Episode 16: Meet the King of Fudge Cakes who became a Deal Machine

0:24Welcome to the Dealmaker Uncut Podcast where we speak to some of the UK's most exciting Hello, my name as always is Crystal Bryant and I'm the Executive Editor of Business Cloud. The episodes are coming thick and fast and thank you to our growing number of listeners and viewers. As always, I'm joined by the most full award-winning dealmaker himself, Jonathan Boyes. Jonathan's been involved in deals totaling more than£5 billion during his long and often illustrious career and he's the Managing Director and Head of Arroyo's and Marcel's Corporate Finance Team in the UK. Welcome, Jonathan. Thanks, Chris.

0:56Great to be here. Great to be here. We're doing this episode remotely. But this podcast gets inside the deal. In the first part of today's show, we're going to be interviewing our special guest. After that, we'll then have a little break. And in part two, Jonathan will be leaning on his 35 years of experience working in the corporate finance sector to answer some listener questions. So, Jonathan, our listeners and our viewers out of their misery, who are we speaking to today? Thanks, Chris. Well, our guest today is Chris Orroth, who is currently the CEO of Cakesmiths. so Chris has been in the cake industry for a long time and we've got an interesting story here where Chris has built some business, bought a business, built it up, sold it and then bought it back again and that's it there's an interesting story around that so welcome Chris.

1:47Good afternoon. Okay we've got too many Chris's so Chris I'm going to kick off with a couple of questions if I may so it's fair to say that you sort of fell into the food industry didn't you because if things had gone differently you would have been an actor if things had gone very differently then yes I would have well I say it would have been I think it would have been a short-lived career but yeah I wanted to be an actor because I enjoyed being on stage and getting applause so that I went and did a degree in drama and then you get to the end of your degree and realize with horror that actually you're not as good as you think you are and then you have to take a good long look at it.

2:26So I went up to Edinburgh to the Fringe Festival and to what I thought much critical acclaim. And then the following day you rushed to the newsstand and by the Scotsman, which is the newspaper that gives the critique of the shows. And mine was a pretty blunt four-letter assessment of how bad I was. So that was the end of that really. And I went back to home in Birmingham and I sort of kicked around for a bit. and then amazingly there was an advert in the in the Birmingham these are the days when you read newspapers for job adverts I hasten to add and there was a job out of for a sales rep with Mars and which was amusing because my grandpa was a lifelong cabaret worker and took a while to get used to that and I went for this job interview with Mars and got the job and that's really how my food industry experience started.

3:15Can I just say Chris that you know failing the fact you aren't a Hollywood actor appearing on the Dealmaker Uncut podcast with myself and Jonathan Boyd must be right out there with career highlights. I think you know the food industry Oscar this is probably a double. I'm truly humbled to be in the front of such industry legends. I think it's legends if I spelt that right as you fair. Spoken like a true actor. Now you worked for Haagen-Dazs, you worked for Ginsters, you basically worked for you know anybody who's anybody in the food industry as well. I think you worked with Richard Branson for a couple of years as well.

3:50What was he like? Oh, revelation. Absolute revelation. I mean, Mars kind of was like a university degree in business. It was very formal, very corporate, very structured. And the only problem really is that there are so many good people wanting to get promoted that inevitably you end up in a bit of a logjam. So, and I ended up in a logjam with people who've gone on to great things. So, Justin King, a very good friend of mine, became Chief Exec of Sainsbury. Richard Baker became Chief Exec of Whitbread. And I just couldn't get through that little door. So I joined a soft drink company that joint ventured with Virgin.

