see an example. I'll use the AI for that sometimes. I'll be like, right, I've been reading up on this. Can you talk through an example? Help me figure this one out. And I can do it in real life and I can see it in action. And then it makes a whole lot more sense. Traditional learning works for some people. Some people love books. I'm, you know, listening to podcasts and YouTube videos, or just examples of something. I learn much better that way. But traditional learning methods work better for some people. Some people love it. They want to go and do a course or they want to go to a lecture or whatever. I don't have any qualifications in IT at all. I'm a psychology graduate. I was going to be a therapist. I'm not. And actually, even more recently, I've done training in— I've done additional training in my own time, just my own interest in counseling and stuff because it interests me. I much prefer that more practical hands-on learning, do it. I wanted to learn something about some of these new website builders and plugins for WordPress and stuff that are out there. So I installed them and I used them. There are docs, I assume. I haven't read them. I just figure it out. But that's my preferred way of doing it. You know, there are books I've read. On a personal level that made an impact. There's a book I read recently by— I forget, but it's called The Subtle Art of Not Giving a— and we'll let you finish the last word there. That's an amazing book in terms of personal growth and how you approach life. I really enjoyed that book. It's such a good book in terms of, like, approaching challenges and adversity. And I think one of the things that stuck out for me the most there in that particular book was one of the almost at the very end, is talking about values and things you can do. And one of the things that said is the sort of counterintuitive value is to be— you're responsible for everything, is what he was saying. That you may not be to blame for everything, but you're responsible for how you choose to respond, how you choose to own that. So if something happens to you, whether it's bad, it's work, it's business, maybe a relationship ends or a family member dies or anything really in life that's challenging, or work. Maybe you don't get a promotion, or you don't get a pay rise, or you have a bad performance review. It's not your fault necessarily that that thing happened, but it doesn't mean you're not responsible for it. You're responsible for how you respond to that. You're responsible for your emotional response. It's up to you when that setback happens. Am I going to hate my boss? I didn't get the promotion. I'm going to work to the letter of my contract. I'm going to just really self-destruct a little bit internally for a while. Or am I going to go, right, okay, they've given me some feedback. This is what I'm going to do. I want to get it next time. I'm going to own this. I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to respond positively to this setback. This is my opportunity. That's a challenge. But I think if you can take responsibility, it's easy to go, oh, well, that's their fault. They're a horrible boss. Well, that's not going to get you anywhere. It's not going to make your life better.

It could be a natural response.

However, yeah, it's not a helpful response. You're responsible for everything. That's of that book, that's probably the thing that stuck with me the most. You're responsible for everything that happens in your life, is your responsibility in terms of how you respond, what it means to you, everything like that. And that was quite a key moment when I read that book, was like, oh yeah, that's good. I can choose. That person's upset me, or this thing's annoyed me. Or I'm frustrated that I didn't have that stuff ready for the board meeting. Okay, what am I going to do about that? I'm going to get better. I'm going to deal with this. I'm not going to get upset about it or frustrated that people haven't agreed with my proposal. I'm going to own it. I think that was a key learning moment. Occasionally I learn things from books. That one.

I'll make sure I include this one in the show notes. Um, yeah, you mentioned your board several times now in our discussion.

Yeah.

And yeah, a lot of entrepreneurs start solo or without having to be giving too many answers to other people. And in a way that can be addictive and I know it from my own experience, but then a board can change everything. What are your reflections? Your emotions in introducing a board, having a responsibility towards them, and also managing their expectations?

