74. How to grow a business fast and exit successfully | Andrew Hulbert

0:00Welcome to All About Business with me, James Reed, the podcast that covers everything about business, management and leadership. Every episode, I sit down with different guests of bootstrap companies, masterminded investment models, built a business empire. They're leaders in their field, and they're here to give you top insights and actionable advice so that you can apply their ideas to your own career or business venture.

0:28What happens after you build and sell a company for 100 million and then step away from the business world before the age of 40? Today on All About Business, I'm joined by Andrew Hulbert, founder of Pareto Facilities Management, a company he built from scratch into a 50 million pound workplace services business, employing more than 500 people. In this episode, we discuss building a business from humble beginnings, the realities of entrepreneurship, and what happens when success arrives earlier than expected. Well, today on All About Business, I'm really delighted to welcome Andrew Hulbert. Andrew is an entrepreneur and is now chair of the Institute of Workplace and Facilities Management, having built and sold a facilities management company called Parito FM, which I believe you started from your bedroom at the age of 27 and exited for the princely sum of$100 million.

1:28That's right, is it, Andrew? Well, that seems like a good place to... You are well-researched. That's great. Thank you. Makes a change. That's my job. That's my job. But I think let's begin with your early life, because I think you grew up on a council estate in Oxford. Yeah. So my family units from the council estate, yeah. I think I mentioned earlier, My grandmother moved there in 1953 in a caravan with my grandfather, and they built the family unit up from there. So they started in a caravan, didn't even have a house initially, but they ran the community center. And it was my grandmother's funeral just a couple of weeks ago, which was tremendously sad, but she was 93, so she had a fantastic wife.

2:06So what was her name? Jean Bradley. Jean Bradley. Jean and Bill Bradley. So they went to Oxford. Yeah, they went to Oxford. And do you know what was really magical about that funeral? There was also a children's home on the estate at the same time. and my nan and grant they just opened their house to that children's home they could come and eat in there whenever they wanted to food's a big part of my family which i'm sure we'll explore today and there were three kids from the children's home at the funeral who are now in their 60s and they were still referring to my nan jean as mum and dad and because that was like part of the ones that brought them up and i think children's homes back in the 50s and 60s probably weren't quite as progressive as they are today when you said you said family unit i feel like that's an interesting way of describing a family it felt in my imagination is a sort of compound well i wouldn't say compound i would say describe this scene because obviously it was obviously a central place for people to come together it was i would sort of describe it as a mafia type group really that's what i didn't want to say that how does that work well what was it what was happening what i mean by family unit is in my immediate family there are around 75 people across 75 correct and which means i was onto something so yes well it makes christmas day a complete nightmare because no five yeah no one has a living room big enough to do it in my family everyone lives close by so everyone's within say 10 minutes drive of each other and when i was 11 and smoking for the first time uh even before mobile phones and everything my mum knew about it before i'd even got home because someone had seen me who'd spoken to someone who told her before I got back and I got a clip around the ear with my Marlborough gold in my pocket at the age of 11.

3:41But yeah, no, what I mean by family unit is a really close group of family members that all looked out for each other. And every Sunday we would get together and eat together, not all 75, but a big group. And yeah, so that's really what family unit means and community and food and being together. That is my background and that's what I love. And I'm so grateful for it. But yeah, it all started in that caravan on the Northway council estate in the 50s. Right. And so there must have been a lot of people at the funeral. Yeah, the funeral. My grandfather's funeral in particular, it was in the crematorium in Oxford.

4:13They were queuing out the door. There were easily 200 people there. It was absolutely huge. My grandmother lived for another 10 years after he passed. So by the time she had passed away, a lot of her friends had died by that stage because she'd outlived them. But I would never forget my grandfather's funeral. And you can have all the money that you want in the world and you can do all those things but actually they weren't rich people but they were brilliant for the community they were genuine leaders genuinely helpful and when they were running the community center they would raise money to buy bikes for the kids and track suits and all those things in a time when you didn't have the internet and go fund me and all that this is when they had to do the hard work so I really that part of my family unit that's really where I resonate and it's where I get my community spirit from and ultimately where I try to put place my entrepreneurship and subsequent to that, my social activities, because that's really important.

