#352 Using AI and the role that business partners can play

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. As a regular listener, you'll know that recent episodes have involved questions from a live audience answered by my inner circle members, real business buyers who've been through my mastermind program and who have gone on to complete dozens of acquisitions between them. This week, they answer questions about how AI helps both the acquisition process as well as the running of the business acquired, and how business partners can be of both a help and a hindrance, and how to make sure they remain an asset to you.

I hope you enjoy it. So who's got a question that they would like to ask? We've got one, one here from Javid. What have you got?

Javid questions about ai and what are the panel doing to put AI into their businesses? Yeah. So we have been speaking to some developers about. Building some sales AI agents.

However, I am approaching it with caution. To be honest. AI is a massive buzzword and we speak about quite a lot how it's going to revolutionize all industries. However, I do approach with caution because I personally wanna deal with humans in, in, in my interactions when I'm buying and selling and doing stuff.

So I don't wanna lose that human element to my business. So although we are working on a sales agent that is only. Maybe to free up staff to do more human-like tasks, if that makes sense. I definitely don't wanna lose that element of it, but it is just an efficiency thing whereby you can allocate low level tasks such as booking appointments to a sales agent.

And I don't even like the term box. We all know when we log onto on online banking, we never wanna speak to a bot. 'cause you just get all the generic answers with the long hyphen, which I've got a pet hit for as well. So yeah, I'm looking into it, we're working on it about how we introduce it, but also keeping it a, a finger on the pulses with keeping it human at the same time.

That's me personally anywhere. Got it. I've got a slightly different approach. So I've got a business partner.

I actively sought out a business partner who specializes in ai and so we're getting into vibe coding, which is where you're doing contextual coding. We're creating software across the board. What. Um, we're adopting it, we're playing with it, and we're failing things fast when it doesn't deliver.

But we've got voice agents, chat bots, we're running internal LLMs within the business. The trouble using chat, GPT, et cetera. Obviously all that data goes out in, in, into the cloud and everyone can use it. So we're focused on creating our own large language models, which we're keeping internally.

And then what we're doing is we take, we turn it about heck. So, rather than creating a, an agent. That does selling for us. We're creating agents that trains our salespeople, and what that does is means that we're capturing every single sales conversation that goes out.

Every single sales person that makes a call, whether it's a training call and doing role play or outbound gets fed into. The sales agent. And the sales agent then becomes the expert in the room because it's got so much contextual data. And at some point when the language is good enough, 'cause you know that lack of human humanity is really apparent in today's world still, we're not quite there.

So in about three months probably it'll be indistinguishable from speaking to an actual human. And so for me, it's about having that technology ready to go when the tipping point is ready. So get as much language into your businesses as you can, as much AI deployment within, because if you are not using it, your competitors are, and you are vast, quickly become irrelevant in that terminology. The, and then just to the caveat to that, for within your team and making sure your team stay motivated, they need to understand that AI is not taking their jobs, right?

People that use AI are taking their jobs. Where do you see it going? The problem with where it's going is that it's gonna go so far beyond where we are. So if you, I can only answer that in the short term.

Okay. So within two to three years, we are gonna see a lot of humanity based jobs, admin, et cetera, compliance within your systems. You've got agents that are gonna be mining through your CRMs within your business, and able to create intent and generate marketing campaigns based on other interactions. So for me, it's how you then get the AI working inside and underneath your business, under the skin of your business, that then reaches out, and then make sure you've got a team capable of delivering whatever inquiries coming off the backend of it.

But where AI is gonna go, they'll be flying spaceships to different planets at some point. Yeah. Our whole thing is we will only buy businesses that a AI proof. Or that can be exploited with ai.

And the way I look at it is if you think back to those of you who are old enough, when they launched Microsoft Excel, everyone said, that's it. Accountants are outta work. No accountant is gonna have a business in 12 months because Excel's gonna take it all. What it did is it changed what accountants did.

And for me, AI is like turning around someone and saying, oh my God, I invented the spinning, Jenny. How is that now gonna transform the world? For those of you who don't know, the spinning Jenny was what they did with Mills to basically thread. Thread completely started the industrial revolution.

We're at the start of a new staging evolution, and if you don't take advantage of it, you're gonna lose massive inefficiencies. And it's going to devastate your business. So for example, with us, we've got a regulated business. The FCA is so far behind where regulation is possible.

