FOUNDER #40. £8M Sports Travel Mogul: "I Watched A Million Pounds Evaporate" - Ian Kerr

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1:14It's an app and website that compares news coverage, allowing you to see how each story is framed across the political spectrum and the world. For the recent story about the U.S. signing the Memorandum of Understanding with Iran, their vantage plan shows us that Right-leaning Daily Express framed it as a historic peace deal, while left-leaning NPR notes it resulted in the president's approval hitting record lows. Plus data like each publication's source of funding and a factuality rating. The Nobel Peace Center even called Ground News an excellent way to stay informed, avoid echo chambers, and expand your worldview.

1:45Get 40 % off by going to ground.news slash 2026. That's ground.news slash 2026. Again, ground.news slash 2026. The world's changing. The agentic economy, whether or not you like it or not, is coming. And I've built this company, AI first, because it's not going to be know your customer, it's going to be know your agent. And your agent's going to have financial autonomy, and this is coming. What's it like growing an£8 million sports travel company? Wild. It's been absolutely wild. 2004, 2005, and a friend of mine and I wanted to go to South Africa to watch England play cricket. And my small brain was going, look, these tour operators wanted to charge me£5 ,000.

2:26There must be a market charging£2 ,000 because people want value for money. And I was like, you know what, I'm going to make this my life. I'm going to set up a cricket travel company and I'm going to travel the world and I'm going to watch England play cricket. And then we successfully ran tours to the Ashes. We snowballed into a Sri Lanka tour and the numbers kept snowballing really. So year on year on year, we were turning over more money. We got relationships with the BBC. We were getting valuations in the region of about 2 million, I think, to exit for at that point. In 16, 17, 18, 19, you could see businesses doing this, and everyone was on a high until the pandemic hit, and then it just squashed everything.

3:01Ian Kerr: You must stay at home. The pandemic hit has incredibly hard. The world was imploding. The short story was, every single person was entitled to a full refund within 40 days. Every hotel, every ticket, every trip, every excursion, every add-on, half a million pounds worth of cost. And there was just this realisation that everything you've ever worked for, you might as well just burn some million pounds in your car park because it was just evaporated. That's a serious amount of pressure on your shoulders. How do you personally deal with it?

3:38Hey guys, we've been running this podcast now for five and a half years. We've had some most amazing business guests on here. Simon Squibb, Daniel Priestley, Barry Hearn. The list just goes on and on from billionaires to people who have built brands. If you want to come on the podcast and talk about your business and sit here with me in the studio and tell your story, go check out dodgewoodall.com forward slash guest and check out the three minute video. We've also left the link below as well. Ian, welcome to the show. Nice to see you again. Yeah. How's things? Very good, mate. Very good. We're looking forward to this one.

4:09Let's roll all the way back. What's it like growing an£8 million sports travel company? Wild. It's been absolutely wild. Yeah, a lot of experience, a lot of water under the bridge and looking forward to telling you how it all came around and, yeah, the full backstory. When did you start it? What year? So the cricket business started following a tour to South Africa in 2004, 2005. It was the early days of the internet and a friend of mine and I wanted to go to South Africa to watch England play cricket. My first experience goes right back to 98, 99, watching England in Australia and something happened there, which maybe we can touch on earlier or later.

4:52But it was 2004, 2005, and Rob and I had the opportunity to go to South Africa. We wanted to go on an organized tour because security and various things. And we was in the early stages of the internet. We Googled the tour companies that were offering tours to that particular tour and got a lot of glossy brochures come through in the post that all wanted to charge us a lot more money than we wanted to pay. So we booked independently. We booked a flight. We flew Christmas Day. It was the night, actually, the tsunami hit. Of course, wasn't it? So we landed into Johannesburg. What was that, 26th of December 2004?

5:29Exactly. So we landed in Johannesburg that morning. The news was full of, obviously, the tsunami and what had happened whilst we'd been flying. but we'd booked this trip ourselves we'd used the internet we'd found hotels in Johannesburg we'd booked Kruger Park Safari and off we went as a pair of clowns on a sleeping in tents in the Kruger Park and then we ended up in Cape Town on New Year's Eve we ended up in the V &A we ended up on the waterfront the fireworks the party the barmy army the atmosphere it was electric and then we prior to that we'd contacted a lady Gwen who still works at the Western province in Newlands and we've got some tickets and we've done things directly and we've sort of got our own trip organized and our own trip sorted at the best time of our lives.

6:16Yeah, I bet. How long were you out there for? Probably around 10, 12 nights maybe that first trip and then we, my small brain was going look I booked this for a thousand pounds, I booked this flight, I booked all this travel, I booked all this accommodation, I've researched it myself and these tour operators wanted to charge me five thousand pounds there must be a market charging two thousand pounds because people want value for money so we we booked so we so it was really an epiphany of that final day in cape town when i was rob and i was walking back up to the waterfront and i was like you know what i'm gonna make this my life i'm gonna i'm gonna set up a cricket travel company and i'm gonna travel the world and gonna watch england play cricket that's like dreams come true by the way well that that's how it started and yeah and and we'd done some sightseeing we'd been up table mountain with all the sort of the usual sightseeing trips and we got back to the uk and totally sunburned and um literally went onto the internet and googled how to set up a travel company what legislation do i need what legal framework do i need how can i actually do this and the name how's that travel was was there it was something that come to me on the spot so you actually you called it how's that we called it how brilliant travel yeah brilliant how's that travel um and had no idea on what i was doing i had no idea on sort of running a business if you like at that point but you did know you were highly organized and you saw a gap in the market well exactly well exactly that and i'd always i'd always had i'd always had a sales background yeah um i'd always been successful in sales every role i'd ever been in in sales i'd always been successful at that i had sort of a b2b sort of sales role at the time and i was sort of stable at a house and a mortgage and various things and i was like let's use this as a side hustle let's see what i can do from it and then it was i think the following year we was flyering at uh trent bridge handing out flyers to and and a chap stood next to me a guy by the name of mike edwards um and he basically said i used to run cricket travel tours and i was like okay what did you used to do and picked his brain a little bit and i said can i get your number really kindly obliged and then contacted him the following week and said can I come and meet you and he yeah had a meeting and I said look will you mentor me because like I'm trying my best but I don't have all the contacts in all the right places and he agreed to do that and his black book opened up and then we I traveled to India independently that winter which was a bit of an eye-opener in terms of how India operates from a cricket perspective and then we successfully ran tours to the ashes uh 2006 2007 we snowballed into a Sri Lanka tour we got our atoll license we got bonded we got everything sort of all of our ducks in a row and then we went into a the West Indies game there was a Stanford million dollar game yeah a bit contentious but we took really good numbers out there and then the financial crash happened 2008 which worked to our advantage because the same customers wanted to travel but they wanted to pay less and we was internet first we was email first we was doing things a little bit differently and we were sort of able to offer a little bit better value for money so things started to snowball and things sort of went really well in the years that followed numbers kept increasing we um over time we um built um better relationships with um not better relationships but we got relationships with the bbc for example so we became preferred supplier for the BBC.

9:44We started doing some stuff with lots of the press packs. So we had people like Paul Newman at the Mail and we had John Etheridge at The Sun and Mike Selvey at The Guardian and then Vic Marks. And we started doing Stephen Brankley at The Independent. And all of these sort of press guys were traveling with us as well and our momentum was growing. And the numbers kept snowballing really. So year on year on year we were turning over more money we were getting more customers and how did the business model work very the whole industry is very sort of 2000 if you like it's very dated people find their ways they find the systems they find their solutions and it and it depends on the tour because it's quite cyclical the thing the cricket circuit so if i wanted to go on if i wanted to go to the ashes away in australia yeah take me back to then in 2006 when you took a load of people out then are you doing their their accommodation their flights their tickets is there anything else you're doing so so in those early days it was a little bit different it's it's very different now because cricket australia have a governing body the cricket australia travel office and you have to become an official partner of that particular entity in order to sell to the uk market back then you could source tickets you could find things so yes you would book a group allocation of flights So if you was looking at Melbourne and Sydney, which is maybe the blue ribbon part of the tour, you would book international flights flying into Melbourne on the 23rd or 24th, Christmas Day Melbourne, Christmas Day dinner, a few sort of add-ons functions, and then obviously tickets to the game and so on and so on with the domestic flight because these things sell out.