5:04So you were inspired by their example. And I really didn't have much choice because it was what we lived every day. And yeah, hugely special. And entrepreneurs, we come from all different backgrounds and places and everything. But helping people and being a good person and having integrity and always being available to support, that's the core values for me. But you had a pretty sort of edgy teenage life, didn't you, in Oxford on this council? What happened? Yeah, well, I mean, you've got some stories to tell. I mean, there's plenty of stories that we haven't got long enough. Look, I think before the age of 16, I sort of started hanging around with the wrong crowd, really.

5:37Now, look, I'm 39 now, but when I was 12, I could walk into a shop and buy alcohol and cigarettes, which as a 12, I mean, it's inconceivable now that that would be possible. But I did. and of course when you start hanging around with that sort of group of people and you have the council estate mentality and we were hanging around with other council estate kids as well you know having sex early and getting in trouble early and all that sort of stuff my mum and dad were really worried when I was about 14 that I was going to get someone pregnant that was the main challenge I know of course that wasn't the vision for myself but you know you're a 14 year old boy and exploring everything so um yeah I got into scrapes I was a bike thief is one of the ways that I used to make some money.

6:17I was very good at stealing bikes. Well, from those Oxford students. From those Oxford students. I mean, I always laugh about this. I probably shouldn't always tell the story, but I lecture at Oxford Brookes University as part of their real estate course. And Brookes is where I used to get the bikes from.

6:35It's not far from where you live. No, no, it was in Headington. So just down from the old Oxford, the manor ground. That was your first business. It was. And I always laugh whenever I address the students for the first time and said, don't worry, your bikes are safe. I steal tea bags generally now from corporate events rather than anything else. So yeah, no, I did a little bit of that. And I was just getting in trouble. I used to start fires in bins and all that sort of thing. Just stupid stuff as a young person. Yeah, just for fun. Because we were bored. And we didn't have a youth club or anything like that.

7:03Did you end up with a record? No, no, no. Never got a record. I mean, got pulled over by the police many times for not having lights on my bike. That was mainly the worst thing. But you're quite clever about how you do some of these things. It culminated one day, I was hanging around with the wrong people and I was in South Park in Oxford when I was about 15. And I did get assaulted and I did nearly get murdered. Three guys beat me up in the park. They had a T-bar scooter handle of those little micro scooters. Two of them held me back. One of them smacked me around the head with the T-bar scooter handle about 10 o 'clock at night.

7:34And I will never forget this vision of this bar coming towards my head. And I pulled over to the side and it caught my ear and tore my ear off. and of course in the family unit in the community spirit i didn't call an ambulance i called my dad my dad rushed down picked me up all these tea towels pushed my ear back on the side of my face it's still there just about yeah and then we went up to the john radcliffe and they sewed it back on for me but i was very angry after that and started carrying a knife and i found the guy that had beaten me up and nearly went back and killed him um but i decided not to and that that was the right choice at that stage but i had the chance and uh so this was like sort of gang warfare well to some degree in a three in a three versus one uh situation but um yeah the youth is youth is dangerous when they're bald and also because i was six foot three when i was 15 i was a big guy so sometimes the real target yeah the young angry small guys you know they want something to go and beat up and i wasn't trying to cause any fuss on that day uh so yes luckily i had an opportunity to get my own back if you like and I had I had a couple of knives that I carried at that stage and I didn't take that chance so what would you say to people now who younger I mean because obviously carrying knives is a huge problem huge yeah uh what would I say to people now I mean I know it seems like the right thing to do for some people that are very young and angry and trying to protect themselves but a knife is more likely to be used back on yourself rather than you using it onto somebody else and if you can somehow get over that red mist and that red anger not everyone is against you not everyone's trying to get you and i think when you're a young man and trying to work it out sometimes that can feel like what's happening and you just need to take yourself out of the situation as much as possible what used to happen to me whenever i went into a shop i would always be followed by the security guards now i didn't steal from shops i was just doing bikes in brooks instead um but actually going into the shops i used to hate it used to really make me angry about what was going on because i was being targeted and i dressed like maybe i was going to but but that was it um but look what happened for me was i got into sixth form and actually all my friends almost exclusively where did you go uh to chairwell school in oxford uh just normal school but it just so happened to be that i got in my gcse grades were reasonable i didn't try very hard but i got in and all that life that i just described got left behind and now i was at sixth form with all my white middle classmates who were all going to go to university and they had good jobs and good relationships with their family and their dad didn't abuse them and all that sort of stuff, which was the relationships I'd had before.

