From paintball to TOY BOYS: a serial entrepreneur's playbook | Interview with Mike Bandar, Waybook and Professor at UCL

0:00Welcome to Strategy and Tragedy, the UK Top 20 business show for entrepreneurs. If you are tuning in for the first time, then a great big warm welcome from me, your host, Stephanie Melodia. If you're tuning back in, then welcome back. It is so wonderful to have you. Honestly, guys, I am so appreciative of you tuning in. And if you haven't already, please hit that follow or subscribe button. I feel like I ask you every single time, but the stats are actually insane. There's like 70, 80 percent of you that are not following or subscribing. So literally doesn't cost a single thing. It takes two seconds.

0:35Please help a sister out and do it right now. I'm giving you a chance. That's much appreciated. All right. Thank you so much for tuning in. I am so excited to interview my next guest, Mike Bander. Oh, my God. How to even begin with his intro. He is currently the co-founder and CEO of Waybook, which is a knowledge base onboarding training platform to become the single source of truth for businesses. There's a lot of knowledge. There's lots of documents flying about, and it's to make sure everything is all in one place so everyone knows how to find everything. How was that as an elevator pitch? It was pretty good, yeah.

1:1190 %? I'd say a strong 91%. Ah, thanks. I'll take the extra 1%. Take it, take it. He is also the co-founder of Hopper, which is a social media scheduling tool, also co-founder of an awesome startup studio, and leaving the best to last, he's also the owner of Toy Boy Warehouse, which, mm-hmm, that was a good one. A bit creepy. No, that was unintentionally creepy. Rich matches older women with charming younger men. Mike, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thanks for having me. And expertly done right there, of course. You were that expert. You nailed it all right there. That was a stab. That was a stab.

1:49I got somewhere close to it. You got there. You don't want to play darts with me. I never get bullseye. But I appreciate that. I'll take the compliment close enough. So more to your intro. One of the things that we've both got in common, in addition to having 5 million job titles is we are both educators in entrepreneurship. That's true. You are a lecturer at UCL. UCL. So cool. Amazing. So my opening question to you is, can you teach entrepreneurship? Can you teach someone to be an entrepreneur? Yeah, big question. I mean, this is kind of an age old question, right? In terms of whether it's innate, whether it's learned.

2:26And I think to really dive into that, we almost need to make two totally separate distinctions about what constitutes an entrepreneur or what is necessary for somebody to become an entrepreneur. Are they born or made? Are they born or made? But actually, there's thousands, millions of different types of entrepreneurs. There's millions of different types of entrepreneurship in terms of, you know, is a plumber running a few additional plumbers an entrepreneur? Arguably, yes. And actually, people running big tech start-ups. But to kind of get into that, I almost separate the entrepreneurial skills that somebody would have.

3:01So the skills being how people sell, how we do market analysis, how we can manage and how we can, you know, basically the tangible tactical skill sets that we can learn. And then entrepreneurship or entrepreneurial characteristics. and by characteristics I mean things like the grit, the hustle, the determination, the more tacit skills that we can kind of feel and understand that somebody has when we're interacting and I think most people agree that the skills can be taught but the characteristics are where a lot of that contention comes from and people aren't sure if it's innate or learned. In my humble opinion I think that a lot of that can be learned and I think that you might teach the skills and that's sort of what we do within our kind of teaching careers if you like so on the masters of entrepreneurship at UCL where I teach we run through that right the modules take you through how do we create a business model canvas and how do we create value propositions and do you know customer intimacy and discovery a lot of that can be taught the characteristic side of it I think almost just to use semantics here I think they can be trained rather than talk Gang, whether or not you like it, if you're in business, you're in sales.

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5:34If you're ready to turn your sales conversations into competitive advantage, then head straight to the show notes for your unique Gong link and see why thousands of revenue teams trust their growth to revenue AI. Because in sales, strategy beats tragedy every time. All right, gang, let's get back to the episode. Okay, I'm going to geek out on this because it is a very rare occasion. I do get to kind of deep dive on kind of the teaching of entrepreneurship. And I love so much what I do, Mike. Honestly, I love it. so much what do you think because i you know unsurprisingly have a few thoughts on this as well what do you think are the hardest characteristics skills to teach people who are maybe not who maybe do not have that like innate college dropout had that made some money on a you know lemonade stand when they were 12 like not that persona because i don't think i'm that persona either the different persona who kind of who would be a student of yours who does want to come and learn and be taught what are the hardest things to teach on on the characteristic side i would say the i would say there's almost characteristics that are necessary to be able to learn the other characteristics right and that is pretty much grit determination resilience and and and that kind of innate hustle so there's there's almost like a restlessness that comes from a lot of entrepreneurs that is what is the unlock for them to then learn the other skills characteristics and traits necessary to unlock what they're trying to do.