11:25Everybody wants to travel New Year's Eve, 31st, Melbourne to Sydney. So are these people all moving around together? so are you looking after them from the moment they land or are you looking after them for when they when you're in Heathrow and you're or wherever you're taking them to yes so in in in those early days when our numbers were quite small yes we would meet them at Heathrow really it would be me that would sort of go to Heathrow meet the group of people we'd be on the same flight we'd give that sort of very group tour experience um we would have transportation when we arrive that would take us to the respective hotel and then we would sort of move from there to um whatever we were doing and we we became busy fools really like we would we'd handhold quite a lot um but what i was really getting to with the cyclical market is every tour is a little bit different so where there's high demand so caribbean two flights a day yeah do seven seven seven three hundreds going in yeah and very limitedly at flights to get you around the respective islands things are a little bit different whereas if you were going to say india it's a lot more wide open there's a lot more accommodation there's a lot more choices depending on where you're going to and what you're doing so all the tours are very different okay how they operate and demand for example so which is which is the one that stands out for you the best tour that you ever been on i've always i've always come out of an india tour and loved it really loved it just the vibrancy the colors the sounds it's just it's just incredible the senses are just buzzing it's just a wild experience and what's he talking about 1.4 billion people who love cricket right Yeah, the atmosphere is different.

13:00It's just something about being in India that you always come home and you always feel sort of like incredible. It's just like just been a mind-blowing experience. The Ashes is for me a little bit vanilla because, I mean, it's like just going to a different city in the UK for a weekend and nothing really changes. It's all the same. Always been really fond of Sri Lanka. It's one of my favourite destinations. There's so much world-class stuff to do and see. Cape Town Newlands is obviously quite under Shr-Lanka's beautiful as well Shr-Lanka's incredible yeah absolutely love Shr-Lanka really fond of Shr-Lanka so yeah all of the tours have all got different flavours have all got different sort of experiences places to play places things to do things to see places to experience and what sort of margins are you working on a business like this are they quite low margins yeah so we really became the busy fool yeah I've got no doubt at all about that and we can talk about how that that's going to change but it depending it depends on the tour and it depends on the stock it depends on the inventory and it depends so if you was looking at cape town only for example which is hugely popular i think the last time we did a trip there before the pandemic we took i think we had 900 people 900 people on the ground just for cape town only oh god so we'd be obviously taking all the group start we're taking all the group flights we'd be block booking the hotels we were on it before anyone else we'd take all the inventory make sure everything's sort of lined up and then we'd sort of sell those tours.

14:27I mean, I don't know. I think it's changed massively really since what was then 2019, 2020 to what is today, 25, 26 in England are going out. The prices have doubled because the airfares have doubled. Yes. Supply and demand. Is that right? They've doubled since 2019. Yeah, yeah. So the prices of the tours are literally... So give an example of how much a tour would cost for one person, say going to South Africa for two weeks so this time around no before before so I'll get a comparison I think off the top of my head I can remember a Cape Town Durban trip we maybe charged something like two and a half to three thousand pounds say three G's for that so that would cover their flights accommodation they buy their own food yeah and the tickets to get into them yeah and we and we got very good at doing extra so we would be working you'd do add-ons would you well we not add-ons but we would exceed expectations.

15:21So we would, I don't know, contact Michael Atherton or we'd contact John Agnew or with new functions. We work with pretty much every living cricketer on the planet at some point or another to bring them in to do additional stuff with them. And yeah, just sort of like add on stuff. And if you now compare that, you're saying three grand back then, what sort of prices would you be having to look today to make it worthwhile? So looking at the market research for the operators that are operating to South Africa this winter Cape Town only, I think, starts at about$3 ,600. I'm pretty sure we charged$1 ,700 back then.

15:58Or five, six years ago. So it's changed much. Is that just because of accommodations gone up, hotels gone up, flights have gone up? I think flights and the oil thing, I think, maybe at the moment's had a bit of a bearing on that. But yeah, a Cape Town only flight, when I looked a few days ago, was like£1 ,600 to fly in and out from London. It's ridiculous. That's crazy, isn't it? Because the supplies they've got, you see, the tour operators. But once you're there, it's worth it. Well, once you're there, it's worth it, of course. Yeah, and it's bucket list stuff. I think there was 35 ,000 people travelled to Australia last winter for the Ashes.

16:2835 ,000 people got on an airfare from the UK. That's unreal, isn't it? I've been on a couple of British Lions tours in 2001 and 2013 when you've got 40 ,000 Scots, Irish, English and Welsh all moving around Australia like that. Yeah. And you cannot beat that feeling. Yeah. It's crazy. and cricket is one thing but as you say there's a whole world of sports travel and I mean the TAM on the global sports travel business is a trillion dollars it's massive so the demand for motorsport golf the Ryder Cup people want it people just want to get that experience I was there and that was a tagline we used for many years how do you beat how do you beat you'll always have people saying that's the package price and your battle there is people going, well, if they do their own accommodation, they do their own flights and get their own tickets, they could get it less.

17:22Like there's always that, isn't there? Where people are trying to research how you can get it cheaper and what have you. How do you combat that in business? Well, in the cricket travel business, you get a competitive advantage because you can get to know the information before the masses. So you can block book the seats to the desired destination with the airlines before it becomes common knowledge. Okay, before it even goes out to general public. So will you take a flight? Will you say, right, I'll take 200 seats. Well, they won't give you 200, but like if it was a Barbados only, again, a high demand tour, you would know that there's a BA flight, a Virgin Atlantic flight.

17:57They fly daily there, and you could go to Virgin. The test is between the third and whatever it is, seventh. You could say, right, on the 31st, the 1st, the 2nd, I want 50 seats on these days, these days, these days, and 50 seats coming home on these days, these days, these days. So you're taking a bit of a gamble on that? Well, you pay a deposit. Oh, you just pay the deposit. And they can release, can they release the seats if you don't take them? A certain percentage, 20%. And you get 20 % flexibility because people want to upgrade, people want premium, people want additional sort of deviance on those flight seats as well.

18:30So you get a little bit of leniency on what you can do with those seats. Amazing. What's your, when you look at all the countries that you've been to, which are your real standouts? And also, which is the ones you go, oh, I don't want to go back there. I didn't really enjoy that. I don't think I... so so when in the early days it was fun because you would have 30 50 100 people you'd get to know every name you'd get to know every individual you could you could sort of like enjoy yourself a little bit more you didn't have the pressure you didn't have the stock and i think as we scaled we um things became more serious you know like you was talking in millions of pounds of revenue you was talking of thousands of people that were going and logistics of I mean we were doing the MCC tours at that point as well and it just became huge really in terms of like the pressure you'd put yourself under because the book stopped to me and we'd have a team of maybe 20 tour managers and obviously the team in the office as well that was organizing those tours but but the it was just the numbers obviously increased so much and the fact the way we organized those tours so we was doing every level of detail and we was you have people that didn't get on and you'd have people who didn't like each other and you'd have people that um you know i mean needed wanted certain seats in a certain place or wanted a certain meal preference on an airline and we we went really deep into the detail to exceed their expectations in what we was trying to do so as the numbers increased the stress increased like we just we didn't we didn't work smarter we just worked harder we just took more people and had more to do and and over time like as you'd done the circuit it kind of like i've been there the first time you see the Taj Mahal it's the most incredible experience of your life and the fifth time you see it it's kind of like here i am again um so so there was a little bit of that going on undoubtedly within within the cricket travel side of things and um yeah but we we all of the destinations have something there's no doubt about it and to sort of pick one particular destination that was my absolute favorite yeah yeah i mean cape town newlands is always great i mean i always enjoy going to wellington in new zing yeah okay so that's a basin so it's a wonderful rainy wellington yeah windy wellington windy ways that's right yeah um but yeah it's um yeah i've kind of done it all seen it all and And I mean, I'm blowing a bit of smoke, I guess.