10:05So I think for me, that was the catalyst for change. Very luckily, at 16, I got in with the right crowd. If I hadn't have done, I would have had a baby when I was young. I would have gone down a certain route. I like to think as an entrepreneur, I still would have made it somehow, but it would have been very difficult and very different. This Earth Day, your gift can make double the difference. From the 22nd to the 29th of April through biggive.org, donations to environmental charities will be double. Earthraise gives you the power to turn your generosity into real, lasting impact. Together we can protect wildlife, restore habitats and help nature thrive.

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11:24so they could afford for me to go. So when I got there at the age of 19 on the very first day, my mum and dad had always sacrificed for us because my dad was working hard in the factory and my mum working three jobs. But when I got to university, I felt very lucky to be there. And as the kicker, literally, as I moved into the halls of residence on day one, I held the door open for this beautiful blonde woman who turned out to be my wife. And we were together for 20 years since then. So serendipity, eh? Oh, and if you want an extra kicker, She was also born the day before I was. Oh, right. And so if you believe in fate, there's your little story on the fate side of things.

11:59That's amazing. That's right. So what did you study? I studied business and I got into University of Essex where I went by the skin of my teeth. I got the exact number of points only because I'd been to Glastonbury and I'd watched Oasis play and I was stood in 100 ,000 people crowd drinking beer and smoking weed and singing champagne supernova and all that came back did the exam for general studies which you didn't have to do any classes for and it said describe a time that you'd been emotional and I wrote this essay about being emotional at Glastonbury and I got 100 % and luckily for me Essex included that general studies as a full A level and it counted towards my degree and I got in by the exact number of points so you were oasis hugely and I went to Heaton Park twice to see them to try and thank them directly but couldn't get close enough to the front um but that was a real moment and actually do you know why that was special because um i'd been earning money since the age of 12 i'd been working in a corner shop stuffing papers getting up at 4 a.m on so you've done legit work as well i've done some real work yeah rather than just stealing bikes and um yeah so i ended up um i had money in terms of like relatively small amounts but it's the first time going to glastonbury i spent that money on something i was just saving i didn't know what i was saving it for um but that was one of the first times I spent it was 149 pounds or whatever for the ticket but that was big for me at the time it's a lot of money now it is it is well yeah I think it's 400 now for a ticket but yeah my mum really encouraged me to go um and yeah it's the best thing I ever did and without it I wouldn't have gone on this journey there's many sliding doors moments in early life it is interesting how some moments that maybe don't seem that significant at the time yeah when you look back become you know they're pivotal yeah and how it's so important to get out there and do things, meet people, because you never know when those moments will be.