7:03That makes a lot of sense. And that burning desire, that burning restlessness is a characteristic that I think can be trained, but it would more be trained through environment. So actually, if you come from a family where it's entrepreneurial and you see people being resilient and getting knocked back and they're still going and getting knocked back and that gives them more fire, then we are a product of the people around us right so you become more like that i love that and i want to deep dive more into kind of like the inner psyche of these profiles the motivation for some people right so that grit that hustler that you describe i have met so many incredible entrepreneurs and those who come to mind who are just these like relentless machines where i'm like you could point them at anything and they will make it a success some of them almost have like something to prove sure there's maybe like a revenge or a tip on the shoulder absolutely so what can you speak to on the motive like what can motivate people to to um to nurture that that grit that resilience like there's got to be that that fire you've got to stoke that fire i would say that it's not all a lot of when we talk about the the kind of elons of the world and the chip on the shoulder a lot of that comes from trauma and i don't think that that means that people without trauma can not become entrepreneurs I think it's more around aligning the aligning that grit that you have that that that thing you're trying to prove to something that is so fundamentally authentically you so if you come from a very privileged up brand it's more healthy you know and yeah it's much it's much healthier and and it's easier to do but I don't think that people are as well aligned to doing that deep dive into themselves and saying why do I actually want to do this exactly what what what feeling am i unlocking in myself and it could just be to prove something to yourself and you don't need trauma and chips around that but you almost you almost dig deep into that that makes a lot of sense and those particular characters that come to mind i mean psychoanalysts would have a field day with those guys on that note i'm not going to come off this subject i definitely want to geek out more with you but i have to ask what motivates you then mike do you know what it's it's a question that i i wrestle with and and i feel like over my career I've got to different levels of comfort.

9:22And if I can digress just a little bit, the way I see us as characters behaving, I almost feel like you've got our comfort zone, right? And if we live in this comfort zone, most people, 99 % of the population, loves to live in the comfort zone. And why wouldn't you? It's comfortable. For sure. And as soon as we go out of that comfort zone, we enter our stretch zone. And that's really the learning zone where we start to see new things, experience new things understand new things and that's where we're learning but then on the outer ring of the learning zone we have our panic zone and so often do people get out of their comfort zone explore look around take you know have a good time and then if they tiptoe into the panic zone they're instantly brought back into their their comfort zone yeah and then have fear to never leave it again i was going to talk to you about fear okay we'll come back to that we'll come Yeah, so that's how we operate, right?

10:14And I think that where I like to be is on the very edge of the learning zone, just before panic. And I feel like if I'm at that point, then I just feel alive and I know that I'm making progress. I know that I'm moving fast. I know that I'm learning things. We've all, well, a lot of people who push have been in panic zone and it's just not enjoyable. but the big trap with all of this is the more you're in your your your stretch and your learning zone it gets bigger because you're stretching and you're learning and then your comfort zone becomes bigger and and i feel like i've i've had this these things throughout my or periods throughout my career where i feel content and i feel i feel oh this is good take a brief and an exhale exactly yeah and i i mentioned to a a mentor of mine once i i went to her probably about 10 years ago and I was like Helen I just feel so content I feel so great and she said it won't last yeah and I was like what how dare you and it didn't last right for somebody as ambitious and driven as well this is it so if we take a moment in your career where you have been at the most outer edge of that stretch zone can you think back to a specific moment you can share it with us or not it's up to you but the key question there is what was that driving factor on your motivation to get that far on the edge of your stretch zone?

11:33For me, it's more a case of challenging these kind of limiting beliefs or assumptions that we might have about ourselves. The reason why I love entrepreneurship in any form is I feel like it's one of the only things where people can do something in a way that they choose and they can do it for the reasons that they choose. There's almost no limits, right? in terms of how you operate and why you operate rather than who you are and what you do like that that doesn't that doesn't matter within entrepreneurship but it basically means that you can kind of set your like choose your own adventure right you can kind of choose so so i think whenever i'm whenever i push to that outer limit it's more where i have a clearer understanding of something that i'm not sure if it can be achieved so it's more curiosity as a driver I wouldn't say curiosity.

