Jessica McGawley

0:06Jessica McGawley: Hello and welcome to the Amber Moment, a podcast that tells stories of remarkable careers. My name's Paul Howarth. My guest today is Jessica McGawley. Jessica is the founder of Dallington, a consultancy that works with families with significant wealth and specializes in the rising generation of inheritors. The wealth management industry has long been concerned with preparing the wealth for the people who will inherit it. But what Jessica and her team focus on is preparing the people for the wealth. Jess, welcome to the show. How are you today? Thank you. I'm well, thank you. It's great to be here with you.

0:40Jessica McGawley: Well, it's a delight to have you on. Thank you so much for making the time to be with us. And what's been keeping you busy recently? I see you recently published a white paper specifically about preparing the people for the wealth. How's that been received? Great. I actually, it's co-authored with three consultants who are in the states which was also a great experience of having that sort of transatlantic approach to preparing the rising generation and what our different definitions and terms are about that but the reason we did it was because we were on a call and we individually realized that we are all being asked the same questions by families and by family advisors many of them are on the more technical side tax legal financial and instead of fielding these questions one at a time we thought let's put our heads together and write an actual comprehensive guide okay it's been really well received so yeah good process so it's like a sort of a really thorough version of frequently asked questions sort of thing would it be exactly yes perfectly put and so so where has it gone and who's been receiving in and what they said so it's gone to majority family advisors and they are often wealth management firms legal practices tax advice places like that some families themselves who are just at the process of thinking starting that process of how do we prepare the rising generation what does preparation even mean where do we look for this we were keen not to stipulate who exactly one should go to and we didn't ourselves in it either because there are perhaps firms and consultants out there who are incredible that we don't know of and we didn't want to exclude them but it was a sort of these are the different areas and ways to even begin this process.

2:16Jessica McGawley: Okay, great. Well, no doubt we'll speak about that and about other aspects of your work as we go through the conversation. But as I think, you know, what I'm trying to do here on the Amber Moment is to tell some great stories. And from the outside looking in, yours looks like a fascinating one. So I would love it if you could share with us a little bit about your childhood, your background, your upbringing, education, and any early influences you might have had. Okay. Well, I am a born and bred Londoner, a North Londoner, and it's something I'm very proud of because I'm not sure there are too many of us who are born and bred here being such a transient place and I absolutely love this city so you'll always hear me talking very proudly about London.

2:53I had a very comfortable and fortunate upbringing. I lived in Hampstead and Highgate which are pretty nice parts of North London. I'm very aware that that was a privilege with my siblings and parents. My father was in shipping and aviation which growing up I had absolutely no interest in and didn't know what that meant. And my mother was a stay-at-home mum for most of our life and then later became a relocation agent. And looking back, actually, that was probably where some of my interest in transitional periods happened because looking at her manage these families moving from the States or India over to the UK, get them set up was, you know, it was really something to see.

3:35So she helped me there. I went to school in London. So I went to a Catholic. It was a convent at the time run by the Duns in London. And then later went to boarding school in the countryside, which I loved. I know lots of people have mixed experiences at boarding school, but I had a great time. Part of the reason I had a great time because because I've always been a doer, as it were. And always, you know, at school, I was in the hockey team, the choir, the orchestra, the dance crew, you name it. I was in it. I definitely wasn't the best at any of these things, but I was in them. And for my earlier education, I was traipsing around London with a violin and a hockey stick on the tube, on the bus, in the back of a taxi.

4:18And getting to boarding school and just having everything on one campus was, to be honest, a real relief. So I love that. And then I went off to Nairobi after I finished at school for three months work placement, which looking back at that age was actually probably quite a big thing to do on my own. But I absolutely loved it, fell in total love with the place, with the culture. And I came home and applied for a place at SOAS, which for anyone who's listening doesn't know is the School of Oriental and African Studies. It's a university in Russell Square. And I read African culture and ethno musicology.

4:55Wow. And I feel really, really lucky that I had that time because very few people probably can say these days increasingly that, you know, they just studied for the pure love of a subject. You know, I had no intention to create a career out of what I was studying. I just was fascinated by it. And I appreciate that's a privilege to be able to do that. But I feel very blessed that I could do that.

