Andrew Barclay | The Future of Britain's Economy

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0:45Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+. Welcome to Jimmy's Jobs of the Future. Today I'm joined by Andrew Barkley. I first got to know Andrew after he co-authored the Entrepreneurship Report with the Think Tank Onward. That was just over a year ago and since then we've become firm friends discussing the importance of enterprise to the UK economy. I like Andrew in many different ways, partly because he's taken an unconventional path in life, not attending university and also he's bullish on the jobs of sales and the importance of sales and I think it's one of the most important things that we massively undersell our kids I suppose you could say in that we don't teach people how to sell and we're sometimes a little bit too British about these things but I think it's really important and Andrew is really good at it and really interesting on it.

1:46So I very much hope you enjoy this episode. On to today's episode. Make sure you subscribe so we can continue to get bigger and bigger guests.

2:01Welcome to Jimmy's Jobs is a Feature Andrew. Where did the name Yoppa come from and what did the company do so yopa stood for originally your online property agent okay but that's obviously a bit of a mouthful so we abbreviated it into yopa but essentially it came from the idea that i was working as an estate agent and whilst it was a really good trade i really enjoyed working as one there was this sort of um technological boom going on at the same time and i was thinking well I could continue trying to sell property or lease property making a fee but if I really wanted to build something how can I also have a foot in the door of the tech world and what's going on in parallel in different industries at the same time so with a friend of mine with four actually four of us who co-founded it we decided to sort of try and figure out a way of starting a new estate agency in the online world and there's all these other parallels about travel agents for example yes who were early on in this um and the more we looked into it the more we actually realized there was a load of people trying to do this online estate agencies right so you had easy um property something to do with stelios and the easy brand yeah there's a bunch of different ones i think about 22 different ones at the time and um and essentially through naivety we thought it would be a good idea to be the 23rd company to try this.

3:37But one thing sort of led to another, and we ended up with one of the top ones. And I think that was partly because we pursued a slightly different model, which was not pure play online. What we recognized from one of the other companies in the industry was there was still a desperate need for the personal interaction. When you're, let's say, a homeowner and you're dealing with the largest asset, 98 % of most people's wealth is in their home, you don't want to necessarily transact PurePlay online. You still want to have someone who feels trusted. And there was a company out there that was doing that already and we thought actually of the 23 of us who are doing it, they're the only ones who we think have got the right model.

4:18So let's adapt and integrate that offering into our platform. what then led on from that was the legacy industries became more and more interested in our space yeah i think many of them are listed and there was some type of pressure as to you know how are you reacting to online and this was also a very different environment this was zero interest rates yeah you know venture flying venture funding flying and so um we got a lot of support because of that iteration in the model from the industry who wanted some access to this market, but also didn't believe in the pure play. And so we were very much the second mover in this space, but we were lucky in that we wanted a lot of trust to the legacy industry.

5:10They came in and funded us and essentially built what is now one of the top five estate estate agencies in the country using this sort of innovative hybrid model between technology and people because that was it you took investment i was reading from savills and from the daily mail yeah like i just thought i was like that's quite interesting because it's not sort of the traditional but obviously both sort of worried about kind of kodak moment style thing right like it was just interesting how that was done how did you go about like having those conversations and speaking to them because obviously in a way you're you're trying to set yourself up as a disruptor to them yeah i mean the truth is the the a lot of it's inbound right so um like i said at the time it was a very different environment to now um high interest rate environment with lots of startups post covid might be struggling the environment in in sort of 80 uh sorry in 1415 was free money being dished out valuation sky high you know everyone was the next whatever it was the next uber the next this the next that um and there were lots of people within the industry who were really keen to get in on the act of online estate agency yeah and so the savils conversation i think just to be completely clear i I was always on the sort of operations and sales side, so never really leading the discussions on funding.

6:43But the Savills conversation was inbound. I actually think it came from LinkedIn, funnily enough. Just a cold LinkedIn email, and that ended up with quite a lot of funding, which was actually a crucial time, which was really early on, a crucial time. It wasn't only funding. When it comes from a company like Savills, it's not only funding, it's also reputation. It helps you hire estate agents. It's so much credibility, which a bunch of 23-year-olds in that position desperately need. And Daily Mail obviously have a record of being very innovative in this space with their partnership with Zoopla and Prime Location.

