EP 42: Financing the Future: AI's Impact on Business Funding

People thought I was mad I left a very comfortable job, but one that was probably quietly suffocating me from my true potential. But it was a huge gamble and a leap of faith to leave that position because I knew once I closed that door, I was never going back. Business finance is really my passion. That's where I really, over the last three years, have really delved into that world and tried to become an expert within it.

I heard it referred to as something other than an umbilical cord. It was crack being broad spectrum. If somebody wants help, then we can help them, but we can also build a strong relationship with them and I think that's really powerful.

Hi, I'm Freya. Welcome to the Skynet Chronicles Business in the AI Age, the podcast that dives deep into the world where artificial intelligence meets business. Join us as we explore the latest trends, challenges and opportunities in this ever evolving landscape. From innovative startups to established enterprises will uncover the secrets behind the successful integration of AI technologies. So grab a cup of coffee, sit back and get ready to unlock the mysteries of business in the AI age.

Good morning and welcome. James, how are you?

I'm really well, thank you. And I'm super excited to be here today.

I'm excited to have you too. So if we go for a way of introduction, James Murray, Finance wizard.

Yeah, we could go with wizards. I think we've, I've gone the long way around to getting to that point for sure. I mean, to think how many years ago would it have been when we'd have been sitting there with, with Brian.

It'S got to be four or five, hasn't it? And at that time you were involved exclusively in car financing?

Yes, yes. Yeah. So my journey really started in car sales for the first 10 years and then I went and started with a relatively new startup in the, the finance sector doing finance brokering. And I was going to do commercial finance and car finance, but I then slipped back into cars again and we ended up building a really big team. Worked there for seven years and at that point I was going through the stage of management. We were part of a club and most of the people within that club were business owners like yourself. And I was one of the only people that was actually employed that was going there. So I got a lot of value listening to other business owners and being.

Told every month, when you're starting a business, James.

Yeah, yeah. David Franklin would tell me about the little gremlins eating away that pull towards entrepreneurship. But I've always been quite risk averse and I'm quite loyal as well. So I wanted and was very happy at where I was at and I had a really good, a good, a good position. I was really comfortable in the role that I had probably actually too comfortable to the point where I had a really successful team that had been built around me. I was well remunerated for the work that I was doing. I had a lot of autonomy in the job. So a lot of people, they leave employment to go into self employment because of a drastic change happens. So they either get made redundant, circumstances change, they have a side hustle which eventually they then ease out of that business and create this other thing on the side. But I, people thought I was mad. I left a very comfortable job but one that was probably quietly suffocating me from my true potential and have been part of that group did just give me a little bit of a glimpse to the outside world and knowing what was potentially out there. But it was a huge gamble and a leap of faith to leave that position because I knew once I closed that door I was never going back.

And so how far in are you now in terms of time?

Yeah, so three years in roughly. I mean it's hard to measure exactly because the first six months with. So as a finance broker you have to get all your regulations become FCA regulated. I work under an umbrella company as well which, which makes it easier but gives me larger access to a broader panel of lenders. So there's probably like a six month, six month breaking in period. But that also gave me the opportunity to build my website, do my branding. I left on really good terms with the previous company. So I've never actively outpoint Bound Air called any of any old clients or anything like that. So it was very much a start from the start from the bottom and work my way up from there.

But it was starting from the bottom with a known network. So people locally knew you and I think that makes a huge difference. And I know you've continued to work on that extensively as we all do, but the power of in person networking and those relationships that you build were lift up in business which they just don't teach at school.

They really don't. I mean I think it's actually only been even in my previous role. I didn't really appreciate the power of your network and networking and, and being associated and working with other business people and other people that are going to raise you up. I, when I, when I left the previous business I didn't actually anticipate anybody would find me. I mean I did Call it James Murray Finance. So if you typed it into Google you would Find Me or ChatGPT now, which wasn't around at the time. And so that was one of the reasons when I, it came to marketing myself I very much just called it my name so people could find me if they wanted to. And I actually, I was pleasantly surprised with the amount of people that came out of the woodwork that when I did then launch came and found me to use my services and that was really quite, quite pleasing. And I guess that was based on the foundation of the work I'd done before. But one of the other reasons was I'd given a lot of my clients away to my, my team. So I had a sales team and I was sort of leveraging them so I had this like lovely position where I was, I was, I was earning commission off of the work that my team did. But I'd actually sort of lost all my leverage as well because I'd given all my best clients away to my sales team.

But your best clients were with you for a reason initially. And so although you'd handed them off as their interests and needs have changed over time, they're still going to come back and have a conversation.