5:19Jessica McGawley: So you were 18 years old when you went off to Nairobi? I was 18 when I went to Nairobi, maybe nearly 19, but yeah, I went to Nairobi and it was just, it was amazing. Yeah. Well, maybe off air we can have a chat because years and years ago I went out with a woman who had grown up in Kenya. She's from a Gujarati family, but they lived in Kenya. And yeah, so I was lucky enough to spend a month there with her back in the day. Incredible, incredible place. It's beautiful, isn't it? Yeah. so then so you fetch up at soas and you read you read that amazing degree you just told us about so how how does that then take you from there to where you ended up in your career what was that sort of journey it's a very good question and I think the same question my parents had which is and what now so I knew I wasn't done with learning and I'd always been fascinated in psychology and I knew that there was a post-grad conversion course at the Tavistock which is the mental health hospital in swiss cottage in north london right and i so i enrolled and started the postgrad there but it was part-time and i had itchy feet and as is something you'll get to know about me i've always i've always wanted to do a bit more than maybe i should yeah and so i asked my friend who was in recruitment at the time if she had any part-time jobs going that would go work alongside my studies yeah and she did and that job happened to be working in a wealth management practice a well, transition practice rather in Mayfair for a temporary six-week project.

6:48This six-week project turned into the best part of about seven years.

6:53Jessica McGawley: Oh, wow. So were you a student still when you started doing that? Was it a placement or it was after you'd finished? So no, it was after I was technically a student at the TAVI. So I was doing my counseling psychotherapy, but it was part-time. And I had all of this free time. So I started at this firm and their entire reason for being was succession. It was how do you take significant wealth and transfer it? And I mean, really, really significant wealth. Most of the families we worked with were billionaires. And how do you transfer that wealth to the next generation? Now, at the time, that was still mostly a technical process of legal, tax, financial planning, estate planning, etc.

7:33And let's remember, this is what, 2009. so a long time before the great wealth transfer media coverage has come about yeah a long time before shows like billions and succession peaked everyone's interest there were very limited research papers books or role models in this industry for me to look up to so I just sort of threw myself into it and because it was such a small firm I saw everything for better than words

8:00Jessica McGawley: Yes. And were you aware of having anything as grand or defined as a sort of a mission at the start of your career? What did you want to achieve and what drove you? You know, it's a really, really important question, I think, because I think there's this assumption that if you're an entrepreneur, which I know I have become, that you have this burning mission or desire throughout your life and you've always known. But I think for a lot of us, that's not the case. And actually, a lot of the mission is a dissatisfaction with something. Right. Some of my entrepreneurial friends who have created products, for example, their product was created out of a lack of something in the market or something that didn't work as well as they thought it should.

8:38So they created it. And that's effectively how I started Dallington. yeah i was in this firm and we kept on talking about succession and helping transfer this this wealth and i said you guys are missing the people who this really matters yeah the kids you know and you can't start this when they're 30 and 40 you need to start this when they're much younger don't get me wrong they need a childhood don't overwhelm them but if you are going to be the beneficiary of a trust or dare i say it inherit a business that employs all these thousands of people that preparation probably needs to start a lot earlier and in an appropriate way so i pitched that to them and they could see the potential but they didn't think it was big enough in its own right and thank god they didn't because that was enough for me to to leave and set up downlington

9:29Jessica McGawley: so just to clarify they didn't think that was big enough commercially yeah commercially it was a nice to have it was maybe a little bit female you know the nice woman in the office who with the site with the psychology degrees funny you know so I so I uh I stomached it for a few months and then I I decided to leave and set up Darlington fair play and I like the way you described there some entrepreneurial friends and indeed yourself there with this kind of what drives you is this dissatisfaction that something isn't there that should be there now it's almost like being an inventor I think isn't it you go oh why can't I do this with I'll better invent something that serves that purpose well you know what Paul I think it's it's important to say and I will back myself on this which is this what i do did not exist in the uk 10 years ago it did not in the us they're absolutely more forward with this but there were banks multifamily offices who absolutely with you had great intentions they'd run next gen programs there there would be some talk and some materials about this but in an entire business in its own right no it just wasn't done and I dealt with years of people looking to be gone out in the face that I thought that this warranted an entire business.