7:20And so I think it was a natural follow on for them. And then obviously at the time, you know, later down the line for Yopa, we also got a lot of support from a company called LSL Property Services, which run a bunch of estate agencies here and under. They've got Marsh and Parsons. They've got a whole suite of different offerings. And so, you know, one thing sort of, you know, when the first mover comes in, several make the move, then everyone sort of pays attention and also wants to join a company that feels like it's got the momentum. And why did you want to become an estate agent? What was the thing that appealed to that?

7:54Because we're going to come on to this as well, that you didn't go to university as well, which I'm going to come on to. But what sort of led you to that? so it's a good question estate agents are um the the least liked industry in the country aside from traffic wardens so so it's a good question um the truth is i've just always been interested in the state agency i can't quite explain it but i've always always been interested since a young age um i think i like i like i like the idea that it's um you're you're servicing something that's tangible you can see what it is um it's it's a people's business um and there's something that appealed to me i'm not particularly academic there's something that appealed to me that actually a state agency without any qualifications in this country at least um with a bit of initiative and the right attitude all you need is a desk and a mobile phone and you it up and go yeah and on top of that because because it's sales you essentially eat what you kill so you know it's very accountable you know you're very accountable to yourself and your own performance and i think it's something that i found very appealing about that um and why do you think it does have a bit of a bad rap though well i think you know a lot of that's for good reason because there is quite a lot of, you know, there is, in this country, it's not viewed in the same way as it is in other countries, let's say in America, where you've got much higher commissions.

9:35But at the same time, that also means you have a much greater appeal to talented people to go in there, to take it seriously. They take a, not only the commission's greater, but they also take a greater portion of that commission, the individual so you have you have a sort of more professional um approach to it for example in the us and now the uae than you do in in this country and i think we've got into a situation here which we partly contributed to a yopa which is a race to the bottom on fees and i think that also can sometimes have the unintended consequence of a race to the bottom on quality as well yeah it's interesting because i agree i think it's one of those jobs where actually you're helping people with their biggest ever purchase.

10:20And there is something, you know, Roy Sutherland has talked about this. There is always going to be a need for estate agents because it can be, you can put in all the filters that you want online and so on. But ultimately there is something about somebody understanding what somebody else wants that they don't perhaps, they perhaps can't articulate and so on when it comes to a home of why it will always be relevant. Yeah. But... And that's interesting, by the way, because just on that, That's interesting because at the moment, the world, let's say from when I started Yopat in, I think it was 2014, we're obviously 10 years on and now the new technological wave is AI.

10:57And the big discussion is mass displacement for jobs. How do we balance the future of the economy, of jobs with AI? And what you just said there is actually there are certain things that humans can do, at least for now, let's say, that humans can do. there are certain roles that we can play that we don't want customers don't want ai to sort of um erode away and so actually the the the the lesson there is that if you can combine the two get people trained up with technology right and get businesses trained up with technology in a proactive way there is actually a future for um you know jobs to be created oh yeah it's true i also think somebody when i was buying my first place about 10 years ago i remember a colleague saying to me like when you know you'll just know and it really stuck with me that all the houses that I've bought since then it is like actually you kind of look back and think yeah I did kind of know within four or five minutes that I really wanted this one and so on that's kind of yeah it's just like I can't see AI being able to sort of do that and so on well it's not just it's not just it's houses but also I worked in office leasing as well and I can tell you where technology really struggles to add value is if you go around a house that on paper look is let's say it's a thousand square feet and it's on on a road um on a corner plot let's say um and you've got an identical one on the opposite side of the street one of them absolutely stinks and the other one doesn't i can promise you that's going to make a difference the price but tech can't pick that up right the other for another example is if you've got an owner that's got a really um specific requirement as to how a deal needs to be structured they need i don't know four months to move out instead of two months to move out that's going to make a difference right and that's the type of stuff that's a nuance that only a talented or skilled agent can come in and and and help negotiate um and so you left school didn't go to university and went to hong kong instead.