Yes.

And so you get that nature of a repeat customer even if it's not for the same finance product, I guess.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the things that I've had is I'm sort of, I wanted to, I'm known for car, say car finance and that's sort of my low hanging fruit but it's not really my passion. But I'd be crazy to not have that as my sort of, as an offering because really it's the sprat that can catch the mackerel really. It can be the thing that sort of brings clients in. I speak with a lot of directors, they will buy cars and often they'll buy them on finance. So some, sometimes it's a really good way to get business finance but business finance is really my passion. That's where I really, over the last three years have really delved into that world and tried to become an expert within it. So although I touched on commercial finance in, in my previous role we started, we built a whole nother division that I didn't, I didn't run for that. So I knew it was going on and I had, was involved in conversations. But since starting my own business I've become incredibly passionate about it and, and I've really gone quite deep. And the problem with this has also been a lot of the recommendations, a lot of the business experts would tell you to niche and. Or a lot of the content we hear is American. So they say niche and which I don't fully get. I'm like, is this niche a thing? Like what, am I saying it wrong? But they say to niche and I hate the idea of leaving something on the table. And I'm also really interested in different business sectors. So one day I might be speaking with a printing company, the other day it might be a tech SaaS company. It could be anything. And I like that because you build a much bigger skill set, but it takes a lot longer and it's a lot harder to market yourself.

It is, but in some ways we've gone down a similar path in that we're still niching relatively locally, accept business from anywhere if the right person comes along. But by having a local focus, supporting local businesses, and yet being broad spectrum, if somebody wants help, then we can help them, but we can also build a strong relationship with them. And I think that's really powerful. So tell me about the different types of finances that a business could take.

Okay, all right. So this is quite relative. This is relatively new to me because I've been not the finance itself, but over the years I've been working on many different types of projects. So sometimes I'll end up working with a large corporation. That's what we'd consider a blue chip company. They might just need assets to buy equipment. They've got an excellent credit rating and they just need funding for that one thing or a fleet of vehicles, let's say. So there's different solutions like that. And then there's other companies that I work with that they're on the starting blocks. They just need to have conversations about how they get that first round of funding or how they get and that how they buy their first van or their, their first piece of equipment or their tools or hire somebody. So I work with a, as you say, a broad spectrum of clients. And there's different funding solutions for different types of clients. And any good finance broker will have a broad stroke conversation with their clients about the different products. Now sometimes that might last five minutes because you might have a client that knows what they want and this is just incredibly price sensitive. Or it might be a farmer that needs annual payments because they're very seasonal business. Or it might be the structure of the agreement, so there's exit clauses and so forth, whereas other times it might be much more nuanced. So I've sort of broken it down into A few different sectors, seven precisely in which I speak to those clients and I work through those options. And it might be that they need a number of them and some of them I don't directly offer. But I'm always quite happy to tell clients, you need to go and explore this first or go and look into him. And then as you said, we build that network up and sometimes you can point people in the right direction. And my whole thing is if I add value at the start, have a very business karma type model, good things will come back to me at the end because essentially I'm remunerated one way and that's why I'm making commissions for introducing business to banks. So if the client doesn't end up using my services, I, I don't get paid. But I know if I do enough of the good stuff at the start, the back end will look after itself.

So what are the seven types?

Okay, so sorry, I do go on a little bit. So I've kind of created an acronym of biceps with an extra S at the end because that was the best one I can do. But I feel I haven't really worked out how that could work. But we need muscles in our business or we need lifting up, something like that. We'll work on it. But so that starts, and it starts quite poignantly really with bootstrapping. So bootstrapping. Do you know where the term bootstrapping came from?

I don't.

So originally it came from the idea of lifting oneself up with your own bootstraps, which ironically is an almost impossible task. So bootstrapping is self funding your business. So a lot of the time this really falls into areas where you might be having a side hustle, so you might use your own savings, you start something on the side, it starts slow and it's self funded. It's probably the safest way to start and build a business. But it's obviously very restrictive because you've not got that immediate access to cash, which ultimately is the fuel to grow your business. And it's also dependent on the sector that you're working in. So if you're building anything from a tech business, you might say, well that that's just labor intensive. But actually you might need to buy software, hardware, you might need to invest in teams, you might need to invest in CRM systems, whatever it is. So each business is unique, but bootstrapping is the starting point. I invoice finance now. This is.

Well, a shiver just went down my back.

Exactly. And it's got a really bad Reputation.

It's from firsthand experience that the shiver went down my back.