10:43So I'm really proud when I go on LinkedIn and I see people are leaving their jobs to set up practices to rival mine. I think, fantastic, this is great. Well, I was going to ask you about that,

10:55Jessica McGawley: what your competitive landscape looks like now because you're starting off with being the only firm that was offering this service and what does that world look like now? Oh, it's absolutely blown up. It's completely changed. And for a few reasons, one being, of course, the emergence of AI and more technology that a lot of the people whose full time role would have been working on estate planning, legal transaction, financial management, don't have the futures that they think they wanted, perhaps, and are looking to the human dimensions of wealth, as they put it. and then we have a lot more interest from the psychological sphere of how does wealth impact people and what are the negatives of wealth so you have this whole emerging emerging industry of consultants and some small businesses and a lot of it is brilliant and i welcome it and i think there is so much need and so much demand and i cannot meet all of it so i'm really encouraged that said there have to be parameters and you know i can say i'm really good at this because I have experience and you know what experience means is I've got it wrong yeah you know in the past I will have got this wrong with families and with clients and this many years in nearly two decades in now I know what good looks like yeah and talking about things that you're good at and this is where you definitely have to leave your modesty very firmly at the door if you don't mind because I want to ask you because you've developed this what at the time was a kind of a unique business and a unique proposition and you've done that because you you had this insight and you recognized a need in the marketplace so I want I want you to let us know what sort of I call the magic tokens sometimes what what are the skills or knowledge or talents or character traits that you possess that have allowed you to succeed in this where others perhaps wouldn't have well I think magic tokens is a lovely way of putting it and I'm going to steal that music with my children if that's okay um absolutely fine so number one is I I don't know if this is a particular skill but I love my work I just adore it nothing gives me energy well it's like raising young children you know you are exhausted you are completely depleted you have you're running on 10 minutes sleep yet you will always find energy for those children because you love them so much as for me the same with my work I will always find the energy for it and the capacity for it so that's been amazing I have to say my dyslexia has been a godsend right I'm so grateful that I am now at school I think I mentioned this earlier I really wasn't the best at everything I wasn't that academic and dyslexia then really wasn't something that was acknowledged right yeah really you know and I'm so grateful it wasn't because it forced me to have to try and to try loads of different things so I think one of my magic tokens in addition to that is probably range which is just saying you know I'll try a load of different things and I'll look at things from different ways and from everything I've seen that's very common in entrepreneurs there's a high level of entrepreneurs who are dyslexic and have approached similar ways and then I think the final one is probably the Tavistock which is this mental health hospital in in North London for anyone who's listening who has been there or is thinking about going there it's a very very challenging at times brutal learning experience you are really thrown into it and And because it's NHS, your experiences are not, you know, the nice, shiny private offices.

14:22They are prisons. They are hospitals, A &E departments, police. You're really seeing the hard stuff. It makes you, forces you to think differently. And when I'm working with maybe sometimes the other end of society, these highly, highly wealthy families, you can see that actually a lot of the challenges that we think are siphoned to one area of our society are not there are plenty of very wealthy families who have social workers because there are challenges in those families that need that extra support there are issues of violence and abuse and of addiction you know so it really made me question how i think are you able to share any of your

15:00Jessica McGawley: specific experiences at tavistock you talk about being kind of a hard school if you like that could bring that to life only if you're able to of course yeah of course so well there's one thing called a group relations conference and everybody has to go on it i've done a few now and you're essentially thrown in a room together and it's very difficult to explain for but you form a society within this room it's it's it's definitely an experiment they put you all in there and without too much guidance as to what's going on and who's doing what and they sort of watch you as somebody becomes the leader and the follower the mother the father that everyone without being given them takes these roles up and you're in it for a week and you sort of you see the best and the worst in people and it and my second group relations conference I was the youngest on the conference and quite the youngest in my subgroup yeah and by the end of the week I'm a proper sort of city jeans black jumper kind of girl I didn't know I even owned anything flowery and by the end of the week I had my hair in pigtails and I was wearing sort of a flowery blouse and some jelly shoes I don't know even how they it came to be but I had totally taken up the role as the little girl in the group yeah and so it's just a really it's amazing experiment but it's um it's quite something so when just take a step back then so what is the purpose of this conference and what you what do you what do you know when you sign up to it it sounds like you don't know anything I think that's just sort of like, you will do it.

16:32It's part of your education. Yes. I think the purpose, again, is to really question your thinking and to understand how this is all about groups. So it's understanding about how a group can so easily turn and influence the masses with one leader or what does leadership and followership really mean? Yeah. And it's really fascinating. But the other experience I had was working, observing, sorry, my observation placement was at Holloway Women's Prison, which no longer exists. It's flats now. But I had to do 40 weeks or 40 hours over X amount of weeks of observations. And I noticed that all of the officers, the prison officers, would do everything in small groups.

