The tricky first year being public - Dan Murray Serter, Chapter 5

0:06If you're raising a million, you need at least half a million committed. Well, I wanted to make sure that we had as much committed as humanly possible. So we said we're raising£1 million, but we had£750 ,000 of it already committed. So a majority of it. And then we just overfunded massively.

0:28That's Dan, the usual host of Secret Leaders. I'm obviously not Dan. I'm Will Stollerman, the head of podcasts here at Kindling Media. Every few months I interview Dan to find out what it's really like being a founder. Because Dan's day job, if you've somehow managed to avoid him on social media, is running his VC-backed startup Heights. I don't know where he finds the time. If this is the first episode like this you've heard, with me sitting down with Dan, then I'd stop what you're doing. Search for Dan chapter one in the secret leader's feed. He's got a great origin story. But if you're up to date, in the previous episode with Dan a few months ago, we learned how to develop a product and bring it to market.

1:04That's where we are today. Dan and his co-founder Joel have developed the Heights Brain Care Supplement, but now they need to scale it. They need to scale the business. This is the tricky first year being public. They need to negotiate their way out of the valley they're in now and get into the larger valley next door. If you want to build a business, then you're going to need to get good at crossing valleys. Because even when things seem like they're going well, a curveball is always just around the corner. it's february 2020 we've just got our first 30 000 pounds and end of the month of january really excited and really proud of what happened big plans for february on all the things we're going to do including going to the usa and doing a fundraising trip and we want to do that because we thought it's a big market in la and new york a really big opportunity for us so i booked my flights for March and February a lot of February is basically set up around like trying to get the right introductions to people trying to make sure we've got the right people in the realm we've now got a business that has just launched and got£30 ,000 in sales already and is like growing nicely and has an audience and yada yada yada immediately like straight into February I'm I fall like really ill and don't know what it is I'm sitting at home like coughing my guts out feeling terrible.

2:22I was sitting at home working all day getting like a massive headache and having a really bad cough and then like towards the end of the day the coughing fit's getting worse and worse and I'm wheezing a bit I'm in bed early my wife is like what is going on like you sound absolutely terrible. Call 111 they're like yeah you're gonna have to come into hospital. I go into hospital. It's February 2020. So there are some reports about some tasty bats that have been Newton and China, sure. I go into UCH hospital, you know, I'm wearing a mask because I think it's the polite thing to do because I have a really terrible cough.

2:55I'm telling them about COVID and they're like, nah, it's definitely not COVID. Don't worry about it. It'll be fine. Doctor tells me to take my mask off. I'm like, are you sure? I'm coughing pretty bad. He's like, yeah, it was pointless. Anyway, stick me on a ventilator. I was on a ventilator for the night feeling pretty bloody terrible. And I spent the night in hospital and then the rest of February, I was just out. We just launched the business. I was so excited. There were two of us. Pretty bad timing. We've got customer service, got brand, got social, like all of these things. There's just two of us.

3:27And I am like flat out cold. And it was very similar to the time I had burnout. I just couldn't get out of bed. I was just dead. My energy was so drained. And I was very much determined to like get over this. but obviously I didn't realise and I never got diagnosed for having COVID but like it was pretty obviously what all the symptoms of COVID afterwards and I was just so so so completely flat out so February was a pretty bad month I'd booked these flights to go to the USA in March and do this fundraising trip stuff is starting to become very very very known about COVID like towards the end of February the start of March I'm starting to recover feeling better a lot of information's coming out about COVID at this point.

4:10I mean, honestly, it was really bad to have two people in a business and one of you is out. It was so unfortunate. We hadn't got around to hiring yet. It was just terrible timing. So I said to Joel, right, I'm going to work from LA for a week. I'm going to do these investor meetings. I've set up some really good ones, like fantastic ones with some of the top angel investors in LA. And one of them, I was even like so like the night before I went on the Friday um the news was getting bad and my wife was suddenly being like please don't go this is like really bad at this point it's terrible please don't go and I'm like look I paid for these flights we've got an office there's a lot of expenses going on I can't just like be burning money for like no particular reason I gotta go and I gotta have these meetings and she's like why don't you just see if these people will do them on zoom or whatever and i'm like don't be ridiculous no one's gonna do it on zoom but i will ask so the night before on the thursday i emailed all the people because i i was having meetings in la on friday i was flying friday morning and then i was having meetings friday afternoon in la so you know it's like whatever it is eight hours behind so i was going to be landing and going straight into these meetings but it was worth it because whatever emailed them all on thursday they said yep definitely want to have these meetings on friday want to do it in real life makes a massive difference really excited to meet you great happy days obviously you can probably see where this is going land friday the news has turned so bad between thursday and friday that they're all like no we don't think it makes sense to have a meeting can we do a video call i end up having all my meetings in la in la on video call with other people in la not one person would actually meet me irl and that was the difference on the friday as i'm there trump starts talking about like closing the borders and I'm like Jesus Christ I'm gonna have to fly home immediately aren't I and I did and I flew home immediately I managed to get out on a Saturday night having had all the meetings I was obviously I was supposed to be in LA for a couple of weeks so all the meetings that were coming up were just going to be done on video call anyway I came home my wife very much like into your room you go for the next two weeks I will put a bowl down by your door for the next two weeks whilst you're in quarantine.