20:53But one of the most knowledgeable brains in the world in terms of cricket travel, the hospitality suite, what to do, how to get there, how to see it. Well, you're the go-to man. Anyone around the world will know, Ian, the go-to for anything to do with travelling with cricket worldwide. In cricket, yeah. So I guess any ground in the country, really, I could sort of pop my head in and there's thousands of people that would sort of know me and know my background, know what we've done, know how we've presented things. So tell me, like, I want to go into the detail of the business. So when you're starting year one, you're probably having a little toy around, a little play around, where we go in this, what we're doing.

21:28When did, in that 17-year period before you sold it, what sort of pressures were you under? Well, as we started, so foreign currency was one thing because you effectively become a foreign currency trader because you're putting out forward contracts on what the Australian dollar is going to do between now and then. so I was very naive and green to forex so and over time you start paying attention then to the stock market to the economy what's going on with respective fields so so you have to say well we were going to turn over x number of million this year how do we then forecast that what's going to happen what data is going to come out how strong is the pound is it going to weaken or strengthen against the czar or against this dollar or against the Australian dollar so so you have to sort of learn around the economy side of things so you effectively become a trader yeah because you're looking at charts now and you're learning technicals and you're learning things like that um and you're sort of doing your due diligence in terms of what's coming up and what may change things so there was so many different learnings from you know what i mean doing it um and then it's all about relationships and i mean i've sort of dug out i don't even know 2 000 business cards in the last few weeks of people I've dealt with and the different destination management companies, the different airlines, the different contacts, the different relationships, the different hotels.

22:49It was 17 years of my life learning everything around all of the respective tours. And then you have things like the World Travel Market where you can go along and meet these people face-to-face and form relationships with them. A lot of these people are friends now, people I've worked with for many, many years. And where were you based then? Where was your HQ? So Melton Moe, very Leicestershire. So we started off at home, I guess, as all businesses do. And then we scaled to a place over near me, Borough Court. And then we, 2011, 12, we outgrown that. We needed more staff. We moved over to the Wartnaby Estate.

23:25There was a historically owned Lord King of Wartnaby, and his son's now got the estate. And we was very happy there. They let us name our office the pavilion. And we were really, really happy there. And we scaled there. and I guess back to your question a little bit 2016 we were breaking the Excel spreadsheets, we were breaking all of the formulas and we needed something because we again, we were getting too big for our own boots and we actually went out and we built some CRM custom software that was specific for what we wanted it to do so customers could now log into their own portal, they could make their own payments it would also update.

24:01It's funny we're talking about this now because this is the norm but when you're talking like 2016 like you would have been fresh we're all fresh to working out these systems and trying to put things in place to streamline your business right? Yeah absolutely and there's all these little nuances like atoll certificates you'll get an atoll. What does that stand for? Air travel organisers licence. Okay so you need that to allow you to be able to take people abroad? To sell flights yeah it's protection law for the UK consumer market so the civil aviation authority they want all passengers to travel with an atoll license so if anything was to happen to the supplier then there's protection there as far as the um on the consumer is concerned how long did it take you to get to a million pound town over do you reckon four years five years yeah something like that something like that we we didn't have any name we didn't have any brand we didn't have any reputation you've got all these big established companies that have been operating for many many years and we came into it naively i guess and inexperienced and we just hustled just figuring it out we just kept turning up we just kept um putting the tours together we were consistent we kept over delivering we kept exceeding expectations we'd get the post-tour feedback through we were 99 happy customers which is way beyond the average within the travel industry and we kept doing a good job basically we kept sort of doing making sure we did everything right and uh and yeah kept building on our reputation Were there any times in your business when you get that email from someone who's massively complained about a tour?

25:34You're like, oh, I've got to deal with this now.

25:39There was a few instances. There was a few customers that behaved inappropriately, pitching wine off the dinner table and things that were commented on. And then you've got to pick up the phone and have that sort of like, you know what I mean? Like you've been naughty sort of thing. and there was a little bit of that. There was a few people came to me over the years where they'd heard something or someone that says something inappropriate, and obviously these are adults, but at times... Back to the kids on tour. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So there was a little bit of that which you had to pick up and sort out, and obviously as we scaled, things happened.

26:18We had one instance in Grenada where on the same day we had three people hospitalized. eyes we had one lady had slipped on her on her walking in the hotel broke her hip so badly that she had to be air ambulance home sort of a million pounds worth of repatriation on a private jet with another guy was chasing someone on the beach that robbed a bag and ran into a wall and broke his wrist and and and and then and then yeah like life you know like numbers of people you know we had one gentleman sadly passed away he was on a new zealand tour Well, he died on tour. Yeah, he was out there on his own, actually.

26:55What, heart attack, or? That's a good question. Well, I think a combination of things. But, yeah, he sadly passed away. And then that last tour we did to Cape Town, we had another lady in hospital. They had a triple R bypass overnight, and then there was insurance issues with that. So, yeah, life happens. Yeah, of course. You know, when you say volume of numbers, you were the festival, things happen. That's just the way it is. So that just comes as part of the territory. but we yeah there was all manner of different stuff and your team when you're back here when you grew did you have a business partner at the start you went 50-50 with someone or so I read a book that year called the Beermat Entrepreneur the Beermat Entrepreneur okay and what that book spoke about any good well it was then because it spoke about cornerstones and if and the idea or the logic was you're better off having 20 % of something that works than having 100 % of nothing nothing and it said who's the best person you know in marketing who's the best person you know in accounting who's the best person you know with web and development technical and seo and all these type of attributes cornerstones of a successful business and and i literally went to these people i went to steve i went to ravo to create mine i said right you you've done your accountancy degree you can be the financial director and you've done your marketing courses and degree you can be the marketing director and i put all of these cornerstones in place and i sold them the idea and this is why I think it's going to work.

28:21And those five guys formed the initial business. All on 20 % each? All on 20 % each. So we built the business 20 % each. I was the guy driving it. But if I needed a website or I needed some SEO or we needed an email send or whatever it was, I'd go to Craig and he'd manage that. And if we needed something drafting, Steve was good at that and meticulous. So we built the business with 20 % equity between five shareholders off the bat. But you were the main driver, were you? yeah very much so did you at any point in that time thinking because it always happens in business you give away shares you're thinking well i'm doing loads more work than you what are you doing for your money what you're doing for there must have been a point where you looked around and said he's not pulling his weight as much as i am can we have a chat there was a little bit of that but i was i know i can't or then i couldn't do everything because i'm not an accountant and i'm no good with finances and i'm not the guy that knew how to do seo and meta tags and things in those days as well So I knew I needed these people, and I guess I stuck with it.

29:21And what happened over a period of time is four of those five guys actually come full-time to work for the business. We were like full-time as the too many chiefs, not enough Indian analogies probably for where we were at that stage. And then we went into the ashes, I think it was 10-11, and the foreign currency went against. 2010, 2011. Yeah, and the foreign currency went against us. and that tour, which should have been a hugely successful tour financially, wasn't because the currency had just gone against us and we'd gone gung-ho and brought a load of forward contracts and it just didn't work out for us.

29:57Is that purely, obviously it's a numbers game, right? Is that purely, was the currency or was it, it might have been, it can't have just been currency that ruined that whole year, was it? Well, it was a combination of things. but we'd come off that tour and we basically what should have been there was no money left basically we were back to ground zero we'd had like six years of being in business and we should have had money in the kitty and money in the pot and there was none and Martin, Rob and Craig decided to walk away from the business and Steve and I took the business on full time as 50 % shareholder did you have to pay those boys anything?

30:39yeah we paid them you had to give them a drink and say thank you Yeah, they got paid off properly and that was all dealt with and formalised and they were happy to walk away. How did that make you feel at that point, knowing that it's gone from five to two and now you're a 50 % shareholder and driving it? Did it feel fresh? Well, I'd just come off. So Steve and I had been in Australia for the ashes. So we'd had a really successful tour that year in terms. None of this impacted the customer experience. So this was all sort of internal. but we'd had a hugely successful tour I mean the popularity was all time high the customer experience was all time high things were working really well as far as we were concerned and even though things had not worked out financially we knew we had a really good brand and we knew we had a really good brand presence and a wonderful reputation wonderful reputation and we knew what was coming up as well so we had the Shirling Couture and South Africa Couture maybe cutting around the corner So at that point, we did an advanced registration for Sri Lanka, and we had, I don't know what it was, 200 people send us£100 in the post.