17:16I mean, make a cup of tea, go for a cigarette, go to the loo. They would always go in twos or threes. and no one ever seemed to do anything on their own and I couldn't really work out why and that at the end I realized it was because they felt so unsafe and they were so heavily outnumbered within the prison and if you work in a prison there is an element of you being a prisoner and so again it it's these things aren't obvious to you but if you sit with them enough and you really try and look at what's going on here because one of the claims that the the management working was that there was a lot of inefficiency going on and that why were everything happening in groups well if your staff don't feel safe yeah they are going to do so let's

18:00Jessica McGawley: address that yeah can you think of any instances or examples of how say that the tavistock groups that you attended and or the the holloway experience has sort of influenced your work that you do now okay with the prison that one's a very easy one for me so i think we all have a of an assumption of what we think prisons and what it means to be a prisoner looks like based on films and tv shows that we've we've seen going in there and realizing that you can be a prisoner in a building of course and have a sentence that you have to see out or you can be a prisoner in your home in your life seemingly free and for some of the families i work with certainly if they're multi-generational and they are growing up with this legacy this surname that they are very much caged or they feel that it's this idea of the gilded cage yes it's beautiful yes there are nice things that go with it but they still do not feel free and they feel that they have this sentence that they have to sort of live out and a behavior that they have got to demonstrate in order to sort of pass the mark so the notoriety of their name and what their family have done which you see in prisons there's the socializing with only people from that group because they understand you which you see in prisons so there were lots of these parallels that again it wasn't obvious to me at the time but at the towards the end of my studies as i was writing everything up i could really see yeah oh that's fascinating stuff i'm going to ask you a bit now about anti-heroes because and every great story you are the hero obviously of your own story but every great story also has an anti-hero pulling in the opposite direction so you don't have to name names unless you particularly want to and it might not be people it might be systems or structures or prevailing ideas what are the sort of barriers you think you've had to overcome to be successful in your career well the first one is definitely being told that the business was not a business in its own right and it couldn't stand on its own two feet that anti-hero I am so grateful for because otherwise I would never have done it and so thank you um but the main anti-hero in my in my life and in my career, which are so intertwined, is not a person.

20:09It is an idea. It's an idea that if you take care of all the structures, if you get all the numbers right and the trust right and the constitution, that everything else will just fall into place. That is not the case. And we have a certain group of corporates, of advisors who perpetuate this belief yeah and we know that the wealth will not survive if the people are not prepared for it if conflict arises if relationships aren't healthy also what is the point of the wealth if the relationships aren't healthy so that is something i continually challenge and the other anti-hero is is an attitude i think that i still encounter that the older generation in business in government in families are the ones with the wisdom and the younger generations are sort of on probation until they've ticked all these boxes and then they can contribute I fundamentally disagree with this I think we have so much to learn from younger people and they have taught me so much so I'd

21:11Jessica McGawley: like to flip that one on its head yeah that's great so there are a lot of prevailing attitudes that you've obviously had to to get around or get over or challenge but what about sort of personally what are your personal beliefs and values we might call them in marketing terms do you think you live those particularly strongly in your day-to-day life well paul i'm so glad you say on market in those marketing terms because to me that's exactly what they are marketing terms i strongly disagree with this trend of us all having to name our values and put our values on our website i used to have values on the darlington website i removed them a couple of years ago because I said unless we're willing to also say and these translate into our behaviors which are xyz then they shouldn't be up there indeed I think it's it's far more important that someone tells me how they live their life and then based on that we can say yeah I can see how what you value and what you behave like instead of me just articulating these lovely beautiful words though I couldn't agree more and actually I often reframe that question by saying what are the behaviors that you kind of treasure so maybe we can think about it in those terms instead okay so behaviors and maybe anti-values to go alongside with that definitely are things like i'm sure you hear this a lot when you ask these questions but number one or at least i hope you hear this is rudeness to anyone in service i can't abide it having worked at one end in the nhs to the other end with families with you know billions how you speak to a taxi driver a waiter a nurse says everything about you to me and I've had billionaire families who you would never know they had the privilege they do they are nice as anything they are so courteous they are open the door they would never talk differently to me versus my assistant or anything like that but then you get the ones who do and I don't want to work with those families so that's really important to me I think a refusal to take responsibility so again this is something if you're an entrepreneur you kind of have to do which is my wins are my wins but my losses are my losses it's on me so I take responsibility for the good and the bad but yes be authentic you know find your niche that's that matters and then thinking again about the totality of your career no one person is an island if you like so who are the kind of the people's and people in groups who have been your real allies along that along the way well beyond my my family my husband he has been with me we well we've been together for 17 years and we have two lovely children together congratulations thank you but most importantly we're both entrepreneurs we're both absolutely bonkers you know we both live and breathe our work and our ability to be autonomous and have an idea and see it through to the end and i imagine for couples where one of you is an entrepreneur that might be hard at times because it can definitely be challenging.

