#348 The Reality of Buying a Business - What No One Tells You

Hi, this is Jonathan Jay, and welcome to Business Buying Strategies, the number one podcast for anyone who wants to buy a business without risking their own cash. Now, you may have heard me talk before about my Inner Circle members. These are real business buyers who've been through my Mastermind program and gone on to complete dozens of acquisitions across sectors as varied as construction it, healthcare, barbershops, accountancy. And oil and gas.

Now, last week I invited seven of those Inner Circle members to the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, and I asked them to strip away the Instagram glamor. And talk honestly about what buying a business is really like the deals that fall apart at the last minute. The sellers who get sellers remorse, the lawyers who drag their feet. So in this and the next few episodes, you'll hear honest accounts of the reality of business buying would you please welcome Martin Patrick, Adrian Harry, Robert, Lee, and Ben.

There they come. Okay. So why don't we start off with some introductions and you might know some people, you might not know others. So let's make sure everyone knows everyone else.

If you could start Rob, that would be fantastic. Thank you. Yeah, my name is Robert Love. I am midway through a buy, build in estate and letting agency, which is what I've been doing my entire career.

But in the last five years it's morphed into a buy build. And we are based in the middle of East Anglo in Paris livings. Okay. So just give us a couple of numbers, Rob.

So how many deals so far? 11 now. Just another little one. Say 11 in the last five years.

11 years. In five years, yeah. Fantastic. Great, Rob, great intro.

Thank you very much, Harry. Hey everyone. I'm Harry. Been with Jonathan for six years now.

Background in fashion design, manufacturing. I've acquired some barbershops during lockdown when I first started Jonathan. And since then, been on the buy and build servicing local authorities and local government contracts. Nice.

Thank you very much. Thank you, Ben. Hi Ben Playfair. I've got a group of construction businesses predominantly m and e and we're, what else was that?

Numbers? Yeah, so give us give us the overall revenue of the group just so we can get an idea of scale. So we should do around 17 million this year for businesses in the group and two being added. Fantastic.

Currently. Thank you very much. Brilliant. Thank you Lee.

Morning everyone. Lee. I own a portfolio of businesses across various sectors oil and gas, engineering waste management and recycling and self storage. That's between the uk, Southeast Asia and Australia.

I've completed five acquisitions in the last six years and we are close to heads of terms with another three at the minutes combined acquisition value of 26 million. Great. Thank you very much. Let's okay.

Adrian Hancock. So I wouldn't have been around Jonathan for just under a year. I heard him speak at an event and he talks about the baby boomers looking to exit the business. And I thought, oh, I know somebody like that.

And I picked up the phone and I rang somebody and he basically threw his business at me. Thank you, Jonathan. And and so I've got building a technology group at the moment. So my original business was sort of 4 million.

We built the group to six already. The target is to 25 million by March 28th through acquisition. And then on, on the, in the residential real estate side, I've also bought a number of properties. So Holly, lets, so when I'm buying b and bs, when I'm buying the business and changing the purposes currently also using the same strategies that I'm learning from Jonathan to buy large portfolios of properties in the region of sort of eight, nine figures.

Amazing. Thank you very much. Hi everyone, my name is Patrick. I'm the managing director of Eden Property Group, and we specialize in acquiring properties through the title split in strategy.

We've got six to eight properties in the portfolio worth roughly around 8 million pound. We specialize in sales lettings project management, one-to-one mentorship, and most recently we just bought out the build team in our supply chain. So I've been around Jonathan in the last, for the last two years, but we completed on that construction company in Feb. We are on track this year to do 5.

2 million in revenue in the group. Amazing. Thank you. Hey, Martin Bound.

So initially my background was sales, marketing, operation improvements, that type of thing. Then got into financial services and then found Jonathan where the whole world then exploded. And now we've got nine accountancy practices. We are doing a buy and building.

Fire Door Security. CCCV. We're doing a veterinary buy and build. We're doing the accounting, buy and build.