We've built bots right now, which we can literally record a client's call, and then the AI behind it will look, do a transcript to the call, upload it to the CRM server, protected against a complaint. It will go through and populate every field in the CRM and then produce all of the recommendation letters that we need and all of the compliance documents without anyone touching it that used to take six hours for an individual. Instead, that individual can now focus on getting deals through quicker, speaking to lenders faster.

And we're actually at the point where when you as a broker, you speak to a lender, you can be in a queue for an hour and a half. We actually built an AI bot that could speak to the lender until the lender got really upset with us sending AI bots to speak to their underwriters. And my answer was then don't make us wait an hour and a half. So what I would say is look at what you're doing, but also realize that AI is the most overutilized and underutilized word in the planet at the moment.

What most people call AI is what we used to just call a program. It's a process. A lot of it, especially when you see 'em in, they're just, it's just step by step. There is no intelligence to what it's doing.

It has massive advantages and it is capable of far more than most people are aware of. And this is where with ai, you've got to be at the forefront because it is moving so ridiculously fast. Your job as a business owner is to simply keep up with the terminology and the possibility you can't keep up with the details. So if you look six months ago, chat, GBT was the be all and end all.

Everything else wanted to be chat, GBT. Then Gemini launched Nano Banana, which suddenly can create business logos and websites better than anything else out there. We completely rebranded one of our companies purely off Nana Banana. It produced a better logo than we were paying three 4,000 pound for now Clause launched their latest version with Opus 4.

6 and Sonet. And it is so far ahead of Gemini. It is incredible what it's capable of doing, but you also have to recognize the limitations with AI is it will tell you what you want to hear to shut you up. So they did a whole study in the States where they basically take, took real far left wing Democrat and a real far right Republican, and they asked 'em the question, give me an independent, unbiased opinion of Trump.

In one. He was the Messiah and the other, he was the antichrist. It will tell you what you want to hear to get you to stop talking. So you've seen loads of people and it's in going.

I asked it to give a summary of who I am. Never once does it say in that summary, you're an asshole who should shoot themselves. It always says about, you're amazing person. You're really good at what you do.

You care about this. It tells you what you need to know. So always be skeptical about the output right now, but it is such an emergent technology in 10 years time. The only question you'll ask yourself is why didn't you get on AI faster?

There's an app as well called Crisp with a K, and I dunno if you've used it, but when you're doing your deal flow and you are speaking to sellers and everyone's trying to take notes when they're on the phone to prospective sellers, this app will record the conversation and actually give you feedback on your call of what they think or what the app thinks could be leverage points, which you could touch on. So you are able to engage in the conversation a hundred percent and not having to take notes.

It's gonna do that for you. So you could actually integrate that into your deal sourcing as well. Just before I'd add that in. I'm gonna add one more point before Harry.

Jump in. AI note takers. You've gotta running AI note takers everywhere you go. So they, the summary.

So I've got applaud, I've got fireflies, I've got all these different ones. I then, what happens is my EA at the end of the day gets all of my, all my, I don't do, I don't take notes in meetings anymore. I also don't do anything off the back end of them unless she tells me to. And she gets every single action point that comes off the back end and then she prioritizes them.

She knows what the goal is and then she tells me exactly what I need to do. So I've now got a boss. Shit. I was a going by to a business lunch networking thing a few months, but no early last year.

Mid lasts year. And one of the challenges, they go around the table like what are your challenges at the moment? So I said, look, we're in our sector. We are pitching against.

Some blue chip companies and it needs to be a polished pitch. It needs to cover all these different criteria. So one of the guys said, actually, I've worked with a company who's ai, again, it's AI specific within that sector who can write that Polish pitch for you. And it did.

And we ended up pretty much getting a, an infrastructure contract off the back of that against some big multi hundred million pound companies. So that's where we've used it. And it's just so happens, I was in the room at the time where someone else could help me and we are using their software internally. But going back to what Adrian said, yeah, applauds brilliant.

If you're not using it, you could attach it to your phone or just leave it there. And it was summarize the whole conversation that you've had with your team, with a supply, with anyone. And it's, you're not focused on making notes, missing things out, ask 'em to repeat themselves and it's all stored so you can go back to it. What was the one you used for the contract?

Sorry? The, for the contract? Yeah. Was that the chat two or?

No. It was a guy in the room who'd used a company specific right. To our sector. Absolutely.