I mean, it's, it's a learning curve for me. It's something new. I'm extremely grateful to be, to be made the CEO of this group of companies, and I'm going to do a good job. And I think I'm accountable to the board. And many of those board members also work within our organization. Or they're a managed services director or product development director. So many of them I work with, but at a high level of strategy. I enjoy the challenge, you know, the challenging friend, I guess you would say, that I've come up with this scheme and I'm saying, right, well, I think we should do this and it's going to cost this much. And they've said, well, why? Why do you want to do this? Why do you want to buy that company? Or why do you want to expand to this industry or this product? And knowing that I'm going to be asked those questions means that I have to think about them. It's not just a case of going, "Well, that seems like a good idea," because I know that someone's going to ask me, "Okay, well, why is it a good idea? What is it going to cost you? What benefit is there to us as a business? Is it going to generate revenue? Is it going to generate profit? Is it going to upset our customers if we move into that industry or move into that product?" Those are all questions I might not have thought about. If you're just living in your own head, just calling the shots dictator style in a smaller business or a business where you don't have that more formal board set up, I think you're more prone to make mistakes. But you'll learn from them, hopefully, if you're introspective enough and can reflect on that. But you also, by embracing expertise of other people, you can learn off of them. All of our, all of our board members, our directors, have different styles of business. They have different expertise. You know, some of them, some of them are more conservative and they don't really want to push too hard. And then some of them are really just like, go for it, just the next big thing, just constant fluid change. Just, this, this is big, do this, this is big, do this. And then some of them are a bit more reflective and they'll be saying, well, you know, what do we think? Do we need a salesperson or We might have a discussion about hiring salespeople, and then we'll have a long discussion from some other directors saying, "Well, do we have the right processes? Do we have the right mechanisms, the right funnels to actually make the most? We're just going to spend loads of money on this person and assume they're going to magically bring in loads of sales." Well, no, actually, when I thought about it, I'm like, "No, you're right. We can hire a salesperson, but that's obviously no good to us if we don't have a way of converting the sale to a to, you know, actually provisioning the service. We can have this sales guy going out all day long selling servers, but if our systems team can't provision the servers fast enough, then we've got a problem. Capacity planning even and budgeting for our network and our growth and our connectivity, all of that is important. Yeah, adapting to a board is challenging. I think I can see that some directors would struggle with that, but I would say embrace the challenging friends. I think if you can find people who want to be on your board who have diverse opinions. You don't want to— you don't want to take the approach of, you know, a certain elected president who might surround themselves with people who agree with them, because that's not going to do you or your business any good. You need people with different opinions and different views who sometimes disagree with you. Not all our directors agree with publishing our tax and profits, you know. Not all of our directors think we should think we should hire salespeople, not all of them think we should move into certain products. It's that friendly back and forth and drawing on our expertise, and we all have done many interesting things, so that we're able to arrive at the strongest, most likely to succeed position, or at least a well-considered position. Sometimes it is a case of me going, "Well, you know, I think this is a good idea," and it's literally my job to come up with strategy. So unless there's like a really big showstopper, then this is what I I want to do, and it's my job to own that if I mess it up. But that's my responsibility, that's my job, to make these calls. But by having a board, accountable to that board, I think it gets rid of that danger of a director or a CEO having a bit of a god complex. You need them to know that they are accountable to someone, and there are people who can help them, advise them, or help them reflect. I think that's important for anyone. I'd encourage anyone to have people around them that they can work with on these things.

Somebody who has been criticized online for having a bit of a God complex, not necessarily having a board.

I know where you're going. Yeah.

And, uh, and also playing a big part in the industry that you're working in, as you mentioned, WordPress, is obviously Matt Mullenweg, and What's your take on what he's trying to do with WordPress? Is he destroying the ecosystem that he has built in the last 15 years?

I don't know if I want to make an enemy. I'm a hosting company. I don't want to draw his attention to me too much. Maybe I should keep my head down. I think, I think there's, it's like I said earlier about trust, wordpress.org. As a foundation is the, the software, not the commercial Automattic and WordPress.com. They produce a piece of arguably critical infrastructure. A vast amount of the internet relies on that technology. And with that comes a huge responsibility and people trust WordPress to provide them with carefully developed software that's neutral to their work. You don't want a piece of software that ties you to something. And so I worry that his actions are eroding that trust. And I think it's— there's a danger erodes on two fronts because you're eroding the trust of your network, your sort of channel essentially of hosts, but also you're making your users who rely on that software think to themselves, oh, this isn't, this isn't a stable bit of software. I spoke to, like I said, to the board and I spoke to them in Teams and like Are there alternatives to WordPress? Should we be looking at whether we offer Drupal or Joomla or SilverStripe or whatever else there is out there? Do we need to pivot a little bit just to give people options? Do we publish blogs and advice on what else there is out there? I don't know if that's the case. I don't know if we should or not. We haven't decided on that yet. WordPress is almost likely, it's likely always going to be a key part of the internet. Infrastructure, isn't it? But I do think that, um, I do think there's a danger of eroding trust. I think he needs to be careful, you know, of, of the image that gives to people who rely on his software. And it is good software. It's great software. It's made a huge difference to the internet. I think the internet would be a very different place were it not for WordPress existing. The alternatives to WordPress are not as good. They don't have the ecosystem. They don't have the support. So I, yeah, I think it's a dangerous game he's playing. I don't, I feel like I should understand why there's this problem with WP Engine and WordPress. And I'm not really sure I understand what happened there. I've tried to understand it. I don't really know what happened. Doesn't seem like a good course of action on either party's approach, to be honest. I'm, I guess from WordPress view, yeah, it's down to trust. We need to be able to trust them to provide software that the internet relies on. I do think it's critical to the internet that it works. Can you imagine if WordPress suddenly collapsed? What on earth would happen? I don't, you know, I don't know how that would even, what would happen next.