6:23Do not pass go, do not collect$200 and do not look at me. She doesn't like germs, does she, at the best of times? She does not like germs. No, indeed. And what I had just done was basically germ central as far as she was concerned. So my experience of fundraising for Heights was an absolute disaster. I mean, just for clarity, I flew to LA on Friday morning and had to fly home Sunday night to then spend two weeks in quarantine in my bedroom after being ill for the whole month before. And that was all just so that I could have some video calls on Friday in LA to other people in LA. It was the biggest disaster.

7:02Very frustrating. So what did this mean for the company? Were you worried for the company then at this point? Yeah. So basically we'd had a plan of we need to raise some money. We need to raise the money because we need to hire a team. We needed some money by June. it was March there's usually enough time especially for angel investing but suddenly this thing happens and no one knows how anyone's going to react so first week everyone is just like cancelling all meetings we're not finding anything we don't know what's going on we don't know how to communicate with data but what we do know is you know every investor was like we need to just back the companies we've already given money to that's the most important thing totally understand within the second or third week the narrative started to change quite fast actually people started to be pretty open-minded.

7:43I think a lot of people were like, oh my god, this is going to be a six to 12 month thing. We can't just like not do anything for six to 12 months. So I guess let's just like move everything online and just get on with our lives. And that changed within a couple of weeks. The way that Joel and I split our time was I said, I'm going to focus entirely on the fundraising because if we don't fundraise, we don't have a business. And one of the reasons is, you know, Heights has a physical supply chain. It's an expensive business to run. There are just like huge costs that you'd like go into like investing in the business before you can actually grow it.

8:16Most startups, to be honest, that like raised in the early days, don't really need the money. The money is a function of going faster. But if you're in CPG or you have physical products, you need the money or you can't really grow. You just literally can't make orders for new customers. So you just can't grow. We were stuck in that sort of paradox. So I was saying to Joel, I'll focus entirely on this. You focus on running the business, so to speak. So we hired a couple of people, hired a product manager and a social media manager, basically just got to work on building the brand and making sure that the website was essentially functioning.

8:48And we were doing customer service in the meantime, like ourselves. What's the money position then? If you need to raise by June, do you remember what that was? Because you've just also hired two people. So you've added to your burn. What was the money and how transparent are you with new joiners about that because I always think it's quite interesting because you don't want to screw someone over. You want to attract talent, but you need to also be upfront with them that, you know, they might not have a job in three months. So how did you handle all of that? Yeah, I think we had something like 500k in the bank.

9:15We didn't have no money. We had a decent amount of money, but the decent amount of money in a business like ours depletes quickly. And basically there are big cash investment moments in a business like ours. And so you need that balance to not go too low. Otherwise, your stock suppliers won't serve you. It's very much like a function with CPG. So consumer product goods is very much a function of making sure that you look like you are a legitimate enough business to continue operating. Otherwise, people literally just won't, your suppliers won't work with you. How transparent are we? I mean, we build in public.

9:52So like really transparent, really transparent with our first starters, but really clear on our mission, really clear on our vision like really explaining what we're trying to do and how we're trying to build it which obviously is the startup way and we found people who were like mega mega mega passionate about what we do um and it's worth saying that we had in the year before we had focused really heavily on company values so something we did wrong in our last company was uh not care about company values and not really figure out culture and so something that we spent a lot of time on when it was just Joel and I in the year before building in the background was creating like a code of conduct a code of conduct brand guidelines and a set of company values and had written all of our interview questions interview processes how they aligned with our company values and even done all of our onboarding documentation all in preparation of hiring anyone which was just the exact opposite of what we'd ever done previously and it made an enormous difference to people joining the company and really immediately from day one feeling like they're part of the culture but especially even more so at a point where you're working remote people don't really necessarily know how to work remote like we were not intending to work remotely right so everyone's kind of just figuring out as you go along these are people who you're meant to be meeting and working with and collaborating on a daily basis that was the job description that was what the expectation was and that's now not what's happening and on top of that one of the founders is basically spending 95 % of their time fundraising.