12:30It's more a case of uncertainty. But so let me give it let me give an example. Right. So when we started when we started Hopper, which is our planning and scheduling tool for social media, it technically wasn't possible. It wasn't possible to do. And there was a lot within that that was a technical difficulty. It was also a commercial difficulty. What year was this? This was 2015. OK. And there was also a lot around how we operated a business. this we we wanted to stay bootstrapped whereas we started to work in an environment where everyone was vc backed and and actually hopper shouldn't really exist as a business it shouldn't it shouldn't have worked um and i love that because i was like okay like that let's do something that's difficult enough that will kind of get me excited and wake up in the morning and i i've reflected on this a couple of times over the over the years where i feel like i think i'm a wartime ceo because i always love running the business but i am i am on when there's problems like i am i am loving it like is that just a sense of like rising to the challenge yeah i think i think it's so i think it almost is just so stimulating right it's it's makes you feel something makes you feel a lot yeah it's like okay i just i don't do drugs exactly yeah just like turn off your servers and watch the chaos happen and then and then fix it and actually it's funny i i do this even even when i'm doing uh you know a talk or a workshop or something i'm i'm i know that i will do a good job um but in order to really kind of really kind of juice me i need to leave it i i need i need to i need to make it difficult yeah i need to get into the panic it's not healthy by the way it's not i wouldn't recommend it i mean there is there was this what oh i'm gonna butcher it there was a psychology study of this like wave where there is almost similar to like your concentric ripples on the the comfort zone and the stretch zone there with um the stimulation and it's kind of like you need enough pressure enough stimulation perfect example there like if you've got a talk but if it's really high stakes um it's that adrenaline it's that sort of slightly panic stations which is fine obviously it's a survival mechanism it's fine in small doses but it's just obviously if it is prolonged so on your wartime ceo self-realization here what about the recovery from that because i can definitely empathize with like the proverbial has hit the fan we need to sort you out and i'm like similarly i'm like okay get down to business sort this all out but then my recovery afterward once i then can process and take a breathe then i'm like wow i need a while to lick the wounds afterwards yeah yeah i'll rise to the challenge in the moment is that the same for you or i i the way i the the model i have in my head is is almost the the mental emotional equivalent of having fast twitch or slow twitch muscle so if you think about runners fast twitch runners can or fast muscle you you can sprint right and actually you sprint and then recover and you can just nail out these 100 meters right whereas people with slow twitch muscle can run a marathon and then they have to rest yeah that's a good example and actually i believe that we have the same in a in our in our you know psyche and in the way we the way we work and and it's i don't know the neuroscience behind it but it's true because he says i don't know anything about science but it's true um because actually if you look if you look at the rates of people who have strokes after they retire yeah so you know the the 65 7 67 rates of of post retirement strokes are off the chart uh and and heart attacks and also you look at any parent most parents will get ill in the summer holidays because they've been building themselves up so much and then their mind their body everything relaxes now i think if you apply that to a kind of working environment it's more about understanding how do you best operate because some of our developers for example and even our marketing team some of these people best work in three hour chunks and if i'm saying like steph i want to tell you something i'm just knocking i'm killing them right like i'm knocking them off because i'm distracting them and doing whatever so they'll do their three hour chunk and then they'll have to rest and recoup for 20 minutes for me i i'm i'm very fast twitch on on on that side like a sprinter i'm more like a sprinter and actually that that doesn't necessarily it's not better or worse it just means i can context switch quickly yeah i can jump in and out of things fast and also i need more regular but shorter recovery yeah so i can have a yeah yeah okay and and look there's i want somebody to do more in this right like i i did i did do a i did do a test once which kind of um aligned and assigned to some stuff like this many years ago um but i think the important thing is it's knowing how you operate and how you recover from that exactly exactly yeah really i'm thinking of different examples of people that i've worked with and i remember somebody brilliant who i hired with my last business that really kind of put it um you know brought it to light for me where they were just they were the marathon they were like i'm in the zone i'm locked in i'm like cool i'll leave you alone and mike testament to your self awareness as a leader as well to know how to provide the most conducive environments to your team because honestly there's you know we need more leaders like you and especially i actually don't think it's that surprising a trait to be that sprinter as the founder because i think such an important and overlooked skill especially in like the earlier days is creating that sense of urgency and so i think there's some of that that does come into play to like gang like we need to like rally the troops we need to like you just got to create that sense of urgency for people But then it's kind of like, I guess, once you found product market fit, once you're scaling, once you have these teams, you need to set them up for success.

18:09It's so true. But I think even in that time where it's high pressure, being agile, you know, chopping and changing. If people, if work that needs to be done needs deep work, focus and concentration, then it is torture for people if they're, you know, being thrown to the wind. But, you know, interestingly, you talk about my self-awareness. That actually came because we used to have an office in Birmingham. and I used to have a lot of guilt when I wasn't in the office right like I've always been involved and like loving it and and because I started spending more and more time in London I would come back from London I'd be like guys I'm so sorry I've literally only been here one one day this week and everyone's like Mike we have been so productive and I think we're all better without you here so so that was actually the seed that got me into trying to understand why why are people better when i when i'm not around yeah and i'm like don't don't worry on some lana del rey oh okay love you too guys love you too all right that was amazing so we mentioned the keyword fear you mentioned that a little while ago i wanted to come back to that and looping back into like teaching entrepreneurship and my question however long ago it was around like the hardest characteristics or skills to teach people and that was one that i had in my mind was the fear factor and i guess that kind of relates to your concentric circles uh framework there we don't suddenly kind of leapfrog out into that danger zone but what has been your experience of pushing i guess sort of like first-time founders entrepreneurs that are new to this space pushing them to take risks because risk tolerance is another huge factor when it comes to like success yeah I I think there's a there's more so in the UK than than in other countries I agree that there is an alignment between people's sense of worth being who they are how good they are and the project they're working on and what you tend to find in particularly in earlier stage entrepreneurship is that people will will share and have pride about everything that they're doing but then you get into this kind of valley of despair where they aren't moving as fast as they would like to be so they're not actually exposing their idea they were getting in front of people which actually slows down the progress of their business becoming something but growing and then they build up this fear of failure on or actually not looking as good as what they think they should be doing and then it's a bit of a downward spiral and then it's a downward spiral so i actually was in an incubator in Birmingham for many years.

20:51And there was this guy who had this really great idea, this really great product, but he would never show it to us. He would never show it to us. And then every time we spoke to him, it had another feature and it was doing another thing. And actually, we kind of went our separate ways and left the incubator. And I saw him two years afterwards. And I said, Oh, whatever happened with the projects? And he said, Oh, what next month, we're just doing this, we're adding that. And we both knew that he hadn't launched it, he wasn't doing it but he was still in this this inertia of of saving face yeah yeah and i think that that that fear of um i don't even know what it is well i was gonna say sorry carry on i know i know what it is though it's all these different fears yeah because this is sorry i'll finish your story but in my teaching experience as well it has one of the biggest eye openers mentoring and And having the privilege of one-to-one mentoring with some of these incredible budding founders was the variety of fears.