31:46You know what I mean? Just to lock in. Just to lock in, just to make sure we was okay financially for the next bit for deposits for the Sri Lanka talk. So it just played out that way, really. And Steve is great. He's really meticulous. You know what I mean? He was a great business partner to have at the time. and we used to bounce stuff off each other and then we very quickly with the numbers increased from that day on we got ducks in a row, we became more organised we structured ourselves better we were very more accountable for what we were doing and how we were doing it and who we was working with and how we recorded stuff and we sharpened our pencil quite a lot because we were probably a little bit slapdash This is great to hear all this, this is real This is real business Anyone listening out there, listening to the founder, this is real this isn't like fluff everyone's amazing everyone's amazing we are all just winging it we're all giving it a good go we're all learning as we go along and we're constantly tweaking and this is a beautiful story of hearing you just constantly tweaking to get it to a point where you go do you know what now we're in a really nice position but people think you can do business in three years you can't you know you're what six seven years in now and you've learned all the lessons not all of them but a high majority of lessons here to go do you know what now we're ready to go again and that's why I asked the question did you feel like you had a fresh start when it was just two of you Yeah, maybe we did.

33:03Maybe we did. Maybe we did. We were sat in that office. It was a stressful time. I mean, the credit cards were coming out and things were not as gravy as they should have been. And we were, obviously, there were some concerns there. But I mean, I've always believed in this. I mean, I don't quit, you know, like it's, I mean, and I'd seen firsthand everything on the ground in terms of the popularity. So it was easy for me to make that decision really and take on board what I needed to do. and yes the other guys have gone and still friends and know all the guys now there's no bad blood or anything like that but they had other things they had other professions they had other opportunities to be working on so and they've all gone off and been successful in their own respective did you take any bank loans out on that journey you never took any bank loans well we used the house as a guarantor at one point um for what was that for so we must have had some kind of loan but no i don't remember taking a bank okay and then what was the point when you're like right we need to take the credit cards out to pay what were you paying then for the credit cards i think we even paid some hotels at some point okay just like yeah okay yeah wonderful yeah we did what we had to do just to make sure that there was no impact on the customer journey at all really so um but yeah we yeah you just hustle you just you fight for what you believe in right yeah you just turn up and just get it right and keep at it keep out it yeah and i knew what we'd built and i still believed in and I saw what it could become and what it was becoming and I had sort of a first-hand view on that as well.

34:30Did you have in mind as you were growing this business that one day you wanted to get an exit and sell it? So 2017 maybe, 2018, things were going really well then. I mean, we were well into the millions of turnover. I mean, the numbers were thousands per annum on respective tours. Yeah, people. We'd flirted with other stuff as well. so we we had a dabble at athletics um we did some stuff for boxing we did some lions yeah yeah um we did a tour to south africa for the rugby as well so we'd flirted with some other stuff um but but yeah things were going well and we were sort of like scaling rapidly and then steve and i had a chat because my kids had arrived then and and like being away so much as i was and um and and we we did we engaged with benchmark i think yeah um and we we we got some valuations our ebitda was good everything was good about the business we could have sold it then and we would have got a decent exit then um but we i guess whatever we were 37 38 years old um decided that let's carry on with it for a bit more because we can keep going we run in a salary i guess and we We rent dividends and things were coming nicely along.

35:49And we just stuck with it and we carried on moving forward and our popularity carried on increasing and we carried on taking more numbers. We'd probably got 40 % of the UK market share by that point. 40 %? 40%. We were directing, we got to the point where we were talking to government level authorities to dictate which games happened in which order in the Caribbean because they were saying, right, where do you - What numbers you bring in? Yeah. Yeah, okay. Because should we go Barbados first, or should we go Antigua first, or should we go Grenada first? Well, don't go Grenada first because you can't get the uplift.

36:22We can get more flights. We can charter more stuff to get into Grenada from Barbados. And we were, yeah, literally talking. I remember I went to the Cricket World Cup in Barbados in 2007. Was that right? T20. Yeah. Yeah, they won it. England won it. Yeah, 2007. I remember being in the stand and we took six lads. And I was like, I remember saying to the lads, I was like, lads Barbados fancy it they're like yeah fancy it I said put a grand in my bank they all put a grand I said we're going to go there for like five days got all these tickets booked it went boys we're going for 14 nights so then they had to tell their missuses we're all going for 14 nights because Dodgers already booked the flight it's gone from 5 to 14 I had a situation in 2010 where we organised a small group to go to the World Cup in South Africa when England should have won it with the Vuvuzelas what we We called them the booze booze sailors.

37:17Because they took a yard. But yeah, so we took a group down to South Africa, working with a guy in Australia who had managed, he was an official tour operator, and we'd managed to put a little package together and a group of us went down there. But I was at the Glastonbury Festival on the weekend when they played Germany, knowing that I was traveling to South Africa on the Wednesday, knowing that it was a team-specific England ticket and obviously got knocked out. So we flew down there. there were quarterfinal, semifinal, final and no England. Didn't matter. Didn't matter. Of course it did. We had the best time ever really.

37:52We played golf everywhere when we were travelling around. We had a minibus and we just, yeah, we just literally went on a wild goose chase and we were quite flexible really because we were having a good time in Cape Town and the sun was shining so we said we were staying in Cape Town. Happy days. That's what we did in Bobo's, just stayed there and just partied and had fun. Yeah. Pretty amazing. I want to go back to that 2017 period there. You're thinking, at the moment, you're growing the business, everything's looking good, you're getting mass numbers there's more pressure on you personally there's probably more financial pressure there's more looking back going I've got my kids at home and my missus is going why are you travelling again all these things were going on when you had your vision of wanting to sell to get an exit what multiple of the net profit were you looking for back then?

38:32I can't remember what the percentages were of the EBITDA but we were getting valuations in the region of about 2 million I think to exit for at that point so it was a reasonable it was a nice do you know people people talk about these 20 million valuations and selling out for 50 million hold on if you can sell a business for 2 million quid and split between two back then you're probably playing 10 % tax because the entrepreneur's relief tax was 10 % that's a lovely lump and I think a lot of people seem to think you've got to be selling for copious amounts of millions to be a success you can actually go and sell a business and change someone's life by selling it for 750 ,000 pounds 500 ,000 pounds it can take you to pay your mortgage off it can take all you're building take the pressures off you know i think there's too much talk out there about these massive numbers well yeah maybe um and and that was enough really like i'm i'm i'm not sort of an extravagant you're not flashed no no no i'm not very modestly i'm a sort of working class background don't have any sort of expectations or like like nice things but like i don't require anything i don't need anything so yeah we we could have should have maybe and obviously didn't know about the pandemic that was coming up and all of the dramas associated to that but we we decided that we would carry on and we would um try to give ourselves a little bit more downtime and work a little bit less and be a bit more responsible with the hours that never happened run your own business now we we just got busier we just took more people we just carried on compounding the workload compounding the detail compounding the stress and uh and and just carried on really at peak in all your years of building this business what year was your peak and how much was your turnover roughly so i think the peak in terms of numbers was that last south africa tour we did i think we had 1 800 customers across one tour paying a rough average amount of probably 4 000 okay okay in terms of turnover the ashes dictates that i mean like we had one guy bless him he's not with us now but um we had one guy he'd be none of that business class rubbish i want first class only um and i want to be looking at sydney opera house on new year's eve in the penthouse and i want hospitality and i want to i want to fly myself up to flinders valley because he had a pilot's license um and i want to do all of these amazing things and you literally toss it all up at 40 50 000 pounds and he was in oh yeah like yeah i'll have something yeah i'll have some of that um so so you'll get that extreme yeah um and you know we had some extremely affluent people travel with us over the years that have been very successful at the highest levels people like lauren mclaurin i guess travel with us who was the chief executive at vodafone yeah um and uh tesco's yeah um and we had some actors we had people like kevin waitley travel with us it was inspector morse we had manda barry from coronation street it was also Cleopatra as well I think so we so we had you know I mean people were sort of coming along and then we were doing quite a lot of the players families as well at the end so you have Graham Cook he's Alistair Cook's father yeah numerous different conversations with numerous different people and they'd come on the tours or they'd be part of it because we were offering something that that they were you ever were you ever part of the Barmy Army so the Barmy Army is a good one so the Barmy Army has changed an awful lot and I'm not entirely up to date I actually messaged Chris the other week actually who's crazy the owner of barmy well so the original founders um dave peacock and paul burnham yeah so they were the guys that put it all together with atherton stores for australia in 94 who i know both personally yeah michael atherton no um yeah um and so they they put that it was it was the british media that called these guys barmy for going around the world watching England lose every opportunity.