11:21So not really being involved in the meetings, not really being involved in like the core stuff, because any time there was an opportunity to get a meeting in, any time. And I literally mean any time, like I was working like 7am till midnight. You know, I was doing calls with LA, I was doing calls with Asia. I did not care, like we were desperate. We had three months to raise money. I would work on any time zone to have any conversation. And the only thing that I would stop that for ultimately was if it clashed with another investor call. I took a really strategic approach to the investment side as well.

11:51We basically decided we wanted to raise crowdfunding at the end of the year. And what we wanted to do was raise enough money in like part one, tranche one, so to speak. I want to raise enough money by June that we had that money in the bank and were able to like use it and touch it if we wanted to. However, that it was like very much sort of an escrow as part of a broader round. so we were raising one and a half million i said as long as we get 500 600k in the bank does everyone else agree that we can get that in the bank and start spending it while spending the rest because sometimes where startups fail is having to get the whole amount in by a certain deadline and if you don't you don't get any of it which i do understand but desperate times call for desperate measures and that wasn't going to be an applicable opportunity for us i went to town on i found there were some lists during COVID that people made, like, you know, here's a list of all the active angel investors in Europe and stuff like that.

12:44And I literally contacted everyone on the list. There must have been 1000 people. And I got in touch with every single one that said that they were interested in consumer startups. When I say I did the hustle, I've never hustled so hard as trying to raise money in COVID ever. So here you are, you know, it's sort of March-ish time, I I imagine 2020, there's two goals. The money is like the big goal. By end of June, you need some money in the bank. It's a high burn business, but there's also going to be this big round at the end of the year. So you now need to position the company so that you can effectively do that.

13:20You say that you've never hustled so far, but I'd love to know, and I think our listeners would as well, what do you think that the key lessons were from that period when you were fundraising? You obviously did a lot of things. What were the things that really worked? I mean, I think the companies that survived and thrived in COVID versus the ones that died, often, like just outworking everyone, it sounds really bad, but fundamentally the market was in chaos. But if you worked hard enough, especially in the early days, it all got so much easier so fast. You know, by the summer, people were sort of throwing money at startups and the narrative all changed so much.

13:58But in the first three months was sort of like the valley of death. If you were at risk and vulnerable in that time, only way through that path was a numbers game. I know how to play a numbers game, right? You reach out to a thousand people. You might hear a hundred responses. You might book 20 phone calls. Done. On to the next thousand. Like my days were so methodically single-minded and having such a clear purpose. At this point, I spent, you know, the best part of 18 months, two years, just preparing to build the company of my dreams. I wasn't about to let COVID take it away. Having really clear delineation between Joel and myself, making it super clear, like, Joel, this investor is going to want five interviews, you join interview number five.

14:43I wasn't going to bore him with, like, interviews one and four. And every single time someone told me that they were going to invest, I assumed that they weren't because people are just so flaky. We never, ever banked on any of the money coming in. We didn't have metrics to go to venture capital funds. One thing that we did, really unusually, was we had quite a high valuation. We were raising£2 million in total at£8 million pre. So we were doing like£500 in the first tranche and then£1.5 afterwards. £8 million pre,£10 million post in a market where no one wants to invest and you've got£30 ,000 of sales.

15:18Absolutely, astonishingly ridiculous. However, our narrative was we've got X many hundred thousands of pounds worth of stock. we've got you know an absolute best-in-class product that actually cost this much on R &D you know there's a lot a lot of reasons why we believed that we were worth that and also because fundamentally we weren't willing to dilute ourselves more than that we fought tooth and nail with every single investor any investor that suggested that they get preference shares any investor that suggested that they wanted more than we felt comfortable for one person to be giving away absolutely anything that involved anything other than the terms we set we walked away from which was insane if you think about it like we were running out of money i'd say 90 % of investors were just telling us the valuation's too high the market's changed we're not willing to go that high etc and multiple times joel and i having the conversation of should we switch this up like we keep getting this feedback the valuation's too high and actually it was just like, no, let's keep going.