21:52I still need to do a whole video on this. But there's fear of judgment. There's fear of it not being perfect, like just perfectionism getting in the way. There's simply fear of the perception and just kind of like, what are other people going to think? Who gives a shit? Who are these other people? the biggest thing with that which I love is uh you know an Olympic athlete is never going to judge someone going out for their first run in the same way a serial exited entrepreneur is never going to judge anyone for starting out their first business so whoever's judging you literally doesn't even matter and then of course the fear of failure as well so and I think a lot of the time because we fear fear we don't even go as far as identifying we don't even we just don't even we don't want to feel it we avoid it we don't even go that far in our minds what even am i afraid of course it's irrational but once you do start to look at it it helps to identify a problem that you can then solve but of course it's not going to happen overnight and it does take time like strengthening muscles to increase that risk tolerance you're so right and and i think you you say that the people who might be judging you early on don't even matter the the sad fact is to those people in a lot of scenarios those people do matter because quite often they are their close friends and their family and it keeps them stuck and I think this is something you see more within the UK unfortunately and that's why it's so important to be in founder circles and kind of getting that inspiration and that kind of camaraderie if you like from other people That average of the people you spend your most time with It's so true right?

23:29It's so true I actually read something about how some criminals are like in the most like extreme crazy circumstance are like kept kind of stuck because that is the people that they're with and like they don't want to break free from the tribe because like that feels like death to us as homeless humans um yeah that's interesting but that's not always the case like as in as in this is this is the thing and actually i think to to kind of put this to to uh i guess linking it back to teaching entrepreneurship part of the value of entrepreneurial training whether that be at university or whether that be in you know any any format is the cohort that you build and and actually back to the point of the characteristics that can be trained rather than the skills that can be taught the more you surround yourself by these people you kind of create a positive echo chamber right i guess and and get that you know inspiration in from different people and i think i think that that's very easy to find actually these days it's almost just you need to you need to take those first steps and and kind of have that resilience to stay in there even if you don't feel like you're fully you're fully at the table I know so many people who are trapped at least in part because of the people around them it's hard it's hard when it is you know being real about like when they are your close friends and family and it's like are you going to abandon all of that and these people that you do care about and you love in pursuit of this personal development in entrepreneurship given all the benefits in entrepreneurship and sort of sticking with the education theme for a sec do you think that entrepreneurship should factor in more into schools curriculum 100 and what can government do about it why shouldn't why are they not really doing it oh fuck don't answer that question um we don't have all day but no 100 and i and i think the you know the i think it's i think it's quite politicized actually i i think it's quite politicized in terms of um what how firstly how good is entrepreneurship for uk plc that that that that is that's the main question that that and that ultimately filters down into all kind of other policy decisions the other key thing to bear in mind which makes this difficult to to actually execute is the best form of entrepreneurship education in my opinion is from other entrepreneurs and actually it's very hard to systemize and scale that out to the general population through all school years one day is doing a pretty good job of it just saying oh yeah of course yeah yeah of course you can sign up to one day so so i think so i think that that that's one of that's one of the kind of practical challenges but but it's the the policy but but saying that there are there are lots of i would say extracurricular things that that have been that that are available within in schools and i know that that's become a more increasing much more than before but the underlying question you raise is so important which is ultimately how beneficial is this for uk plc and if we're trying to position ourselves as half a semi-decent competitor in the innovation economy surely breeding more entrepreneurs is part of the answer it's not just getting too political or should I take this to House of Lords?

26:39Take it. Bang on that door. I want to. No, I think, look, I don't actually think it's, I personally don't think it's that contentious, but I think maybe I'll just only speak to the people that agree with you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We need to get some politicians on this. Well, I think, look, just to kind of still man the other side, it's a case of, well, not everybody can be an entrepreneur. Not everybody has the opportunity. That's a hot speak to you with that. No. Well, okay, no, I don't think everybody can become, um a vc-backed tech startup i i agree with that and i don't think the answer to everyone's solution is start a business but i think that more comes down to the media's perception of a business and being an entrepreneur yeah and i feel like entrepreneurship and and entrepreneurial activities can are becoming so kind of rich varied and embedded within the fabric of of what a future career would be right and to your earlier points with using like a plumber example and like it can take shape in so many different forms which perfectly serves me on a silver platter mike my follow-up question which has given you are such a serial entrepreneur you have started your own businesses but you've also acquired businesses as well and so i would love to hear more from you on the different ways to get into entrepreneurship it doesn't always mean that you have to default to finding a problem to solve, finding a market to go after, doing your market analysis, having the grit and the resilience to build something from scratch.

28:07So talk us through the other ways people can get into entrepreneurship, maybe relate to some of your experience. Yeah, sure. I think this has actually become a lot more popular in the last few years, really, with the whole concept of buying a boring business and doing all of that. That's Cody Sanchez. Cody Sanchez, yeah. She's basically increased the value of every storage, like laundromat ever. yeah so it's a real thing every mechanic exactly but but i mean the and just on that so so this for for viewers who are being like who's cody sanchez and what they're talking about is a lot of business influencers are now saying look you don't have to start you can basically find a cash flowing business you can you can buy it for three four five times revenue you can get debt against the business to buy the business and then just sit back and print money now that is that is true, but it's also like glamorized way more than what it actually is, right?

28:59Like it's hard. And you're buying these kind of clunkier businesses that you still need to have domain knowledge and skills and contingency and everything else. So buying businesses is definitely one thing. I think that in a lot of scenarios, dependent on your ability to get debt, that can still be a bit out of reach for a lot of people, particularly first time entrepreneurs. and particularly and that's not necessarily a bad thing because if you've never run a business you've never done anything you've never managed a p &l you've never sold you need to earn your stripes well you you almost you almost want to test that out in a way before you've kind of put everything you've got into it and tons of debt against a business so so that that is one viable way yeah the other way i think that i think that people can act and be entrepreneurial at a very young age um that where the risks are lower and and actually you know going to a car boot sale and buying stuff and selling it on ebay this is a really bad example that's that's entrepreneurship right that that's kind of understanding different things a bit of a bit of hustling and there's no risk against that so so i feel like getting into the spirit of entrepreneurship is uh and and spotting those opportunities in daily life is is is great and you know you look at people like alex alex Tom Mosey, he has lots of great ideas around this where go to a service business within your local your local town and say, OK, you're a chiropractor.