13:47But isn't that still good advice today? Get out there and be around people. In this lecture I did at Brooks, they're all, say, 21, about to go into the world of work. I was saying, how many days do you want to be in the office to this group? There's about 50 of them, two. I was like, well, my advice to any entrepreneurs in here is go to the office five days a week because your presenteeism activities will get you much further than the other people who are not there three days a week. and I think early life is about building your own personal brand and business and understanding how business works to get the skills you need to go and start something yourself in the future the concept of leaving university starting a business and being a huge success there are people that do it but I think we all need to learn from businesses first before we go and build something I really agree I mean a friend of mine's son recently got a job and he was told by the employers you only have to come in two days a week yeah my friend said to me what do you think about that and i said tell him to go in every day yeah which he did and he's been promoted three or four times out of pay rises and is doing really well and i think that's exactly because of the advice you just gave yeah the people saw he was committed yes he cared yes i mean it's that basic but this is i mean it's a tale as old as time we know academically that this has been the right thing to do since the 80s i remember in my course i studied japanese culture and in japanese business culture in the 90s you'd take an extra jacket and leave it on your chair to make sure that people knew you were there and if you fell asleep at your desk it was seen as a great sign that you were working really hard yeah that might be overdoing it oh yeah well it depends what time you wake up but but even like go back to xerox xerox knew in the 80s that the engineers coming back from fixing printers at the water cooler and chatting about their knowledge at the water cooler that tacit knowledge exchange that was the most precious knowledge they could share and there's no way xerox could even make that happen it was just the fact that they happened to be at the water cooler or the coffee machine yeah that was so bent that was so beneficial so learning from each other absolutely but that is still key now and even more so and there's a big piece of management theory at the moment that the gen z's that don't want to go into the office when the alphas come in who are not um affected by covid this is the next generation this is the next gen now when they come in they might go back four or five days a week and they might out well i think they are i see that already i mean i think that's a different view really important and actually there's only so much uh entitlement you can have yeah i i think that's interesting so i understand you're well you're a student you did a bit of work for reed we did indeed and this is how we temporary work this is well very very temporary this is how we came to meet uh at the end of my first year of university i'd put on a bit of weight i'd had a very enjoyable time in the first year drinking a bit too much and i went to reed agency and i was like i want to be a dustbin man and um so i thought great i now look at university genuinely i was waking up at 5 30 p.m and i would watch neighbors uh at 5 30 p.m whilst eating my breakfast for anyone who doesn't know neighbors it used to be on twice a day 2 p.m and 5 p.m and i went so you were doing a sort of nocturnal course i was well i was and i wasn't going to my lectures either which uh wasn't particularly good but back in the day you could buy the cassette of your lecture and i had a mini i had a metro and i used to listen to the cassette in the metro writing my notes while I was eating my cereal and things and I wasn't particularly good in that first year of university um so yes I went to Reed and they got me on the dustbin lorries and I and I went out now what you should understand is dustbin lorries go out very early so I had a 3 30 a.m alarm clock on that first day it's a lovely sunny day and I went over to uh Didcot it was where I did it and I went out with the team all five of us on there were temps.

17:26So they're all through Reid and we were just trying to work out what we needed to do. We had a route and we had a plan and the driver, he was really keen because on those jobs, you got paid the same regardless of what time you finished. So he wanted to do it quick and we were all running around and sweating and everything for him. And I probably hadn't showered either because it was so early in the morning. So yeah, we went round, it was brilliant camaraderie. And on the way back, he stopped off and he bought us a pack of Fosters and we all had a beer apart from him uh on the way back to the depot and i got back and i got home at maybe 11 30 a.m and i just went back to sleep and then the next morning when that alarm went off again i was like no this this isn't for me so you worked for reed for one day that's pathetic i did i i actually i did actually also work for reed separately because i did um over one of the summers i worked for barclays and barclays used reed as a uh yeah they were a big client yes as an agency so i was also through them doing some stuff for them in corn market street in oxford but yeah the the dustbin lorry was a great experience because the characters on there were brilliant and i i remember just getting in the bus to go over to the depot and the guy was like oh man should have seen the color of my excrement this morning i had four guinnesses last night we don't need to hear that on the podcast these are formative experiences for young people to go and do the uh yeah jobs yeah and it's hugely formative and actually I wouldn't change it and I don't care work is good yeah I don't care what background you're from what form of life you're from stick yourself in the middle of that situation and see how you get on some people think some people swim and I was just too lazy ultimately physically at that stage and I I was so bad with my sleeping pattern that it was just never going to work for me but as your life progressed you became quite dynamic as it turns out well yes so you started a business yes from your bedroom is that right that's correct so tell us that story Yeah, so I went to university, I studied business, and I finished my degree.

19:23And I got linked up with a property services business, a£6 million one, and I went and joined them for about six years. So what sort of work were they doing? So imagine a nice commercial office in London, nice tall building. We looked after all of the maintenance, the statutory compliance, the leases, everything that it took to deliver statutory services to buildings. And that's what facilities management is from our perspective. So just so people understand, what sort of statutory things are we talking about? Water management. So literally taking the tap temperatures, checking for Legionella, doing the fire alarm testing, checking the emergency lights.