16:23Like we will find the people that believe in this product who actually believe in what we're doing enough. The valuation isn't really a consideration. What's a consideration is the opportunity. We stood by that and we made it all the way through, right? We raised the entire 2 million pounds. We ended up doing our crowdfunding. We ended up giving away not a single piece of legal rights that we were not comfortable or willing to give up. We made it just really clear that we want to run this business. And based on previous experience of having very challenging board members and other voices at the table, we made it super clear the things that we are and aren't willing to give up.

17:02And those things were equity and control. When did you close that round? So the first tranche closed in June 2020, just in time. And I remember this was the period as well of zoom backgrounds going crazy they had all the virtual video zoom backgrounds i turned up to one of our team meetings with this image i'd done of joel and myself cigars in our mouths and money floating down from the sky it's kind of like a breaking bad thing but like just like dollar bills like animated all over us etc etc as the background um that was like my background to like team announcement i think we were six people at that time saying we've got the money time to move bored, yada, yada, like all exciting.

17:43Everyone's really happy. Anyway, close the meeting. An hour later, I've got another investor meeting to like have a conversation with them about like where to wire the money. And I totally forgot that I would have that auto background on. I started this investor call with this, like they've just met me and just agreed to invest. And I'm suddenly there with this like background of me and Joel with cigars in our mouths and money falling all over our heads. It was absolutely incredible. Fortunately, they took it really well, but I was mortified. brilliant so um you've now you've got the money but you've already started hiring people it's really tricky the hiring one because the right way to do it is to hire based on values um which we did really really well we outperformed massively for the first couple of years and it's because we did hire really great people like we were very good at it i would say so you're starting to build or certainly recruit the team, you've got this goal end of the year that you want to do a fundraise.

18:43What do you need to achieve in that year to be in a good position to do a crowd round? Doing a crowdfunding round is an extremely laborious process. There's a lot of time that goes into it. It's unbelievably detail-oriented. And because they're FCA regulated as well, it is just a total minefield. at the level of detail at which you need to provide evidence for everything that you say all the time. At the end of the day, the most important thing when you're doing a crowdfund is making sure that you have at least 50 % of the money lined up, ready to go. So that was one of the really important things, like strategically, because I knew that we wanted to do crowdfunding that year.

19:26I made sure that the way that we handled the money, so how the money went in, was into an escrow account, was in line essentially with crowdfunding rules of how to use and touch money that is like earmarked for a round. So if you're raising a million, you need at least half a million committed. Well, I wanted to make sure that we had as much committed as humanly possible. So we did a very sort of cheeky framing of it all where we said we're raising one million pound, but we had 750 ,000 pounds of it already committed. So a majority of it. And then we just overfunded massively. We were raising officially one million pound was a number that we said.

20:04And then the idea is you go into overfunding. We raise obviously the half a million that I mentioned earlier, we'd raise that by June. And from the point of June onwards, knowing that we're going to do this crowdfunding, we launched it in, I think, October, maybe end of October, then it closed in December. One of the things you need for crowdfunding is time. Like if you want to do it well, you have a bit of time to plan it all to make sure that it is like smooth. But what you need is momentum. Like the number one most important thing is momentum. We got very lucky because we had been building a customer list for sure.

20:34I think we were, you know, getting close to a thousand customers by the time it was summer. By the time maybe it was like September, I think we had around a thousand customers. But it'd been a hard slog, right? And we'd done so many things through COVID to sort of activate it. We'd done all these YouTube lives, which, you know, had been really well attended. You know, YouTube live with Stephen Fry one week. We did one with Jay Shetty the next week. We found, yeah, had like 7 ,000 people watching live quite often. Really quite amazing. Like because it was the pandemic and no one had anything better to do than learn, it was just the perfect place for us.

21:07And we had the perfect kind of content. It was really great brand awareness. We had got to about a thousand customers, very bootstrapped. I mean, all this stuff is obviously content. So it's just like my time and free. We didn't really have an advertising budget we weren't doing any paid and at that point I was invited to speak on Diary of a CEO with Stephen Bartlett obviously I said yes it was a weird one because it was like there was a pandemic was still happening and he was very much like we're doing it at mine in the house like all the stuff and I was like really and he was like yeah I don't want to do anything that's not like that and I was like all right if you've been tested and all that stuff so anyway and it was a great interview really enjoyed it he's obviously a master of what he does it went live a few weeks later it was just in time for our crowdfunding campaign it was perfect we i'd say got another 500 customers or so from that in the next couple of weeks which is pretty good that's quite a big conversion rate in general but if you think about it it's also like exactly what you need to show going into crowdfunding like you know officially what they can see is you've spent no extra money whatsoever and you've just grown 50 that's kind of how it was like going into crowdfunding like i was going and accepting interview requests in a lot of different places.