We're doing a buy and build in manufacturing and engineering. We've currently got seven deals at heads of terms going through legals, four of which will complete in the next two weeks. And you still found time to be here. Amazing.

Thank you. Thanks very much. Great. Well done.

Great panel. Alright where do we start? So let me prompt a discussion and anyone who wants to speak, just tell me that you want and we'll zip a mic to you or, grab the closest one to you. These days buying a business is the sort of, is the new rock and roll isn't it?

Is the new property investment. And I dunno about you, but I see LinkedIn full of people. Telling you how to buy a business, and quite often they're standing in front of Lamborghinis or they're they're in Dubai and they're kind of show showing off a little bit. But it's not as glamorous as that is it.

So let's talk a little bit about the reality of buying a business, not what Instagram says, buying a business is about. So who'd like to to kick off? Yeah. Martin.

Yeah. So everyone looks at the numbers and goes, oh my God, you've got so many deals going through and you've bought so many businesses now using Jonathan's methods. The reality is, and I always remember this is I went on Jonathan's podcast really soon after we joined Dealmakers and we literally bought the first business. We spoke to the second business we spoke to, and I went, this is a piece of cake.

His methods work so well, and I implement 'em so well. I'm obviously a genius and I think on YouTube there's a video where I say we will buy 50 businesses this year. We then spoke to 69 or 70 businesses and got our ass handed to us. We had deals that fell apart.

We had one where we were buying it from a franchise where the guy was retiring, he had stage four cancer. You know how we talk about motivated sellers? That's pretty motivated. On the day of signing, he decided he was feeling actually good that day.

Literally, we'd done the website, we'd rebranded it 'cause we had to get it away from the franchise. We'd spent about 15 grand in preparation and he came, you went, I've been taking this new energy drink that my wife's got me making this. It's organic. I think they've got the diagnosis wrong.

I'm just gonna leave it. Literally, we had everything done. All you had to do was sign the paperwork. We had deals where when you go through, you think it's a great idea, they think it's a great idea, and then lawyers fall out of each other.

And that's why I really like Jonathan's team of lawyers that they use where everyone's paying a fixed price rather than by the hour. Because when people are paid by the hour, if you have two people who the more they argue, the more they get paid. They're not really motivated to find the middle ground. It's like taking two kids and go, every time you hate each other, I'll give you a sweet, but you've gotta stop fighting.

At some point, they're gonna walk away with a massive bowl of sweets. So it is brutal. And probably the hardest thing for people, and this is where I think I have an advantage with it, is the emotional regulation side of it is that it is an absolute rollercoaster. You think business is hard, wait until you start buying them where it's highs and lows, and then you think you've got a great business, you buy it.

And it turns out actually half the Stafford dissatisfied, half the customers are fed up with it and there's lots of stuff you can't find afterwards. So just be prepared is it is literally game where it's like baseball, you're gonna strike out seven times outta 10 and knock it outta the park three times. expect the unexpected business plans on paper look great, but the reality is very different. Who's got a, another perspective on, on that?

The reality of buying businesses as opposed to the glamorous external view that people. I will actually say something now. So I bought couple of barbershops during lockdown, mainly to test the di Jonathan's teachings is are people actually gonna answer letters? Does the whole deferred concept works?

And it all did. And I've come into some money, repaid my deferred early. It all works. I've done it.

So one of the barber shops I bought he was a barber for 30 years or so. Coming up through his retirement with his wife, they wanted to go and do something else. Now he spent his life building that business. But the moment I took over, I put in and he was, he cut hair.

He wasn't a business person. So I put in marketing sales, we rebranded it we tarted it up, if you like. And within no time sales rocketed, he found out through customers, et cetera. And he started putting, and he still had the, I still remember he had, he still had the login for the Facebook part of the business, and he started putting all these random reviews and we found out it was him just because he didn't like the fact that this guy who's come along can't even use a pair of scissors, has turned around my business, which I've been building for 30 years, and he didn't like it, and it does happen.