So it's sometimes known as invoice factoring, discounting. There's things like block discounting, selective invoice factoring. We won't go into the details of it, but essentially what it is is it's you're forwarding the payment for your invoices. So this is quite important for businesses when they are scaling. Let's use an example of a fruit and veg wholesaler that's got a nice business and they're providing fruit and veg to market stalls and so forth. But then they get a really, really good opportunity to get into Sainsbury's or Tesco's or all other supermarkets are available as well. They would say to. But Sainsbury's or Tesco's have big buying power so they can dictate the terms of that contract. So they may say to that wholesaler, well, we'll use you. It's a great order for this, it's a great contract for this business to win. But at the same time they might not get paid for 60 or sometimes even 90 days and cash flowing those operations upfront is really difficult. Now the good thing with invoice finance is the credit checks are based on the, on the debtors rather than the, the business itself. So if it's a strong business like a supermarket, one owned supermarket, local councils are actually ironically, quite, quite a good one as well, despite recent news. And what that will do is it means that you can then forward maybe 85, 90% of that invoice in on day one. So you get the money in upfront. You obviously pay a fee to the invoice finance company for that, but it means it keeps cash flow and it keeps operations going. The downside with it though, you have to be really careful. It's like an umbilical cord. Once you're in it, it's very hard to leave.

I heard it referred to as something other than an umbilical cord. It was crack.

Yeah, whichever phrase you want to use. Yes, it's super hard because you then need to cash flow massively to get out of it. And it's also really risky in the fact of, I mean, you can get a thing called bad debt protection, which protects you against bad debt. You need to be careful and read the T's and C's of that. But essentially what that will do is it will cover you for the, if the, if the debt goes bad, because let's say you get £10,000 in from a cleaning contract that you just did. But when the invoice finance company go and collect that money, if they've gone bust in the meantime, that money never gets collected, you're still on the hook for it, but you've then gone and spent that 10,000. So again you have to be really careful with it. But it's definitely a conversation people at least need to have or know that those products are available.

Especially selective where it's not whole of book.

