Exposing Britain’s Broken Education System: Peter Wood

0:00The problem I solve is the skills gap. Generally the lack of trust that exists in the talent industry. It's what I've learned in business that nobody's going to give you the right to do it. I do not know where I fit into any of this and how do I even get there? Only you can rebel against that and if it's not happening as quick as you want there's probably a good reason for it. What is the state of play in the UK at the moment with the skill gap? What do you think is the biggest bucket to kind of put as many coins in as you can? do we just accept as a generation that there are going to be people that are going to have to stay and do those mediocre jobs and probably not be content in life because that's the way it's always been um peter welcome to the show thank you for having me lads very very excited to chat to you it's been a while yeah obviously you guys came on the pod about a year ago and i think a lot has changed for both of us now well let's kick it off yeah who are you and what problem do you solve so i'm peter i'm the uh ceo and founder of caliber which we've just launched together with the apprentify group uh the problem i solve is the skills gap um and generally the lack of trust that exists in the talent industry we're trying to make it a much more human and you know real solution to what is a graduate career crisis with a huge lag in how the people are developing skills that actually are desirable in this uh in this world of work so yes that's what i've been solving i've been doing it for like three years with varying degrees of success but fast forward to now and i actually feel like i'm in a pretty good position to take it on what what do you think makes you uniquely qualified to tackle something like that i think listen there are loads of people that are going to try and solve this in many different ways it's going to be the people who do it with AI and there's going to be the the people that just brute force recruitment but for me like the approach that we've taken I think it's very true to myself like I'm an incredibly curious person and I've been interviewing people building a community around this problem for over three years before I like proclaim myself as a business person or anyone who had the right to solve it but I guess what I've learned in business that nobody's going to give you the right to do it so you know especially as a young founder you'll get belittled out the market people will tell you oh don't do that somebody's already doing it but I think you have to believe in the nuance of what you're doing and some of that's just you know pooch in the pudding but I think in terms of my threshold for you know being told I can't do it and still doing it like i reckon yeah i'll i'll stay in the game as long as they'll have me um and try and try and give it a go nice with so peter with with every entrepreneur there's there's typically this fault line of before and after so like there's this normal life i'm going through i may be a bit of an npc i'm not actually awake yet and then all of a sudden there's like this penny drop moment where something happens where you go i'm gonna start doing something i don't necessarily have the all the cards yet but I'm going to move forward paint us a picture what what did that look like just before you dived into the water yeah um I guess it's that back against the wall feeling right um you know I think university especially does a pretty good job at making you an NPC like you kind of get to a point in second year where you're like oh what have I even done for the last two years um and I think you know I joined a COVID which didn't help either and everyone around me like having worked really hard to get into a good university but not being like a natural academic myself was just applying to these spring weeks and summer internships and starting their careers as consultants and bangers lawyers and I was like I do not know where I fit into any of this and at the same time I'm this hugely ambitious person and I so I think the effects of not knowing what I wanted to do you know it really what it really triggered me to like actually sort my shit out basically um and for me i think that looked like you know knowing okay i've got my mates um you know i'm not really a comfortable person on social media in general but i'm gonna push through that like fear of cringe and that anxiety and just start putting myself out there on linkedin by platforming others right you know this person said it not me that's kind of what you could do with a podcast um i think bit by bit i realized how many people resonate with the problem i was trying to solve myself you know especially in the time of social media where you get exposed to like the good life and all the amazing things that people can do in the future but that paralysis of choice leaves you yeah just so like well how do i even get there and then i think for me it was a bit of a flight or flight moment you know i either double down on entrepreneurship you know this is my bed so i'm gonna lie in it and yeah through so many things at the wall um i can talk about other ventures if you want but like a water filter business putting on hackathons in the us um you know the graduate guide all the different lives it's lived now to caliber i think uh i feel like entrepreneurship is just like it's just part of me at this point and it's weird like i don't know it sounds weird to say but i couldn't imagine doing anything else at this point and that's a pretty cool position to be in at 24 you know actually knowing what you want to spend the rest of your life doing um so i think yeah i Does that answer your question?