42:30And the English being the English just started singing Barmy Army. And the rest was history. And I think they printed some t-shirts up. And they obviously trademarked it and did what they did with it. And they flirted with their own organised tours. And they still do their own organised tours. Yeah, I was about to say, I think they do, yeah. My details might not be entirely correct, but I believe Matthew Root has got involved, who's Joe's father, Matt Root. And there's been some acquisitions that have happened recently. But Paul Burnham, when he was running it, I'd had dozens of meetings with him because he wanted us to run the Barmy Army Tours.

43:04Okay. And we always, because the Barmy Army clientele is a little bit different, it wasn't our clientele. So did we want to marry the two up? And the Barmy Army Tours did go to Gulliver's for a while as well. But I think they've now gone off on their own and they're doing their own thing. And I spoke to George DeBell the other day at the Wisdom, at the Cricketer even. And they're doing really well, I think. They've got themselves organised and they've got good numbers and they had a hugely successful Ashes tour, I think. I tell you what, I love seeing the bar on the army on telly. Oh, the crackers.

43:36Amazing. The whole stadium of just English fans just singing and drinking beers and smiling and having fun. Well, I come from a football background. I grew up as a football guy. Dad took me to Leicester City, Leicester City through and through. I used to love going to Filbert Road. Filbert Street. Filbert Street, sorry, back in the day. Well, that's where it started. Members down. Loved it. Low level tier when we were absolutely terrible. Six, seven, eight thousand people there. That's right. I used to go West Ham away up at Leicester and you always knew it'd be a good game. Yeah. Up in the corner though.

44:09We got a few coins thrown at you. But yeah, no. So through and through, my dad used to take me to the away games and I'd kind of grew up with football. Yeah. And my granddad used to take me to Grace Road to watch Leicestershire and there was always a little fascination with cricket. Okay. and i always loved the cricket and and as a this will lead on to the to the barmy army story but but as a young child um i grew up you remember when we used to have sky tv downstairs and it used to be wired up by the loft yeah yeah in the bedrooms upstairs and when the ashes was on the um i used to lie awake all night with the volume at a certain level that if there was a wicket it'd wake me up yeah kind of find out what's going on and as a 13 14 year old lad all i ever wanted to do was to go to australia to watch the cricket and all i ever that was the only ambition i had was i was going to go watch this cricket tour and and as soon as i had that opportunity at 18 i was on a flight on my own to go into sydney and a family friend picked me up housed me did whatever and he got me tickets on that opening day at the scg and it was the day that Darren Goff got his hat trick.

45:18Oh, I remember, yeah. So it was, who was it? It was Ian Healy. Wicked Keeper. Was he the keeper? Yeah, he was. He was, wasn't he? Colin Miller. I want to say Stuart McGill. Yeah. I might be wrong. But what happened, we had these best seats, because with cricket, it's straight down the bowler's arm. So you can see, yeah. Best seats in the house. And we had these best seats in the Churchill stand. And Goffey had got his hat trick. and what was going on to the right of me on Yabba Hill in Sydney was thousands of these Brits that you're talking about. And there was this carnival atmosphere. And it was just like there was singing and partying and dancing and fancy dress and dressed up.

46:01And it was like something you would have at the festival site. But all in good vibes, right? All in good vibes. There's no attitude. There's no trouble. It's just good wit. It's banter. It's fun. and I went and sat on the hill and and like experienced this a little bit during the afternoon session and I was like I want a bit more of that so we'd gone back to staying in Wollongong which is about an hour away down the coast from Sydney and we'd gone back up to sit I got home I was like I'm going back yeah like next day I was on the train on my own back there 11 o 'clock in the morning scooter in and 32 degrees and like and and every single thing I'd ever experienced in football this just was incredible yeah like this was like the apex and it was really that trip and and that that triggered you and and and all the things that happened that sort of put these seeds of i want to do a little bit more um but at that point i was yeah anyway that's quality so going back to 2017 2018 2019 all our businesses whether i'm in the festival world whatever anyone was seemed to touch really in 16 17 18 19 you could see businesses doing this and everyone was on a high until the pandemic hit and then it just squashed everything yeah more so your business being a travel business when the pandemic hit was that the start of you going oh no how did you feel at the time what went on with your business and tell me the journey so we were scaling yeah things were going really really well and we'd had with that winter was a particularly busy winter because of the the South Africa tour.

47:37So you would be selling, you'd be working on a South Africa tour 12 months in advance, getting the stock, getting the inventory, building the website, putting all your ducks in a row ready to sell. And we sold extremely well. We'd got extremely good sort of demand. We'd had a hugely successful tour. We'd got all the teams, all the tour managers, all the logistics, all the sightseeing, all the add-ons, everything sort of pulled together. And then we traveled to South Africa. I flew straight into Cape Town. I think I had Christmas Day at home with the family, Boxing Day, into Cape Town.

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49:18And it was just straight off the bat. It was seven days a week or the whole time I was there. it was the candle at both ends so you're up at first cracker sparrows but whatever comes along and every night of the week there was something there was a function with the mcc there was a welcome party there was a q a with mark butcher there was something going on here with them we had boycott at the kelvin grove we had aggers doing something and a talk here so every single night there was a function and that night would be 10 11 12 o 'clock at night before you'd switch off and then you would be up in the morning at it again 17 messages overnight and this transfer has not turned up and this has gone wrong or he's moaned about this and they're not happy with the room there so so and then she's in hospital and they're so you're constantly firefighting constantly yeah and i went into that tour i guess probably like with dread okay maybe okay um because there was so much attention to detail with all of the the very finer details were complex and and you were the mastermind of a lot of me personally but like as a team we were the mastermind of everything we'd organized all the respective transfers and everything in between and and then yeah it played out like there was nothing wrong everyone had the hospitality suites everybody had the best seats everyone had the western province cricket club and all the different tickets but the tour was an overwhelming success but soon as the Cape Town test finished we were going they want to go off to Victoria Falls we had a group go up to Namibia we had a group go on the blue train of Centurion we had a group go over to the battlefields we had groups go along the garden route.

51:05Logistically this sounds this sounds you've got to be a certain breed to handle all this. The complexity of it but we but we what we did have by then is we built this CRM system so so this crm system helped us with stock with inventory i understand all that but i'm talking the pressures on you personally yeah a lot knowing that your standards are so high and your reputation's on the line and you're you're known as one of the best travel companies in the uk if not in the world for what you do yep that's a serious amount of pressure on your shoulders so how did you personally deal with that pressure because as you know i own a festival we 30 000 people a thousand staff on the day you've got all these moving parts that can go wrong yeah how do you personally deal with it how do i deal with it then it's probably come home and have half a bottle of wine yeah okay like that was how i dealt with it then yeah um things have changed significantly since then like i'm not saying i don't drink but like i i'm i'm the fittest i've ever been really i look after myself at the gym did you know that the pressure was putting pressure on your heart at the time with the stresses of going on like you do you like you are putting increasingly pressure on yourself as an individual with scaling the business with more people with more numbers with more attention to detail on what you're putting through so there was there was i was aware that i was overweight i was drinking and like i was not looking after myself and then going into this tour with dread and there is a social angle on the tour as well so you've got these every night every night yeah of course every night and yeah there was a lot of that and i wasn't looking after myself particularly well but and at that point obviously the pandemic news was creeping up as well we was aware this thing was going on the news was getting stronger the um everywhere you looked you sort of there was something else sort of scaremongering you in terms of what was going on in the world um but yeah that that tour was hugely successful from a customer point of view yeah so that was It was 2019, 2020.