13:05What appealed about Hong Kong? Hong Kong again at the time crikey, it's not that long ago but a lot has changed. At the time it was a different place to what it is today and to be honest I haven't been back for a while but I understand it's very different now but back then Hong Kong was a very very exciting place. It was familiar in the sense coming from the UK you know you drive on the same street there's lots of english signs so you had that familiar sort of um familiarity to it but there's also there was also something exciting about asia um and just to be clear it wasn't a some sort of grand plan it was just that i got on uh an offer for an apprenticeship there yeah um in a state agency in in in uh in hong kong and thought i'm should take that opportunity i mean a lot of the reason why people do go to university is is to sort of have that change of scenery to get away from home to have a different experience i wasn't particularly academic so the idea of um going to university wasn't really something that i considered i wasn't very good at many subjects apart from business studies and so i just i just wanted to get into work quickly and um start trying to make money make money do transactions learn about the industry that i wanted to go into and this opportunity opened up which then led to the same type of opportunity in New York.

14:32And so that was a great placement, basically, to start my working career. It must have been cool working in Hong Kong and New York as the only part of your career. Where do you think you'd be going now? I mean, I was going to say a young Andrew Barkley. You're still pretty young anyway. But where would sort of an 18, 19-year-old Andrew Barkley be looking to go to today? The sad truth is it's not Hong Kong anymore. It's pretty terrible what's going on there. and it doesn't have that appeal anymore, global appeal anymore, which it did back then. I think the truth matters, a lot of the places at the moment,

15:11a lot of the places at the moment that you would consider are in America. And probably if it wasn't Hong Kong in that part of the world, it would be the UAE. specifically from a state agency. It's a very interesting market because it's more of that American system I talked about. But, you know, when I was in Hong Kong, I was, spent a little bit of time ducking around mainland China as well, like Shanghai, within the company that I was working for. And the truth is that's very different, right? That is, you know, that's a different world altogether. So you don't have that familiarity to it. So I think it would be UAE or it would be Florida, New York, those kind of markets that are the places that a lot of young people are today looking to go towards for either a placement or for a job.

16:05And tell us what you've been up to a bit more recently because we first kind of came across each other about a year ago or so when you did the British Entrepreneur Report for Onward, which I found very interesting. But yeah, you're kind of coming a bit more into the kind of public policy world. Yeah, so I did the British Entrepreneur with Onward essentially to analyse all of the, you hear a lot from politicians in Westminster about business, supporting business, or we're doing this to support business. But it's kind of always grouped together under one banner that I think is so much more nuanced than in the way it's talked about.

16:50and what we really wanted to do with British Entrepreneurs is map out the different types of business people there are in the country. What do they feel? What do they need? What are they missing out on? On top of that, the future entrepreneurs, people who are in a job at the moment who are thinking about starting a business or one day have that desire to go into partnership with a friend and start something and what they're concerned about and what they need to feel in order to make that step. And so the British Entrepreneur took about a year to do. and we spoke to all different groups of people and in these different categories to come up with ideas and policies that would help people with businesses expand help people who are in jobs who want to start a business make that step but also there are lots of people out there who just have no interest and that's completely fine probably shouldn't be doing business policies for them um but in order to to target um those two groups of people when it comes to growing the economy and it comes to supporting business i thought that by doing this british entrepreneur report we could sort of um you know provide something valuable to those creating policy by actually sort of trying to get them to focus on the categories that really matter and what were those categories and what did you learn from doing the reports so the first thing i did learn from the report if i'm honest was the first few rounds of doing the report it was incredibly focused the people that came up in our focus groups and conversations was incredibly focused on london or southeast tech communities yeah it was a real battle to get that um you know to make sure it was much more geographically diverse but also in the industry diverse um and i was super keen to have people from hospitality specifically in there because i just think the hospitality industry is so much more valuable to this country than it's given credit for and it's probably the single biggest industry that is um consistently whacked with regulation and taxes in just the most unfair way and if you think about the vast majority of people out there a lot of young people their first job their internship the job on the weekend is through hospitality and a bit like a state agency it's one of the only industries where you don't need any qualifications you need a little bit of training and with the right attitude and effort you can go from the very bottom to the very top in a record amount of time right you can go from being a busboy to a maitre d pretty quick if you're good and you work hard that is something we should encourage right so I was very keen in the British entrepreneur to include that and speak to them.