5:41I can't carry my own pipeline. Oh, it looks heavy. It's really heavy. I think it's because I've only been calling people at 98 % accurate with my current data provider. Whoa, does that mean you're just speaking to decision makers all the time? All day, every day. But I bet you won't know who I'm using. Can I guess? Try. Is it Prospio? What, you mean P-R-O-S-P-E-O dot I-O? Prospio dot I-O. 98 % correct data. there's a link in the bio try it for free now that's prospio.io so you you said you were hugely ambitious but there's like a period before action so like it sounded like there was this like ambition these goals these dreams but you probably like but how do i get there or what am i doing what what give me an example of that i was just so intimidated by them to be honest um and i think that you know you can go back as far as you want but like my childhood um I always was this sort of innately curious and somebody who cared a lot about things and I think that kind of got bullied out of me at school a bit um and I think that happens to a lot of people and me without those two characteristics is not really much um and so I think when I like slowly re-found myself I I really like ran so intensely away from that feeling of like losing yourself towards like well I wasn't sure at that age but just towards like a feeling where I was like at equilibrium of what I wanted to achieve and like each day felt like I was doing the best thing that I could personally be doing for me um and then like you know like I said university gets in the way and And I think, yeah, like it's just, I think it's just you do what everyone else does.

7:30And some of that's great. Like, you know, whether that's club nights, going to the pub, whatever. But I think even like degeneracy and that like that element of your life, I think learning to like find your own relationship with that is kind of like an underspoken thing in the world of work and entrepreneurship. like you know especially if you're trying to build something for your own it's very manic depressive um you know your ambitions they're so jumbled up and the only way you're going to do it is by putting some order on it and bringing some other people in to support that mission be that employees or just like serendipity from you know people that actually care about seeing you win and so i think that ambition has always been like so it's just dictated my life a lot right uh and i and so So now I really put an onus on listening to it, basically.

8:25And I think, yeah, that's serving me well at this point in my life. So talk to us about the skill gap and the problem that you solve. What is the state of play in the UK at the moment with the skill gap? So I guess you can go back to secondary school and the education that's happening there all the way through to university and whether you should go or shouldn't. and then you know how that actually applies to what the working world wants i think part of the problem of the skills gap is that this this education system got built for the service economy and it got built for companies that were able to grow into behemoths in a sort of stable way where they could do a lot of the workplace education through grad schemes and they don't exist anymore part that's like a macroeconomic thing right um you know especially with ai like if you can cut costs you will at the moment and what happens is that early talent now they've been for an education system where you know in theory they've developed you know some good soft skills you know they've lived their life uh you know they've got that out of the way and and you know should you have studied the humanities i mean for example you might understand uh basic things like how to write how to communicate um but the application of it to the world of work like if you look at startups and scale-ups which is a market i'm focusing on you need the people you hire to hit the ground running from day one you can't really afford for them not to and then you bring in probation periods and things like that for an early talent someone even if they've got a great degree from a great university which by the way it's not a lot of people lots of people go to university and question why they've even done it in the end and and it's pretty humbling to everybody i think this skills gap because the way things are changing the skills that are needed whether that's hard or soft like hard just talking tech stack you know like having a sort of yeah having an idea of how to use platforms that will make you more efficient from day one that isn't something you'll ever learn in the education system right and how to actually be confident enough to say what you think that's not something you get in the education system how to like understand different people of from like different stakeholders within a business it's not something you're gonna learn and even business degrees it's it's then it's not applied enough education right now and so i guess yeah that's how i see the skills gap and and we're really trying to bring something new to the table of how they get solved so so if i put you in third year of a business studies degree today and you're well aware next year i'm going out to work and get my first proper proper jobs and stuff what do you think is the biggest bucket to kind of put as many coins in as you can well um i think obviously like a caveat of saying it's different to each person right for me how i should then build my career and build my skills is going to be different um to you know someone who's going to be more technical within a business but i think you can almost i find it really useful thinking okay if i was in a very small team and you've got ceo cco you've got um chief operating officer you've got chief revenue officer you've got chief marketing officer who would you be within like let's say it's a group project who would you be in those like in that team you know really try and apply yourself to like you've got no support you're not just a cog in a big machine you have to you're not going to be in a company if you can't contribute to those and you're not saying that they're going to graduate and become a chief whatever of any company but it's a good perspective to think like okay maybe i'm the guy who's you know more savvy with partnerships and you know making things happen and maybe i've got a bit more of the gift of gab maybe you end up being way more technical than you think especially now like being a coder you don't need to be completely hard skills like you can just be really curious and on it with what the market wants and