4:26And I was about to go to Amsterdam and run Benelux as a general manager of Benelux. Got a phone call saying, actually, we're going to do a JV with Virgin and you need to be interviewed by Richard. So I went and got in a cab this will sound really you got in a cab with an address in london went to the address asked the cab driver to park up about three road three doors away and i got out and i was walking up and down the road what do you say what am i going to say hi chris hi hi chris is written richard it's chris i'm hi and i rehearsed this looked up and there's richard standing in the doorway laughing with his arms folded and he came down the path and he just said hi he said you must be chris i'm richard branson do you want to come in and it was um a real fantastic touch of normality and that was the guy so he came with me to a number of meetings and we had some great fun working i worked with him for him for two years uh and when i left uh he came to my leaving party then sent about six months after i left my eldest son was born 12 weeks premature and i had a letter from richard i mean clearly somebody would have told him but that's richard expressing just the news your son's been born premature so is my daughter don't worry they soon grow up fast by the way when you can come back to work for virgin yours richard and i just thought that was a real so so i think with richard what you see is absolutely what you get but the one lesson i took from richard we're in the car one day i was we're driving to see i think what used to be then called nerden and peacock passion carried business and i said to richard i said richard i said go on what's the most important thing in business do you think and he looks at me and said go on smart ass you know you tell me so i said clearly it must be profits or sales and he said no i said in that it must be sales then as opposed to he said no he's got no idea it's people he said it's always people chris he said if your people enjoy working for you or working with you then customers will enjoy interacting with them and your business will be successful and he was magnificent at making it a fun culturally fun place to work so much so that the virgin air stewardesses at the time or the air crew were generally paid about a third less than the ba crew at the time but everybody wanted to work for Virgin.

6:34And so... I've heard he's a great guy. I'd love to meet him. You know, it was really lovely. And not long ago, I went over to the Caribbean for a holiday. And I was in the queue off the, shamefully, one on British Airways. And we landed, I think it was in Barbad. And we look at, and the Virgin plane's coming alongside us. And there were people queuing, checking to get the passport. And Richard's in that queue on the other side. And he would never push in front of the queue. He would never do that. He'd always stay in the queue. And anyway, I went across to sort of say, shall I go and say hello, Dawn?

7:07So I thought, sorry, I'll walk across and say, hello, Richard. Before I even got to him, he looked at me, hi, Chris, how are you? Gave me this huge bear hug. So I remember your name, but I can't remember who you work for. Remind me. And no, he was lovely. So a lot of my, when I became finally able to run my own business, I've always wanted to make it as enjoyable brackets, highly professional, close brackets, but an enjoyable place to work and not to judge people on what they look like, what they wear, but what they do. Right. So let's talk about the sort of your buying business career. At the age of 40, you decided to go and acquire a business.

7:48So obviously that's quite, quite late. A lot of people start doing that sort of thing earlier than that. Would you just talk about, you know, the process, the thought process and what you actually did to do that, that first deal? Well, I think I got to a stage, and, you know, 40 is a similar age, and you're right, it does feel a bit old to sort of cast it off, and there is this bit of a scary moment when you decide to go and do it. But I just got to 40 and thought, you know what? I've got two very clear choices ahead of me now. I was reasonably successful in the corporate world. And, you know, as Chris said earlier, you can sort of sit there with a decent salary that increases each year, with a decent bonus, your pension's safe.

8:28and you can enjoy all the corporate trappings that go with that and there is nothing underlined nothing wrong with that but i just felt restless i wanted to run my own ship and i wanted to see i wanted to see if i was as good as i thought i was you know i'd made decent money for richard i'd made decent money for david samworth at ginster's samworth brothers and i'd made decent money for um perwin was he was then the owner of s &a foods and i just wanted to back myself so i went home and said to my wife i said right i've got an idea i'd like to buy a business We're going to sell the house. We're going to take all the money out.

8:59We're going to move down to a place near Taunton. And I found a business called Maynard Scott's. But we have to sink all the money into it. Don't worry. We live in a small house. So it was it was Stuart Rose said, didn't he, when he ran M &S, that there's no plan B. There is just plan A. And that's all I had was plan A. I just wanted to see if I could do it for myself. if it had gone wrong I kind of took the view I'd somehow get back onto the treadmill somewhere but I just had to scratch the itch and that's what that's what it was and did you have a clear plan to wait once you required that business did you have a clear value creation plan because no no no do you know this is I think one of the things that you learn as you go through this um this fantastic world well I say fantastic because I've enjoyed it private equity backed world and in fact i didn't have i had such little plan that one of the questions that my private my first private equity backers were mobius capital or mobius as they're now called and then they were then called matrix and bob my initial private equity backer said before you buy the business chris who are you going to sell it to i said crikey about myself i haven't even bought the business yet what do you mean i'm going to say i had no idea i just want to buy it run it he said well you need to find it he said chris you'll never make good money running a business You'll make good money buying and selling.