Isn't that a danger though, that they are too big and too influential? Would, what, what, what alternatives to WordPress would you advise a client who would be looking at having a self-hosted website? A lot of the other alternatives, if we're looking at blogging and we're thinking about Substack, or if we're looking at e-commerce and we're thinking, say, Shopify, they are all externally hosted and you become part of a different platform.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Alternatives. It's interesting, isn't it? Because were you— were WordPress any other industry, a commercial industry, you'd be tumbling down an antitrust scenario because there's too many, it's a competition issue. There's too much in one plate, but open source software apparently is immune from this. So when the open source community, then it all falls apart because of one key developer. I think it's like a, it might be an XKCD cartoon where there's this huge stack of little blocks that open source software relies on this one tiny project run by one guy in his bedroom and it all falls apart. You've got one guy seemingly in control of WordPress. And it's eroding trust a little bit. Are there alternatives? You've got Drupal and Joomla, and there's hosted solutions like Substack and Medium and stuff like that. Ghost. I quite like Ghost. A lot of my colleagues who are quite technical don't because it's all Node.js. And I think Node.js is a bit devopsy, isn't it? It's not very traditional systems. I don't think, you know, we have, and we're working on Node.js hosting, you know, in some of our products to make that better. We have customers who host host Ghost blogs. I quite like it, but I don't think that there is a good alternative of the scale that WordPress is. You think WordPress can host huge shops, huge blogs, massive websites. There's not really very much that WordPress can't do. Arguably, you want to host a big shop, there are better ways of doing it from a purely technical point of view, but from a work— from a user perspective, being able to Google how to do it. Customer came to us and they're like, we want to sell chocolate on a subscription. I'm like, okay, we will make it happen. And we searched, we Googled, we researched, we're like, yeah, there's a plugin. We can make a chocolate subscription for you in your website. And we did. So now you can subscribe to chocolate, which sounds delightful. You know, doing that—

I'd be down for that.

Oh, 100%. I like how I think one of the options is like weekly, a weekly chocolate box is the way forward. So I think that there is a challenge there in that there is not, is not really, in my opinion, a good self-hosted alternative to WordPress. There are alternatives, but they are not going to be anywhere near as capable as what you get with, with WordPress. They're not gonna have the documentation. You can YouTube, you can Google, and it's very quickly going to tell you how to do something WordPress. You're not going to get that in in, in something, some alternative. And you're right, you could use something like Wix or Shopify, but then you're stuck. You're a bit of a prisoner. So you build your massive e-commerce business in Shopify and they triple their prices and you're stuck and you're just gonna have to suck it up and it's gonna cripple your business potentially. So WordPress, yeah, it's, it's a cheap way of doing it. It's efficient, it's, you know, it's well supported, but if it becomes unstable, then the cost of paying Shopify might be more worthwhile versus the potential cost of WordPress disintegrating around you. I don't know. I don't think we're at that point yet, but when you've got everything in one basket, it does pose questions, doesn't it? When there's the appearance of instability in that project.

I guess that's the dilemma of any business and business operator.

Yeah.