22:19Like I'd build up a bit of a content story in the year that had been so far by doing these YouTube lives and getting in contact with cool people. So I was having a, you know, a moment where I was focusing on spreading the message far and wide as much as I could on various different podcasts. And that strategy was really working for us. And so going into the crowdfunding campaign, we're just like a really strong narrative pretty much 30 percent month-on-month growth and also like dan you've written uh i think it's a linkedin post which is all about how to do crowdfunding well and and cedars i seem to remember saying lots of people have written these guides but you're the first person to tell the truth yeah exactly and the reason for that will is because i uh the title is how to raise a million pounds in 10 minutes because we did and it was a ground it was a record-breaking crowdfund and then the first line in it is something along the lines of well we didn't this is what actually happen and it's like this is how much we raised in advance this is how much was prepped like don't believe all the hype you ever see on crowdfunding platforms this is actually what you do behind the scenes you wanted to crowdfund at the end of the year presumably you had some kind of targets like we want to be at 2 000 customers or whatever and then you needed to mold the team around that so i'd love to know what your goal if you can remember what your goals were and then how did you get the team operating because this is something founders will have You know, you've got to create all the rituals and you've got to manage people into sort of performing or create the right environment.

23:47What happened there? Because it's one of the toughest things in business, right? Yeah. So in terms of like the processes, the strategic management and stuff like that, that's very much my business partner, Joel's not necessarily zone of genius, but certainly like because he's got other zones of genius. But it's definitely an area where he's really strong. He, I would say, is very curious and not dogmatic. about what is the best way to work and what are the ways that should work for us. And so I say that because at Heights, we've had so many different styles of things that we've tried and then not tried and then tried again, because we're consistently like all startups should be on a mission to search for what actually works to deliver the best results.

24:29Now, at the time, I remember that we had something called explore OKRs. So OKRs are objectives and key results. And for anyone that doesn't know about them, they're used in lots of the biggest companies in the world. and there's a great book called Measure What Matters by a guy called John Doher and you should read more about them there but what they essentially are is you know you have your broad objectives and then key results are very specific and actionable and like measurable so you can actually say whether or not you've accomplished them. We've got the team aligned with those but what explore OKRs are is sort of the you accept that as a startup you're in exploration of product market fit so being too dogmatic about what a key result is is actually kind of silly because you really don't know anything.

25:10We became quite good at making sure that we're like, let's not spend any time doing anything that we haven't pre-agreed to do as a strategy, but not so dogmatic that we won't change. So if we suddenly find ourselves in a situation, as you do in startups, where you ask people what they did this week, and they tell you, and then you're like, wait a minute, that doesn't sound like anything related to the OKRs that we just talked about. What is going on? You're like, well, this stuff's far more important. Then you've got two questions to ask. One is, have I just hired an idiot that literally doesn't understand how to follow their own instructions that they set out to are our okrs wrong and they need updating because like why would we dogmatically keep something that clearly isn't where the opportunity is right now there's the being in constant search of processes and like you know even team meetings and stuff right like what works for us as a team like how do we collaborate to actually get results the stuff's hard like it's really genuinely hard like it's so easy to it's one of the most underestimated things but it's very easy to come up with ideas to all collaborate passionately in a meeting and think that you know we've had a breakthrough but actually like the execution and collaboration of who does what and tying that together and actually turning it into a meaningful output that looks good bloody hard work so that is the thing that we spent a lot of time on and I say we but I really mean Joel um but I spent a lot of time like figuring out like the different ways that different things we can try different ways that we can try them constantly getting feedback from the team about what was or wasn't working so do you remember any specifically great to give some examples to our team about like the different kinds of rituals or whatever you uh and some maybe that worked in particular as well that you think are worth sharing um well we used to have a thing called friday night heights because we think we're really funny um and friday night lights is one of my favorite films and it's a great tv show so that was friday night heights and then ironically in terms of like rituals we then decided that friday night was actually a really bad time to do like the all hands company meeting because then you've got the weekend and and it took us like six months essentially to realize that this wasn't the optimal time so then we were trying to look for another time that it worked and the only time that we could find it was thursday and now forever since it's been called thursday night heights except now Thursday Night Heights, because we're now an international team, like straddling loads of different time zones.