10:21And I kind of let that drift over. But gosh, he was right. Absolutely was he right. But I still had no idea who I was going to sell it to because I didn't. I bought a cake business. I'd just come down from an ice cream operation and a curry maker. I had no idea about the world of cake or about frozen cakes as it was then. So I just got into it. And what I found were one or two customers that I really got on well with. And I could understand what they wanted to do. I was really customer focused, which is, again, what I got from Richard. So I would spend all the time I had visiting outlets of customers to see what they were doing and what they were sending and how I could make it better for them.

10:58And then I went back and talked it through them. And I never, ever forget when I got the critical break. I was in the car with my mother-in-law. And I took a phone call from a buyer at one of the big UK pub chains, now Green King. and the buyer just he wham me at his old chris said the chocolate fudge cake you sent in he said it was useless i don't know what you were doing but beyond poor and i thought that's it i've lost it all when you come in and i went quiet he went you completely empty he said we're delighted with it you won it that was a two million quid contract and this that transformed ministry of cake as i'd renamed that business ministry of cake and it made me believe myself and it was from that moment onwards but i grew it um to a point where i think at one point i was making about 80 of all the chocolate fudge cakes in the food service world not retail but food service which is a boast that always does well for me at dinner parties when people invite me i never get invited back but i always get invited for the first time um but that was really it so so no i genuinely didn't have now the first time i didn't every business since then i bought and sold six businesses subsequently, I've always known who I'm selling them to at the point of purchasing them.

12:13Whether it's a one, two, three, four year journey, I don't mind. I broadly know. Now, ironically, I've been bought by two businesses I've never heard of when I first got involved with the company I bought. So I know who I'm going to sell it to, but it's not always the person you end up selling it to. Chris, can I just ask a quick question? when you took over the first business and you renamed it the Ministry of Cakes wasn't it I think you renamed your job the Prime Minister and your FD became the Chancellor of the Exchequer now I'll be honest with you I think you could do a better job than the real Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer but because you liked fun the reason for doing that was what?

12:55it was to differentiate ourselves Chris it was you know the world of frozen chocolate fudge cake at that point was fairly heavily populated by a bunch of, I thought, fairly unremarkable staid businesses. It is interesting, the food service or catering supply world is very different to the retail world. If you're a supplier to retail, like a Mars, a Kellogg's or a Pepsi, you're generally quite sharp, bright young things straight out of university. The food service world at that point was much, much less professional. So I just wanted to make ourselves memorable. And because I spent a couple of years at Haagen-Dazs, when I first joined Haagen-Dazs, nobody had a clue what.

13:33You'd phone up and say, hi, it's Chris from Haagen-Dazs. And people would just go quiet on the phone. And we knew, or I knew, about two years into that, when we were more successful and I called people, Chris from Haagen-Dazs, they then knew the name. It had become memorable. So I wanted to come up with a memorable name for the Ministry of Cake, but frustratingly it wasn't. My wife came up with the name. But I just thought, brilliant. if I call myself prime minister people when I phone them they will laugh and if they laugh remembering what Richard had said to me they'll be engaged if they're engaged then I'm halfway through the door so I called my sales my salesman was the foreign secretary my operations director was the home secretary I encourage everybody in the business to come up with some kind of departmental title and they all did it they all joined in so um and we all had business cards which is with your ministry title on one side, but your normal title on the other.

14:26So if you met a complete square, you could always hand over the proper side of the business. But we ended up with, as I was saying earlier, I got interviewed by Laura Kunzberg who came down. When Nick Clegg, beg your pardon, was the deputy prime minister, he came down to meet me with Nick Robinson. The BBC did a package that evening. Meet the real prime minister. Yes, Nick Clegg, deputy prime minister, with Chris the prime minister. I had Ian Duncan Swift so he gave and I had George Osborne when he was the chancellor and all of that was not because of what a great little chocolate fudge cake business I was but because we were a deep fun and engaging business to be with and we sent Boris Johnson a fudge cake when he was I think it was at that point his foreign secretary we had a letter back from him saying gents thanks for the chocolate fudge cake it was eaten in a flash woof and Boris and so excellent yeah it just it just gave us it gave me a sense of amusement.