have a lot of success as a you know more technical person within a business so i guess short answer is just find a way to get exposure whether that's working with your peers and colleagues or in making someone empower you with responsibility that actually applies your your skill set and yourself to a business that's what i would do in my final year of business studies because you can have all the business acumen that you want you can tick all the boxes but it just doesn't at all reach the employers as useful like they just don't care anymore especially in the world of startups scale ups if you cannot do what they want you to do in order for the business to succeed they're not like brutally they're not going to take that risk on you they're just going to go for someone more experienced who objectively can say that so the so when we think with our solution caps on and we think about let's focus on soft skills it it's really hard like you you're you're shortening the the gap between them but when you think about how you can teach those soft skills in like a low stakes environment so rather than it being a big lecture hall and say like this is how i'm going to teach you how to be more confident in what you're asking for what are some of those solutions that people can start applying from a low stakes point of view so i think because soft skills right there are some more hidden ones i think like you might get you might see on a jd for a job description um you know the basic ones are like you know communication confidence curiosity coachability all these kind of things that generally like make you employable um but i think there are like there's things like conscientiousness you know empathy being a good person um and a lot of the ability to portray that and show that in a world of work uh it's changing because cvs just are not the way to get work really any anymore unfortunately i say unfortunately like i'm privileged enough to have never actually made a cv but that's partly because i just rejected the the idea of going into the corporate world at university but like if you think about it like why would you hire someone off that like sometimes like i read people's when they ask me to them like that's not you i know you who you are like that's who are you're going to be hiring so i would say like in terms of soft skills it's a new style of storytelling you don't need to have a podcast you don't need to have a personal brand i'm not going to prescribe that on anybody it's really useful to do it if you want to do certain things but always think through the vein of like storytelling and being an infectious person where people want to buy into you because otherwise those soft skills just exist in a vacuum and you know i think what's also really cool is that in the world of startups like employment it's not as rigid and and i think like take our most recent hire he did a university degree in business marketing from edinburgh but he did videography production freelancing for seven years since he was a kid and never stopped doing at university and he is so much more talented than any other personal interview that have been 10 years in an industry like working for an agency it's just like staying in touch with your true self and like the more body of work you have to prove that so people can't call you bullshit like the better it's going to serve you okay so that that that makes sense like the video side of thing is like you've got this body of work and i think you're right like you don't need a personal brand you don't need a podcast or it's all about like showcasing who you are but if we think right you're a young grad you're coming into like i don't know but i might have some like marketing or some operational skills but i don't have this classic cv can you think of anything anecdotal that someone can do or that you've seen that that is a good way to like i'll tell you a story without being 2001 well i can tell you our solution uh that we enact as a business uh which is that we do all of our assessments in person um yes we do screen people to get in person but really that's more of a cultural test that we've built and it's not dictated by what university you've been to what degree you've done um but then when you're in person we are basically we have employers there on the day so they get to you get to meet employers you get to actually have that feedback loop closed um and learn where you're actually at your career should you get a job or not but you are being you're working together with other people you're putting yourself in a realistic uh office environment where you're you're going to be uncomfortable you're going to have a you know you're going to be thinking you're going to have coming up with ideas but having the confidence to say it in front of a room of people is actually the only way that you can be useful in a business context i don't know if you guys agree but like if you had someone come to your business and they expressed all these like really amazing characteristics in the interview process you know they let's say they kind of blagged it a little bit in the online interviews and you get in person they're just like too scared to actually say what you you know you employed them for this and they're not even showcasing it like i we are putting it all in person because that is the reality of business um and then you know it also gives us a way better idea of the person so that when we provide our upskilling um you know we have 200 trainers in our business all across ai data marketing sales um and we we can apply it to the right person in the right way like the more in person they're assessed and the more we can basically like create this yeah i think about almost like a video game where you've got those um you know those hexagons um like you can get like or fifa skill points whatever like you can actually see where you're at in terms of your ability right now and apply very strategically okay he's really confident he isn't so he doesn't need coaching and his confidence he just needs more of the hard skills so he can be more proficiently joins or someone completely different it's like okay well this founders associate role like they're really operationally savvy but they need to get a bit better at marketing so how can we give them that as well um and i think it's just a really i don't know it's fascinating to be honest i mean i guess that's why i'm doing it but uh yeah that's what that that's uh i think just bring it in person is genuinely my answer and i'll let you know if it works wow we were really connecting with that guest.