Yeah, yeah. And then there's different costs involved. So the more sort of. So construction it's quite difficult to get get in. So because it's contractual debt, the way in which the, the jobs are carried out, it's much more difficult and more expensive than it would be if it was an A2B business that just sells a product, invoices it out and the work has been delivered. Yeah. So that's invoicing what we're biceps C so cash flow and working capital. So this sort of if you were cash flow loan is anything where it's an unsecured loan that might be a cash injection into a business where you are just having an, you're going through a growth phase. It might be that you're employing staff and you just need to, we often say it maybe takes like six months for especially like sales staff to get up and running and become income generating. You've then got onboarding costs like IT equipment training, all your national insurance costs, the base salaries, everything else that goes with that. So planning ahead, having a good cash flow Runway, knowing what that's going to cost you, you might want a cash injection. But then that also goes into other working capital solutions. It might be that you even consider things like an overdraft with your bank. And as, as I say any good finance broker will explore those options. I'm going to mention a product later but the cash flow loan here I'm talking about is reasonably priced loans. They're more expensive than asset finance. But we're not talking daylight robbery loans here, we're going to get to them. And these can still be short term, but generally the standard loans have been up to sort of five years, sometimes a bit longer. You'll have known anything from companies like Funding Circle offering these directly to the high street as that kind of fintech bounce back. Yeah. And well also the government growth guarantee scheme that can fall under these as well. So and again as, as a finance broker, I'll talk clients through the pros and cons of those different products and how they can be worked into their business. And a lot of the time I use the words return on investment a lot in what is that money? What's it going to do for you? How's it going to grow your business? How are you going to get it and set it to work for you? That's the key really with a lot of these finance products, so biceps we've got equity equity investors. So that's not something I directly offer, but it's a conversation I have with a lot of people. A lot of the biggest companies that we've ever heard of have either gone through rounds of funding or they have had investors or they've had deep pockets that they've been able to then scale their growth. Now selling equity in your business, there's lots of different ways in which you can go around it. You can access, access cash. Once it's there, it can be on tap. So there might be share options, it might be that there'll be get out clauses as well where you can buy those investors out. There'll be all sorts of different variations of selling equity in your business. One of the things that I talk to people about is the type of investor that you get on board because a lot of people leave self employment to go and steer their own ship. And the minute you then bring on somebody else, sometimes you lose a bit of control in the direction that your business is going for better or for worse. Because sometimes you might bring on a mentor that can actually guide you through that particular industry. They might have experience, network and the deep pockets to be able to fund you through it and you sort of go along with them. But at the same time it might also put you in a position where you're not comfortable with the direction or it might go outside of your own risk tolerance and that's really, really important. So the other thing as well to mention on that is it's not as easy to find the funding as you might think. I think a lot of people think they can on like a Dragon's Den type situation and be able to just raise money. A lot of it involves trust. So if you are maybe raising us in the smaller brackets of funding and you're taking on a smaller amount, the type of investor that's interested in that type of loan or that type of agreement is going to be a lot more picky with regards to their due diligence. And there's going, I think really when you're approaching people like that, I would actually start at home, start within your own network where you've already built that trust and people that believe in you and want to see you do well and you might also get better type of better terms in place as well. So that brings us on to P Payday loans. Payday loans are really for private individuals, but I stick them in the bracket of the commercial world and this essentially is something I'm quite against. There is a time and place for it and I have arranged these types of agreements for clients in the past. But for me as a finance broker it's a last resort. And even as a sticking plaster, I really do try and guide clients through these other options first and try and explore other scenarios. Now there has been situations where I've had a client before where they got an opportunity to buy a shipping container of equipment that they had and it was an industry they already knew, they knew they could sell this and they just didn't have access to, to buy the. I think it was about 40Ks worth of tires. So they ended up taking this loan out. But we did a full forecast, we did a return on investment calculation and it still added up and we did a best case, worst case scenario and it kind of made sense. Most people don't do it for that though. They normally take these loans out because it's the last option. But what I'm seeing, and not all finance brokers are built the same, but a lot of them are taking the quick win. So they're very quick decisions. And you can go online, type your details in and ask for a loan. And the problem is you'll end up getting a brokerage that has somebody at the end of their desk. Their primary job is to make commission and it's to just extract money from you. It's not to offer this consultative approach where we explore these different avenues. And potentially, I mean it's probably one of the easiest loans I can ever write is doing one of these payday loan type short term loans. They're normally maximum 24 months, but sometimes they're 6 to 12 months. And the easiest thing for me to do would just be able to put an algorithm through, get everybody to apply through there and just stick loans out and a numbers game. And the problem is a lot of people end up taking these loans out and it actually doesn't always do you any good, it doesn't help your growth and you end up paying through the nose for expensive finance. So yeah, that's a solution and it does work sometimes, but I'm very, very cautious about implementing it into a business. We're getting through these where Are we now S? S. Okay. S. Oh, we're onto my two favorite. Okay, two S's. The two S's. So we spelled biceps wrong. I know. So if anybody can actually recommend after this.

Oh, no, no, we're not moving away from double biceps.

We're sticking, we're sticking double biceps.

I love it.

So S is secured finance. So a lot of the time this, this might come under the, the umbrella of property finance, but essentially what I mainly do is asset finance. So that's hard and soft. So that soft asset finance is stuff like renewables, might be solar panels, things that banks might secure finance against, but there's no real tangible value at the end of it. But the hard asset finance is the world assets. It's the vans, it's the printing machines, it's the dumpers, it's the excavators. It's all the stuff that you can go and sell and has a secondhand market. And the great thing with asset finance like this is a bank is much more likely to lend you the amount that you need because there's added security. So with some of those other loans that we just discussed, I didn't really mention that the way the scoring system and the way in which a bank makes its decision, apart from with the invoice finance, where they work on the debtors, a lot of the time they'll be looking at the trading history of a business, how long it's been, how long it's been established, how profitable it is, looking at the balance sheet, looking at all these other metrics. Then they also look at the directors. There's a big push towards having, being a homeowner a whole nother subject for another day is personal guarantees. Because with a limited company, you're essentially setting up a, a limited company which, which should protect the directors as a separate entity. By putting personal guarantees in there, you're sort of linking those, but that's a whole nother conversation. Personal guarantees are quite popular, especially in the unsecured space. But with asset finance, you're less likely to need personal guarantees if you've got a strong business and you have got an asset that is of value. And this gets really funky and fun because you can look at the return on investment, how you're going to put that asset to use. Sometimes I get a lot of cases where I might have a rent a company that's renting equipment and the rentals are normally sort of three, four times the amount that it would cost for them to buy it. So we've got immediate Serviceability there. So might be costing 2,000 pounds a month to rent a piece of equipment that might cost five to seven hundred pounds a month to, to own it. So you can add an asset to your, to to your books and pay it off. It can be fully amortized. You can put bloom payments on these things. You can do the seasonal payments for seasonal business. We can get really funky with it. And also as I say, when that business is buying that asset, you can plan how it's going to be used and how it's going to help that business grow and go through the next stages. The problem is I speak to a lot of businesses that are at the early stages and they don't always have the, they, they don't need necessarily an asset, they just need cash. And that's where we then end up going into those, those, those other options and segue nicely into the other S, because the other S is solutions. And solutions means outside solutions. Thinking outside the box. What can you do to effectively change the way your business operates? How can you bring cash flow forward? Can you negotiate payment supplier terms? Can you bring those invoices through from 60 days down to 30? Can you bring them down to 15? Can you bring them to make 50% deposits on day one? I know this isn't typical of a finance broker, but I think it's essential for a finance broker to have this knowledge and be able to explain these things to clients. Because the two bookends here, the bootstrapping, what you can fund yourself, what you can put some skin in the game from your own, your own net worth and what solutions you can do to make your business efficient. You could then look at things outside of that. You could look at doing like a joint venture with an investor. So instead of going full equity, find somebody in your local network that let's say you've got a 20 grand investment, you need to go and buy some, invest in some software or some development. But you're not a homeowner. You've got no balance sheet, you've got no accounts, you've got no profitability to show you've got nothing to hang a loan on. You could potentially go to an investor that you know and say, look, I'm doing this one time project, I could return you X amount if it goes well. Do you believe in me? Make a business plan up. Just doing that business plan in its own right. Would you invest in that business if you were the investor? Ask yourself that question. You could then also look at things, I mean we could speak all day I'm sure about tactical ways to improve your business, but things like government grants. So if you're in an industry where, especially in tech businesses where there's innovation, there might be grants within your local councils and then also within, if you've got sort of maybe an E commerce business, there might be funding options within the platforms that you work on like Shopify and so forth. So it's just trying to work through different tactics to get the right funding to help fuel your business's growth.