19:56So making sure it's all compliant and safe for the people who work there or use it. Exactly. And mainly for insurance purposes, because fires do happen. And when fires happen and you get investigated from an insurance perspective, you can evidence that you had control of the building. So that's what facilities management is principally, looking after the assets. and what we know in most businesses people costs is usually the first cost and property cost is usually the second so managing property cost effectively is really important but you've also got how sustainable is the building and what are the energy and utility management pieces all the changes in compliance and law which is significant so yeah we delivered all of those services on a self-delivery model and actually used agencies this was the company you were working that's who i worked for to start with and used agencies to supply staff absolutely because we work with facilities yes i would have thought so because we employ 1.2 million people in this sector in the uk it's worth over 100 billion in gdp and so we know it's a critically important one and interestingly there are 125 000 service providers in this sector according to the office of national statistics so starting one was an interesting one because there was 125 000 other people doing what you were doing um i did four years with roll right and i was an ops director when I was 24.

21:10I had a team of 250 people under me at that stage. I was working hard. And then we got bought out by a big business. And I did two years for that big business. Didn't like the big business mentality. It wasn't for me. I'd gone from being the king of this very small castle to being nobody in the big business. So when I was 27, it's literally true. I went home to my wife one day and I said, I'm going to leave. I'm going to start my own business. She wasn't entirely on board with the idea to leave a well-paid job. We just got a mortgage. We didn't have kids yet at that stage. Was she working as well?

21:40She was working as well yeah we were sort of starting to plan the rest of our life really at that stage and yeah no I literally just gave my three months notice and I started Pareto from my bedroom in August 2014 and when I say I started with nothing it was literally me and a laptop so I didn't have partners, didn't have processes, didn't have any funding, any investment, it was just me and an idea. So what was your idea how did you do that? The concept was that the bigger businesses in our sector had completely lost touch with the client. And actually, they were so big that they were too rigid, and they didn't treat staff very well.

22:13And they didn't care about things like sustainability and people and social. And I wanted to start this modern version of what a facilities management and property business could be. And I was 27. So all of my ideas were pretty sort of new and different. And so there were really three concepts. Put people right back at the heart again, because we just lost touch with the staff. And I mean, pay them on time, pay their expenses on time, give them a decent allowance for their boots, give them the tools that they need. They sound really basic, but that wasn't practice, common practice in the sector.

22:44Make your processes completely flexible. So a lot of these big companies, they had really rigid IT processes that if the customer wanted to work with you, the customer had to change their processes to fit yours. I was like, no, no, no, let's turn it around. Let's have really flexible cloud-based processes so that we can do it the way the customer wants to do it. And then the final one is what I would call ESG, so Environmental, Social and Governance, which really means doing brilliant sustainability initiatives that are very real. so we were carbon neutral on scope one and two for example and we'll be net zero by 2027 still going today um but also to have a brilliant social heart so to be a good business to help people out to do lots of initiatives around charity and making our own honey and all that sort of stuff we had Pareto honey made in Market Harbour as well which I know is a passion of yours yeah no I think that's very good yeah so um in the end that's what we started with but what made us special was we went for the big brands right from the very beginning I was trying to be a 20 million business out of my bedroom from day one so the first four or five customers bulgari hotel which is obviously amazing jewelry brand yahoo candy crush twitter london zoo so but you obviously went out and won them as customers correct yeah so you went and sit to see them yes presented to them and exactly you're obviously good at that i i think so i hope so um we must have been i went on what was your pitch i mean my go to so okay talk us through bulgari hotel this is in knights bridge no yeah yeah it's a glittering six star hotel six stars yeah yeah so this is an amazing hotel so why did they pick you at 27 out of a bedroom in oxford yes good question um now look for the six years prior to starting the business i'd been networking my ass off i'd been writing articles i've been winning awards i've been doing my linkedin i created a brand for andrew as myself so when i started on day one it wasn't like i'd come out of nowhere and i just entered the sector and no one knew who I was.

24:34They knew who I was because I was good and what I'd been delivering previously. So I knew Bulgari Hotel from the networking and from being around. And I called Jeff. Jeff is the guy who gave me my first opportunity. And Jeff was a bit of a maverick, which in entrepreneurship, you need mavericks sometimes to say yes. And it was an engineering contract, a couple of hundred thousand a year. And I called him up and I said, look, Jeff, I've started this business. I'd be really interested in helping you out. I knew Jeff was getting frustrated with the big business that was serving him. in that organization.