30:24What's the minimum that you would possibly sell a chiropractor session for? And if that's 20 quid, then actually you can you can basically go and sell packages of 10 chiropractic sessions for, you know. Yeah, exactly. And that is a zero, zero cost, like zero issue thing where actually if you don't sell them, then you've lost nothing. So there's lots of entrepreneurial tactics and things that you can do that aren't necessarily buying a big business, starting a tech company, you know, investing lots of capital. And I think that that is an important thing for people to do if it's either a stepping stone into starting your own business, if it's a hustle to make some money whilst you're starting a business, or actually just a skill set that you're then going to later use in a job or, you know, in life.

31:10Yeah, 100%. So how did you acquiring Toyboy Warehouse come about? Because I still feel like it is kind of rare, like unless you are more so in the finance industry and you kind of like know the lingo and you have a bit more of that familiarity. I don't think many people think of buying a business entering entrepreneurship. Most people still think I need to start my own business, go into it. How did it come about for you? You must have already been aware of this concept. It was actually very natural, to be fair. I would love to say I was born a private equity champion, but it was very natural. So basically, as I grew up, I did a lot of these kind of small, thank you, I did a lot of these small, Are there any fun ones you want to say on the show?

31:52Oh, I mean, loads of fun ones. I once bought 100 ,000 balloons at auction, only to find that all of the print had been printed upside down, and that's why I got them so cheap. So I was basically logging these balloons as non-helion balloons. So when you hung them upside down, the print was the right way. Oh, that's so creative. Thank you very much. Travelling dog bowls, just loads of things. My first proper business was a paintballing company. So I basically had a business that we didn't operate the sites, but we operated the ticket sales, the booking, and put bums on seats basically in the sites.

32:29And that was a fantastic business. I ran that all throughout my university. And actually, that's what gave me a seed bit of capital to then help with acquisition later on. So that was a way in. But I always had growing up impatient ambition, right? Like, well, actually, you hear it being discussed more now as a bias to action, which is way nicer. I grew up with a bias to action, but I was basically just like, like ADHD, like wannabe entrepreneur. And I was like, oh, look over there. Let's try and do this. let's try to do that so so i always had that in me and and actually as i started doing bigger products and projects and bits like that i almost wanted to i almost wanted to firstly formalize that a little bit and the opportunity to to buy the dating business almost just came around left field i was actually doing some consulting whilst starting a fitness supplement by subscription company.

33:27And I met the person who wanted some consulting to to on another business she owned. And when I found out that she had this dating business, I was like, wow, this is amazing. It was it was it was profitable. It wasn't really growing, but she was bored of it. And because we had previously played with some different tech products, I looked at the I looked at the business and I was like, there's no recurring revenue. This SEO is amazing. The site conversion is awful like the the the forum basically everything when i looked at it i could i could fix so much opportunity so much opportunity and and i asked myself the question like what could we do different to the existing owners and there was tons there was tons where our our kind of hypothesis of what could be better was so de-risked i was like we've just got to buy this business um was it like you don't need to share the amount but like how did you secure the funding to buy a So we self-funded it.

34:22And that was largely because of the money that I'd done from the paintball business. But also just good deal structuring with the existing owner. So we actually guaranteed her the amount of profit she was taking out indefinitely. She maintained 10 % of that business and we basically bought 90 % of the business for fair market value. But we got a discount on that because of her maintaining the profit share. The art of negotiation. well exactly like negotiation isn't about you getting the best it literally is the best for both parties it's so true and actually i i remember i was speaking to a guy called peter dines about this and then three months later i met him at an event and he said oh what happened to the dating business i said oh no the deal fell over and the deal fell over and i was like so you know it's not happening and he was like mike make it happen it's fallen over and it's not happening because you've not yet made it happen and i was like okay yep so i just i like picked up back the phone i just made the deal happen and and it's just bits like that like it's just such a wake-up call and and that's true in so much guy sorry uh a guy called peter dines i must admit i've not been in touch with him for a very long time but he he sits very favorably in my head he's a really really great guy hello to him i'm sure it will yeah heard of him sorry who is he what was he he was basically a kind of mentor in the birmingham entrepreneurship space so so he was really successful within his businesses and i've got so many of these great mentors that that have kind of like passed through in my life and have really kind of been massively impactful for me.

35:52It's great at these sliding doors moments right and it kind of goes back to what you're saying with the people you surround yourself with. Literally if he hadn't just challenged you in that moment you could have just let that by the wayside. Yeah I wouldn't have been a professional toy boy you know. So anyway so. It actually could have been so different. Well true and so basically when that opportunity came about and going back to your point about you know portfolio business and different different ways in I was still massively ambitious and I still really wanted to kind of like learn and grow and adapt the the dating business was a great opportunity but it didn't satisfy the full ambition of what I wanted to achieve so at that point we decided to buy that within a group and the group was called turn partners so that was the the seed of saying okay well look let's let's turn this business around but we don't want to be the toy boys right Like that's not our destiny.