Fantastic. Can you give me a case study on the solution side? Because that's really interesting, isn't it? It's where effectively you're crafting something specific for a business that's going to help them change. Change. So I think I'd love to hear an example of a solution that you've worked through. Obviously you don't need to be specific about who and what, but just to sort of take us through. So how have that worked?

Okay, I've actually had a couple of cases here. Similar businesses that have come to me that don't have any tangible assets, they're more service led businesses. So they're in, let's say again, I don't want to mention any particular names, but let's say the health and safety and they've got a profitable business being doing really well, but with a lot of like maybe lifestyle businesses, sometimes the accounts don't always look as strong as they actually are. So it might be that directors pull more money out or they use that, that business to service their lifestyle, which is absolutely fine. But sometimes that doesn't mean that they've geared the business particularly well for raising finance. So I have a couple of. This scenario happens quite a lot actually. So I've got one particular example where a client came to me and he was looking for funding, but as far as the pure algorithm set, they wouldn't necessarily get the funding they need. So I was able to approach a funder that I work with that offers a thing called the Growth Guarantee Scheme, which is the government initiative which helps banks. The idea really is to help make banks lend more money. So they protect 70% of the loan at the end if it, if it goes wrong. They also give the director I mentioned earlier about personal guarantees. They also give a bit more protection for the personal guarantees because the lenders will always normally ask on an unsecured loan for a personal guarantee. And what they do under the Growth Guarantee Scheme is they protect your primary residence. So that can't be taken. So it just gives a little bit More comfort for the director. But in this particular case my client wanted to diversify a bit and they needed to inject into a new project. They actually were investing into some AI tech and wanted to explore this now. But the problem being it's still, it's still an idea it go. It just goes slightly outside of their core offering that they do. Although it's aligned, it's something, it's a strategic move that they thought of that they wanted to implement this money and invest in two members of team. The costs of implementing this software, which I think was going to take about six months to develop, there was a need for about £65,000. I think it was off the top of my head but as I say, most of the banks on this unsecured space wouldn't approach it. A lot of the other products that we've just mentioned wouldn't be suitable. So we really. The unsecured loan was ideal but also then we need to look at monthly payments so we don't want to. Paying back 65,000 pounds over 12 months can be quite expensive and it wouldn't be manageable. So I think we did that one over the four or five years. But again just to get it over the line with a lender, we activated the GGS scheme. So the client still paid reasonable rates for the money. They got the money within, I think it was about five days of the acceptance going through. The acceptance was about 24 hours from the application going in super quick. The reason we were successful with the application was the write up. So it's what we called storyboard lending. Storybook lending, sorry, storyboard either work but storybook lending. So it's where you end up really creating a story about where the business has been, who are the people behind the business and what is the vision and if you can, then again I talk about return on investment, show where that money is being utilised, especially under the GGS scheme. It's really, really effective when you're then putting an application in and if the business is steady and it's got good directors and especially if they're homeowners, that really helps as well. The reason the weird thing with the homeowner thing is you could be a homeowner and have zero equity in your home or be in negative equity officially. As far as a tick box is concerned, you tick a a better box than somebody that's renting, that's got the freedom of moving and has got 100k sitting in his.