25:04And I was just right place, right time. And the reason I targeted Jeff, he had two kids that were in their 30s that also ran their own businesses. So I was like, look, Jeff, I know you've got kids similar age to me. I know that you love entrepreneurship and I know that I can deliver services to you in this space. Oh, so find an entrepreneur-friendly client. It was. Oh, that's a good idea. Yeah, and actually, look, that's good networking because the fact I even knew he had kids and what his kids did. Yeah, he's going to be sympathetic to your sort of - Yes, that's the idea. And you also need someone who's a little bit unhinged that's going to say yes.

25:35Your first yes is the hardest one because you've got nothing to sell. Exactly. That's what I'm thinking. Yeah. And you just have to convince them. But also, look, I'm a good salesperson. I genuinely went on to sell a quarter of a billion pounds of services personally over the next nine years. So you were really leading from the front. Absolutely. All the way through. Too much so. I was all in as an entrepreneur. But as soon as you get your first one, and when it happens to be Bulgari Hotel, which is 15 ,000 a night to stay in the suite. And they claim to be one of the most expensive hotels in London.

26:04It was a brilliant name to sell from. And then we started to gain a bit of attention. So what was the engineering you were doing for them? So that was maintenance of all of the, say, heating and air conditioning system. So you want that to work when you've got 16 ,000 pounds? One of the challenges in that location is the quality of the guests is very high. Perhaps the most famous people in the world. And their expectations are very high. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. So temperature control is an important one. It has to be precise. It does. And, you know, especially when you have, like, people from Saudi and Middle East who are coming there and they want it to be very cold.

26:39And then there were certain people that were there that wanted it to be very warm. And it was all about changing yourself. So you had to provide the facilities management that would make that deliverable to your client. Correct. And it wasn't just the heating and cooling. It was things like the swimming pool. So obviously when you have public swimming pools, there's lots of risk around Legionella and illness and those things that you have to demonstrate. And then even down to things like the electrical system that's running the building, electrical systems in London, we have spikes quite a lot.

27:07So making sure that if we have a spike or the power goes off for like seven seconds or so, that the building still functions because the expectations are very high. But we were good and we were on it. And the one way I can... So you need a good network of engineers. Hugely. So who you have in your world. Yes, your network. I'm thinking of your family unit, the lessons of that sort of connected group. It's almost recreating that, isn't it? You are so right. The strength of an organization. Yes, it was me. And yes, it was the engineers that we hired directly into those teams. But it was the specialist service providers outside of this that if I called them at 11 o 'clock on a Friday night because there was a problem, then they could come.

27:46And of course, the thing with property services is, especially in a hotel or in a zoo, it's not as if at five o 'clock everything gets turned off and everyone's all okay. That's a 24-7 business. And expectations, even at three in the morning, are still very, very high. And if you have water coming through the ceiling at three in the morning, which happens invariably in property, you want to make sure you're going to sort it out. So it was that personal assurance early on which I was able to give. And also, they knew that I would just give my all. And it would happen. It would work. and I was able to prove myself from there.

28:16So yeah, that's how it started. And then we started just to build out from there. So the likes of Yahoo and Candy Crush and London Zoo and things. You said the zoo. So you looked after the zoo. Still do today, yeah. Been a 10-year contract. So what has been the most challenging thing that's happened down at the zoo? I can't say some of the things on camera. No, London Zoo and Whipsnade Zoo. You're not responsible for escaped animals. There are some stories around those that some made the press. um the working in 700 acres with 20 000 animals and over 250 buildings is a phenomenal undertaking for a small business to take on so that's the that's the that's the scale footprint of london london and whipsnade zoo yeah the two together yeah whipsnade over in um in woburn and uh we uh we built systems for them we built their compliance we built their structure and we've been there for 10 years and it's been through competitive retender and it's a really successful customer animals are a completely different thing because of course you have something called a category one animal which is something that can kill you now of course a spider a snake or gorilla or an antelope can kill you for one reason or another so the health and safety protocols and the security there was really important and london zoo they love animals i hope so yeah but that but that is what they do and like that is the most important thing human safety animal safety and they would never want to get that wrong and that was so important there so again bulgari may seem nice and shiny and there's lots of rich people there but in the zoo if you got it wrong animals could be harmed and you didn't want to do that because they were a zoological service and a beautiful client amazing relationship and something that really helped propel us at the start because when pareto was about 1.5 million turnover um they we brought them on as a customer and it was a couple of million pound a year contract and we grew 300 in one year um off the back of that contract.