24:03And we take up a lot of space.

24:06Jessica McGawley: We're very passionate, but we also really get each other. So I think that's been incredibly helpful. In the business, Gemma and Farrah, I've been with them, with Farrah for eight years. Gemma, I've worked with in a couple of firms for probably the best part of 15 years. These are people who I trust implicitly and mean the world to me. they're also the kinds of people that you never know if for any reason we worked in different places in the future or one of them moved country I know I would still they would still be in my life so I you know they've been amazing allies to me well that's lovely to hear in fact just my brief interactions with Gemma in particular in setting this up you know warm regards and warmly just little touches like that you go this is a nice person I'm dealing with here so it's so true they are really nice people yeah and I think other than you know I've got some I've absolutely got some lovely friends I've made this is a bit of a strange response but my biggest ally really has been the business now I know that sounds bad because I created and it's not its own living breathing human entity as it were but it's given me a reason to to get up and and to have purpose and the fact that we we have a building and it's something to take care of and make sure that there's somewhere that our clients can turn up the business in itself has been sort of my greatest ally in some ways yeah no that does make sense it does i find that strangely touching if that's okay to say um no it's great so thinking about when when all of your good stuff comes together your your kind of mission professional personal mission all your kind of beliefs and I won't call them values, but all those behaviours manifest themselves in the right way.

25:49Jessica McGawley: When all of that comes together, what does that sort of happy ending look like? That's a very profound question, Paul. Thank you. When you say when, I think what I would love is that through my work, through my writing, through the work that I do, I would really hope to change the narrative slightly in some way, in some small way, that we should approach wealth a bit like any powerful drug with a lot more caution and respect than probably we do. Wow. The reason I say that is, you know, on one hand, I work with very wealthy families who get this right. Absolutely. And there are good and bad ways to live with wealth.

26:31And I've seen them lived out. but more importantly for the average family i would love for them to understand how much more wealthy they are because they can define wealth on their own terms wealth is not just money and i know people with significant amounts of money who would not necessarily deem themselves wealthy and by that i mean whole healthy happy relationships connections because if you don't have that and all you've got a lot of money it doesn't mean anything if anything it takes away so I would love to be able to be someone who has turned a bit of the narrative around our increasingly insatiable appetite for more and for more material goods and more wealth and on I guess the more personal side is just to do what I'm still doing which is spend more time with my family my friends my books and And, you know, no one to say no, because increasingly I'm getting great offers and wonderful opportunities.

27:30But I always have to think, what is the cost? I always ask myself that. What's the cost of saying yes? Does it outweigh the time I will miss with my children or at home or my personal health? And there is always a cost. And sometimes it's absolutely worth it. But sometimes it's not.

27:46Jessica McGawley: But I'm really interested to hear you talk about wanting to move the dial a bit in terms of what we might deem in inverted commas ordinary families with ordinary amounts of wealth, because you work primarily, if not exclusively, with incredibly wealthy families. So how do you see yourself tackling that sort of broader communications issue, if you like? well I am writing a book at the moment yeah to be out next year so that hopefully to be a lot more accessible and increasingly trying to write and speak and do things like this you know just talk about this and to sort of challenge the status quo that more is better for those families who I meet who are how they might put it on their wealth creation journey you know their first time entrepreneurs they are building something and it's building rapidly and they as they put it they want to be my they want to be my client they want to have so much money in the future that they that they have some of these challenges and they're thinking about it in advance yeah and my question would always be why you know again what at what cost so to challenge people to understand that more wealth is not always better and we have this assumption that if we have more money we will just immediately have more freedom more choice more fun i have seen the opposite to be true i have seen people who have enough money to go away for three months do a tour on the most beautiful yacht of the galapagos take their children out of school to have you know experiences of a lifetime and spend the entire time inside on their phone navigating calls, navigating deals and the stock market, whatever it may be.

29:28It's a myth.