Unfortunately, we got to the bottom of it and he, he disappeared. So this is like a No. As in he's around, but I didn't hear from them Again, one of the more advanced strategies, so a bit too early for that. So you've got someone with sellers remorse, haven't you?

Correct. So they, they sell because they've hit a brick wall with the growth of the business. They don't really want you to be more successful than them because their ego won't take it. Correct.

Their ego is then damaged by you being more successful than they are just by doing some common sense business things that exactly you've learned over the years from experience. And then they try and damage the business. Now, how do we we are going slightly off track, but how do we hedge against that? How do we protect ourselves from the seller turning against us once they sold the business?

Any ideas, any strategies that we could use there? Adrian, I'm gonna give you one strategy not to do and when Jonathan's teachings is, don't keep a director on board once you've done the acquisition. And unfortunately the company I bought, there were two directors and one of them insisted on staying on board. And so I, despite Jonathan's advice, I hear that a lot by the way.

And so we agreed to keep him on board. And so from September through till. The end of February when I finally got him to exit the business, he was actively sabotaging the business from the inside out to the point where we ended up paying him a full settlement to, to leave the business, obviously confidentiality. And even though he is a technical director, he managed to forget the printout was on the printer in front of all of his staff.

So very tricky. So definitely don't keep on directors even 'cause he was not the motivated seller his business partner was. And the fact is he was just scared that he couldn't run the business because the other guy did most of the work. So yeah that's a what not to do.

So I didn't answer your question, but yeah. Okay. Yeah, go for it. From my perspective, a risk mitigation factor for the sabotage parts of that is deferred consideration.

And if you have deferred consideration over three to five years based on a percentage of net profits. Then the more they sabotage the business, the less pay it gets and the longer it takes to settle the deferred, if ever. And this is the difference between agreeing a fixed amount and chopping it up, which is what the, so the most basic vanilla way of doing anything is to say we're gonna pay you X and you're gonna get a quarter of X this year and a quarter of X next year. And when those payments are fixed, there is zero motivation for the seller to help you be successful because they're gonna get their money anyway.

But if you do what Lee said and you make it a variable amount according to the success of the business, even if it ends up being added together over a period of time, an agreed figure, so the overall figure doesn't have to vary. It might do, that's a different strategy. But what happens then? You've got someone who's incentivized to help you be successful to get their money faster.

The way that, that we do our structure, that is we'll give you x percent of the net profits. Over X years until you're paid off. So it's not a fixed duration either. So the better the business performs, the sooner they get settled ultimately as well.

Yeah, ab absolutely. So everyone wins. Ben. There is nuance there isn't now.

And to keep keeping the person in, 'cause I've got people in that have sold business and they're great. I think you said that you've suffered on that view anyway, haven't you? Yeah, so I, I used to be very militant about this, whereas basically you kick the owner out on day one. But it doesn't make any friends.

That's for sure. And sometimes you act you do need that person more than you think you're going to need them. And that's when you start believing your own publicity and you start you, you think you're untouchable, you know everything about everything. And then you realize actually you need that person's help with this and someone else's help with that.

So I'm a little softer on it, but it's getting that balance between motivating the seller and having them. Being in the business where the staff are confused. Who's the boss? Who do I listen to?

And the seller forgetting that they've sold it and still thinking it's theirs. So it's all as most things in life. It's getting the moderation and the balance. Yeah.

Lee, grab a mic. Cool. Yeah, so I think one of the, one of the things if you're gonna keep somebody on because you feel you need them for whatever reason, just from a technical perspective. And there, there's been a couple of people trip over this in the last few months is being really clear on what the status of that person is when you're keeping them on.

It absolutely cannot be an employee. And, if you really need a proper solicitor that's gonna make sure that seller or director resigns their employment or that shareholder resigns their employment if they're staying on in a shareholding capacity, you need a shareholder's agreement to make sure that it's really clear what happens. I'm gonna say if, but when it, when there's a challenge or when there's a complexity with your new business partner. So a lot of the time when you are doing the deal very early on, everyone's friends, it's exciting, they get to move on.

