Sam Stoffel | Building The Business That Made Bookmakers Sue Me & Why I Sold It

0:00As soon as you start to win, they're going to ban your account. So they close down winners and they let the losers keep betting. And how did you build a business from zero to ten million a year fighting against the betting firms? There's a system I found where I can guarantee to make a profit regardless of what happens. Can you share it? Yeah, it's literally, it's really simple. How did you feel when all that money hit your bank? That's the only time I've ever thought that I might die. I ended up in a big legal battle, hired a private investigator. Wow, why? Probably the biggest red flag about the con man I asked him early on.

0:31What's his name? One of the biggest problems in this country is entrepreneurship is not encouraged at all in schools. Like, fail forward and fail fast. Tell us some of the dirty tricks that the big betting firms get up to. The main ones is... Sam, is it true most gambling firms try and sue you? Well, we've had five different companies try and sue us over the years, so yeah. Wow, why? They don't like us teaching people how to make free money. it turns out right and um what are you exposing the betting company's business model is that what you're doing the whole thing a bookie does is it tries to rope you in with a free bet as a kind of loss leader because they want you to become addicted to gambling and what we were teaching people to do is if you sign up with a bookie and get the free bet and sign up with another bookie and get the free bet you can guarantee yourself a profit and then run run a mile after that and they don't like that.

1:23Oh, I like this already. I really like this. I dislike strongly gambling firms. I had Paul Merson on the show and he said gambling firms would be giving him free bets of tens of thousands of pounds. So they know what they're doing. Absolutely. Yeah. The whole, the only reason a bookie's ever giving you money is because they think they can get more out of you. It's fundamentally a corrupt business model. And you get, you know, the likes of Denise Coates who portrays herself as Britain's biggest taxpayer, takes 500 million a year as PAYE salary. But it's all to mask the fact that all of their money is coming from illicit sources, gambling addicts, grey markets like China.

2:06All of this stuff is where they're getting their money from. And what, were you a bit into gambling and just found your own way of hacking the system? No. You geeked out? No, so for me, it was always a way to make money. So I was at uni looking for ways to make money in 2008 and i came across this thing called matched betting on money saving expert but it was just really really complicated couldn't get my head around it for ages and then eventually tried it and i made about 20 grand whilst i was at uni bearing in mind before this i'd never placed a bet in my life and i don't i don't like football i couldn't tell you a single premier league player it was just not something i'm into so it was always just there's a system i found where i can guarantee to make a profit regardless of what happens does that system still work yeah it still it's still it's today so what i did after you share it yeah yeah yeah i mean i'll go through it in a second but um so basically i did that at uni i made about 20 grand and then i thought everyone should be doing this why isn't everyone doing it and you were basically just hacking the free bet system yeah it's literally it's really simple it's you sign up to bookie a they've got a free bet and you're betting on england to win and then you go to another bookie like bet fair and you bet against england to win and you cover the draw so no matter what happens you've placed bets on both sides so you're going to break even because you're using free bets as well one of those bets has to win and so you'll make a profit from that and the other one you won't make a loss because it wasn't your money have they not cottoned on to that though they have but it's like a loss leader for them they're they they they you know it's such a they make so much money the bookies that the tiny proportion of people that are abusing their free bets is just you know it's a mosquito bite it's it's not significant enough for them to stop doing it and if and the only way they can stop it is by not offering free bets but then they'd stop getting customers that's how they compete with other bookies and they've tried you know they've tried sending legal threats to us over the years the very first one we had was paddy power and they said that we were uh inducing a breach of contact sorry inducing a breach of contract by teaching their customers how to guarantee a win and apparently that wasn't fair because it's okay for them to have an edge right So it's okay for them to guarantee the win.

4:12Yeah, yeah. And it's okay for them to guarantee most people lose. Yeah. But when the shoe's on the other foot. They don't like it. Yeah. And they threw everything in the kitchen sink. So they sued you personally. Yeah, yeah. And the company. They tried everything they could. They tried using our trademark, unfair business practices, all of this stuff. And it never went anywhere because they had no ground to stand on. Right. And have you sold that business now? I sold it at the end of last year. I had it for 10 years and I sold it to one of our competitors. Right. So what did you get the turnover up to?