It is. You, you, you risk, you know, simplicity versus resilience. We talk about it with data centers. A lot of our data centers are contracted to the same supplier. We have a problem with them or some contractual issue with them, you know, we're all in one place versus if we have lots of suppliers, lots of different contracts for data centers, but then it costs more. So we have to put prices up. So do we put it all in fewer data centers or do we have lots and lots of contractors, or do we, as we are at the moment, still somewhat dependent on one supplier for our primary data centers because it gives us the best balance and we, we mitigate that risk as best we can. It's, it is a challenge. And I think, I don't know that there is a correct answer. I think businesses have to look at the risks like they would anything and decide what they're going to do. That's something we see, especially the e-commerce sites. How many times have I had conversations? Oh, my site was down for 2 minutes, I lost £10,000. I'm thinking, well, if you're making £10,000 every 2 minutes, you probably should spend more than 30 quid a year on your hosting, would be my suggestion. Some people are not so good at mitigating risk.

I typically tend to wrap up Millennial Masters with an introspective question. And I want to ask you, Kieran, what is the biggest sacrifice you had to make to be where you are today?

Biggest sacrifice I've had to make to be here? I don't, I'm trying to think. One of the things I miss about being here, my mind immediately leaps to the issue of remote working. I used to work traditionally in an office with lots of people, and I enjoyed that. And I had lots of friends I worked with. We had lots of fun. We went in, we had Christmas parties. As a remote worker for a remote company, I don't have that. But also, there are limits when you're the CEO or you're the managing director. There's only so close you can be with your team, because there has to be an element of separation. So I think they say, "Oh, it's lonely at the top." And I don't view myself as being some big boss of everyone. We chat and we're friendly, and I hope that the staff don't, like, like talking to me and they're not scared of me as the boss or something. But certainly, I don't think the directors obviously aren't aren't scared of me because they're my co-directors. I've worked with them for a long time. Edward definitely isn't. But yeah, I think that probably is one of the things I would miss. Like, it'd be nice to be in an office with people and making friends and stuff. But equally, I love being at home. I love the job I do, and I really love running a business. Running a business is probably one of my favorite things to do. I was asked once by the the CEO of another large web host, and he said, what do you like about this? And I'm like, I just love running a business. I could be selling novelty spatulas. I don't really mind what I'm selling or what I'm doing. I really enjoy the running of the business. It's not so much hosting or servers. Computers are annoying. I wouldn't recommend anyone maybe get into this industry, but I think I enjoy running a business. Some people run businesses because they love the product or anything. But in my case, I love running, running a business. That does require some sacrifice in terms of effort or time. You know, I, I do lots of meetings. Sometimes I have to work late, I have to travel. That's, that's a necessary part. But just like with risk, you're balancing risk. Okay, you've sacrificed some nights because you've worked, or you get to travel, but also you're paid well for your job, you have a sense of success, people They want to talk to you, they're interested in you. I'm here talking to you, and I had some major imposter syndrome this one. I'm like a master, like I'm a master of something? I don't know about that. I'm assured, I was like, well, clearly someone thinks so, so here we are. There is a balancing act when you're running a business to sacrifice an element of your work friendships. You take on more responsibility, but you're also taking on a sense of achievement or pay or perks, you know, travel is both a blessing and a curse, I think, to some extent. But yeah, I don't know that I've made massive sacrifices. I think probably I'm an exception though. I think many people out there who start a business sacrifice a lot. They have to put loads of money into it and they struggle financially or they lose relationships or they lose time with their children because they're working so hard. And you know, that would be a huge sacrifice. I'm I'm under no illusion, I'm very fortunate that I have managed to grow this business from nothing while still going to university, still holding down another job to help do it on the side, and grow it to the point we are now where we have tens of thousands of customers and, you know, are successful in our industry. I think that's— I'm extremely fortunate. So I'd love to paint some sob story about all these sacrifices I've made. I don't know that I have. But I certainly respect those who do. You know, I'm lucky without a doubt.

I think you just summed up to yourself and everybody listening and watching why you are a Millennial Master, Kieran.

Good.

And on that note, I'd like to thank you for sharing your journey and your insights and looking forward to your next move.

I really enjoyed chatting. It's been a pleasure.

Thanks. Thanks for sticking till the end for another great episode of Millennial Masters. But don't keep this to yourself, please share the wisdom with someone else, and it will also help me spread the word. Don't miss out on my book club and extra features, get them in your inbox every week. Simply subscribe on millennialmasters.net. Catch you next week.