It's all looking very positive. It's easy to get carried away and not have those discussions around those technical items. It's be much better to have someone on as a consultant or on some kind of day rate or something like that for a period rather than just have this open-ended agreement that's gonna, that's gonna tie your hands and lead you into problems and making sure your KPIs are really clear and exactly defining what that role's gonna be so that it's not if it's gonna change, that it's clear for everybody.

And that's communicated throughout the whole business what that person's gonna be doing going forward so that the staff aren't left to work it out and you just lead letting it see how it lands. I like that. I like that. So there, there is, and I remember one situation where the negotiation of the consultancy agreement with the exiting owner.

Took longer than the negotiation of the Salem purchase agreement and they were obsessed with what their day rate should be. Maybe they got some figure in their head that they felt that they were worth, because I suppose that could be tied into their ego. And I learned from that, that you need a consultancy agreement that's very open-ended where, there is no commitment to a day rate because you don't quite know what you want 'em to consult on yet. And you have to agree what the project is you want 'em to consult on.

And then you can terminate at any time. And the fee is commensurate with what the work is and negotiated at that point. Not at the point of agreeing the SPA. Okay.

Which means that you can pick them up and drop them as you need to. And of course that agreement is in the members area. If you haven't seen that. Any other experiences then from anyone on this subject of.

The, what the glamorous side of buying businesses versus the reality. Any reality situations, Patrick? Yeah, I just I could talk quite a lot about single digit percentages. And I think that Jonathan's approach is brilliant if you follow that.

Let's use the 1000 letters approach. You are gonna be in the low single digit percentages of response rates, and therefore, even the people that respond typically are the poorest of responders, and that's why they may want to sell. Now, if you do happen to get someone come forward that does have a profitable company and they have got a reason for selling, you are then into even less single digit percentages. So the point I'm trying to make is that.

More to hedge that you need to just do more volume. And I think last year, this was a lot to me, but I think we did about 15,000 letters over the course of a 12, 12 month period. Not over the two years. I think over two years we're about 20,000 letters.

And then if you multiply that by the amount of phone calls, it is just about more volume than that's what's going to transpire into getting a deal. But yeah, if you I'm just trying to open your eyes to the 1000 letter approach is good, but you are in very small and that's the reality. I'm just trying to provide a contrary view to that. Yeah.

Let me just balance that up. Those of you we've got a new group called Millionaires Boardroom. And those of you are in that group, was it two weeks ago, three weeks ago? Dan did his 10 million pound first deal with 400 letters.

So there is an element of luck and an element of. S but the bottom line is persistence in everything in life pays off. Whether it's persistence, going to the gym, you can't go once and hope that you're gonna be fit. It's persistence in business.

'cause anyone who's been in business more than five minutes knows that it's not all plane sailing. You always gotta, you're gotta keep on pushing, keep on going. And it's persistence with everything that you do. And the most persistent people are always the most successful.

The two things are inextricably linked. Any thoughts on persistence and not giving up? That's a good subject. Yeah.

So in terms of the letters, I do slightly different. I have a targeted letter approach. So I identify targets do some front end work to identify who I would like to approach in the specific sector that I'm looking at. And I do a marketing campaign, sorry, a letter outreach campaign.

You do get responses. Pardon me? If there's no response every three months, send them another letter because they might not pick up the first letter or be in a position that they think they want to sell the business the next time they receive that they might be having a bad day or a bad quarter. If you are the first name that comes to their head every time they change their mind because you're constantly sending letters without being too annoying, of course they will more than likely pick up the phone or send you a quick note to read you a quick coffee, purely out of curiosity or just to see what they could get.

And the first thing that they always say is, hi, such and such. I received your letter, give you a quick call. I don't want to sell my business, by the way, but let's catch up for a coffee. I love it when people say, I don't wanna sell my business, but I'm just calling you about selling my business, but I'm trying to play it cool because that's how negotiations work, right?

Yeah. I think that the best negotiations are where you are honest. You are open. You're not bluffing all the time.