19:34We don't think of it as much of a career here. No. As they do in France, let's say. I agree people see it as a very good learning curve for people, but it's still not seen as a career for people as much. And we've done stuff with McDonald's and Hawksmoor, right? I'm very big, as you are, on the benefits of hospitality. yeah yeah we we don't i think there are other countries that do like to talk about this to to two geographies i was speaking about earlier the usa um and with where famously at the moment they've got this no tax on tips bill going through at the moment and the uae which a lot of young hospitality workers in the uk are actually looking towards yeah right because they're not only it's not only a tax thing this is actually a lot of job openings and opportunities are there but I think that government should actually look at hospitality in its own special category which is this produces this is a great way of getting people into work we don't it doesn't need huge amounts of university investment in student loans to to get people ready to do it and it actually gets young people the momentum they need in their career get going and and and standing on their own two feet I think it's it's an amazing industry that we should really should support and so just coming back to the british entrepreneur we made sure to include a lot of people from hospitality industry as well people who run everything from um rural hospitality businesses to um you know restaurants in the city and and try to understand what what they're feeling um in terms of what they need to expand yeah you won't be surprised that it's not more regulation and it's not more taxes so it's about a year's worth of work to come to that conclusion but it It was nevertheless very interesting to jump through those hoops and figure out specifically what it was.

21:26Are you a fan of Jimmy's Jobs of the Future? Hi, I'm Sonny, one of the producers behind the show. And we don't just make this podcast. We produce some of the best business content out there, working with global brands and founders. Over the past year, we've flown around the world and demand keeps growing. And with four prime ministers trusting us with their appearances on this show, you're in safe hands. so if you're already in the market for a podcast or standout business content why not start with us drop me a line at sunny at boxlight.io try our podcast calculator or book a meeting at boxlight.io that's boxlight.io now back to jimmy um and what is it on those things because what i'm often surprised about in those businesses is the margins are basically do you know what it's one of the first entrepreneurial ideas i ever had by the way was for a fish and chip a high-end kind of fish and chip shop.

22:18I'm not sure I've ever spoken about that before on this show, but I but then, and so I spent quite a lot of time It sounds like the estate agency, like it's just what London needs is another fish and chip shop Well I was, no, but I remember exactly where I was, I was going for lunch with my old friend Christian May and we were working at the institute directors doing loads of entrepreneurial stuff and we were both slightly hungover so we went for fish and chips at this place just off Leicester Square and it was just full of tourists and I remember thinking, oh it's not a really great traditional fish and chip experience it's like they've clearly like read this is what to do it and i thought if you could do something that was like a high-end fish and chip shop that was quite cool and kind of different i mean it was around that 2014 2015 time when things were very cool and that type of thing i was like you could pick this sort of different batter and that and that type of things but it was um but i spent quite a lot of time looking into it and kind of like building a business case and stuff like that I was just shocked at the margins.

23:14It's going to be really, really tough. When you learn more and more about the hospitality business, it gives you way more respect for those who work in it and those who actually go and start it. It's not surprising that the number one amount of bankruptcies in this country is hospitality businesses. But they are so necessary and they bring so much value to our society. like you know one thing everyone discovered in covid is just going out for a pint going out for food it's you miss it when you don't have it um and like i said it's got all these broader economic benefits and i think there is at the heart of every single community and the other thing the other interesting thing is in an age of disruption the one thing that's going to be very difficult to disrupt is the need for food now you've got that delivery it's an iteration but it's not the need to you know it's not it's not disrupting the the human need to want to go out to convene to eat to drink yeah and actually what we've seen is maybe london doesn't need another fish and chip shop but but there are lots of interesting concepts that do get started do scale hawks more is one of them um you know wing stop were in the uk was just sold to a private equity firm yeah um you know a bunch of entrepreneurs came together and started that they've ended up with i don't know how many stores now but a huge number there's always an evolution in our tastes and our desires and what we want to do.