Because you've managed to persuade a bank to give you money previously.

Well, it's, it's actually, I think statistically more debts are successfully repaid from homeowners than they are tenants. And I think it's just maths. It's just maths, yeah. So. But it does frustrate me sometimes because there are lenders where they actually do ask for the equity position of the homeowner. But again, a lot of these other funders out there, the ones where you just put in the details, that adds a big tick in the box if you're a homeowner, but it doesn't always mean anything really magical.

So you've got a lovely looking magazine on the desk in front of you there. Tell me about modern business.

Yes, this has been an evolving project that I did. Yes, it's very pretty. This is being printed at the moment by our good friends at Peterborough Printing services, Marcus printing 3,000 copies for us as we speak. This was originally designed as a finance brochure. I thought about it last year and I thought, what can I do that's a bit different that can add value to my clients, be a handout to people and give out and having coffee shops and that sort of thing. And I took a bit of advice on it and somebody said, well, if you went a bit more broader with it, it could be a lot more accessible to. Because I think sometimes the word finance that we said about invoice finance can kind of switch people off. It can be seen as a bit boring. I get a lot of finance magazines and they're very gray, they don't offer a lot. There's just pictures of the London skyscrapers and that's about it. So I then started thinking a little bit deeper and I thought, really, what, what can this be? What can it be about? And I thought about my own journey into entrepreneurship. I thought about my networks, I thought about some of the skills that I've learned along the way in building my own business. And then I got excited. So I then just started writing content. So I do blogs and all this other stuff anyway, so I'd kind of created some content amongst that. And then over a few months I just started building out pages based mainly on the finance side. So there's things in here that are based on how to raise Capex finance, there's a glossary on finance, there's information about directors, car finance, all that sort of stuff that I think business owners are going to enjoy. But then I then expanded and I work with some collaborators. So there's no marketing in this apart from me. It's a subliminal marketing exercise, I guess. But I've then worked with people that I know and trust in the industry. So there's a lot more on strategy, branding, pr, marketing mindset actually as well. And then there's common asked questions. I've got an interview with emerges and acquisition specialist. So I think people are interested in how they gear their business up for sale. So yeah, I've ultimately created a magazine that's really accessible for business owners that they can use keep on their coffee table. It's got a notes section in the back so you can scribble in it and I want to get it out there to business owners. I've got two different ways in which you can read this. You can either find a copy in your local coffee shop, dentist, doctor's surgery. I will be distributing them as well to industrial local estates and so forth. But there's a digital version as well. So if you go on to my website, jamesmariefinance.co.uk you can download one for free. And I was going to say for the podcast just to check people have been listening and watching through the time that we've been here. If they mention this podcast as a special offer, I will send a physical copy out. So if they prefer a physical one, I'll post one for free to anybody that mentions the podcast name. Send me your address and details and I'll get a physical copy sent out to anybody that's interested. But yeah, it's been a really interesting project and maybe there'll be future issues.

What I really like about it James, is the bottom right underneath the barcode where it says issue one. It's a statement of intent.

Statement of intent. No pressure. I've. I was so I actually had. It's interesting, I was conscious before coming on here of how much I could feed into AI and I know you'll have a lot of business owners watch so I'm hoping that I can share some value with them. But also trying to segue into different bits about about your business and AI and tech. But I my original designer let me down so I probably a bad business model here but I've at each stage so I didn't look into printing costs until the very end because I didn't want to put myself off doing it. I've not looked at doing issue two. I know I would love to but I think that would be a whole other project and I might then embark on building a bigger team to help me with that. Be a bigger thing, maybe add some advertising in to it to help with the cost. But when I went through the stages of design, when I got to the design stage, my designer that I've used for all my marketing up to this point decided to take a full time employed job. So he really kindly blessed him. He said, I'll do it in evenings and stuff. And I just was like, this is too big for that. So before I met a wonderful guy called Kaz Casamano who's been crazy, amazing and patient with me doing this, and I did look into the free versions of AI to see if it could help me design it. And it isn't quite there yet. Maybe there are some specific paid versions where it would do it yet, but the usual ChatGPT and Claudes and stuff of the world weren't quite ready to build a full luxury magazine.