27:31Thursday Night Heights now happens on Thursday lunchtime. So it's now neither night nor Friday. That is a good example of don't get too dogmatic over your naming of these things. One that's really been great that we've actually had since the very start that we've never stopped is we had this thing called Central Park. essentially we just like back in the day on zoom i just had a central perk background for everyone and it was a 3 p.m on a wednesday it was just like a come join the central perk cafe and just have a chat non-work related and just chat to anyone that like wants to turn up and that's still something that we do every single wednesday i mean we're still fully remote right so we'll play games or we'll just have a casual chat or we'll use it as like a learning opportunity but it's actually really great to see like there are a couple of these things that have actually stood the test of time and seen the light of day and continue to.

28:20There's a company that I invested in previously called Flown. They came up in the pandemic as well. Like their idea is genius. It's essentially that they have a really good insight. They're trying to be essentially the peloton of work. People find more accountability to do their work when they are, especially if they're working remotely, when they have other people around them to hold them accountable. So the idea with Flown, which is a bit odd, but it's actually amazing and always works and has become a massive part of the heights culture. You turn up, you speak to other people that are on the Zoom call, essentially.

28:51They have a facilitator who might do interludes in the middle and ask you to do some yoga stretches or like share a fun fact with someone else. But ultimately, you go off into like a breakout room with three or four other people and say what you're going to work on in the next 90 minutes and what you're hoping to achieve and what you're hoping to achieve. It's sort of a five minute powwow with a bunch of strangers. Go back into the main room. Everyone has their commitments there it's facilitated everyone is literally just working on silent with a zoom massive zoom group in the background it's a bit weird and culty but it's excellent and then you work for your 90 minutes and when the 90 minutes is up they tell you and you go back into your rooms and share with other people what you've done and what you've accomplished we trialed it about a year ago and we've done it ever since so we do two flowns a week as a team we actually find it to be a really great way as well to connect with each other so we we do flown through the platform and now we do like our own internal ones as well and when we do our own internal ones we tend to ask ourselves questions that are related to our values so how have you shown up this week and built trust with someone for example will be the question and everyone will answer it together anyway so these are like some rituals that i feel like have been really powerful in building a remote company and making sure that meetings are a bit of a minimum, but like interactions are at an all time high.

30:08Any other particular tips for founders? Because you know, so much of work now is hybrid or even fully remote for founders. I love that flown example. Are there any other tools or tactics that you think are particularly good? I often find, you know, the remote stuff can end up feeling quite sort of gimmicky, or it can like fold out by the wayside. And obviously, you've got to try new things to keep it fresh. So is there anything in particular that doesn't fall foul of those things. I think it's really important for teams to try things together and see what works. We've tried all the sort of like water cooler chat apps and, you know, all the different like walking apps.

30:42And but at the end of the day, like our experience has just been that most people don't want more apps and more things. They kind of want like less things and to just like really hone in and how to make those experiences better. One of the challenges we had was in the year that we launched, we weren't supposed to be a remote company. And so we weren't interested already to become a remote company. We had spent most of our time thinking about how to build a culture in an office. We had an office in Soho. We only got out of that contract in September. And so for like the whole year, basically, you know, we were locked into a contract and thinking that we're going back into an office, even though we never did.

31:15One of the problems that happened there is we had like a cultural analysis paralysis of like, OK, we're hybrid because we say we're hybrid. But we never really identified how to do hybrid well. One of the things we do do as a company is company retreats. We do two company retreats a year, which I am responsible for planning and executing. And that's been like a really great way. And even when we're doing hybrid, that's what we decided was like going to be a really good way to bring the company together. Yeah, one of the really common misconceptions that people have about building remote versus building IRL is you'll save money.

31:46I think that can be true, but I think if you're building a great culture, you're probably doing it wrong if that's your thinking. Because all the money that we spend, or would spend, sorry, on having an office, we generally put into retreats and into making sure that the remote setup for employees is super comfortable and happy. We use a company called Juno. We give every employee at height£100 a month on wellness that they can use. We have learning and development budgets. We have, you know, just so many wellness perks that we really focus on because we want people to turn up, be happy and have all this like exceptional freedom and opportunity to do what they want.