What It Takes to Build and Sell a Business Before 40 with Andrew Hulbert

0:00The more successful you become, the more those doubts grow because you have something to lose at that stage. I was 27. So I, as I mentioned, I left that business, I handed in three months notice from my corporate job. I literally set up from my bedroom on my own, never run my own business before. And I had no money or backers or partners or anything at that stage. I was more focused around how do I get that first win under my belt? That's really where my thoughts were. So I sold a contract to Bulgari Hotel, which is a five star hotel in Knightsbridge, our first property services contract. It was a couple of hundred thousand pounds a year, and it paid quarterly in advance and it helped us to fund ourselves from the very beginning on a cash flow perspective.

0:39For nine years, we hired 17 senior managers and not one of them left. We didn't get it wrong once. And my superpower, or one of them, was understanding people's motivations and whether our vehicle was going to be right for them over the long term of this business. Okay, so Andrew, let's go back. What was the moment that you said, I'm going to build this myself? What was that final straw that ultimately made you start your business? It's a good question. I'm not sure there's always one defining moment because I think entrepreneurship is a lifestyle from a very early age. When I was 15, I knew I wanted to start my own business because business studies was all I was ever good at.

1:17I was also terrible at listening to other people. So I had to do it my way. There was one moment in particular, I'd worked for an SME that had been bought out by a larger organization. And I was part of that larger organization for a small period of time. and we've been out on a corporate night out you know nice dinner and drinks and stuff and I was a little bit drunk in the back of a cab on the way back out of that dinner with the people I was the senior team and I just looked around and I thought what am I doing here I don't like these people I'm not growing any longer I'm not really getting anywhere in this organization and I had just one of those moments where I looked around and thought nah this isn't for me and quite shortly after that then I handed my notice in and started Pareto from my bedroom at that stage.

1:56Got it and And tell me again, how old were you? Because I guess doing what you've done, as people will find out over the course of the next 40, 45 minutes, is that you didn't have a name in the industry. You didn't have a network in that industry. You didn't have any money. What doubts or voices in your head nearly stopped you from pushing through? Well, yeah, and we all have doubts and they always go through. For me, the more successful you become, the more those doubts grow because you have something to lose at that stage. I was 27. So as I mentioned, I left that business. I handed in three months notice from my corporate job.

2:31I literally set up from my bedroom on my own. Now that I had already worked in that career from the aspect of the property management sector, but I never run my own business before. And I had no money or backers or partners or anything at that stage. So really, because I was still a bit of an upstart at that age, 27, I'm 39 now, and I'm still an upstart these days, but a little bit less, hopefully. And it was more, I was more focused around how do I get that first win under my belt? That's really where my thoughts were. My bigger concern probably was I had a mortgage to pay and I had a wife that was on board with me starting a business, but obviously needed money so that we could pay the mortgage that we had because we were just on normal incomes in a normal job to begin with.

3:15So that was more of my focus. But what that made me do was really hone in on trying to find the first deal and the first sale. And luckily for us, I sold a contract to Bulgari Hotel, which is a five-star hotel in Knightsbridge, our first property services contract. It was a couple of hundred thousand pounds a year, and it paid quarterly in advance. And it helped us to fund ourselves from the very beginning on a cash flow perspective. there aren't many deals like that around now but in 2014 we were able to make that happen and that's how we started and that's how the cash flow began and we've stayed in a positive position all the way through the journey from that point did you just assume that that was the the average deal then given that was your first deal as entrepreneurs i think you beg steal and borrow right when when someone that if anybody who has not started yet and you're looking for your first customer or your first couple of customers if someone is going to believe in you enough to give you the first opportunity.

4:07You need to find the right person that's going to do that for you. But probably they will understand that you need some sort of special treatment to begin with to make it work for them as well. And in the sector I was in, it's serviced by lots of massive companies that are really terrible at delivering services to these corporates and organizations. This organization, Bulgari, was looking for something really high end. So to achieve high end, they had to help us to deliver that back to them, if that makes sense. But that's what real partnership is. When customers and suppliers can work together to understand the fragilities of each other and how you need to deliver service as well.

4:40That is the real sweet spot partnership piece for me. And for us, just as a first contract, it just worked really well. And we built off the back of that one. And was there a point or points early on where you thought, actually, this isn't going to work? Was there, you know, like a real low moment in those early days that nearly stopped you from actually going on that nine-year journey and achieving the exit that you did? Honestly, I'd love to say yes, but no. I was so outwardly focused and inwardly focused on making this a success that I almost didn't have time to stop and worry about the doubts.

5:16I was so laser focused on making it work. That's not always a good thing, by the way. It sounds good, but it's not always because you're so driven to do things that you can't often see what's going on around you and strategy becomes really blurry because you're just dealing with what's in front of you day to day. I think what the pushbacks you did get is even when we got to like a 10, 15, 20 million pound business with 200 staff, people were still telling us we were too small. And that was disheartening because when you were going to deliver services to a corporate client and there were five other competitors you were against that were all 300 times your size.

5:51I mean, we were tiny compared to them. There was always this concern that even though we were brilliant, we were too small. And I used to call it being friend zoned. They would take us all the way to the end and be like, Yeah, we absolutely love you. You're exactly the partner for us. But corporate deal, it's too much of a risk to use your organization. Now, that's OK. You just have to roll with those. You accept that that's what's happened and you move on to the next one. But the way you deal with that is just go and find three more and then show them that they were wrong and use that negativity to keep growing.

6:21So, yeah, you have the doubts, but we went on an incredibly fast growth curve that had sometimes 300 percent growth each year. you don't really have chance to stop and look at what's going on. Just have to try and keep within a certain level of parameters and keep moving forward. If this conversation resonated with you, don't just sit there, act on it. Make sure you follow or subscribe for more game-changing conversations. And remember, the only thing standing between you and your business breakthrough is the decision to screw it and just do it.