I think that. That an open, transparent approach goes a long way. Can I just open up the conversation just to a little wider beyond deal sourcing to just general persistence in business? Anyone got any thoughts on or experiences?

Marty? Yeah. So I always think of persistency. Whatever you do, it's about how you're trying to succeed.

So there's a couple of quotes that I always look at and one is you don't succeed your way to success. You fail your way to success, and the quicker you fail, the quicker you succeed. Because if you think about it, if you have a 2-year-old child or a one year-old child trying to walk, at what point do you turn around to 'em and say, it's okay. You fell down enough.

You don't have to walk. None of us do that. As parents, we say you're gonna walk no matter what happens. But yet what you'll find is many people will give up just before they get there.

And I always remember I had a mentor when I was about 18, 19, turn around and say that you will always test yourself to make sure you really want it. And whether you believe that's universe, whether it's a religion or whatever, I just believe that as yourself it's gonna be uncomfortable. And you have to test yourself mentally to know that you're gonna put through what's there. Now, if you're stubborn like me, that means you're gonna make life healthy yourself sometimes, but you have to do it.

And there's a whole point that if you don't give up, you can't fail unless you should quit. And that's the power of knowing when to quit. Yeah, and it's the same when you look at sales or when you look at acquisitions is I always say to people is you don't make a hundred thousand pound from the deal that says yes. If it took you 20 negotiations, you made 5,000 pound per negotiation regardless of the outcome.

Now, if I said to you that every person you spoke to, whether they said yes or no, you're gonna make five grand. How many of you would just go out and speak to 200, 300 people in the next six months, regardless of what they said? And it's when you detach the outcome from the activity, you can focus on the activity and then persistency becomes a hell of a lot easier. That's actually a really good reframing, isn't it?

I like that a lot. There's also the really important distinction about persistence and just keep doing the same thing over and over again. And learning when you've gotta pivot and shift and move to a different direction. And as business owners, we drive ourselves to succeed.

We are our own worst critic. And we have an innate drive to succeed, and we will keep pushing ourselves until that happens. But the key thing to just remember is just keep an eye on what the outcome that you're looking to achieve is. And then make sure that if we are doing something and we fail, we learn from it.

And don't just keep doing the same thing. So my shift in, in the acquisitions I did a load of letters after the first thing I'd let yourself, I spoke to one person I one of business. Woo. Now now I've sent thousands of letters out and now I'm in the gritty side of things.

But what I know also is I don't have the time to manage that. So I've outsourced, I've got a VA who's actually managing all my outreach for me, right? Because I don't have the time to be focused on it, right? I'm still being persistent, but I'm doing things differently.

Nice. So I sometimes see people who are better than the business that they own. They are a better business person. They deserve more than the business that they own.

And I see people struggling and being persistent when they should have, let's not say given up, but they should have pivoted. What a great new word that is in Hidden. Have you noticed that no one's a business owner anymore? Everyone's a founder.

Where do business owners disappear to? We all used to be business owners and now we're all founders. I had a meeting with a a potential hire recently, just this week, and I've never used anyone, heard anyone use the word cadence so many times in one conversation. This corporate speak is just ridiculous sometimes.

So I have a friend who's been in the same business for 18 years. And I've known her for most of those 18 years, and she's never really made any money. She's just head above water all the time. And we spoke a couple of summers back.

I remember very clearly I was on holiday at the time. I remember sitting in the sunshine talking to her on the phone and she said, I'm thinking about closing it down and moving onto something else. And I said, you know what? I think that could be the best move ever.

You are better than this business that you are always complaining about. Depresses you, makes you anxious, stops you sleeping well at night, and you can sometimes barely pay the bills. So a few months later, Senator WhatsApp, how's it going? Oh, it's great.

I got a new client, so she's, because she got that new client, she now thinks that the business has legs. How many years do you have to persist at something to know that either you are not right for it or it's not right for you? Okay, so it's knowing where to get that balance between persistence and maybe actually I should shift gear, don't you think? Any thoughts?