4:46What was the highest point? About 8 million. 8 million a year? Yeah. Okay. And what did you sell the business for? 10 million. Nice. And how old were you when you sold it? I was 34. I am 34 now actually. No, no, I'm just 1035. So yeah, 34. Right. And how did you feel cashing in 10 million? Do you know, for me, the only reason I sold, look, I had that business for 10 years. It was very cashflow positive. It built a great life for me. I didn't sell because I wanted to go and retire on a beach in Malibu somewhere. I had another idea and I just wanted to fully focus on that. And in the past, I've tried to launch other businesses at the same time.

5:23And all that happens is your kind of attention is divided and every business suffers. Whereas I want to focus fully on this new idea. And so selling was just a way to move on, close that chapter, move on to something else and use the capital to do it right did you sell to a betting firm uh sort of there was a company called bet connect which is like a bet fair betting exchange type and they bought uh one of our competitors about two years ago and so they had entered into the match betting space it's owned by a guy called nick candy right and um and so that it was one of the candy brothers yeah yeah yeah yeah he's um yeah we're a good friend of mine now yeah and um Yeah, so they bought our competitor and then a couple of years it just made sense for them to buy us as well.

6:07Right. Just on the Nick Candy thing, isn't he like with reform now? Yeah, yeah. He is a big... Is he the treasurer of reform? Yeah, he's just joined as treasurer or he's in the process of joining as treasurer or something like that. Yeah. Well, isn't it great that we're getting business people into politics? And it baffles me already that more politicians aren't from a business background. It's like, why would you want people running the country that have no idea how to run a business? Because in a way, the country is a business. Yeah. Why are we not running the country like a business? Yeah, exactly.

6:38It is a business. And we're getting people in that have no experience doing anything like this. Well, do you know what? The top five MPs in Labour, none of them have ever run a business. That doesn't surprise me. Anyway, we won't, we won't. We will not go there. Too much into it. Okay. So tell us some of the dirty tricks that the big betting firms get up to. the main ones is as soon as you start to win they're going to ban your account like that's one of their main strategy if they if they see that you're a winning customer if you have basically when you sign up they have like an algorithm that determines how profitable you are to them so if you you're if you're below a certain profitability score they won't even open your account straight away and they can do this just by looking up you know where you live and just sort of demographic information they know who are kind of profitable people who aren't and then if you're placing bets that show a certain level of sophistication they're just going to shut you down as soon as they can catch on to it they shut you down straight away so they close down winners and they they let the losers keep betting and how does that make you feel um frustrated but in a way you know i'm pleased that we've been able to damage them so much as we have i mean so we've had smaller bookies there's one one called bet butler a number of years ago that we actually made go bankrupt because they were offering so many free bets that we were just telling our members just go hammer these right and they couldn't afford it and so they closed down and and you feel good about that very i feel very good about that because it's not a good it's not a you know it's not a good industry it ruins lives and so anything that takes money from the bookies pockets into normal people's pockets is a very good thing in my view yeah would the betting firms just argue well it's just a market and they're just serving the market yeah and Look, I'm not saying you should ban gambling altogether.

8:23I'm generally very liberal. Do what you want. And a lot of people enjoy a recreational gamble. But I think it's the fact that a vast proportion of their profits comes from the vulnerable gamblers. I think that's my main issue with it. Yeah. And how did you build a business from zero to 10 million a year fighting against the betting firms. It must have been like quite hard. Yeah, I mean... I mean, you don't look that stressed. I don't think you've got any grey hair. Oh, no, I do. A few coming through now. Although I think that's children more than anything. Yeah, look, there were many stressful times.