Who was focusing, who had the AI to writes those pitches. Interesting. Yeah, and I think that's happening already with lawyers and accountants. They're building their own in-house ai.

Unlike the stuff that's out there for everyone to use and share, it's only limited by the information that's on there. Yep. With a bit of an inflection point in our industry in that there are already players, software players that are completely embedded in the industry developing their own things to a greater or lesser extent. And those software platforms run everything in the business.

So to change from one to another is a massive undertaking. It's basically breaking the business and put and put 'em back together again. So we're watching and waiting to be honest, to see whether where our supply goes and where others go. And there are some doing a much, much better job of it.

And interestingly, there's a company called Dwelly who are P backed and are buying, letting agencies as a proving ground to test their fully a R, where was that AI enabled internal platform. And they're able to take 60, 70% of the cost that are running a agency. So we are definitely watching, waiting to see which way it goes. And either the established players will produce something that means we can get that without having to go do it ourselves.

Or whether we need to go down the route and do something internally. So yeah, within the next 3, 4, 5 months, we'll know what we're doing. But it's coming either Which way? My no, no one ever goes to me for any sort of technical advice.

I'm not think like hr, don't ask me technical stuff, don't ask me. But I would say that I did something that saved me a whole world of pain the other day using Claude. So I was looking for a particular hire and Claude helped me put together the job description, which was a lot better than I would've written myself. And we put that into Indeed, indeed.

com. Got a couple of hundred responses, very quickly eliminated half of those because people were just clicking submit for their CV and they, they weren't, they had no background remotely connected to what the job was advertised and narrowed it down to 60 cvs. I uploaded them to Claude. I said, match them against the job description.

And Claude summarized it down to and numbered the top 10 candidates. And every time new CVS came in, I uploaded them and it kept coming out the top three candidates and why they were the best. Here are the questions need to asked them. I interviewed five, and I hired the one that Claude actually said would be the, as you hired, number one and number two, that Claude said would be the best, the best candidates for the job.

And I hate hiring. I'm not a hire, you're starting to wonder what I am actually good at, aren't you? Because all these things I'm not good at. So I, it eliminated all that pain of having to do dozens and dozens of interviews.

And it just, I'll tell you in six months where the, where the Claude was, but matching job description to experience and, and just the way this, the Claude might say, this person sounds like someone who wants to tell other people what to do rather than actually do the job themselves. Yeah. Yeah. I was just gonna add on that as well, is that is the one way that every one of you right now should be using ai, and that is as a conversation partner, because you can talk to it, it will suggest stuff in general.

So it's, give you an idea. I'm always pushing personal productivity in it. The weekend I literally sat down, we Claude for an hour and a half and went, this is my situation. This is where I feel disorganized.

This is what I want the outcome to be. And within an hour it gave me a full tech stack of what I should be doing, what to eliminate from that, how to implement it, and gave me a full plan and gave me seven different PDF documents I can give to the team to say, go build me that. That's how I now operate. And here's our internal triage system of how we prioritize tasks.

And it did all the work. I just steered the conversation. And you literally talk to it like your own executive assistant. And it is the most powerful thing I think business owners can do because we are lonely.

You don't have people who can do it, and you can chat to it at two o'clock in the morning. And the output from Claude particular right now is off the chart, but just for clarity of thought about whether you're writing a book, whether you've got a meeting, whether whatever you're trying to prep, it can ask you pointy questions to guide your thought in a way that I've never met a person who can do it, as well as what Claude does right now. So it's a really easy one to utilize at the, this is the beginning of the journey that imagine this in just a few years time.

So to answer your question earlier about what type of business should I buy, you might want to say. To cord, which by the way, I think there's a freeze version. I pay for it. I want to be able to upload more documents and things.

But you, you'd say, look, this is me. This is my background. These are my interests, this is my experience. This is what I definitely don't want.

And in an ideal world, this is what I would like to have GI give me a hundred sectors where, or a hundred types of businesses that would fit these criteria. And then you can start narrowing them down. And then you could say, for the top three, for these top three, I would just search the internet using the word acquisition or acquired or sold or bought to find references to companies in these sectors being sold aboard. You find all the press releases and you can start to see the activity.