24:36So in that sense, it's a great, ticks a lot of boxes, undisruptible, provides lots of employment, really enjoyable. From a government perspective, what is not to like about hospitality? Yeah, completely. Yet it still doesn't, you know, probably been, don't want to get too political about it and whatever, but it's probably been one of the hardest that's been hit by the government with the NICS increase, but also the dropping of the thresholds as well, national minimum wage, business rates, etc. They've been really, like, bothered after Brexit. Well, Brexit being part of the challenge, but also the pandemic as well.

25:13Like, yeah, it really did impact the hospitality industry. I just think they've been a harder hit than almost any other industry going. Yeah, I think that's right. And then, I think that's right. And I think, you know, employment legislation is not going to, becoming more restrictive, is not going to help either. and that's what I think the interesting thing I mean I didn't do this in the British Entrepreneur because that wasn't the purpose for the report but I think there is a piece of work that could be done which looks at the value the hospitality industry provides the whole of the country that is far more than simply paying tax and actually the case here could even be in so many ways we subsidise so many things and the big debate in the past couple of days is welfare reform right there is never this there will never be proper welfare reform or the government getting across the welfare budget if you cannot support local employment opportunities for people in those areas what is one of those industries that can is hospitality right i mean there are there are other ones but hospitality is one of them if that's not worth supporting maybe even subsidizing some capacity I don't know what is completely completely and what did you find what else about the actual report writing because it's one of these things where you talk about sort of not being academic and whatever but policy is often decided in quite sort of wonky academic you know partner with a think tank etc yeah it was interesting I mean I've never done it before and was lucky to work with a lot of people who could bring that sort of academic approach to it it was it was long it was a long process it was really detailed and you can see how look you can see the difference between having an idea as an entrepreneur or someone coming out of politics and then trying to turn it into an actual policy or detailed report you do understand what policymakers or politicians the considerations they have to make how do you pay for certain things how are you actually going to cost it yeah that's something that's not always thought of when you're saying this is what government should do um and so writing a report with with onwards sort of gave me exposure to actually you can't just sort of wave a wand and say this is what government should do and don't really have to think about how you pay for it or how you can implement it so it was interesting from that perspective um and it's also led you to land of opportunity yeah so talk to us about that and how that's all kind of so land of opportunity essentially is um come about as partly because of that but also partly like i said by working in um hong kong and new york which was really interesting from a personal perspective but it sort of planted the seed in my mind hold hold on a minute, like, Hong Kong was essentially our British creation.

28:15Hold on a minute, America is as well, right? Okay, what's the difference out there? You go out to Hong Kong, and I used to, let's say, I used to play football on Sunday, five-a-side game, and at half-time, they're not very good at football out there, right, which is great, but it's great because you feel like Lionel Messi, right, in comparison. but at half time all of them are on the phone conference calls business calls working right the sort of banter level out in hong kong is about zero out of ten but the but the work rate is like 12 out of 10 go over to america it's pretty similar right but what's really interesting is it's it's ideas that came from this country right that's that's allowing it's the framework for them to produce these amazing results, this very enterprising attitude.

29:10You can't help but think coming back to Britain after that experience, you come back raring to go. It's slightly more sort of European in our mentality. We've become a little bit more laid back. We've still got that system, but it's a little bit more laid back. And so Land of Opportunity, that was that was the original um seed that was planted but land of opportunity came about as a campaign to say well look britain my belief is that britain needs to be a land of opportunity if we are going to succeed currently it does not feel like my generation or generation believe me consider it as a land of opportunity lots of people are leaving the country yeah and this ties into one of the small campaigns we've done around the non-dom issue which was always trending in this direction but the current government obviously sort of put the nail in the coffin and ended the scheme once and for all and the argument around non-doms has been purely around sort of foreign entrepreneurs living here not paying their tax which you can get into the debate about i think the truth of the matter is they are paying disproportionately they were sorry they were paying disproportionate amounts of tax anyway so there's this mathematical argument for and against it but the argument that's not being made is the exodus of talent in and around that capital that's leaving and that's the one thing a lot of i find politicians don't understand is that talent and capital are two sides of the same coin and when the because a lot of talent wants to earn money right and so when there's when when a lot of the opportunities go abroad and a lot of the capital goes abroad, the talent follows.