53:05Was that the last big tour before the pandemic hit? Yeah. So I can't remember the exact numbers, but we had 500 people in Port Elizabeth following the Cape Town test. I was in Port Elizabeth and then came home straight after Port Elizabeth. But it was literally 24 hours at home back in the office because we had a Sri Lanka tour to deliver. Back under pressure. How did your missus deal with this? How was your relationship at the time? Well, I divorced my first wife. um so in this journey um that had all came about i was at this point for south africa i was single so um there was there was no sort of immediate stress there um i've always done what i can so i have the kids every weekend in the week and um was the was the pressure of your occupation your job put strain on your relationship i think so yeah i think so and and the company always came first like i know that sounds bad but but it did um and and if i needed to be away i missed kids birthdays i missed christmases i missed all sorts of stuff during those early years okay um because no one else was going to do it like it like this tour needed me and it needed me to be there and it needed me to make it happen so yes it undoubtedly was an issue um and it was part of the journey that we was on and if you had your time again you'd do things differently and it's only when the kids come along that you sort of realize and i mean and when the pandemic and obviously we'll talk about what happened there that that it was um yeah like the sacrifices you had made was it worth it was it worth it and the answer to that would have been no absolutely but you don't know at the time you don't know the time you do and also you're building a business trying to bring in money to have a knife like nice lifestyle but it sounds to me like i've got obviously well connected with a lot of professional sportsmen and you're following that sportsman's lifestyle that life obviously they're not boozing at night time but if you're going on tour you're going on tour for three weeks or you're going away again and sports players whether it's rugby or football are constantly away I was away four or five months of the year most years because we do inspection trips reconnaissance trips did you get a buzz though like I'm on a plane again I'm going to a new hotel I'm going to do this or did that buzz start to wear off when I'm travelling I'm free I'm the happiest that's me I'm a free soul and when I'm free, I don't know where I'm going today.

55:21I'm going somewhere new. I'm travelling on the bus, meeting new people, going to different hotels, networking. I'm really happy in that environment. I don't know what's around the corner, so to speak. And I think that's the way we desire to be. On the flip side, I think when there was one trip to the West Indies, I did 17 flights, travelling around different islands, some days, three flights. When you were on the West Indies, you did 17 internal flights, what, to Grenada and Antigua? On a reconnaissance trip, yeah. so we'd go and like literally just be here there everywhere flying in flying out meeting a few people going there meeting the people going there that's someone's dream by the way i know it is yeah and i've got a and it's probably your dream as well like that knowing that you could around the islands i have no regrets at all but i have a dj pal and friends in that world as well and right and and you see the here's me in front of 3 000 people on a saturday night on the stage yeah but what they don't show you is the nine hour transatlantic flight every friday night to go and play that two-hour set to fly back on the Monday morning.

56:19So it's the bit that everyone sees. And I think every time you'd speak to anyone, everyone would say the same thing, like you've got the best job in the world. But they don't see all of the… They don't see behind the scenes. That's the same. Oh, you're a festival owner. It must be lovely. They don't see all the pressures building up. We work 362 days a year to earn all your money on three days of the year. That's risk. And you only profit on the last day. Yeah. Well, I've tried club promoting as well. and I had a music brand and we had a record label and I played around with a few little things over the years as well.

56:49Same thing, we booked, I don't know, Brandon Block for a night or Randy Farley or whoever. Blocko lives around the corner. Yeah. So you'd put these events together and you'd advertise it locally because these things were in Meltemont or Eiffel. And you'd advertise it locally, but you had no idea on who was going to turn up. Were you going to break even or was it this whole thing just cost you a chunk of money? So tell me on that 17 year period when did you actually sell the company? 2022 And why did you sell it? So the pandemic it has incredibly hard So we'd got back off that South Africa tour and the world was imploding We had hundreds of people either on the ground in Sri Lanka or we have hundreds due to depart on the Monday and the Tuesday when I'd heard through members of the press that England were returning home.

57:53So we knew the tour was not going to take place. We spent a couple of days calling the hundreds to say, this is not going to happen from a cricket perspective, but travel arrangements are still valid. Do you want to still travel? And the majority did. And we presume speak with your travel insurance and see where you stand with it. And then on that Sunday morning, I'd got the children and Boris Johnson did that. 23rd of March. There you go. Press announcement to say all foreign nationals need to come home now. If you don't, we're not going to be responsible for you. And I rang the ex-wife and said, like, I need to drop the kids off.

58:38I need to go to the office now. and Steve and I straight up to the office. It was a Sunday. Everything was out of hours globally. Sri Lankan Airways had pulled all the flights off the GDS. So we couldn't amend anything. The only option we had right there on that Sunday with these customers on the ground in Sri Lanka was put them on the next available flight home. And it meant booking new flights. Who had to pay for them? We did. We did. We spent hundreds of thousands. we put everyone on the next available flight home and if he was in business, you flew home in business. We just did what was right.

59:14We did what was right. We've always done that. So at that point there, you're thinking this could absolutely cripple our business in a very short space of time. I don't think we had time to think about it like that. We were like, customer safe. Nobody knew the severity. Nobody really knew anything. All you knew was the headlines. And the world was imploding. and it was imploding fast at that point it was it was you were picking up what you were picking up and it was like you need to get home now and we contacted all the tour managers on all these some of them are in candy and off watching elephants and safaris and whatever and we were like next available flight and we just booked it we didn't think about it we just booked them we just got them on the flight and we got them home um and that was on the sunday it was a complete mess um we was in the office till well gone midnight and then monday morning i was in the office again at 5 a.m um and at nine o 'clock because we had an automated phone system the phones come on at nine nine o 'clock phone's ringing can i get a refund i'm not traveling and what a lot of people forget with sri lanka is they'd had the easter sunday terrorist attacks 12 months before so tourism as a tourist island was at an all-time low following yeah following the terrorist attacks and the what were the terrorist attacks they happened at three or four hotels cinnamon grand um maybe the moment pick but yeah there were four hotels three hotels on easter sunday um got blown up hundreds of tourists died um at the main colombo hotels which was literally 12 months before the pandemic so tourism just took an absolute nosedive into sri lanka following these attacks and then this england tour was going and it was the shining light it was the thing that was going to bring people back into the economy but monday but monday morning at nine o 'clock the phone was alive people wanting a refund and we were like well look like give us chance to breathe i don't we don't know what's going on here we've not even spoken to the agents in sri lanka but everything was paid for every hotel every ticket every trip every excursion every add-on everything you could ever imagine had been paid for and you're talking off the top of my head i'll say a half a million pounds worth of cost maybe more and um and we obviously not got that money because we'd paid for everything yeah and and these guys were due to depart and they were on the phone monday morning my travel insurance company says i need to contact you for a refund so the insurance companies deflected the liability okay and we were like well we've got type terms and conditions that everyone signed and things like force majeure and whatever were in those conditions and we thought that this would all get resolved and get a ducks in a row and it didn't because there was a piece of european legislation a traveled a package directives act that was still in play which trumped uk legislation and the short story was every single person was entitled to a full refund within 14 days legally so we'd got all of this exposure no sign of any money um Sri Lanka actually went into administration um their currency collapsed they had IMF bailouts and we'd got this dilemma where these people were like we need our money and a lot of people were very accommodating so a lot of people were very sympathetic of the situation we'll just give it to us when you've got it sort of thing but there was a lot of people that were like I want my money now and at that point then obviously there was no more tours um we kept the offices obviously this will blow over it won't last and and that was sort of march april may june and and we were paying our staff full we got their furlough but as you know limited company directors got no help nothing and and it started initially i guess after that initial phase i was like i can go fishing for a bit and i can do these things that i enjoy and spend my time wisely but that soon started filtering out and that as we went into that summer i don't know what the burn rate was but sort of 30 000 pounds a month that we were still paying out on offices and things and we like say we were upping the guy's salary doing things to make sure they were all okay and looked after and we'd spent all this money out on these flights we still hadn't had the refund from Sri Lanka we'd refunded however many people that were demanding it because legally we had to and there was just this realization that like everything you've ever worked for like you might as well just burn a million pounds in the car park yeah because it was just evaporated yeah and then steve and i as we got to the late summer we're like we can't keep just paying for the offices and paying for the rents and paying for the costs and paying for the infrastructure and paying for everything we need to do something about it because we're just spending money for old road and we reluctantly hardest decision i guess we made was phone the guys and say we're gonna lay you off we're gonna make you redundant how many people are there six um and they had families they had children yeah of course they had all the responsibilities as well but like and obviously that comes when you make the redundancy that you you pay them off with the correct terms and salaries and things that's more money shelled out more money shelled out and then there was a conversation that we probably had a runway of Steve and I continually because without this money still not in from Sri Lanka like there's probably 18 months of runway here like even without the offices and we we moved the office out of the the big office into a storage unit and I actually emptied it the other day actually it's full of memories um that we we we um yeah we moved the office out i mean i sat i remember sat in that office and jeff from the estate comes in and i'm just sat there crying yeah i was crying like why is this what what is going on you know and there's like signed stuff everywhere and memorabilia and memories and like and there was no explanation it wasn't like we'd done anything wrong or it was just something outside of our control and obviously didn't get any government help and we were just left to rot basically pick up the pieces yeah totally and we we went into low power mode so the whole business we we streamlined back we got rid of the offices we got rid of the expenditure we got rid of the staff um and it was random as you like my mum had sent me a photo out of nowhere and i wasn't even like i'd even thought about it of a narrowboat for sale um at pillings lot marina just up the road from me and it wasn't a lot of money i was like hang on a minute I'm not listening in this I'm not going to be doing anything with my life and I've got to be being told to stay at home and do nothing I'm going to maybe you can go and live on a boat and move my house and and and and and I was like the juices started going I was like hang on a minute and I ended up renting out my house because I had no department you needed it yeah yeah whatever I went and not that boat but I brought another boat and I brought it and and I went and like literally the whole way of the world had been lifted okay good i just went into like switched off mode and the business went into low power mode and like the rods were coming out and just enjoying i was just like sat there i'm in a camera watching the sun sunset and barbecuing and meeting new people and did you ever get to a point at that point you're going i need to sell this company someone needs to take this on because we've created a brand we've created something who can take this on i'd no not at that point it was just in low power mode nothing was happening and what year did you sell it then so 2022.