29:30Jessica McGawley: Got you. So what is what's next for Jessica McGaulay? What's coming? It could be the near future next week or the far future, five or 10 years time. What's on the horizon? Well, I think the book is the main thing for me. So to get that out into the world and a bit like how we're speaking, it's don't get me wrong. there's a it's backed up with a lot of research and support but it is it's very much me and it's my experience of 20 years of working with significantly wealthy families and it's talking about how to parent with wealth is the yeah it's the current title how to parent with okay how to parent with yeah with significant wealth like we all assume that parenting with wealth will make everything easier because we'll be able to get the best education and health care and experiences and don't get me wrong parenting without money with a lack of money is seriously hard there is nothing to take away from that and that's a real reality but this book is about the challenges that come with more and i have seen it those who have gone from being absolutely very wealthy by anyone's normal standards you know a few billion a few tens of million then they have an exit of their business and they're in the hundred millions of category and life does not get better so i i want to talk about that a lot more and yet again to make sure that more families realize that they are far far wealthier than they may believe they are and what's the status of the book is it about to come out what's it is so i'm just finishing the manuscript it goes to them um in end of the year then i'm sure they'll come back with a million and one red lines through everything and my wonderful spelling and grammar, although I'm a fan of Grammarly because otherwise it really would be a mess.

31:12And then we'll go from there. And then I hope to be talking about this topic a lot.

31:17Jessica McGawley: Great. Well, best of luck with that. I'm going to ask you now a little bit, we'll take as Red that family, friends and loved ones are important in everyone's life and I'm sure yours. But I want to know a bit about what else is important outside of work and sort of family stuff, passions and hobbies and interests that you have. okay so number one i adore boxing oh cool i have a lifelong love affair with martial arts i well that's not fair i was introduced to it when i was about 19 20 and but i have so best part of 20 years now yeah been doing muay thai western boxing and some brazilian jiu-jitsu and i don't care to watch it too much i'm not a fan of it as a you know spectator sport but i adore the practice of it and the discipline and almost the chess of it of understanding psychology behind it so I'm big love of that oh wow which of the ones that you described there is your favorite do you have a favorite yeah Muay Thai which is Thai boxing okay ah ever tried it no but I did go and see I spent a small amount of time in Bangkok years ago and I went to see it and it from someone who only ever knew and I don't really know much about boxing anyway but I was judging it from that point of view but it turns out the people who are good at the little kicks and things like that are generally the winners anyway oh yeah yes okay so i big big love of that yeah and and you know the added side benefit is that it keeps you fit ish so that's helpful um the other thing which is maybe at the complete opposite end of the spectrum is that i am a complete christmas nut ah you know it's october we haven't even had halloween and i've already got the christmas decorations out so okay yep i'm one of them

33:05Jessica McGawley: why this obsession why this obsession with christmas then what's the what's the what's the big deal i adore it i just think this it's the best it's the magical i i tell you what it is paul i haven't got a great inner child it's something i've always tried to work on i'm not naturally very silly i'm not naturally very good at make-believe and you know all of that it doesn't come that naturally to me as a parent and but when it comes to Christmas for some reason I can get right in there and so I feel I the inner child comes out the best part of parenting comes out and I have a really good time so it's a full season two or three month season really in your house oh yeah definitely amazing oh yes I mean I did you know that there's a Christmas channel that goes all year round now that's my favorite I think I had heard that but I've not got an experience just yet okay the final final question then since we're on a podcast right now would you have a podcast recommendation for our listeners i'm conscious that probably everyone says this on yours or will do but i'm still to this day a lifelong lover of desert island discs but particularly the desert island discs of sue lawley's era those sort of earlier desert island disc episodes i love hearing those stories even if you have got no idea who they're interviewing you just learn about industries and people's lives that you would never have had that sort of insight to and you know paul i should i want to thank you because minus the tracks you can pick a song you can pick a few songs if you want that's fine this has been a bit like a desert island disc for me going through these these questions with you and uh it's been a real privilege oh well thank you no i'm i'm delighted you decided to come on and I mean I'm not going to congratulate myself for thinking that you have an interesting story to tell but you did and so that was great and by the way I don't think anyone has mentioned Desert Island Discs when I've asked them that question okay it's a bit surprising so it's an absolute classic and brilliant thank you very much for that recommendation but thank you even more for coming on the Amber Moment and telling us your amazing story Jessica McGauley best of luck thank you Paul join me next time on the Amber Moment when we'll be hearing another story of another remarkable career.

35:17Jessica McGawley: Until then, stay amber.