15:19It gave people that work for the business a sense of difference and enjoyment and energy, and that translated it into how we dealt with customers. So I think it was, I'd love to get the name back, actually, and do it again. But what I have learned is, you know, great funny name businesses won't make a business great, but they will allow you to set the tonality of a culture that will make the business great. Yeah. So So you grew the business. That was the effect of buying back by Mobius. Two years later, you were selling the business to Greencore. That's right. Could you talk about how that happens a little bit earlier than a lot of private equity investments would exit?

16:03Did they approach you? What was the story there? It was, this happened a few times since, but this is the first time and it was almost the dream call. when the phone goes at your desk and you answer it. And there's a guy from Greencore saying, hi, Chris, you don't know me, but my name is X. I just wonder if we could talk about your business and what you're thinking of doing with it. And, you know, your kind of knees start to go weak and you get a bit, you know, suddenly this great businessman that you think you are. I couldn't string a sentence together. I thought, this is... So anyway, we talked to him.

16:39And Mobius, however, then insisted we did a beauty parade with other potential buyers, which I think they were right to do. It always feels a bit strange when you're selling it. I think this person's expressed interest. Why are we asking other people to look at it? But they were right to do that. And Greencore came back with a really attractive offer, far, far quicker than I had given it credit for. I mean, we bought Ministry, or I bought Ministry with Mobius' help, for£3 million, and we sold it to Greencore for£14 million. Less than two years later, it was just about the point where Gordon Brackley had, there was Entrepreneur's Taper Relief, So if you owned an asset for longer than two years, you paid a lower rate of capital gains tax, which I think is a hugely sensible way of running that system.

17:21But that was really Greencore at that point were predominantly a one billion turnover Irish food business that predominantly made ready meals and sandwiches. And they had decided they wanted to get away from just UK retail and strategically diversify into America brand and food service. And I was the food service diversification. so they was so so they approached you you decided to do a bit of market testing but they came through with an offer and that deal happened you made a nice profit which is all good um then the story the story goes that you bought the business back um well yeah about a week after i bought the business sorry about a week after i sold the business you may remember um although you don't look anywhere near as old as me the the um you may remember when northern rock closed the doors i very much did yeah so i've just sold ministry at that point uh okay effectively you think oh i dodged a bullet on that because multiples came significantly down from where i'd sold so i stayed there so green core asked me to stay on as md for ministry for a couple of practice green call was full of young guys and girls and it was patrick coveney was the chief exec he now runs ssp um the big food catering organization worldwide and it wasn't a bad place it was a safe place to be if that doesn't sound too daft at a time when the world was going to hell and back in a hand basket um so i had three four years at green court running ministry for them but i started to get itchy feet and i thought what am i going to do i'd spare time i either back to my 40 year old self i either stay here in the corporate world albeit i have some money in the bank now or if i'm that good if you know the first time i was lucky wasn't it because the first time i was lucky do that good chris go and do it again um it's probably i'm thinking about this mr chris um this might explain my um enjoyment of poker because actually you think i might as well want to have another go at this so um at that point thank heavens green core decided to review their strategy and decided that the food service in fact that america was performing really well and offered a potentially bigger upside for the group.

19:38So therefore, they were going to withdraw from the food service strategy. So Patrick, the chief, said, just to let you know, we're going to put your business up for sale. And I thought, if that's the case, would you let me have the first offer at buying it back? And he was brilliant. And it's one of those ones where sometimes you just trust people to do what they say. And he said, look, you can have the first crack at buying it back. You're not going to buy it in the cheap. And we'll just market test with a couple of people. but effectively, unless yours is a silly offer, Chris, you can buy it back.