So it speeds up what we were talking about earlier. Not a question, but just a comment on ai because that is something that I'm super passionate about, stereotypical Gen Z, of course, looking into ai, but I've even seen. With like it, it being integrated into tech and like physical tech as well. So obviously you've got like the online notetakers, but there's even things like glasses which people put on and then it has a little screen, which is basically what the AI Notetaker is doing on the laptop.

But it's shown and projected into your eyes. So you can literally see, okay, a seller's talking about, oh, they have this specific pain point and it's prompting you, oh, okay, say this. Or here are some bullet, got my special glasses on. Exactly.

It's quite insane. So it is moving at such a fast face and let's wrong, and I can see all these words. Glasses. Yeah, it is, it is crazy.

But it is moving at such a fast pace. But I just wanted to make a comment on that and like similar to what I. Can't remember who was saying before about following like private equity news and newsletters. Yeah.

There's also so many, like AI newsletters just dropped in all the time about that. Yeah. Yeah. Just to comment on what triple's glasses, just because I, I've always been a late adopter of technology and I'm loving Claude, so I've linked it up to my Gmail account, which took like 20 seconds.

And if I, you know, because sometimes looking at your emails, especially when you're on holiday, you just don't wanna do it. But you say, Claude, summarize all the emails that I received in the last 24 hours, and you've already told it to eliminate things like Google alerts and you know, the newsletters and things. And it says you, you've had three important emails in the last 24 hours and this is what, what do you want me to draft a response? It's a click.

It's, I tell you something. This is so clever, and we are at the start just to the, as a step on, there's, and you asked what's next? Ambient a ai, which, where it can, it's listening wherever you are, AI is listening to every single conversation and it's going to track you down with information overload, right? So targeted marketing, but also if it, if within a workplace environment.

They, if you imagine there's, if an AI agent is listening to every single conversation or less listening to a meeting, and I say, I'm gonna get a train to, to London to, to go down to Jonathan Jays, I think you tomorrow. And then by the time I've walked back to my desk, right, the, the agent's gonna bought my train ticket for me. Right? So the ambient side of things, and there's a cultural piece of work that's gonna need to be done around this, but you're gonna start seeing terms and conditions of people's employment and things like that.

It says, we have the right to listen to every single conversation that takes place in the workload. Because as an employee, everything that you do about work actually belongs. And if you think about it as IP to, to the workforce, and if you think if I'm having a telephone conversation with you and I put the phone down and then I speak to Patrick about something about that phone call. There's detail and information that's valuable to the business that's being missed because it's not being captured.

So ambient AI is something that's, we'll start seeing that being talked about quite heavily in the workload, and it'll be the cultural mismatch that, that, that will stop it. 'cause I saw a lot of faces and I can only see a few of them, but, oh, and could we not gonna be, we don't want to have our conversations recorded. Well, these are listening anyway, probably you're paranoid or anything. I'm not that paranoid, but you make a very good point.

So we suggest that you use a, instead of just putting your phone number on letters and communications, obviously because you've been through with the trading session that you should be using, what do we call it? What's the thing that we call it? What's the App? Circle?

Loop? Similar because there's lots of, back then there was only Circle Loop. Now there's lots of similar ones. And you can just pull down all the recordings.

Let's say you do 10 discovery calls, the recording the discovery calls, upload the transcript. To, to Claude and say, this is who I am, this is what I'm trying to do. These are the conversations that I'm having with owners of different businesses. Uh, I want you to analyze them.

And then you could feed in, for example, some of the deal makers training course material as background reading for Claude to understand how a discovery call should be done. And I say, what could I improve? What went well? What didn't go so well?

What was the subtext of what the owner was saying here when we were having this conversation about pricing? And it takes a. When you are in the moment, you don't hear all the things because you'll think, what do I say next? What do I say next?

So you're not really listening to what the seller's saying, and this is a way of taking a really analytical view of everything. So I reckon we could come up with a dozen different ways of using AI with the whole business buying process. If we try, in fact, we could actually say to Claude, if I wanted to use you in the whole business buying process, what would I use you for? So I put in spreadsheets and things and I say, show me the trends.

What's, what makes sense, what doesn't make sense? What are the anomalies? If you are not, if you are not using this, I promise you if, if I can do it, anyone can do it. Seriously.

It's not scary. It's, it is a lot of fun as well because you realize that you've been doing things the hard way and now there's a better way of doing it. Yeah. Any other points on that subject?