36:41Interestingly, I think that that was a bit of a mechanic that addressed the fear that we were talking about before, because the success and failure in the brand and everything of Toyboy Warehouse then was almost one step removed from Mike Bander as the entrepreneur. It sounds inextricably linked to your own identity. Exactly. And actually, I fundamentally believe that I've always believed that entrepreneurship is a ladder. The businesses we start today is not the businesses that will define us, not the businesses we run tomorrow or in the future. But it helps us see the next step of what we're doing and build knowledge and skills and understanding.

37:18we were able to turn around the dating business and we did like an we did like an uh it was insane it was like quadruple digit percentage changes it was it was mental the growth that we did but that was only because we'd previously toyed with some other businesses and we just knew things that that would work right we weren't geniuses within it so yeah of course it just goes to show doesn't like if somebody else has identified this gap in the market they've got something that they've kind of tried and tested it's working and then just bring someone else in to kind of power it up is so interesting and exciting.

37:49You mentioned entrepreneurship is a ladder. We are on the same wavelength because Liz, I was going to come on to that as well. Is that to do with what you call kind of the effectual thinking? Expand on that. What do you mean by that? Effectual thinking. Yeah. So this is my, this is one of my core tenants of how I like to operate and how I encourage others to operate from an entrepreneurship perspective. So perhaps I'll explain entrepreneur effectual thinking and then we'll link it to the latter so effectual thinking is is is a type of thinking it's an approach to thinking so it's not necessarily a framework or a process where you would think in this way and come up with a business idea but it is often applied to early stage entrepreneurship now most people start a business by designing the goal and we're told have these goals what's it going to be what's your exit strategy and then you basically work out everything you need to do in order to achieve that goal get all of the resources the skills that everything and and you just power through and you're resilient and you go and you go so when we started our our fitness supplement company what happened with that was that a success or failure it was a it was a a very it was like a difficult success it didn't fail interesting but that was a failure for what we needed um so we ended up closing that because actually it it was we had focused too much on the model the business model rather than on the customers um but we we kind of ran that project for about nine months we made some money in it and we made a call that it wasn't going to go um but in that process we said i want to do a fitness supplement company by subscription this is when gray's box and all of the other subscriptions were coming up so we're like amazing yeah so so it was a perfect model design that out what do we need in order to do that we need a protein supplier we need a brand we need marketing we need this we need that and we basically look built a plan of what we need and then we just went through it okay so what's this what's and that's how most people start a business yeah but that is called causal logic and that is the opposite of effectual logic so if you want to start a business using effectual thinking forget everything that's logical and forget everything you know and it's almost the opposite so instead of starting with a goal in mind you try not to have a goal you try not to think about what you're building or how you're going and and the the true art of effectual thinking is you you don't have a goal for as long as possible within the first part of that procedure but you start with your bird in hand what do you know who do you know um you know who are you what do you love who is around you all of these things and you slowly start to get an understanding of of of what you are able to do and what accesses you have and then you can always build these self-selecting like network of stakeholders so instead of spotting the competition and being like okay we're going to go against them look at the market that you know and your understanding and try and try and see how you can work with them and kind of compliment them or whatever that may be yeah and then another really critical principle within effectual thinking is work out your affordable loss so every time we start a new project this might be a macro a new business or even a project within a business we say what can we afford to lose assuming that this current direction is a complete failure and that is loss in terms of time on a calendar time in a day money health you know like social anything you have rather than what is your expected return because we've all done it where we've put a i'm going to buy a widget for a pound sell it for two you put it on excel you drag it to the millionth cell and you're like i'm going to be a millionaire right i'm going to be a millionaire so so actually you just gun and and you're just like well okay it doesn't quite matter that it's taken me six years now because i'm going for that millionth widget um whereas you work on what's your affordable loss yeah and if you hit that affordable loss you can then take a step back and you can say well look do i want to put more affordable loss into this or actually is that is that right so is affordable loss the same as cost benefit analysis and economics similar it's it's similar but it's but it's more around everything about you as an entrepreneur yeah yeah yeah because it also has the opportunity cost of you as a founder it has you know the the time in the evening like and and actually what it enables you to do is it enables you to actually say okay well look my affordable loss on this business means I have to start it in a certain way if you can't afford to give up your evenings and weekends and you can't give up your salary that's fine maybe you go into it in a slightly different way or or actually maybe that means you have to raise investment from day one and raise off a deck so it doesn't mean you can't do it it just narrows your scope where innovation can really happen Yeah, that makes sense.

42:26And helps just kind of like remove some of the other options to help you kind of reach a decision process. So yeah, interesting. So there's a few other pieces within effectual thinking, but actually perhaps I'll give an example which might make it a bit easier. So when we had Hopper HQ, we still own the business today, but when we were really gunning that business in the early days, we had thousands of people, businesses on Instagram, thousands of influencers. they trusted us they connected their social uh that you know we were like the voice we had domain knowledge domain expertise expertise and we started to see that some of our brands were advertising on some of our influencer accounts and this is the very early days of influencer marketing we were like that's kind of interesting because they both know us and we know them and there's money transacting so we actually went to some of our brand accounts and we said hey do you want to do you want to get some influencers and we'll do that and they were like okay and then we went to some of our influencers and we're like hey do you want to post this for them and and get paid for it and they were like okay and literally overnight like i kid you not overnight we we were like oh we're an influencer agency now and we spun up this side business called real tribe and we actually brought someone in to run the business and within two weeks we were the we were the exclusive influencer marketing agency for uber in the uk and ireland and then we just sacked on other other clients and we're like that is effectual because the key thing is if other people could and did start influencers agencies in that time but none of them would have been able to do it as fast just working with the end in mind as opposed to jumping on the opportunity it's it's more about it's more about pulling together this pulling together the things that you already have yeah because if we if we wanted to start and you know you've got the ice hotel and the ice bars, right?