30:58And that's why right now you're seeing young hospitality workers looking to go to the UAE or America. You've got nurses. You've got people who want to go to Riyadh, to Australia. So their entire ecosystems essentially being airlifted out of this country, right? And then just being dropped in another country and they're hitting the ground running. Because the world's changed. you can do that today yeah and that's and that's why this not this sort of non-dom campaign that we've been running we've been uh we work with the cbr on sort of analyzing um the treasury's numbers where we expose that basically if 25 of non-doms leave that's where they break even so i if 26 leave it starts to cost the taxpayer money yeah most and just explain just what a non-dom is as Well, just give us that.

31:48In a nutshell, what this is, is people have built a business or come here from abroad. They're choosing to live in Britain. They're choosing to live in the UK, send their kids to school here, whatever. Up until this point, they had a certain amount of time where they could live here until they were considered a full British citizen and where they had to pay the same taxes as a British citizen. That's now all been abolished. And it's far less friendly. And what it's saying is if you come here, let's say you're a Japanese bloke who's built a business in Japan and you've come to live in the UK. What we're now saying is not only you're going to pay all of your same same taxes as every British citizen does in Britain, which is right.

32:33We're now saying we're actually going to reach over back into Japan. And when you die, the British state's going to tax your home back in Japan and your business back in Japan. That's not right. I mean, it's just clearly not right. And it's especially illogical in a fluid and global world where people have options, but we have to compete with a lot of other countries and states that are saying, well, what you did back in Japan or whichever country it is, there's nothing really to do with the British government or the Italian government. Italian government being one example. They're now doing this scheme.

33:09when the Italians are beating you at entrepreneurship you know you're doing something wrong so a lot of countries have recognised this and they are benefiting from this exodus but the real problem is like I keep saying there is a really good argument on its own merit to say well actually this is going to cost us money and we've exposed that through the CBR report and our non-dom campaign but what's not quantifiable is the exodus and the brain drain of talent that is off the back of the capital that's leaving the country as well. You see, I think it's... I wonder how long it's going to take for this to kind of get more on the radar of Westminster.

33:53Because it definitely is, right? And the campaign that you've done and so on is. But I remember quite clearly at the last TV debate between Starmer and Sunak, where it was... I think it was the penultimate question that a young lady got up and said, lots of my friends are moving to Australia and Dubai etc because they see great opportunity there I remember thinking that's the first time that I really remember emigration being on the national kind of debate and so on and like it's really ratcheted up in the last year or so but I just I still think it's one of those things that's quite hard for politicians to sort of quantify and it often ends up being a lot of this is a London issue partly as well in terms of like it is Londoners so our system in the UK is not like, in a way it's wonderful in terms of the constituency representation and so on and people being in touch with hospitality businesses on a regular basis but actually this is almost quite a, you know, it's a while before this sort of begins to seep out I might say some of it's quite unquantifiable at the moment but I'm worried because you and I both know in our network so are people leaving all the time at the moment like 11 ,000 millionaires in the last year Yeah, I mean there's so many different arguments you can go down The truth of the matter is, what is an endome?

35:07You just said it yourself, right? It's a silly word, confusing, sounds a bit like condom, like just bin the whole thing and start again. Let's get back to making the argument that if you come to Britain, you should pay the same taxes as me and you, 100%, right? But if you built a business in a different country and you've got your family home in a different country, it's got nothing to do with us. Why would we handcuff ourselves? The second point is if you think about the value to the taxpayer for just one second, let's say from a business perspective, okay? These are a small number of people who are going to come here, foreign entrepreneurs and investors, who are not going to take up council housing stock.

35:53They are likely not going to send their children and take up state school places. They are probably not going to take a state pension. Yeah. There is a huge number of public services they are not going to be using. From a pure business trade perspective, all they're going to be doing is contributing for almost no cost. It's the best piece of business the taxpayer could do, pretty much, in the whole country. So we should do that, one. But two, it's all of the talent that is attracted to capital. It's two sides of the same coin. So them going abroad, it creates a movement. It creates a sort of energy in a certain direction that is leaving this country, not coming into this country.