9:04The bookies took a while to cotton on. I think it was until we got to a certain size before they really noticed. And by that point, you know, we were making quite a bit of money. so it was easier to deal with yeah the the stress of that um you know i'm very much of the view of this too shall pass you know whatever is if if you're getting a legal threat from someone or something's gone terribly wrong you can usually wait it out and you know it's going to resolve itself in some way so i'm quite patient i suppose in that respect um you know i didn't i kind of just had to figure things out as i went along you know i didn't do any i didn't go to business school everything that i'd you know i should teach myself how to code i had to teach myself facebook ads um you know how to hire people and how to run a company and i've just figured out as i went along um and yeah yeah must have been quite hard for you to run ads on the kind of product that you had yes very very much so is that one of the hardest parts it was it used to be so frustrating because like the advertising standards so obviously what we were doing we knew was risk free you placed bets it was impossible to lose money doing it but because it fell under gambling we weren't allowed to say risk-free even though i know it's not gambling we're just told you can't say this or we had people that had literally paid off their debts when there was articles about it i'm not allowed to say that because it's suggesting gambling is a solution to financial problems and so it's like this real frustrating thing where you know you're right but this law says you can't do it anyway yeah um so yeah but we usually found ways around it how you just skirt as close to the line as possible without going over it so it's you know if you you can't say risk-free so we say it's impossible to lose money or just altering the language slightly where you're not directly contravening the rules but you know you're kind of as close to it as you can be it's kind of a bit of a game of ping-pong between you and advertising standards yeah have you ever bet any of your own money not the gambling firm's money um i have the grand national once or twice but for me because i know how gambling works and i know it's all rigged against you right it it's kind of foolish for me to place a bet because i know it's a losing thing it's different if you're you know you've gone to the races with your friends and you're just having a laugh and it's just you know just you know you're not doing it to make money but if you're placing normal bets with the intention of winning and you're not doing something like match betting, you've got no chance.

11:28Yeah. And how is gambling rigged against the ordinary person? Well, the odds are, if you have a coin toss, you know the odds are 50-50, but a bookie will price it at, you know, you get 45p back if you win. So they've got that 10p difference. The more times you flip that coin, the more by default is going to them. It's like if you spin a roulette wheel, where you've got a one, your payout is 1 to 36, but you've actually got a slightly higher chance of losing because there's a zero as well. Yeah. And what do you think about all these footballers or these ex-footballers who then become commentators that basically put their name to gambling firms and just allow a load of gambling ads?

12:08Yeah. It's tricky. I'm not fundamentally against it. I mean, I get that we live in a capitalist world. You've got to find a way to make money somehow. There are not better ways to make money. Yeah, for sure. But I suppose it's difficult for a footballer to pivot into something else once their short, you know, their kind of young career is over. I don't have a problem with that per se. It's more, look, again, I don't have a problem with gambling as a concept. It's just some of the more predatory practices that I wish weren't there. And are there any other predatory practices? i mean there's there's all kinds of stuff that the gambling commission are sort of catching on to now it's like you're supposed to know uh that your customer can afford to place the amounts they're losing and bookies will you know there's there's cases of people being allowed to deposit hundreds of thousands of pounds when they earn on paper 40 grand a year it's like where are they getting this money from oh they're gambling their employees money you know things like that that they should do more of but they don't because it's easier for them to get a slap on the wrist after it's happened.

13:15They'll get a million pound fine. Well, they make 10 million pound a day. They don't care. So you've sold your business. Yes. What advice would you give to me? So my business has been 19 years in this training business. I guess its best year would be 25 million in sales. Turnover is a bit less than that, but that's the sales. We're probably not quite there because post lockdown hurts a bit and we're building back up there. Got 92 staff. Do we just keep growing and try and get to 50 million in sales and go global? Or do we try and cash out a decent multiplier? What's your advice? First question I would ask is, what would you do after you sold?

13:58Like what was how is selling going to actually change your life? Like, are you going to go retire somewhere or are you just going to go and start another business? I mean, I'm definitely not going to retire. I've tried that at least four times and I hate retirement. and I'm not surprised that you sold your business to do something else, a new business, because most entrepreneurs I know, they don't want to retire. So why would I do it? Maybe I saw it a risk to be the size of staff we are or the overhead that we have, because we're not far off about a million pound a month overhead and that could be deemed as a risk.

14:34Maybe I've been doing it 19 years, so maybe it might be nice to do other things. You know, I could grow money.school. That's got 12 ,500 members. I could grow disruptors. We're in our 10th anniversary. So there's plenty of things I could do. If you were me, we're just having fun here, but you've sold your business. If you were me, would you keep growing it and go through a few years of growing pains, bearing in mind Labour are ruining this country and more taxes are coming? There's a short-term pain there, though, because I think the chance of them getting elected again in three years is quite low.