44:12We can come up with that idea here. We say we're going to start an ice hotel. Right. And we'll make it happen, right? We're smart people. We'll make it happen. Right. But think about all the things we need to do. Yeah. And if you look at the people who actually started the ice hotel, which started in 1989 in the international ice carving competition in Reykjavik, when the people who were organizing the travel didn't have enough hotels for their international ice carving teams. And one of the teams from Japan said, hey, it doesn't matter. we're actually just going to take some of this ice and create some igloos.

44:44Had to be the Japanese. Oh, cool. Very industrious. And they got some animal hides and skins. And the people who slept outside in the igloos woke up and they were like, that was the best night's sleep I've ever had. So the next year, more things are saying, we want to stay in those. And then that slowly evolved into the ice hotel. But if you think about that, they are... You can't beat against all of that. You can't win. They are the world's best international experts in ice. linked to the International Tourism Board of Iceland, where there is a ton of ice. You know, you put all of that together.

45:18It just goes on and on, let alone the 30 plus years of like building brand reputation. Exactly. All the rest of it. So that means that even if we started at the same time, the other team who, by the way, that is very effectual, they will win. And that doesn't mean that you can't start a business. It means what is your effectual business to start? Yeah. Okay. so a couple of things come to mind so number one especially more in the first part does mirror what we teach her at one day as well some of the modules and there's like a specific masterclass that's all on like founder idea fit and it is looking at start with what you have which actually links to a mutual friend of ours jodie cook who talks about playing your ace cards and there's something in that as well which i'll try not to digress too much but there's something in how we severely overlook the stuff that's easy to us just because it is easy to us you often it's a blind spot in order to know what you're great at yeah you actually have to ask you have to ask other people right because it's just so easy for you i'll be with some friends who are just amazing at maths and i'll be like don't even realize they don't even know because they're just good at maths right like but it's also the point with this specifically is feeling there's almost like Like there is satisfaction that does come from, you know, an element of pain, right?

46:34Like there is like running a marathon again, using like that great example there. There's almost like there's again, the physical example is just the best to bring it to life is there's a good but bad kind of aching feeling in your muscles when you've had a good workout. Right. To bring that to life to most people. And it's the same concept here personally and with business. there's almost there's kind of like sweet victory you know when you've had to work for it so there's something in that as well with tied up within the first part of effectual thinking which is starting with one day what we call the founder idea fit which is what do you already know who have you already plugged into your network because even your network's new communities you could easily take for granted as well yeah so many people it's like wait like not everyone has so and so on speed dial you do yeah message them like you know um so there's that i just wanted to comment on and then the great example you shared with hopper and that example of effectual thinking of kind of seizing an opportunity and you've got everything there my counter argument to that is the lack of focus that a lot of stars and especially if they are kind of adhd sprinting kind of entrepreneurial stereotypes what would you say to that kind of the difference to try and sort of distinguish between the effectual thinking the seizing an opportunity bring all these things together versus not getting distracted so great Paul I think that I've given that example of a hopper starting another business because it's easy to understand effectual thinking on how we can can discover a business that we start rather than you design a business that you should start yeah however effectual thinking is can can be used as an approach to thinking when you don't have any business and it can also be used when you're looking at at specific projects or ideas internally so it doesn't actually have to be a separate business it could be we want to increase our average revenue per user in a SaaS business okay cool well well let's look at our effectual map who do we know what do we know we have our customers we can get customer intimacy with them what what products can we build well actually we've got really good well so for hopper for example we we run some tests and it didn't take off but it was very effectual um where we had a lot of design talent internally so actually we knew a lot of our our businesses needed some some actual posts for their social media so actually we were like okay cool well look if the biggest biggest issue for you to become activated in hopper is knowing what to post then we'll do the basic strategy for you and we'll design the post and do whatever else so so for a while we kind of had that as a as a feature bolt on um and and to your point that was a bit too much of a distraction and and pulled away in that part but it but sometimes it's not you know and and and sometimes even in the the the the features we build internally the services we create they can be applied with an effectual thinking um that that brings that alignment and and gives us the reason why we would win as opposed to some some other people it's kind of that low hanging fruit is all these terms that come to mind yeah playing your race card the low hanging yeah yeah it's it's really but but if anyone is interested in this definitely look up effectual thinking and and perhaps we'll put some links in the show notes as well where where i i would encourage people to to kind of explore it and and try and live in that space yeah um it's one of those things you see and you're like oh yeah that makes sense but then there's another layer of being like okay i'm gonna i'm gonna be effective because it is uncomfortable right it's uncomfortable to be like i don't really know i'm figuring it out and that is the plan right that's like oh so what are you doing you know um yeah it's counter it's counter to what to what a lot of what we know and that does link back to our earlier comments not to be like bashing our own home turf here but the british culture as well you know it doesn't really help with that either it doesn't help with like oh okay like we don't have that same sort of heyday silicon valley entrepreneurial energy of like okay cool like you'll figure it out yeah that there really is something to be said for that american like the american dream for sure i think i think i think there's more uh there's more of it now than ever in the uk but i think you need to find it more whereas i feel like so culturally it's not it's not at the surface but the communities do exist yeah yeah i appreciate you putting a bit of a silver line yeah we're not we're not we're still here we haven't flown off to dubai yet mike my penultimate question to you before my traditional closing question is given your wealth of experience across entrepreneurship your own businesses as well as teaching entrepreneurs what's a common trap that so many founders fall into

51:23um i would say i'm laughing i had a conversation the other day where someone i said oh what what do you do oh like i run a business i'm like oh cool what do you do in the business and they're like i'm ceo chief everything officer ha ha ha that's really how i introduced my last guess oh really okay well i'm about to let you finish i'm about to slate i feel he doesn't I feel like when you're chief, when you have that mindset of being chief everything officer, the way I would translate that is, so you're the bottleneck. That's exactly where I was going with the question. Yeah. And I feel like as founders, it is our responsibility to do the explore work, find new ways to do new things.