36:37And that affects, it is a London issue. But if you think about it, a lot of these people who come here, foreign entrepreneurs and investors, take my example of a guy who built a business in Tokyo. He's not coming to London and just sitting around picking his nose. He's going to be investing a business. He's probably going to start a business. he'll probably put his money in a venture capital fund that is you know investing in something a startup in manchester there are so many bad consumption right vat employment there are so many benefits at the moment the argument is they contributed about nine billion quid right i wouldn't be surprised if it's a hell of a lot more than that when you consider all this type of stuff but i think we do have to go through the whole process of making the arguments again getting really clear on why they're valuable coming up with a better name than non-dom right and and starting again but that's got to happen soon because it's pretty clear the treasury are going to lose and the british taxpayer are going to lose out and taxes are going to have to go up to fund that hole yeah well exactly um and how do we sort of improve that kind of like cultural aspect of entrepreneurship enterprise right like you know it's something that's come up on the podcast loads and loads even when we interviewed rishi sun out where he's chancellor two and a half years ago like he was like that's the one of the biggest challenges and being in hong kong and new york etc how how can we look to improve that culture of enterprise i think the truth is like there's lots to learn from hong kong lots to learn from america right but we we don't want to be america right i guess like there's a lot going for this country that hong kongers and americans don't have humor being one of them right so we really don't want to we really don't want to like copy and paste everything from there but the bits that they are really good at the point i was making is they came from here in the first place yeah right and it was a napoleon said we're a nation of shopkeepers right which is the great compliment we've got it in us already that the british what i discovered from the british entrepreneur is there is a huge desire to be entrepreneurial in your career that doesn't just mean um owning a business but it also means people who want to build a capital base off their salary maybe earn up to shares in the startup they work in or a bonus kind of structure where they have economic aspiration we've got that already but what has happened is several decades of a political system that has crushed the spirit and the desire to go in that direction to the point where a lot of people just say it's at best tight margins and flipping hard right but at worst you're just going to have taxes and regulations preventing you at every step of the way especially in the crucial early years yeah so that's why one of our proposals was actually is there some type of startup relief that they've done in ireland and holland where you can deduct some of your income tax from last year if the funds go towards starting a business because one of the main main problems is getting the funding you know post post financial crash funding has dried up yeah and yet and again it's not london that suffers from that it's the secondary towns you know so it's it's the regions that really suffer from that so the truth to answer your question is we the british people are very enterprising yeah right we government shouldn't be trying to manage attitudes it should be just trying to get the hell out of the way and allow them to flourish.

40:05It's one of the things that I sort of slightly struck up by in the kind of Conservative Party election, leadership elections over the last few years. Like, the sort of more entrepreneurial business people with backgrounds have not particularly fared that well in the various contests. Like, you know, but it's like, you know, sort of Jeremy Hunt and Idid Zawahi, like, you know, Sajid Javid to an element as well. like these had all got sort of like quite business entrepreneurial backgrounds yeah and yet actually none of them did well in the conservative leadership either that's obviously not the it's not the kind of only reason but it did just yeah i just think it's a funny thing of where we don't you know even in the conservative party the sort of culture of enterprise is perhaps not held in as high esteem as it once was i think there's an important distinction there and i do think this is a distinction that needs to be made more in politics and it's the difference between finance and business right and there is a lot and there's no just you know london financial services you know our whole economy is a finance it's based on that but you know the city of london is something to be very proud of and i really don't believe that you level up by leveling down anyone right so you know big fan of the city of london and and london finance you know circles but it is so often misinterpreted as business and entrepreneurship and it's not there is a very bit and that's what you know that there is a very big difference between the sort of hedge fund traders in the three-piece suits that play a really important role in the economy but they are not small business yeah and they are not your hospitality owner that has to deal with an absolute nightmare on a daily basis who's not picking up a two percent management fee it's a very different thing altogether and I think that actually what the Conservative Party and all politics doesn't have is enough of proper small business owners and entrepreneurs that are the backbone of the economy.