Any thoughts on that? Yeah, Ben. Yeah. It's organic growth versus acquisition growth, isn't it?

It can be it's miles apart. I started my business 17 years ago and I've been that business owner where it's been crazy experiences and then since acquisition, but you do learn. You learn. Hopefully you learn from those experiences.

But I think if I'd carried on doing that and not done that acquisition, then I'd probably still be in that crazy rollercoaster that I was in. And then acquisition, I got my first acquisition about four years ago, then joined deal makers, and that's been. Exponential. But then, and then it allows you to bring in people that you wouldn't normally be able to bring in.

'cause you wouldn't be big enough. Like we've got a fi an FD who runs everything financially and now we are running an affiliate program for smaller contractors to join us. 'cause then they can, 'cause the other thing is doing acquisition well, isn't it? And the benefit there is they can join us and then benefit from a sale.

And then potentially benefit from an, from selling themselves, then potentially benefit from a wider group sale for a higher multiple and then learn how to do it along the way from me and my team. Yeah, sure. And you meet business owners who proudly say that, they're up a few percent on last year. And then you meet people who grow by acquisition and they've just doubled and then they tripled and then they had an extra few million where most business owners are doing it the hard way.

They're struggling. They're they think that they work a little bit longer. They come to the office at the weekend, they run some more Facebook ads. Someone says, oh, you can get on TikTok.

Why? You get on TikTok? There's a big audience on TikTok and they're doing all these little nibbling around the edges moves to grow. To grow.

Where why don't you say, okay, I'm gonna double the size of my business in the next 12 months. I'm at two and a half million. I'm gonna go and find another business that does at least two and a half million, and I'm gonna buy it and I'm gonna put the two together and I won't be just at 5 million. Probably I'll get some growth outta the fact that I'm now bigger, so I'll probably be at five and a half, 6 million.

But I think that sometimes it takes a lot of courage to be successful. It takes courage to actually, not comple. I don't go to networking groups. I've never really ever been to networking groups.

I can't think of anything worse than one of these half past six in the morning. Starts, I dunno if anyone's ever been to one of those, I don't get it, but the few occasions I have been to networking, it typically is people having a bit of a moan, bit of a complaint about how bad things is complaining about Rachel Reeves complaining about the economy in general, complaining about how the good one, recently he spoke to a friend and he said how the war in Iran was going to actually be affecting his.

I thought there, there is no connection between Iran and what he, there is no connection whatsoever, but people are looking for excuses not to be successful. So it takes a lot of courage to step up and say, I'm not happy where I am at my 1 million a year. I've been hovering around that point for three or four years. I am worth more than this.

I'm gonna get to 5 million. I'll follow the process, follow the system, I'll make it happen. Thoughts on that? Martin?

Grab the mic. Yeah, I was gonna say, I think it's absolutely key and part of what I think people get confused about, and it's more a mindset issue, is they look at the goal is to grow the business. And I don't, I always look at, even when I had a couple of jobs, I was viewing it as I'm getting paid to learn. And for me it's not about what you can do with the business, it's about where is the business facilitating your growth as a person.

And when you stop growing is when you should let that business go and do something else. So one of the things that I always try to do is when I set the goals, oh, sorry. When I set the goals is I always try and there's a really good goal setting technique, which is you set a goal where you can only see how to get 30% of the way there. But if you constantly aren't moving forwards, and if you're not learning, that means it's the wrong goal and the wrong business and you need to move on to something else.

So we had a really good business in will writing that we actually sold for next to nothing, simply because when I looked at it, I was like, we're making money. We could make a lot more money, but it's not worth the effort because I won't deliver anything in my growth. All I'm doing is applying what I already know. Let someone else do that.

'cause I can put two zeroes on our number by doing this instead. And I think if you have that mindset that the business is a vehicle to allow you to grow and allow you to become a better person and a better business owner, that then tells you when you need to either step up a gear and do something different or let that business go and refocus what you're doing. Love it. Thank you.