30:08So you have a wide variety of clients. Yes. And that's how you scale the business. Yes. So what was the moment when it really took off? Was it winning that zoo contract? Yeah, I think so. So at the end of year one, we were run rating at 1.5 million. At the end of year two, including the zoo, we were run rating at 5 million. And at the end of year three, we were approaching 10 million. So we had some really quick growth going off the back of those. The best thing about facilities management contracts is their long term contracts. So they're five to seven years long they are hundreds of thousands if not millions on an annual basis and they're tied in and actually they're linked to various sla service level performance and key performance indicators and things but they're good and you know that if you win a contract you can continue to build but Pareto so from the standing start every quarter for 10 years straight Pareto grew 10 years straight every quarter and some years we grew 300 as I mentioned so trying to keep hold of that growth was really quite difficult and i'm just an entrepreneur who started from my bedroom i didn't necessarily know what i was doing um but it really took off after the zoo and then we quite quickly got to 20 million turnover and then um uh and then that's a remarkable record every quarter was ahead of the previous one for 10 years 10 years yeah and it included in covid if i can add and in covid all the offices were empty so basically in covid um it was a very challenging time as it was for all businesses.

31:33And most of our clients sent everybody home as they had to by law. So we work with all our customers to say, right, we can furlough the staff, we can send our staff home, we can claim the furlough credits, we can give it back to you, all those different things. And we retained all of our customers in that time. If I go back to big business for a second, what didn't work in COVID is the large providers generally were saying to customers, our notice period is six months. If you want to change anything, you need to give a six months notice. and of course that upset customers quite significantly we'd said to all of them we'll change it tomorrow as long as we can mutually agree what we're going to do and so we went into covid on 16 million came out around 18 million turnover and then off the back of covid we'd won a lot of customers who were disillusioned with the big businesses and we grew from 18 to 32 million organically in one year and then we did 42 million the year after and then nearly 50 million the year after that so we had a huge growth off the back so looking back for what i've just heard You'd credit some of that growth to being sort of customer-oriented and flexible.

32:33Yes, hugely. Because other competitors in the sector, they weren't. And actually, we were gaining a reputation that if you wanted to do it your way within services, you came to Pareto. But we also had a brilliant social heart and we were a great organization and great marketing and stuff that came with it. But that is what you did. You came to us and we would build something that had been broken for a long time. and in a facilities management business you generally have one central computer system which we call a CAFAM system we had 11 because customers wanted to do it differently so we just changed ourselves every time and what was really unique about us is if their customer had their own system we would just operate inside their system IT permitting and IT is one of the biggest challenges to facilities management so yeah that worked that worked really well very adaptable very very adaptable and it sounds really simple but the sector hadn't seen an organization like that before and um and because i was still in my early 30s this was also very new and exciting and i was talking about things that people weren't talking about and that's where the um the environmental and social stuff came into so you had this great run but in 2023 you decided to sell the business yes that's right so how did you come to that decision and yes um look the truth is i've been running hard for nine years and um we've made a great we've made great growth and um and it was a point where if I didn't sort something out, my conversations with my wife and divorce were going to get very difficult because I was just all in.

33:59And I'd had two kids by that point. I had my daughter in 2019 and son in 2021. So what that meant to me was I now had this biological pull that I hadn't had before with the children. And I wasn't getting the balance right to start off with because I would come home just before seven o 'clock, bath my daughter, give her back to my wife and then I'd carry on working till midnight or whatever I was doing. Just for context, I was an entrepreneur that was up at five and went to sleep at midnight and then did that for every day. And even on Sunday. You're now talking five in the morning. Five in the morning, yeah.