20:08And I duly did that about eight months later. Now, that's with LDC. That was my first time with LDC, I hasten to add. And I got to meet the account manager from LDC, my investment director, and he was great. That was before I bought Ministry back. We got friendly. He lives in Bristol. And so he understood what I was looking to do before I even did it. So by the time I got to buy Ministry back from Greenville, LDC were in prime position to offer me the funding to do that and we got it through the investment I mean when you've done the deal once as you'll probably know the investment committees generally you've ticked one box haven't you I think and because I've made an acquisition with Ministry I bought another business down in Torquay I kind of ticked you can make an acquisition and you can integrate it box so it's still you still have to put a decent business plan together but LDC backed me and I bought it back from Greencore and I've remained friends with most of the Greencore guys ever since.

21:03So yeah you're right once you've made some money for one private equity house it improves your stock for the next time round I definitely think that's the case. So did you agree a price with Greencore and then go off to try and find a funder or did you? Pretty much yeah. But you'd agreed a deal so it was an old style management buyout where you'd agreed the price and you needed to go and get a funder. Correct. Which was great. And then myself and my finance director, we discovered we'd made an error in our calculations. And I think this is the mark of how I'd regard Greencore and Patrick as just brilliant guys.

21:45So we'd agreed the price to buy it back, and we were getting that funding, and LDC had agreed that funding. And then we realised, well, I came to work one Monday morning to find Jeremy by FD came in looking grayer than a very gray thing. And he'd had the weekend. He discovered he'd got a minus and a plus the wrong way around in the spreadsheet. Just a simple error, human error. But it reduced our profitability by about a million quid, which significantly reflects. So LDCs were like, we still like to fund you, but we can't afford the price we've offered. So I had to phone up Patrick. I know in Ton, she was then the finance director at Greencourt.

22:19He's now the chief executive of Primark. and said to her, look, this is not me trying to game you. We've made an error in our calculations. LDC will still fund us. We can still do the deal, but we have to take a bit off the price. Otherwise, I would have to withdraw. And it's not a game. I fully understand if you decide that that's not the case, and I'll withdraw honourably. But if you let me come and explain what, where, why, when, which Geris and I duly did when Greencore phoned up shortly after a board meeting and said, that's fine. They'd recognise that, and off we go. so you know if Patrick Covey ever happens to listen to this I'd just like to pay him a huge personal thank you because that was a big thing to do and I'd like to think that's how I'd operate in business because you don't you don't often get that but it was uh it was it's it was a hugely honorable thing to do yeah it sounds like they were great to deal with they were and so you you grew the business again and um and do you want to just talk through how the final exit that that happened with that when you sold it to a French business?

23:23Yeah, well, this time I knew exactly who would want to buy Ministry of Cake back, and I had two, maybe three, but definitely two in my mind. One was a French business that's now known as Memoirs and Dessert. The other one was Finsbury Food, which was run by an ex-colleague of mine from Mars, John Duffy, who's still there. And after two years, two, two and a half years, I think it was two and a half years, I'd grown Ministry to just over 30, 32 mil turnover. So when I bought it, bearing in mind, it was about 6 mil. We just won a significant contract with Starbucks. And at that point, we'd been approached by Starbucks in Shanghai, which just in the city of Shanghai, 30 million people, there were 2 ,000 Starbucks.

24:04And so I went over to Shanghai to go and talk to them about chocolate fudge cake for Starbucks being made in Toronto. That was a journey and a half. but when you're selling a business to have these potential new big bits of business and opportunities is hugely important so I wasn't surprised when we took a phone call from Mamazole Desert saying that they would be interested in acquiring us and again we did the same thing with LDC we went out and put the business to the market had a couple of quite interesting offers but at that point Mamazole Desert made a really we were an important part of their private equity build they were private equity backed and so this time we joined them but at that point i decided actually so i worked there for a couple of months then for actually this time it's time to get out sooner rather than later go and do something else and at that point another business had come up uh locally for sale which i was interested in so chris am i am i right in thinking there so in the space of nine years you bought a business sold the business the same business then you've gone back and bought it and sold it again you made money on it still so the way i would describe that is somebody who wanted his cake wanted to eat it would that be fair uh yeah the old cliches are the best but yes that's Jonathan wanted to get that one in he just kicked me under the table