Someone from Dennis and Harry. Yeah. Following on from if that worked, Martin and Jonathan was saying, so how many of you got businesses in the room? Just raise your hand.

So the mindset's always next year's gonna be better. And how many years are we gonna go through that? I had a, I think was speaking to Julia earlier. I've part of my fashion business, we had a jewelry business as well, and that was an ethical brand manufacturing wooden jewelry from barley Indonesia.

So we met a a furniture maker from bar from Java, the wood from Java's. Really good. And it was off cuts from that. So we're like.

Let's make jewelry from it. So we had a great business for about five, six years and it did really well. And then other people at trade shows saw us, found out where we sourced it from, started almost copying us. And I said to my sales guys, look, take us a compliment.

They're trying to replicate us and all the rest of it. But it's one of those where the business has served us and it's pivoting where we end up serving the business. So we've had a great run. Let's just stop and do something else.

And it's just knowing when to stop. Yeah. As opposed to you guys put your hands up. Next year's gonna be better because of all these reasons with governments in Iran and World War ii, whatever people wanna blame, for where you are.

Yeah. Great, Rob. Yeah, I think trying to recognize, persistently recognize when you're putting barriers in your own way and you've got mental mindset issues around taking the next step and the next challenge. Joining something on this, for example, is a huge mindset shift from accepting organic growth being the only option.

But then there'll be people who, need the data to be perfect before they'll send the letter and they'll get obsessed about fonts and formats and layouts. And that's just something to put in your way, and then we don't have time to do it because X, y, z needs me right now. So I think it's just cons, constantly looking at what excuses you're giving yourself and what you can do to get those excuses out of the way. And having insight to recognize that those are self-imposed, self-imposed things.

For example, the idea of saying I wanna get more letters out, but we all accept, we're not gonna sit there and hand write them, and we're not gonna stuff the envelopes ourselves, or we shouldn't be. But to take that next step and say actually I'm gonna, I'm gonna outsource and offshore my leap, my my, my deal flow, is the kind of bigger thinking where you say, actually that's accepting that I've gotta handle this myself, is a limiting mindset. So just constantly looking at what is in my way.

What am I doing that I shouldn't be? What can I get someone else to do so that my hourly rate and my productivity is is better? And there's a huge shift from business owner to acquisition. Entrepreneur is a big shift in terms of what you demand out of your own hourly rate and what you expect for yourself.

But it's then just making sure that you're not getting stuck with small thinking. Love it. Yeah. Any other thoughts on that?

Yes. So one of the key things that I've learned is, we've all went to school with people, right? We're friends with people in school and we've grown and we look and we meet all with people we've met from years ago, and they're doing the same job that they've ever done, right? So they're a tire fitter and there's nothing wrong with that as a job.

But they've hit a financial threshold in their life where they, that's where they see themselves, and they accept that's their place. And so one of the things that we as business owners have got a duty to ourselves to do is to look at where's our financial blueprint? Where do we see ourselves in the world? I was talking to someone before and he had ambitions to go a hundred million pound company.

And I said what does your home life look like at this stage? And he said I'm still gonna be at home with my semi detached house with my three kids. And it was like, there's such a disparity between where he's, he thinks his ambition is and what, where he, where his home life is gonna be. So what's gonna happen is he's gonna push himself to a certain point and then he is gonna self-sabotage.

And I'm saying he, because it could be a she as well, but they're gonna self-sabotage and take themselves back down to this level because they've got this financial security blanket that this is where they see themselves. So we have to really push ourselves and go, okay, what does our life really need to look like? We need to visualize it, we need to feel it and have something that drives us to, to something better. And if we have got.

Caring personalities, we've gotta look beyond just what's in it for me, right? I've gotta look at how else can I create good in the world, and how else can I add value to the world? And so take the winnings that we get from within the whatever it is that we choose to do and leave a positive impact, and that will help elevate you. Because if you can't see your own self-worth, but you can see beyond by helping other people, that's gonna give you the impetus to grow beyond your comfort zone today.