Ai? I'm gonna, whenever I hear technology, I was go, oh, I don't think that's gonna be a good sub. But actually that's a great, that's a great question. Great subject.

The one thing I'm gonna add here is do not underestimate how fast it's coming. So how many of you like Apple products? Okay. Apple launched the M five chip that has a new upgraded AI processor.

And the biggest challenge with ai, as you've seen these data centers where they've used graphics cards and graphic processors, the new M five AI processor allegedly replaces 40,000 graphic card seek GPUs in it's processing power to allow you to build your own LLMs large language models on your small laptop or computer that up until six months ago, you needed a full data center to power. You cannot underestimate how fast this is going and how much it's gonna railroad so many businesses if you are not prepared.

Yeah. Really interesting. Thank you. Thank you.

So, shifting the topic a little bit, but on the topic of working with business partners, so not advisors, but actual like business partners, both. Both before acquiring and then also after question. Just yeah. Would love to hear experiences, the good, the bad, the ugly, anything that that's taken up the next hour.

Definitely business partners. Who wants to talk about business partners? Where do we start? Who wants to start?

We'll be talking about leveraging our time earlier on, and there is only so many hours in the day. Yeah. At some point in your journey there will. Be probably it'd be a need and a value in having people to some extent joining you.

So I think it's a dangerous thing to say, oh, I'm, I'm doing this solo. And there's a risk in that as well. You might get hit by bus tomorrow and the whole thing's, the whole thing's riding on you. But I think the key bit in working out whether it's gonna work or not is just making sure you're aligned and having, taking huge amount of care to make sure you're aligned now and also based would you remain aligned if X, y, z different things happened.

That's not just in terms of how you're remunerated and who gets what and when, and that's all in your shareholders agreement, but making sure you're aligned if your lives change. And so I think having, you need to have a lot of very, I would say, heart to heart, honest and frank conversations around, not just that we both think we've got the skill sets to move this business forwards by making sure that you're, you're definitely on the journey together. Irrespective of whether it's good, bad, indifferent.

Otherwise, you can find halfway through your project, your business partner says, I wanna move to Timbuktu. Then that's all of a sudden a big problem. Yeah. Make sure you've got a, a shareholder's agreement in place and that you, as Rob said, you've fully discussed everything and everything, because especially if you know the person well, even more, it's even more important.

Up from experience and yeah, it's, it, it can be really, I lost one of, I didn't lose him. One of my best friends from 11 years old. He tried to take me to court. It was all lies.

So he didn't go anywhere. But he wasted a lot of my time. But he's deluded. But the rea, if we'd had a shareholder agreement in place, it wouldn't have gone that way.

'cause he would've understood to everybody else. It wasn't just me, everybody around me couldn't believe his behavior. So yeah, it can go wrong, but if you've got a shareholders agreement in place, you've got much le much less chance. 'cause you can revert back to that and say, no, you agreed to this.

And then it would hopefully solve some of the problems. Thank you. Yep. I would add to that as I, before doing acquisitions, I've had several business partnerships in the past and whenever you get into a business partnership, you always need to know one truth.

It will always end and it will never end on a nice term, nine times outta 10. And the reason being is fundamentally one partner is always going to outwork the other one and that's gonna create animosity. Or one partner is always gonna undervalue what the other person does. So for the longest time I said I'm not having business partners again.

'cause I had three really bad. Business partnerships that did really well for three, four years. Then it was absolute carnage when it all fell apart. Then we bought the accounting business specifically.

'cause I wanted Johan as the md we've got a very clear line of who's responsible for what, but I'm still the majority partner in there. And now I've got businesses where we are partnering with people and we're just very clear front who does what, who has what responsibility. And we've already got fail safes built into the shareholders agreement and how that happens. And every partnership is a short term partnership.

Everyone going into it is aware. This is not, we're not marrying each other for the rest of our lives. We're here to do this one objective. We get it done and then we part ways we might go again, we might not, but we're only here for this one thing to make it happen.

And that gives you focus that if there is disagreement. Are you really willing to jeopardize a 5 million exit or a 10 million exit because of a bit of disagreement? Be adults about it, get on with it and achieve the objective. Or, in all of our agreements, we have a fail safe, which is where if both partners aren't getting on, there's a trigger mechanism on who buys out what.