25:21you mentioned the other the next business you acquired and it was another food business uh unsurprisingly which you very quickly rebranded as flavor works i think one of the things that you do really well is that if you don't know what a company does from the name It's the wrong name for the company, in my opinion. So Flavourworks is clearly food-related about flavouring. That was then acquired by Griffith Foods in 2021 for a market improvement on profitability. Wouldn't it be fair to describe you, Chris, as Profits for Sanity, you know, turnovers for vanity sort of guy? You've always looked at the profit number.

25:58Well, I do now, but I didn't at first. And I think that's a really useful question to ask. go there you know i i've trained as a sales rep that's what that's what i did and so at mars and again you know everywhere i went i increased sales and that's the yardstick against which i measured my success so at ministry cake one lovely morning i came in and said you know the first question every month was what have we sold where are we uh and i'd be delighted with another ratcheting enough each week and then my ops direct again it seems to look you need to slow that mate because we can't make the amount of cakes that you're selling we're letting customers down so So I thought, very good.

26:31Okay, Phil, from now on, every Monday morning, my question was how many cakes did we make last week? Because I'm now a trained businessman. I'm more than just a salesperson. And then a couple of weeks later, my finance director came in and said, Chris, he said, we're kind of running out of money because we're making too much stock to fulfill the sales you're making. So actually, we haven't got much cash in the bank. And that was an absolute zeitgeist moment. You know, when the heavens open and the sun comes out, a thousand angels sing, and you realize it's about the cash. it's about what have you got in the bank where's the cash flow going you can we can all look at EBITDA and measure a business in one way but when you run your own business can I afford to pay people at the end of this week um and so flavorworks was the first business that I didn't really grow exponentially from a sales perspective it was in a lovely market doing exactly what its customers wanted but effectively we were making sauces and marinades for some of the larger a ready meal manufacturer so if you go into waitrose and bought chicken kiev the garlic butter in that kiev was made by flavor works if you bought a marinade that you you know the plastic sachets you snap open and put over your fillets that was made by them so but that wouldn't grow because all they do is change this recipe flavor for that recipe flavor so your business is broadly similar turnover so what you get a realize is how do you make the business more profitable you make it more profitable in producing more interesting things more exciting more more premium things and get away from some of the bog standard stuff that the big volume manufacturers can do.

28:00So it's not rocket science, really, but you're absolutely spot on that. For the first time at Flavoworks, I was laser-focused on contribution and cash profitability every day and every week. And I changed the business from a sort of, you know, business that just be run for somebody else's lifestyle. The guy I bought, I would be careful because Richard's still a friend of mine now, but he was running it as a lifestyle. business really and he wanted to retire and I made it much more focused on contribution what we were doing and therefore people understood what I was after and we grew the profit significantly when I owned it great that sounds good so um so you probably got to the point where you're at least close to being financially independent by then and uh but you decided to have another go and you then bought the more recent business, Kate Smith.

28:56Could you, I think that was with LDC's backing as well, wasn't it? So could you talk about that deal and how that happened? Yeah, this one's much more straightforward, actually. So I'd sold Flavoworks. I thought, right, I've got a choice. And you're right. At that point, I could have stopped doing what I do and sort of just gone off into the wilderness. But I still wanted to have another roll of the dice. And I realised by then I was enjoying it and I wanted to see if I could do it again. But this time I didn't know Cakesmith so I employed a corporate finance house in Swindon, a small business called Watershed and I said to Sue, one of the partners, could you go and find me a business that I can invest a bit of money in and see over the next five years we can build it into something interesting.