42:07I think that's something we could do with a lot more of. I don't think there's a single Labour MP that's run a business. Really? Yeah, I don't think there is. I mean, to be fair I mean, the Labour government have been very good at kind of bringing in entrepreneurs from other like elsewhere in the government so you've got like maybe it's point forward but james timpson poppy gustafson yeah i used to pledge matt clippard so they're doing quite well at that but i also think it's interesting i don't think a single labor mp has run a business and i think that is a problem you just don't intrinsically understand it and so on and actually i think one of the things that we one of the things that i think is good about america is often the transparency of taxes and where taxes commit like i i mean i find it intensely frustrating when you're in a state and you go to the till and they put on the kind of vat kind of equivalent sales tax but i do think that stuff makes makes difference and actually if people had a breakdown of their hospitality bill and saw where everything goes and realized the margins that would also make kind of a big difference yeah the other thing by the way the other thing on your point about business entrepreneurship experience crossing over into politics the other area where america do it well is you have some seriously accomplished people who go into government and that's their political system i'm not saying we should change our system yeah where you know i do believe in the accountability of the house of commons and i don't necessarily think that you should you know it's it's not necessarily worth changing that simply to get more business people into politics but i think getting more entrepreneurs or small business owners to stand as mps yeah would be a great development.

43:46I mean, the one thing I would say is at the moment, in the Conservative Party, Andrew Griffiths, who launched the British entrepreneur with me, he's someone I would say actually where he's had a career as chairman of Just Eat, ran Sky, COO, CFO. That's the one example where actually where you've got someone with a phenomenally accomplished business career in the American style coming into British politics. but you know like you said the whole of the labor cabinet is essentially a public sector cabinet and what i fear about you know timpson poppy gustafson what i do fear a lot of the time with politics having a little glimpse of it up close yeah is all these people there simply to give the leader at the time a bit of credibility and my conclusion of all this is that this vision and this philosophy has to come from the very top itself yeah right and and and simply having a business secretary who's worked in the city for a bit of time or whatever you know it's not good enough you've got to have a prime minister who understands if they haven't lived that experience themselves who understands it deeply that exactly what you said that thin margin sweating yeah um uh you know constantly stressed mentality i think elon musk for example said having a starting a business is like chewing glass and staring into the abyss right and it's in it's if you start a business you know exactly what that means right it's like that sort of constant pan and that probably by the way never leaves someone who starts a business or who owns a business until they sell regardless of how successful it is like worrying about payroll worrying about the next quarter worrying if it doesn't go so well where are you going to get the funding all that type of stuff you i think the prime minister himself or herself has to understand that and we haven't really had that I don't think for a very long time.

45:35No, no, no. I don't think there's ever been a Prime Minister that's run a business kind of before successfully or not. I mean, Jeremy Hunt had done, Chancellor, so like, you know, probably sort of the closest. I think to be, I mean, it's not in recent times, but the two examples I think that Margaret Thatcher hadn't but for some reason understood it. Maybe it was her dad who ran a small business. She clearly felt it. It wasn't intellectual, it's a feeling that she understood. And I think, you know, also equally to be fair, Tony Blair really was very supportive of, it's not corporate, it's the entrepreneur itself.

46:14And that's all too often our politics misplaces business as corporate. And all of our regulations and all of our taxes and a lot of the time the support for business is actually support for corporate multinationals and it's disproportionately affects the small entrepreneur the future entrepreneur the small business owner yeah i mean i think blair is a fascinating character on this i mean obviously we did him in the podcast earlier this year and so i spent a lot of time reading about it him and his background and so on and one of the things that actually was that kind of like real sort of aspirational side it And I think Thatcher had it as well, that understanding that people want to get on and better themselves, whether it's the extension or the conservatory and so on.

47:02I don't think either party has had a leader quite like that. Like you say, it's kind of understanding it in their core about what people sort of want to achieve and kind of want to get on. Yeah, it's kind of fascinating, despite the fact that neither of them, like you say, had run businesses. They understood why people wanted to do it and to better themselves, etc. It's really interesting. It's understanding. That's the point. I don't think for a minute that everyone needs to be an entrepreneur. Not at all. Everyone's got a value in society.