1:06:46Okay. So Steve called me randomly out of the blue and said that the MD of Gulliver wants a meeting with us. Was that Sam? No, no. So Sam Stewart I think. I think it was, yeah, okay. But yeah, Neil, Simon contacted us and said to go and have a meeting. Okay, we'll go see what he's got to say. And we'd had a chat. And in that conversation are you considering selling or would you sell and i was like literally the weight of the world had been lifted i was on this boat and i was hadn't got a care in the world seeing the kids plenty i'd been homeschooling and it was geared up and all that stuff and we got into that and i was quite just content just yeah just literally just went back to grassroots and and i was traveling around and didn't know what was around the corner and that free spirit lifestyle was back within me if you like and um yeah so that meeting moved on to another meeting and they they made us an offer and i won't say publicly what it was because it wasn't anywhere close to what it was worth um but we accepted it yeah okay just went just get rid of it okay just done like we haven't got to go through the process of did you have to go with it no what were they buying well they brought the database which was 17 000 people i think um they brought the brand the website the ip they brought everything basically and they merged, well they ran with that name right up until very recently and they were doing tours with our tour managers So they've embedded everything in and have they taken the name away now and you just don't ask?

1:08:20Yeah, so Gulliver Sports Travel is the main company and they've brought the Halversack brand into the Gulliver's brand And what are you doing today? So I had a wild journey so the first part of the pandemic i just told you i sat on the boat and i did nothing yeah and then i was not particularly happy with the way my life was going in the sense i was getting fat i was drinking um and i was like i need to sort my out i need to get myself back on track and signed up with a great guy in leicester so shout out to helder who hb health club and he won't train you unless you're serious serious yeah and he and i went i had an interview with him and he was like right okay blah blah blah and he goes deep on everything he goes deep in what you're eating nutrition yeah like he wants to know like you've got the morning wood you know what i mean like he's like he's on it did you say have you got morning wood well but he's like he wants to know what you should take life like yeah he wants to know what shit looks like yeah he wants to know everything about you and and and but he but he's also like he's like in the morning like screen time blue blocking glasses okay he's he's on it yeah and i went and i and i listened to him and i was like if i'm gonna pay you the money i'm gonna i'm gonna train with you and it was and and and that journey i lost a quarter of my body weight um and i learned for the first time in my life to lift i learned how to do things properly i learned how nutrition i learned loads of different sort of details and on sort of life skills and and it was an incredible journey and and and and that really sort of set me up and and it was at that point i'd had a bit of a punt on a crypto project i took a few hundred project pounds into a project called luna and that project had sky rocketed in price and that was now worth a chunk of change and i'd walked the did you sell that no because luna i'll tell you i'll tell you because this is this is a good part of the story really but so so luna had skyrocketed and i was like how can i help the community how can i do something so you put what a couple of under quid what did skyrocket to i don't know probably about 50 000 okay um and and the good numbers well better than nothing yeah and um and it went to zero again by the way yeah i know yeah um but but i'd walk the pennine way with my dj friend jennyx and um we'd spend 12 days in each other's back pocket slogging out 30 miles a day doing eye on 300 miles and um really got under the hood with obviously i'm sitting here telling my sob story of the pandemic but musicians of the world they're equal equally as bad like they got told to stay at home and do twitch streams and and like literally try and keep their audience happy and they make no money out producing music and the spotify analogy of a million streams but next to nothing in terms of revenue and and anyway the short story is i'd had this idea in your field that it was at the time where music artists who were sort of getting into the blockchain and there was i don't know disclosure and grimes and steve aoki and all these sort of eminem and big names were like putting their names into projects and and music was going on chain and i've got this interest in in what was going on there and i was in on this particular twitter space with the lunar community when it was probably 150 dollars of coin type thing and um and and i and i literally chirped up got the mic and said look my background's in sports travel i've got a few contacts in the music industry i've got a few friends that are djs these guys suffered in the pandemic this music nft thing blowing up i think we can put together a music festival where we can make this currency which was the lunar currency ust the currency of choice for the festival as you come to the festival you get some tokens those tokens give the people governance right so do you want a house do you want rock do you want drummer bass do you want techno you know i mean like you can give the decision making to the people that go to the event and they can dictate based on governance on on how this festival so you you were thinking this were you this is what this was the thing i've been manifesting for the last year of doing nothing and that's a long time on a boat thinking about that well maybe and and it but it was a bit like a boomerang it kept coming back to me and then this was obviously following the week i'd with with damien and and i literally jumped on this twitter space and i pitched this idea and said i've got this idea shoot me down i have no idea what i'm doing in this world it's all alien to me but like it keeps coming back to me as a good idea my feed went wild like literally i genuinely had 250 dm it was and this is the best thing i've ever heard when lunar fast like literally like yeah like it was getting wild like everyone was high on dopamine and rich on on this on this on this crypto and and all of a sudden i was literally networking so um blah blah blah i can't remember his name but he put me in touch with sarah main so sarah main's been the resident of pasha in ibiza for a long time and made people like work with guetta and swish house mafia and danny whittle he obviously did quite bloke danny yeah and sarah said you need to speak to danny did you speak to danny yes what did he say freshest idea is early in 20 years

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1:15:05You need to bring this to the IMS. Danny said that. Danny said that. Okay. Did you go to the IMS? Yeah, we presented. Did you? So, like, we were, like, flying. Okay. Literally, the world was opening up. I was jumping on calls with Nervo. You know what I mean? Like, literally, I was jumping on these big, high-profile DJ vehicles. And everywhere. And, like, people were memeing us. People were making NFTs out of us. Like, people, like, literally, the feed was going skyrocketing. and skyrocketed yeah and we we went to the ims um we were the stars of the show we were next like el acoustic so ims for people as an international music summit yeah exactly yeah so it's run by ben turner and danny will and pete yeah um and and we were going and we sat there and i built this world-class team like genuinely to do this festival so steve durham you might know what we are and i've got joe crossley from astral project this like big big brain people but the universe just brought all these people to me.