34:30It's switched. Yeah, yeah, big one. I was four or five hours a night's sleep and, you know, taking a lot of caffeine and things to keep going. So that's not sustainable, you're saying? Absolutely not. No, no. And I do believe in entrepreneurship. There are times when you need to be unbalanced because you need to outperform your competitor doing things quicker doing things more detailed doing things better I think you should do but there's only so long you can run at that before you ruin all your personal relationships my wife your own health probably and your own well yeah and I talk about my health as well because I went on a big weight loss journey in between all this too so I think yeah for me that that had become quite difficult and quite strained and I'd said to my wife in about 2020 about 2020 in the middle of COVID I said I just need three years just give me three years and I got three huge wall charts showing the next three years and I drew a big red x on three years from that moment and I said I'll be done by this point and luckily it only took two and a half years from there but um but I got out so it became to a point where I knew it wasn't sustainable I knew that the business was valued at a level that I would make a significant return so that I was very happy in my late 30s so were you the sole shareholder I would no no there's various shareholders we'd split it between us we'd given 20 percent of the business to the team as well because we had that senior leadership team too so no there was a wide cap table on what we were doing that was split between us but i like that because we were even though we made say 100 million dollars in total value it was split across many people and that was brilliant from my perspective lots of winners lots of winners and also um for anyone who does ever go and sell a business and you get eight figures in your bank account one day you feel a lot less guilty when there's people around you that are also jumping up and down because they're paying their mortgages off or they're buying a new car or whatever it is that they wanted to do about a year before the exit we hired a new c-suite of the whole team because i knew that at exit i couldn't be the center of attention because that wasn't going to be sustainable for the longer term so we hired a brilliant c-suite and it was a really diverse group of people about 15 people in total that we had across the the senior and director team and that was the team of the future that was the future team and i and actually for any entrepreneur who goes to try and hire their own replacement as ceo that's also an interesting endeavor to go down because what advice would you give me uh they'll never be as good as you are and and try and see the best in them but also you don't have to be their best friend right you're there if i may be crass they're there to perform a function so you can exit so whether you entirely agree with what they're doing and whether you think they're absolutely perfect your opinion sort of irrelevant now what's relevant is how are they going to be seen to investors in the future so these things can work and that is a really important piece of advice is difficult to take because especially with men being men, it's difficult for us to think other men might be able to do what we do in a different way.

37:16So yeah, we did that and we hired a great team and I agreed to stay on as a non-exec as part of the deal. So I didn't want to leave entirely. So you're vice chair, is that right? I'm vice chair, yeah. So still non-exec today. And so I go to the board meetings and I don't have any operational day-to-day now. I just advise, which is great. And I also chair the industry workplace as you mentioned at the start so those roles really go hand in hand very nicely um so yes we managed to get our exit and for anybody who's ever sold a business the due diligence process to sell it is very very challenging you have about a million pounds being spent on fees to exit the business and pwc come in and deloitte come in and the banks come in and ask you all these difficult questions you have no idea what they mean when we sold in 23 there were 856 questions we had to answer as part of the due diligence process.

38:03And we did that in just over three weeks. And we managed to execute the deal in that. It's one of the fastest deals I'm aware of that's happened within the sector. And then that was it. And then that was in November 2023. And then I took my step back at that stage. And that's when I would say I semi-retired. You're a young man now. You were younger. You were 37. I was 37 when I finished, yeah. So what are you going to do now? I'm a bit mystified. Yeah, I'm still working it out. Look, it really weighed heavily on me that I wasn't a good enough father because I wasn't there enough. I was not prioritizing my kids and I wasn't prioritizing my wife and even my family.

38:44Go back to the family unit that I mentioned at the start. In my family, it doesn't matter how much money you've got. It matters that you're part of the unit and you're part of the group and you look after each other. And if someone needs to take into the airport at three in the morning, there should be three of you putting their hand up to do it. It's that sort of environment. So the last two years, I've literally just gone back to being a dad. I'm just doing my because my kids were two and four when I finished. So taking them to school, making their lunches, cooking dinner, going swimming, doing the homework, going to play out in the farm, which I'll come on to.