15:09well we hope well they mean the odds say faraj is the most likely to win now yeah by quite a way nigel's my friend and i i know him well and i i i think he really does support entrepreneurship well they're positioning themselves as the party of working people which i like yeah um you know there's one of the biggest problems in this country is entrepreneurship is a not encouraged at all in schools like you're not even taught that it's an option to go into business um and b success is almost something to be afraid of you know if you're successful people aren't it's not like in america where everyone's cheering you on here it's very much a you know dislike the rich kind of thing yeah um and anything we can do to change the culture of that i think is going to do great things for our economy and great things for the country as a whole so uh very much um in favor of that yeah um you know would i going back to your your question would i would i sell your business i think entrepreneurs have a we get through this phase where we're kind of itching to go and do something new for the sake of it and often it's better to do 10 times more of what you're already doing right before before going and pivoting to something else yeah because you got to start from scratch yeah exactly you know i went i went through a phase i think it was 2017 and i was like right i want to go and do something else so i'm going to go and start a mobile app company and i'm going to go and start an interior design company right and i was doing that and doing that and doing a property company and running property accumulator at the same time and did it distract you a lot every my focus was so split every single business underperformed yeah it's so much better to just focus really really hard on one thing until you're sure you can't scale it anymore and then talk to 10 other people and find for sure that you definitely can't scale it anymore and then maybe think about selling is that where you got to with your company then you're just like you've taken it as far as you can go it that it wasn't so much that i'd i'd i'd done it for so long i could have carried on scaling it but it was it was getting harder and harder to do and because i knew i had something else that i cared more about and i thought had a much higher growth potential and i'd validated it as a real problem i just wanted to be able to jump into that with both feet and i was like that's like yeah had you know had this opportunity to sell not come along I would have happily carried on running it you know just for cash no problem at all yeah but the combination of this is the time to do this other thing I've got a really good offer so did someone caught you yeah so it wouldn't say it fell on your lap but you didn't have to go to market and oh no I didn't go through any kind of process it was what it was one buyer all along I'd never went to anyone else the price was was good enough for me and everything just seemed to align.

17:47How long did the whole process take their diligence all the way through to the sale? Well, it was interesting because we'd been talking for about a year about merging. So the original conversation was, let's merge the two companies and we'll have a monopoly on the market. They're a much better company as well and we'll use that to grow. And we explored that for about a year and I thought, actually, I don't want to merge. It's not for me because I'm a little bit of a control freak. As is every entrepreneur. So they probably were too. Yeah. And so the idea of having to share control, having a board just didn't work for me.

18:18Yeah. And so I called him up and I said, I want to sell. Now, the problem was this was just before the election and we knew that Labour were coming in and we also knew. Oh, sorry. Labour just won. Sorry. And we knew. Entrepreneurs relief. Were they, was that still. Entrepreneurs relief was still a thing. But what we knew was going to happen or we suspected was they were going to raise capital gains tax in that first budget, which they did. 28 % of the highest level. But we didn't know if it was going to go to 50. Yeah, true, yeah. So did you sell at the point, sorry to jump in, but you sold at the point when you got entrepreneur's relief on 10 million, not 1 million.

18:52Yes, so it was 10 million, yes. So 10 % on the first, no, hang on. Got to get this right. Well, how much tax did you pay on your 10 million? That'll answer.

19:05I can't say how much tax I've paid. Yes, you can. um that that either means you paid a lot more than you want or you paid a very little you don't admit it i i i paid a good number of tax right okay do you pay more than 10 percent just okay yeah well that's that feels fair i i i had i think i'd already used part of my entrepreneur's relief before so it was like i had a bit of it left you use some of it but the the main thing is because we knew the so on the date of the budget we knew capital gains was going to go up but if you did a deal before the budget announcement you'd pay the current rate yeah so i called the competitor up and i said well that's nice to have a hard deadline yeah i said if you buy us by this time this is the price otherwise it can go up to god knows what right and so we got the whole deal done in three days literally 10 minutes to midnight before the budget we signed had they done all their diligence before so they because of the merger conversations they they knew the business really really well there was a little bit still to do and it literally was to the wire getting it done well that i mean i've my friend al barrett he's sold his business from grenade you know a few times and he says the whole process is just so like you're up till all hours of the morning goes on and on was it like that it was it was that and did you know i remember actually on the last day so of this three-day process the last day it gets to about lunchtime and i'm like right are we are we doing this today and they're completely silent there's no response i send an email i've thrown them out i was just bonding and about three hours later um they basically emailed me and said that they wanted to reduce the price by a million pounds and this was their price and i and then there was this moment where i was like do i actually want this enough to drop the price by that yeah and i thought about it and i was like no i don't and i emailed back and said okay no problem sorry we couldn't do a deal and then within 30 seconds they're on the phone and match the original price.