1:15:59And we, I mean, I mean, Joe built the first AI intelligence systems at Burning Man. I mean, projection map, so he was sitting in the opera house. We were, got metaverse partners to do all this really cool stuff where we could do it in the metaverse and have these sort of parallel worlds. Isn't it mad those times, like when you look back at all those times of this, this could be something. It was something. And until that day when it was in the April and my daughter, so what happened was luna was going all guns a blazing and it and two weeks later it died it literally died luna died the whole blockchain collapsed whether or not it was attacked or not it's another story but by and 60 billion got wiped off the lunar market and our community just died with it yeah everything we've done in this new festival world yeah like it just died with it and we rebranded quickly we took it to America to a conference consensus and we were just flogging a dead horse and the market had gone the timing had gone and I saw a lot of that going on at that period not necessarily yourself I saw a lot of this big fantasy thing we're going to do because we're all in pandemic and the NFTs everyone's jumping all these things I was just like this is mad what's going on here that's crazy I'm not too sure I'm believing any of this stuff that's what I was like well it was real and I think I mean the belief was there for the people that were tied up the people that had invested some of their money who wanted to be part of something that could be massive the potential the potential but the reality well so we went out there and obviously it died so for the second time in two years two big hits yeah two big hits So what have you moved into today then?

1:17:45Well, I've carried on learning. So I've carried on educating myself. I've carried on going to conferences. I've carried on networking. I've carried on meeting people. I've carried on learning, understanding, watching. And it was a conversation late last year. I've tried to do a few things. I've built a few things. I've worked with incredible people like Tango Meski, who's a Forbes 30 Under 30. I was a CTO. And I've had really good insight from big brain individuals building at the cutting edge of what's possible and building things in emerging technology. Good for you, man. So late last year, Ben Walno contacted me and said, like, your NDA Ben Walno, is that?

1:18:23Okay. He contacted me and said, your non-compete must be coming to an end. I used to go to school with Ben. And he contacted me because he was running our athletics tours for a long period of time. So when we splintered, if you like, and Ben took over the athletics side of things. I've known Ben for a long time. he actually when Leicester won the Premier League he got me a ticket for the Jamie Vardy football writers did he so there was me like literally four days after getting the trophy I was with Lineker and all the guys Ben's a good lad and Ben's dad was Brian who was the chief editor for The Sun for like 20 years and like really well respected one of the main I went to his I went to his funeral this is years ago now and the turnout was unreal I can imagine he was well respected well respected and well loved but the turnout I was in like every face was in there yeah it was the football world yeah I think he wrote John Barnes yeah I think his biography but yeah and I saw Ben relatively recently down in Portugal so I had a message from him yesterday actually so Ben's got a lot of contacts as well so what is your company called today so the company today is called following what happened yeah follow on tours follow on tours so for two reasons are you back doing the cricket tours again but in a different way smarter okay and tell me tell me before we wrap up here tell me what that business model looks like so it's ai first okay the world's changing yes in the same way we built house app as web first this is built ai first so the agentic economy whether or not you like it or not is coming and in the not too distant future the google searches won't be no more you'll be saying to your AI, go and find me a cricket holiday to South Africa.

1:20:06And your AI will go and look and it will connect by MCPs and it will connect to get the information. And there was a piece of legislation on just yesterday in Congress, marked up, it's going to hit the floor, the Clarity Act, which we're now going to, the world's changing. And this now is going to move into this agentic world. and I've built this company AI first not just for cricket because follow-on tours it's rugby tours it's golf tours it's tennis formula one you name it like all of the whole market but I fully automated the whole process yeah so everything on the website this morning looks fantastic by the way yeah so I it started off with me talking to Claude yeah and I said look this is everything I know this is everything I did this is the rabbit hole I've been down this is all of my product knowledge with all the people i've worked with all my capabilities all my learnings um and everything i know about agentic finance because it's not going to be know your customer it's going to be know your agent agent yeah and your agent's going to have financial autonomy and this is coming yeah maybe this year yeah and your agents will be saying do you want to pay you the deposit for this trip dodge yeah yes and you'll be clicking a phone in the car on the way to work to pay the deposit because your agent has got your good for you man good for you because your skill set is people and your skill set is obviously what you did for 17 years you've replicated now but just trying to streamline it even better to just make it really efficient well in two ways so you can pick up the phone and you can call me yeah and that's built and and or you can book a zoom call and speak to me and that's built but if you want to pay 200 pound less you go through the automated service stop like like if you want to call and you won't have to build a team of six people i i'm doing everything on my own yeah and i've got good people around me so like like tango for example who's obviously security and making sure the architectures are the highest grade to make sure that there's obviously no elucidations and things are done in the right way with the right prompting but yeah it started off with a conversation with Claude and said like Jensen Young says in NVIDIA use this technology in your lane don't try and do something with this technology with something you don't know about.

1:22:14In a shiny object syndrome going okay yeah. So it was yeah this is what I know this is my expertise this is how the cricket industry works these are the destinations these are the tours where you get the pressure points with the airlift these are the tours where you do not these are the tours where you have the official bodies these are the tours where you don't and it's it's not just england going to south africa it's the guy in mumbai going to deli to watch the ipf it's the australian guy going to so because it auto routes the inquiry with a commission to the company yeah i don't even need to see it it's like you talk to it you put in what you want and then that inquiry will go to the right person on planet earth that can deal with it who i know that i trust that can yeah that can produce it and then it'll auto route the inquiry through self-generates the pdfs i get logs of everything that's going on and i've got all the systems all the heartbeats and isn't this mad we're even talking about this like ai has come onto the scene and it's massive and it's just like this tsunami that if you you need to be ahead of the game to learn all this and understand that and actually be talking into it into the right way for it to be working for you.

1:23:20Ian, where can people see this information or see your website or see who you are if they wanted to find out? How would someone get in contact? So followontours.com. Ian at followontours.com. I've had a couple of pledges for money already from family. Are you looking for investment? If the right person comes along that's skilled, that's knowledgeable, that's got a network, that knows about sports travel, I know everything about cricket travel. I'm a little bit loose on Formula One, for example. Rugby is not my first forte, for example. So there's an opportunity for the right people in the right place.

1:23:57To add value within the company. To add value because I've already started structuring it now for golf. I didn't tell you that I mentioned Darren Goff at the start, but Darren Goff has come in on board as an ambassador as well because I don't have a database. So Darren's coming on board and he's got in the region of around a million social followers to help bring traction. and there's no one he doesn't know in the world of cricket well and he's well connected with golf for example and rugby and rugby but he's also yesterday's voicemail was well let's do 20 trips a year with me going on tour with to play golf with darren goff and there's a market there because 20 people would love to go and play golf at these extravagant courses around the world so so yeah darren's on board i've had i've it's still in its infancy it's um we have taken some bookings now so i've routed a few inquiries through and we've had revenue come through so we're off we've prove the concept um looking to scale looking to get the atom license looking to go into multi sports um love this and then we'll do the we'll do the organized stuff so if we're doing the five star premium stuff happily do 50 people 30 people i'll be not the busy fool for 5 000 for the 5 000 we'll do the automated you get your flight you get your hotel if you want transfers if you're creme de creme we'll do this for you yeah exactly yeah this has been fascinating thank you i think if you're honesty like everything we spoke about here is a real honest journey of entrepreneurship of just an idea a vision and having that sort of mindset to go I will make this work and it wasn't your fault it's no one's fault that in 2020 this happened it happened to everyone it happened to all of us or whatever but you've bounced back now and I think you've got something really special here so I really appreciate you coming down pleasure I've really enjoyed the conversation thank you and I wish you all the best mate thanks Dodge good man All the best.

1:25:42Good man. Cheers.

1:25:46Hi, guys. I really hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. Can you do us a favor and leave us a review as it massively helps us grow the show? Cheers, guys.

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1:26:36It's an app and website that compares news coverage, allowing you to see how each story is framed across the political spectrum and the world. For the recent story about the U.S. signing the Memorandum of Understanding with Iran, their vantage plan shows us that. Right-leaning Daily Express framed it as a historic peace deal, while left-leaning NPR notes it resulted in the president's approval hitting record lows. Plus data like each publication's source of funding and a factuality rating. The Nobel Peace Center even called ground news an excellent way to stay informed. avoid echo chambers, and expand your worldview.

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