And I'm glad they're not yet. I mean, if we roll forward 6 months, 12 months, 18 months, I'm sure that pitch will change because if we look back at any of the individual building blocks of capabilities, they're moving forward very quickly. But there has to still be a place for human invention and creativity. And so I'm glad that we're not there yet. I think it will come, but there will still be a place for human creativity.

The only time the human part, I thought I was starting to become a pain. And you know what it's like when you talk to AI. I mean, I still say please and thank you. I don't know about anybody else, but I'm very polite to my AI and she's very polite back to me. But if I'd have been going back to AI, going, can you tweak this? Can you tweak that? Can you tweak this? I probably would have kept going and kept going, whereas I was conscious that I was dealing with a human and their time was precious.

Contractual agreement for a set number of revisions.

I mean, he was so good. So good. I mean, the problem is when you're doing it on your own, the editing work, I'm a bit of a perfectionist, as you know, and I just, I'm sure there's, there will be, somebody will point out a spelling mistake here or there. But the editing process, we'd, we'd notice maybe 30 mistakes. Just tiniest things from capital letters here to a full stop there and all sorts to a full on mistake or grammatical error. And every time you'd go and change it, you then would get the next version and then you'd find more and then you'd Find more but then sometimes tweaking on tweaks that then moved things. So it's been a really good experiment and as with all of the business that we've discussed here, a lot of the things that I'm learning and things I'm doing I'm then sharing with my clients because it's all relative. So it's a nice sort of ecosystem of taking on these projects and then sharing my pains, but also the successes of it as well.

And I don't think it matters how you're learning as long as you're constantly stretching yourself. You become a better businessman, a better person. It's what are those boundaries you're pushing? How do you build in that necessity to try something new on a regular basis? Especially with the rate of change that we've got in AI? It's if you are having a practice of spending a certain amount of time each week playing, testing, working with things, you will be better than those that are not.

Well, I think you're. I don't know if you've shared it on this podcast, but what you, you and your team do on a Friday afternoon, have you shared that before?

Probably, yeah.

I just think that's brilliant and I think being able to just take that creative side. I'm a big fan of Rory Sutherland and he talks about the unquantifiable work, the bits that logic doesn't dictate. You can't really get a return on the investment or you can't see the, the benefit of it directly. But what you do with activating your team to just go and play, that just inspires and we shamelessly stole it from Google.

So they had the set aside time for personal projects. Well, I don't quite want it to be a personal project, but the only way we can actually keep up with the rate of change is to have the team playing and have that feedback process. And we've started but we haven't quite perfected the short clip videos that will be socially acceptable. So at the moment they're quite internal. Sometimes there's a little bit too much of a tymnism in them, but if we can get it so that appropriate to share externally. Our intention is that some of those clips we will share so it will show we were trying to solve this problem. We played with this tool and in a five minute clip just give an example of how it's been done.

I think that's so useful. I think that actually is bringing back and like we said at the start, it's trying to actually Add value, like real value. And I think with AI, we're going through a bit of a. A series at the moment of novelty. And I think those things they, soon as with novelty, it wears off. We had the little toy things that everybody did, everybody had a version of that. We've had Baby Jeremy Clarkson on a podcast and all those sort of things. And they're really funny or interesting at the start, but it wears off super quick. And I think anybody that's trying to actually solve problems and bring actual issues that can be solved to the forefront rather than just playing with gimmicks, I, I'm, I like to see. And I think that's where we need to go. I think, I think the gimmicky stuff eventually will be watered down. And I think I also find that I, I associate it with distrust. So until it's good enough. I saw an advertisement from another finance brokerage on a train station and then when I looked a bit closer, it looked like it was King's Cross. I was like, God, that guy's doing well. He's advertising in King's Cross. I didn't even know you could do that. And then I stationed nine and three quarters. Not quite. But as I zoomed in I was like, ah, the fate. It was obviously a really good image, but you could tell it was AI and the immediate thought I had then was one of distrust.

Yeah. And I think how we ensure we're presenting that human authenticity is going to be absolutely crucial. I think now is the best time to be doing long form video because it just shows that it's a real conversation, it's taken place, it will get faked. But if there's that history of doing it, that's going to be valuable.

You've segued beautifully. And we haven't planned this, have we? But you've segued onto something I want to ask you about.

Go for it.

Governance. Because I feel, and I've recently read a book, Nexus, by the author of Sapiens.

Yeah.

Have you read it?