20:57So they're just trying to drop you. Yeah, which I respect. Do you respect or do you think it's cheeky? I mean, it's a bit cheeky, but you know what? It's business is business. At the end of the day, I'm not, you know, precious about it. Yeah, right. So you sold it, you sold it for 10. You paid a little bit over 10%, but you're not disclosing how much tax. How did you feel when all that money hit your bank? Honestly, not what you would expect. I didn't feel this massive sense of relief to me. Surely you should feel more than relief when you get that kind of money in your bank, shouldn't you? You should.

21:32How old were you? You were 34 at the time? Yeah. I mean, that's a lot of money for a 34-year-old. It is a lot of money, but I just saw a finite pot of money that every time I spent was therefore going down because I had no income. Right. So it wasn't quite enough. It wasn't enough for me to go and live for the rest of my life. No. And because I've got so many things I want to do, you know, most of what I get there will be invested into other businesses. So you invested most of it, did you? Straight away. Yeah. So what did you invest your 10 million in? I, you know, I bought, I put a fair bit in the stock market, NVIDIA, Meta, things that I have kind of a long term belief in.

22:10I'm very kind of long term on AI. So I put about a million pounds into NVIDIA. Right. Which is doing very well. Yeah. um i'm bought i bought a building in nottingham city center that i'm turning into a kind of co-working space but aimed at creators small businesses so there'll be a podcast studio in um you know just things designed to make instagram friendly content really but also a place you want to go and work um i'm doing another tech startup called subspot and is this your new business this is the big why you sold exactly yeah yeah so this is taking up most of the capital which is uh it's basically shopify for subscriptions so if you want to start any recurring revenue business so like school i like school but school's digital products mostly so this is any kind of product you could do your monthly subscription boxes you know if you get right food boxes even if you're a person it's almost like a white label yeah platform like maybe kajabi that people can use exactly very much you've got all the e-commerce the architecture the subscription on it exactly so you can you know we'll process your payments, we'll host your website, you can manage your customers, generate shipping labels, basically run your whole business through the platform.

23:19That's what we're building. Okay, and you said earlier you found a problem. What's the problem then that this is solving? A few problems. The main one is having run a subscription business for 10 years, so you've got PayPal or Stripe for your billing, you've got something else to manage your customers, you've got a third-party tool to view what your customers are doing. and I found that the data didn't match up. Like your analytics software was saying this thing, your attribution software was saying this, your payment data was saying this and so it makes it very hard to make decisions about growth.

23:52You know, are these ads delivering a return on investment? You know, is this the best way for me to acquire customers? And you couldn't be sure about it. I wanted everything to be in one place and not fragmented over 10 different tools and that's the main problem I was looking to solve. Yeah, okay. So I want to talk a bit about business in a moment but i still want to talk about your 10 million quid um so you also did you did you bought that 270 grand bentley as well yeah you didn't mention that in the i may have skipped over that part yeah um i understand um you've got a bit of a car history i have i did my research so i understand i haven't invented or i understand you had one i i did i had two actually yeah and And yeah, tell me about what happened.