And it's fair in both sides is that whoever makes the offer doesn't decide if they're buying or selling. The other person decides if they're buying or selling on that deal. So at any point, if I wanted to buy out, say me and Patrick were in business and I said, okay, this isn't working. We need to separate.

I can make an offer or he can make an offer, and whoever makes the offer, the other person chooses if they're buying or selling to keep everyone fair. It's like when you've got two kids, if you've got one cake, you'll let one of them cut it, but the other one chooses which slice they take. It keeps everyone honest in the agreement. Just a quick comment, Martin, on this, you probably need not to only discuss responsibilities with your partner, but probably an exit strategy as well.

So yeah, that's what we said. Everything's short term. We've got an objective we're delivering and is to deliver that objective. We don't have a long term business partnership ever again, and I never ever will have a long-term business partnership ever again because they will always fail because you develop at different speeds.

I know I'm always gonna develop faster and outwork any business partner I have, and I'm okay with that sacrifice. Short-term, enriching someone else. If it moves me along faster, I'm not making anyone super rich because I'm gonna outwork them. So it's a short term, three to five year, and then an exit.

And we have the fail safe mechanisms of who's gonna buy out, who at when, or what we're gonna do. Or we've got the, as it called, bad lever, where basically one person says, I want, we're done. They make the offer and the other person decides if they're buying or selling on those terms. So you uh, write down in the share agreement exit strategy as well?

Yes. Okay. Thanks. And shareholders agreements are expensive to write.

So before you get there, go through a a what if document, right? So what if I have a child? What if I get cancer? What if my, a whole set of scenarios and both people should write it from their perspective, right?

And then just compare the answers because that's gonna tell, that's one of the tools that's gonna help you work out whether your values are aligned. Okay? So before you go to the expense of drafting shareholders. 'cause if you get into a debate over it, your solicitors are gonna have some fun.

Yeah. And then the only other thing, I've never had an equal partner. Uh, I've either been a senior or a junior partner and that, so that there's always somebody that's in control and somebody that's making a decision. I prefer that to be a click 50 50.

You're hamstrung. I don't think it's a healthy way of, of running a business person. I. can I share some business partner experiences?

You may have heard these stories before, but a lot of you, a lot of you haven't. Years ago I had a, a business that I thought we, we were doing a few million a year. It wasn't huge and I identified that a certain person and their access and their, the way they were connected would be, would be very beneficial to the business. So we put together an agreement where we were 50 51st mistake.

So who was saying that? Never. Yeah, exactly. 50.

There's no such thing as equality and complete total parity. But we did have a shareholder's agreement. I don't always follow my own advice, but sometimes I do. However, I was, I must have been feeling particularly tight that day because I went with a, a solicitor that had been recommended and it was 750 pounds.

Now, if you are putting together a shareholders agreement for a multimillion revenue business and the bill is 750 pounds, I think clearly that lawyer is not spending very much time on it because there's no way they could, there's not enough time, there's not enough money there for them to spend time on it. So I should have gone to my regular guy who'd probably charged five or 6,000 pounds, and I'd have had a far better agreement. As a result, I had a very thin agreement. The business with this new collaboration and partnership took off like a rocket, and our run rate suddenly was 10 million.

It was just incredible. We're doing 200,000 a week. In sales and it was really nicely, just took off beautifully and you think therefore the happy days, everyone's happy. My, this person didn't even live in the UK at the time and the business was under my sort of direction.

And I went out to find a buyer and I'm very pleased to say that I got to heads with actually a, an indicative heads and one, and signed heads on the other with two parties. The indicative heads was with LDC Capital, which is Lloyd's Development Capital, which is Lloyd's Bank, and that was 21.5 million pounds, but the other one was with a smaller outfit that was actually based around, around here, Lonsdale Capital Partners. That was about 15.

5 million pounds. In actual fact, everything pointed at the Lonsdale deal being better than the LDC deal. It was a lower amount, but actually the terms were a lot better. Then LDC is quite a sort of, someone was talking about LDC at the millionaires boardroom event, weren't they?

Yeah, it was. It was Tony, I think. Was it Tony? Yeah.

You think? Yeah. Again, happy days and then everything, due diligence, all of this, and it all starts to get a little bit stressful because a pot of gold was in sight. There it is.

It is just over there. We can nearly touch it and of course that everything gets a little tense. This person came from their country over to the UK and that meant that we were in the same environment and it all started to get a little bit heated and, and then things started to unravel when the buyer, quite rightly, when we got our draft, say the purchase agreement, going backwards and forwards, didn't want the non-compete part of any sale and purchase agreement to apply to him.