52:04Chief explorer officer. Oh, that works. That's better. But crucially, once you found out those new ways, once you found out new, you know, places to buy things, channels to sell things, ways to speak to customers, we then basically need to turn that into a core piece of work. And by core, I mean, we want to document, we want to systemize, we want to delegate that. So we're building the foundation that the systemization behind our business. So we can remove ourselves to then go and do the next higher level work. and a lot of people do not do that they become the bottleneck and they some people get attached to the ego of it because oh you know i'm wearing all the hats it's like wear the hats but pass them on right right and if you're ready to scale up your business and stop being the bottleneck then check out waybook.com i mean you joke but actually the the reason why i well the reason why i love waybook is because i've seen that right like i felt that there's no way that we would have been able to have you know used one business to grow the other to grow another and and and now you know we're we're we're a relatively decent sized group bootstrap yeah it's because we've systemized yeah yeah yeah no i get it documented yeah no i'm only half day no no i love it i um i'm also i've noticed how um is meta the right word i'm not sure but how certain business especially somebody like you who's had so many like such a serial entrepreneur how so many businesses kind of come out of like other businesses and almost like an aside from the main thing so i guess like slack is the best example of this where slack was born out of this game started out as a video game the developers again because it's going back as well needed a very fast lean efficient way to communicate with each other hence because they're all developers gamers they're always kind of tech geeks built the separate thing to it and then that became slack and then she realized oh my god that's kind of these again i don't know what the word is i'm looking for i'll tell you what the word is it's effectual oh that's effectual yeah like that is an effect that is an effectual approach to to spin slacker would it be fair to describe waybook in this instance as effectual from all of you discover so yes i think i think it's more effectual than what it sounds on on that part so so it wouldn't be effectual necessarily or wholly for me to say i had this problem and i solved it but what makes it actually effectual is we used our team from hopper to then build waybook so we and we had great network of of similar sized businesses that we were targeting so we had we knew the pain yes we had the ability to make it we had the skill sets internally we had the access to the market so those things are quite effectual and and actually the the hopper team was the team that built that built waybook and and many of them some went back to hopham and many of them are actually now full-time waybook so are you writing a book called the effectual entrepreneur do you know what i'm not but that's because i i i'm not very good at writing we can get ghost writer we can get that sorted i feel like there's a book in here do you know what i do i talk about it so much i talk about it so much i i should and and you know what every i i I onboarded two people in our business this week.

55:18And one of our values is think effectively. I ask people so much, like, do you know effectual thinking? I ask so many people. No one ever knows about it. Exactly. No one ever knows about it. Exactly. And there's quite limited information on it. So, yeah. Not as if you're busy enough. I know. Just giving you something else to do. That's the other downside of doing multiple things. It's a trap as well, right? And actually this kind of bias to action slash impatient ambition is about knowing where to apply focus. Which is where the loss assessment comes in as well. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. As a part of the festival thinking.

55:57Wow. OK, right. Maybe I've written it already. Maybe I've written it. Can I also just, sorry, I did say before, it was a penultimate question a few questions ago, but um you mentioned kind of revenue generating being so successful with the paintballing business that you had enough profits to then put into this like um acquisition of toy boy and you had kind of you know the deal structuring everything else have you ever had to get investment for your other businesses has it always been reinvesting yeah that's incredible we had we had a grant once from um but we had 100 100 grand grant um early on uh uh but that was kind of actually that was in in hopper time but no everything else has been bootstrapped so impressive it's painful it's it's impressive now but it was painful painful i mean it's like like choose your poison as well it's so true because it's so true you know it's also painful to fundraise and deal with investors do you know what this this has always been one well two two reasons why i've i've never wanted to raise one of them was i never wanted to raise speculatively and be a part of somebody else's game yeah yeah you look at you look at how investment works and and and i invest in quite a few other businesses you don't expect them all to work right i expect my businesses to work yeah and if that doesn't work i'll pivot and i'll make it work and and i didn't want to be the nine out of ten that didn't work so so that particularly early on because i didn't want to you know i see this as my craft right my career like and and so i didn't want to be like oh you know chance that's not gonna work and i know people who raise don't think that but the people who invest do oh i get it so so that that's number one the second reason was i basically we made decisions early on that enabled us to be quite efficient and and and we we realized that money doesn't solve all of the problems yeah so actually it really doesn't particularly in sass like you basically put in good things and apply time so yes sass you can acquire more customers you can do things we had an affordable loss for um for hopper so so we had like a i think it was originally like a an 80 grand affordable loss and then we we put that up to maybe like 150 um and and that that was what we were willing to lose on this new project and it turned out to be well um we spent a lot more in waybook so so our affordable loss was 1.2 million we ended up going just a bit over that but now we're profitable and and in a good position.