24:37Okay. So look, I was 26 years old. I'd just been on a date with a very beautiful girl. And I dropped her off. And I was sat back at some traffic lights, but three cars back. In your Lamborghini event store. In the green Lamborghini event store. Yeah. And I was just thinking about the date and not really paying attention. And I look forward and the cars have gone and the light's now green. So I'm like, oh, I'll razz it through. Yeah. Accelerated. And then I didn't look at the lights again. and obviously it changed to red right and i went through and then one bus came at me on the right and i saw that and accelerated to get past it and then another bus came from the left hit the side of me into the side of a lamppost oh shit and then obviously i'm like completely startled you know just trying to like complete right off yeah completely and i'm sat in the car can't open the door go to the other door won't open i'm like okay i'll just sit there and i'll wait and then someone comes off the bus and say oh just to let you know your car's on fire and i'm like well i I think that's how Jota died.

25:35That car blew up. Yeah. And so that's the only time I've ever thought that I might die. So you thought you were going to die? I genuinely thought, this is it. I'm going to sit here and I'm going to die in this car. Luckily, I managed to get the window down just enough. I could climb out the window. Right. And escape. When you thought you might die, what went through your mind? The main thing was you idiot. Right. You know, crashing into a lamppost. It was. Did it change your view of things? I mean, I'm very scared of that junction from now on. Is that why you've got a Bentley now? Yeah, well, no.

26:12Because you've got a car for 60-year-olds. That's a side effect of having children now. A two-seater is not practical. Well, it's hardly a four-seater, is it? You could have had a more practical four-seater. I've got a three and a five-year-old, so they can fit quite nicely in the back. Yeah, until they get to eight, and then they won't fit in that anymore. Then it's going over. And I suppose it's very 26 year old, isn't it? To get a Lamborghini Aventador, but get it in green. Yeah. I mean, I think that's the point. When you first start making money, you want everyone to see you. You want to be like, look, this guy's successful.

26:43You know, you, you drive it through and the engine's loud and you think all the girls are going to look at you. No girl looks at you. It's all boys.

26:53And, you know, I had, I bought my first car, my first car when I did well, I got a Ferrari California. and then it was the lambo and then i got a 488 and look they're beautiful they're beautiful cars you know i still love ferraris um but there comes a point where you want to be you know the bentley is a bit more kind of understated i think you know it's in gray it's more about comfort yes it's got an engine that can really purr but your priorities kind of shift it's not about looking wealthy it's about feeling wealthy i think yeah which most people i think usually come to when And they're like in their 50s, maybe.

27:30And you've come to that in your 30s. I guess I've cycled through the car situation pretty quickly. Yeah. What about a classic? What about getting a classic? Yeah, I'd like, I'd love, you know. A 355 is a good value. Yes, yeah. I think that's, you know, a future, future list at the moment. My next target is a helicopter because I fly helicopters for fun. Did you learn on the Robinson R22? 22, 22, then 44. And then I've just done 206. Right, nice. I just test flew a 505 last week. So I've very much got the bug. Yeah. At the moment. But I mean, I mean, there are a lot of money to run, aren't they?

28:05They're expensive to run. I mean, not as much as you think that. I think, I learned on the 22. Oh, you fly as well? Well, I haven't flown for a little while. Oh, right. Mostly because my wife didn't like it. So many things I used to do and then my wife doesn't like. Yeah, I learned. And I mean, when Mark and I sort of like made it, a gift to ourselves was we both learned to fly the helicopter at the same time, my business partner and I. So yeah, like you learned in the 22, which is actually, I think, the most fun helicopter to fly. It's great fun, but you know, I flew it to London once. So the main reason, one of the main reasons I fly, other than fun, is to get to London quickly.

28:41Right, yeah. So then you come around to your business as an expense. Exactly. Yeah, and get your tax bill down. I remember once I was in the 22, cruising down at 70 knots. Yeah. And then I've got like a 20 knot headwind, so I'm doing 50 miles an hour. watching the cars on the M1 going faster than me. It's not a journey I've done again in that machine. No, that's why you go on the 44, isn't it? You've got more power. But yeah, I think owning those things is going to cost a lot of money. I've got a friend that owns one and it's 30 grand a year to own. Wow, I mean, my Aventador probably costs that.

29:12Yeah, well, in depreciation, possibly more, I would think. Yeah, no, I think we factored in the depreciation. I think it's bottomed out now. Yeah, true. You wouldn't know because you crashed yours. Well, I did. So they paid me out. The insurance paid me out the full purchase price for it, which I don't know why they did. Wow. So I bought it for$3.30 and they paid me out$3.30. And then I went and I did the clever thing and went and bought another one in black, which I did 500 miles in and then sold it for a 60 grand loss. Yeah. That's a good payout, though. I mean, insurance companies love to wriggle, don't they?