Didn't want it to apply to him because he didn't want to be restricted with what he did in the future. That that's the whole point. You can't sell the business and then go and compete with the business that you've sold. You can't have your cake and eat it.

He didn't see it that way. And they pulled out and the whole thing went very sour. And of course it was gonna be my fault, wasn't it? Of course it was my fault.

So yeah, tensions run high, and at the same time, the business starts to take a downward spiral because what he's bringing to the party, which were his contacts and connections, were suddenly withdrawn. So as a result, the, the business starts to shrink. So I've got all these overheads and I've got staff, I've got 45 people, I've got these two offices. So I have to start letting people go because, because the income's going down, but the overheads are still high.

So I have to keep, I'm trimming the overheads as fast as I can to keep in line with this reducing income. And then he said, if you want to, you can buy back. You can buy back the 50%. I thought actually that like take back control of my own business.

That would be a really good thing. And you know how he valued his 50%? He valued it on the LDC 21.5 million.

So he said, 10 and a half million pounds. You go, oh, come on. Oh, come on. This is not the business.

This is not the business that was, that had a 2021 and a half million pound payment link to it. So as a result, that didn't happen. It went s and forwards. S and Forwards.

S and forwards, and the 10 and a half million UNK shrunk down to 50,000 pounds. I thought, okay, we are not gonna go any further. So I gave her 50,000 pounds. Unfortunately, my legal bill at that point was another 50,000 pounds, so it really cost me hundred thousand pounds.

But I realized that in fact, I was being stupid about this. I should have just said, oh, have the whole damn thing. Because at that point, the business was no longer viable and I just ended up closing it. I lost the business as a result of if I track it all back, because I'm very.

I, I play these things through in my mind for years afterwards. What could I have done smarter? What could I have done better? It was the poor shareholders' agreement.

Do not skimp on your legal fees. It is not worth it at all. Yeah, there you go. Good advice.

Yeah. So don't it. A shareholder's agreement and an interesting one is that I've been thinking about recently where I ended up with a business partner unintentionally. It's a quick, it's a quick one.

Okay. So I set up a, a management team for a very specific purpose and I got myself a finance director. I got myself an operations director. I got myself a person who was specialized in that sector and they would run the entire group.

And then there was me as the shareholder. So there's me as the investor and everyone else running everything. Within about six months, I was tipped off by the specialist person that possibly the relationship, which was a strong relationship between the finance director and the ops director. They were maybe playing a bit of a game.

They were having a meeting before the board meeting to align themselves. They were trying to get this other person involved in these meetings to align themselves with what to say to me. And the word was that possibly there's gonna be a little bit of shenanigans going on here, a bit of maneuvering that might even end up with me losing control of the business. Okay.

So I started to become a little paranoid about this and I started to look into it and possibly the, when I was saying, what WhatsApp, what are you doing today? I got a little of pushback. No one wants to tell me what they were doing. And so it's, I started to feel that something wasn't right.

So I, I had a meeting with the finance. Director and at the end of that 60 minutes, I didn't have a finance director. Okay. But of course, unfair dismissal, he su or constructive dismissal.

In that case, he, he sued, started a whole legal process against the company, and of course his friend then followed the operations director. So now I've got the specialist person and me plus that feeling of, I've just had my fingers burned massively with these two people. We don't need them. We can do it ourselves.

Oh, the craziness of it, because I've gone from, I've got three people running a business to now I've got a business partner and I'm running the business, which actually I'm no good at. Okay. So sometimes these things. Your people move around and before you know it, you stepped up to solve a problem, but created a far bigger problem.

So that was my unintentional business partner story. Would you do anything differently? Would I do anything differently? Yeah, I would.

I would've, yeah, I would've hired. Just hired a few people. Yeah. There are good people out there.

It takes time. I think that the way we talk about mostly Inner Circle is using fractional people. So part-time fractional founder is the new business owner. Fractional is the new part-time.

Have you noticed that no one these days has a part-time job? Everyone has a side hustle. Everyone's got a side hustle. So much sexier than part-time job.

So I, I would've just gone and got someone part-time in the interim. And I cannot emphasize enough as a business grows how important that finance function is. 'cause without that nothing else hacked.