I haven't read it yet. I'm still actually halfway through Sapiens. It's on my desk.

Sapiens is like top 10 book for me. It's. So if you've read Sapiens, you can understand the way in which Yuval goes through the process. And he brings, he brings a subject. So that's on a brief history of humankind, Sapiens, the book. And he goes through from start through to modern day and he picks at these subjects, but he makes it very accessible and it's a beautiful book and I think we should teach it at schools. I think it should be. That should be read at schools. So he then. So it stood out to me. There's been a lot of books on AI but because it was done by him, I. It was drawn to me. So I started reading it and it was a lot more difficult to read because it's a lot more technical. So I then downloaded it. So I did read it and I just didn't take anything in. And it's actually Spotify give you audio books for free up to 15 hours or something if you've got a premium account. So I downloaded the. The audio version and I listened back, which really, actually was a really good weight. If you really want to take something in reading it and then listen while you're walking. Yeah, a bit of everything down the gym, sort of in the car. But sometimes I find I. I'm very rarely take notes and I sometimes I'm listening to podcasts and I'm going off one on one here. But you know when you're listening to a podcast or listening to an audiobook and you hear something really interesting and then a day later you can't remember what it is and I'm like, why don't I take notes? Why don't I write it down? Anyway, during the book, he references and he comes from a fairly objective point of view. I think there's maybe a slight bias of negativity maybe towards AI but I think generally speaking it's probably as independent a review of it. And he's spoken to a lot of specialists within the field and he references things like Facebook with social media as being one of the closest things. Because information networks, human information networks, have never been like AI you can't relate it to the printing press because it was just. It didn't think for itself. It wasn't programmed to. It was just a fixed amount of information. And he does closely associate it to things like Facebook, where there's been suppression of certain information and this conversation about free speech. And I think on the face of it, that's always done for the right reasons at the start. But then you have this question about free speech and who is the person that's actually in charge of saying what you can say and what you can't say and then is it outcome led and all these other challenges that come with that. Then he links that almost in a way of the Sorcerer's Apprentices, the fable of the apprentice that's left in charge of getting the water, who casts the Sorcerer's spell starts getting water with the broom and it all works really well until it gets out of hand and he doesn't know how to stop the spell. And he sort of uses that as a metaphor for AI and essentially says at the end, I've spoiled it now. But it doesn't spoil it. But he talks about the governance of it, how we can manage it. And AI can be as powerful or damaging as the people that invent it are in charge of it and govern it. And I guess I'm just interested to know your perspective on where you feel that is going. I personally would like, for example, future AI images to have to have a disclaimer on them to say this was AI generated.

I think we'll end up with a necessity that all video and image content is watermarked in some way, shape or form. And currently a lot of the models are fingerprinting behind the scenes both on image, video and text output. So actually the Gemini output, Google knows that it's been Produced by Gemini. OpenAI has a similar approach. So they can effectively, if they choose to stop that content from being used for training purposes. So there will be the case of using synthetic data to train these models to be more capable, but they can specifically exclude that. And I think that will become a requirement in many countries to prove authenticity. I think there'll also be some correlation to blockchain. So we'll end up effectively tagging our content in a way that it can be shown. No question it hasn't been altered.

So you can always source it back to the original because I guess that's the other thing when you're. I get. So I do my little 60 second videos to camera. I do them on sort of a, just a, an app that gives me the, the platform and everything, but it offers me at the end I can, I can AI upgrade the quality of the image. So it used to be make it HD, make it 4K and I obviously want the highest quality. But it's recently said I can use AI to do that. But my reservation with, with that was, is then when I upload it to YouTube, is YouTube going to think it's actually AI or is it going to know it's human? So we go back to this. Actually offering human things will maybe be a commodity in itself.

Well, and it's ironic that I run a fully remote AI company and yet I do an in person podcast and every member of the team networks in person because our best deals come from in person conversations. So I don't think that goes away I think people buy people and the more you can demonstrate authenticity and presence the more powerful that's going to be it's just how do you accelerate everything else through automation and AI Yeah yeah so I think we've actually done our time which has flown by Amazing isn't.

Has it has I didn't know necessarily exactly what we'd talk about but I've.

Really enjoyed Nor did I It's always.

The best way I've really enjoyed it and it's been really nice to sort of sit down and chew the fat with you and talk through my business and maybe in the future we can see how maybe AI has been integrated into finance and into the broker world and the finance sector or even more directly into my exact business as I.

Grow and I think there will be more and more occasions where your services help our customers to achieve their goals so it's a great time to be alive Absolutely thank you James thank you Sam.