29:50Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I just, and I, to this day, don't know, like it wasn't worth$3.30 anymore. Yeah. But they paid out. I've been an entrepreneur for 20 years. In fact, I don't know if you remember, but this show used to be called Disruptive Entrepreneur. Interviewed hundreds of entrepreneurs here. In fact, most of my friends are entrepreneurs. One of them who's been a friend for 20 years is Daniel Priestley, who's the founder of Score App. So if you want consistent leads in sales and you're an entrepreneur, you need to listen to this. because Daniel Priestley has built this amazing tool and it helps entrepreneurs attract leads at scale online using interactive assessments and quizzes.

30:28ScoreApp turns your traffic into a steady stream of qualified leads day and night. It's like having a lead generation machine working 24-7, 365 so you can focus on growing your business. So if you go right now to scoreapp.com forward slash Rob, you can use a ready-made template or an AI on ScoreApp and you can get your first leads attracted within the next 60 minutes. Go right now to scoreapp.com forward slash Rob. So my friend Neville Wright, who sold Kiddy Care, which was actually in Peterborough, he built that up, family business, sold it for, I think he got 75 million for it. And he said it was the worst day of his life.

31:10Why? Because he just felt like lost. He'd let this thing go. He didn't really know what to do. Did you have any remorse when you sold your company? I had had such a long time to consider the option of selling it and how I would feel about it. But when it came to it, I'd already kind of gone through that mental battle in my head. Half spent the money probably. Yeah. Like it was, it was my baby in a way, but because it had never been, you know, it wasn't a topic that I was passionate about. Right. So I didn't have that attachment to it in that sense. Yeah. It was always just a means to an end. It was.

31:44And so because I had something else to distract me, I didn't really feel that loss. Yeah. It was more excitement to the next thing. Right. And has your attitude changed towards money? Yes. How? Massively. Because in 2023, I nearly lost the whole business. So we went from a period of making 100 grand a month to losing 100 grand a month. Wow. In about four months. What happened? The slightly longer version is I was raising money to build our own betting exchange. um and so for match betting you have a bookie that has the free bet and you have somewhere like betfair to to lay the bet to bet against the outcome right and we were sending all our customers to betfair and they paid us a commission and i thought ah what if we had all those customers ourselves in our own exchange so i'm going to build pocket bet and i was going to raise money to do this i needed a few million quid so i looked for investors and i got introduced to a guy who i'm not going to name uh what's his name i'm genuinely not going to name him for my what is his name again let's let's call him uh let's let's call him jason and um he um he was basically pitched himself as this billionaire he'd owned stakes in jimmy chew uh anyone who pitches themselves as a billionaire that's a problem straight away so he'd just bought a house from guy phoenix five million quid in nottingham you know he took me to this private members club in london he showed me his big wine collection he kind of he introduced me to celebrities you know he was clearly connected clearly done well for himself um but everyone was said he was a billionaire and i and he basically convinced me to sell him a chunk of the company for really cheap on the basis that he would be able to grow the business a lot from his experience and very naively i did that and what ended up happening how much of your company did you sell him 25 for how much about 150 grand right so not a lot not a lot at all and and the mechanism was i would take a salary basically equal to the all the profit that we made so that he only benefited if it grew yeah um and at first it was fine it went well and then it gets to about october 22 and he says that we should rebrand the company change the name and i didn't really like the name profit accumulator i thought it was a bit it's a bit scammy sounding and so i went along with it and what happened i mean a rebrand though is a massive move.

34:04You don't just do it that way. Well, no, no. Look at Jaguar. Yeah. And they didn't even change the name. So what happened to us, we lost all of our organic search positions on Google. We disappeared off Google. It's the first thing, isn't it? Overnight. And we thought we prepared for this. You know, we did everything properly. We were redirecting everything and we just disappeared and our traffic just disappeared overnight. And with a subscription business, it takes a while to feel the effect of that. It gets to about February and a CFO comes to me and said, you're going to run out of money in four months.