29:37And so Sue, as a little rock miler, went off and came back fairly quickly with a couple of businesses in the southwest and one of which was a business called Cakesmith. I said to Sue, I'd worked in the cake industry for 15 years in the southwest never heard of cakes miss so to be honest it's probably below my interest level but she persuaded me to go and see it and boy i'm glad that i did um this is a rocket ship of a business so three years four years ago it's turning over three mil i've owned it for the last one i owned it and sold it but i've owned it for the last three and a half this year will turn over just under 40 so we've grown it exponentially and we've got a basically it's a website e-commerce enabled business which is a whole different world I found it through a corporate finance business that found it for me as soon as I met the owners and they were very blunt you know when you look to buy a business you can all dance around the flames of it where I'd like to look at business well yeah how much is it worth what do you think so I've now decided as I got older that I like to say quite quickly how much I think I'm prepared to pay for business or if I'm selling I like to say quite quickly this is the price I'm looking for because it just cuts out any of the type because it lets you get down to to business And the two guys I brought Kate Smith from were very clear about the price, but the price was not substantiated by the EBITDA trading figures at the time.

30:54And the reason for that is the other side of COVID, but they were working on a last four months and how quickly they were recovering. And I had a look at the numbers and looked at their market positioning and thought, you know, I believe their story. So I phoned up LDC and said, look, I've got a business. I've got a price for the business. I don't think there's any point negotiating it. I really don't. But if I did it as a classic EBITDA times this multiple, you won't get the price they're looking for. But if we do it on a run rate basis, we look at, I think, where they currently are and where they're going.

31:26I think it makes sense. So an LDC, to be fair, back to the point you made earlier, Jonathan, I'd worked with LDC before. I'd made good money for them before. And so two hours later, I had a phone call back from Stefan Gunn, the investment director in the Bristol office at LDC with an indicative level of funding, an offer of funding. And it was spot on. And so we concluded the deal fairly quickly and bought the business from the two guys. And that was, you know, I don't think, I don't think I could have raised that money had I been either A, inexperienced, or B, just straight out of the corporate world.

32:01I think I was able to raise the money for it because LDC trusted my judgment on what I could do with it. And that's how that came about. One other thing that strikes me is, because that's what the jargon would have been a management buy-in, isn't it? Where you were buying into a business that you weren't running. Most of the buyout deals that happen with private equity, the management team are installed. And the private equity house are backing an acquisition where the incumbent team will be a team that have been backed. So it is quite unusual. That's twice you did that. because the first deal he did was a management buy-in as well.

32:39So that was pretty recently, wasn't it? That was in the last few years. If you think you're any good as a salesman, you've got to be able to sell yourself, haven't you? And so I kind of backed myself on it. But you're spot on with that question because LDC – so Stefan, investment director of Bristol, very comfortable because I knew him. The senior investment committee team back in London were much less comfortable because it was, as you say, a bimbo. so effectively what I did I retained the guy who was the end there was an MD in the business and I he stayed on and I joined as chief exec as a kind of chairman investor and but I knew what I wanted to do and so quite quickly we reached a position where we made we we didn't need a managing director so I kind of bought it through the back door really um but you're quite right it's been both much more difficult generally to get interested backing it than an MBO and then this sort of brings us almost up to date doesn't it because um you then sell that business um to a waterland backed um business from france do you want to just summarize that deal and then yeah this was one of these ones where so when i bought cakesmiths um i knew who i was going to sell it to i pretty much knew i was going to sell it to um and ironically was going to one of the businesses that bought my last cake was mamazelle dessert because i thought this would suit them beautifully but again one of those i was actually on holiday at the time and the phone went uh it was an investment director from waterland a guy with the implausible name of xavier raymond for said an impeccable english i think his mother's york and his father's french but xavier was a class act or is a class act and just so that we'd be monitoring the business we'd be really interested if we'd like to come and join the honorate mra is a growth platform for waterland the French bakery business looking to expand across Europe.

34:30They'd bought a Cornish pasty business down in Bodmin, and they identified us as a quick growth. We were fast growth. We were double-digit EBITDA, and we were attracted to them. So I'd only owned the business for 18 months at that point. That was a much, much quicker approach, and I'd given that credit for. And again, fair play to LDC, because this was only 18 months into what was going to be a five-year business plan. But we'd hit the numbers I wrote for the business plan. And we'd hit year three within the first 12 months. We were growing that. I mean, we were growing faster than I'd ever grow the credit for.