19:33And I think that we're connecting today, Mr. Thompson. I don't. But let me ask you a question. How do you connect with qualified prospects at an alarming rate every single day? Great question. I've been using Nooks and so many people think that Nooks is just a dialer, but actually it's so much more than just a dialer. It helps you find people. It gives you the intent signals so that when you reach out to them, you've got a great tool to sell to them. Wow. So it's intent and intense. But how would I get in touch with them straight away and start using them in my sales team it's nooks.ai nooks.ai that's n-o-o-k-s.ai i'm thinking about young people now are probably like we're going to sound old when i say this but you've come up for a generation where the algorithm understands you you're very embedded with social media so if i do have a bit of like entrepreneurialism or business savvy in me i'm probably seeing a lot of steven bartler but i'm also probably seeing a lot of like get rich quick schemes do a bit of day trading why not get into crypto yeah do you think there's any con to people looking at very short solutions on their phone then coming out into the business world i mean like algorithms are echo chambers aren't they like uh and you can get stuck in these echo chambers really quickly without ever voluntarily deciding to be in them um so i think that's something to be really wary of is like you know it's never been more important who you're influenced by online um i mean you can go completely off it but i don't think that's the answer to be honest i think the internet is one of the greatest inventions in the world like i'm very optimistic about its future because you know as a history student i look at you know times gone by like information has always been power and you know whether it's the creation of the radio or then the tv and the weaponization that powerful people do to like try and dictate the narrative you know Nazis getting in power or like you know awful things happening right now our algorithms are controlled by very powerful people but I think you're starting to see apathy from the users and voices are starting to emerge that previously wouldn't kind of as a counterweight where they are not giving you just like this like course selling like fleecing you with like information that may have worked for them but won't work for everyone they're actually just trying to be very vulnerable and like you know i think podcasts things like that if you can find the right ones for you where you feel heard and like you're genuinely curious you're not just doing it because you were told to or it feels like what everyone else is doing like that's such a force for good so i guess it's a long way of answering your question but yes do it like but just really really careful when you're doing it because i definitely did and i think you know it's just given me a wearable that i couldn't have had before and then i suppose to follow up there's a thing with ai that i think a lot people talk about on linkedin particularly around young people is even things like claude updates are advertised as we now do the work of the junior person so like the paralegal yeah claude might do the work of the paralegal so that bottom rung of the ladder of getting into like a big law firm or something it's just become much harder so how do you think people can make sure they're still kind of relevant against that yeah i mean this is the thing like it's gonna be there's gonna be so many teething problems in this changeover of what role young people play in the world of work but if we get it right like genuinely on the other side it's people feeling more empowered uh doing more achieving more like you know and and doing it from wherever they want and and there is you know i mean perfection never exists never has throughout any period history but i think you have to think in your mind of like i don't know like i don't want to come back to ambition again but i have this maybe somewhat delusional belief that everybody has ambitions and everybody is ambitious to an extent yes you have more type a people that express it or apply it or you know shout about it more but part of like you know depression or feeling like really down is not being able to live up to those ambitions and i think like you have to be the starting point for anything career building where you know let's say ai is going to take your job and everything's bad or whatever only you can rebel against that and I think you need to have your sort of personal life ducks in order and go like right well what do I actually want to do with this world like in this world how can I get other people invested in in my unique idea of you know career building world building whatever you want to call it and and so I do feel sorry for the people that did done every single thing they were told got into great university got first like you know and now they're you know applying and their parents would being maybe in law let's use that as the example um you know they just wanted to live the life their parents told them was a good life and you know have that nice house and um you know stable career where you go into the office and you do it like and to be honest i think there is still room for those people but it just can't be as many as it was because you know the world's basically gone we need to do more and be more as humans like and the techs advance way quicker than people's willingness to adapt to it or like conscientiousness even when when you're talking peter you you've you've taken me back to a point where i was 15 and i was sat in my local town you met you but you you're kind of describing two different sides of the coin and there was a guy that i'm friends with and i was telling him about all these big ambitious dreams and goals i had and at the time it was probably to do with music and traveling the world and getting out of this small town that means that grew up in and doing all these big things i remember his response being something very similar to oh i'm just probably going to stay here and get an admin job because someone has to stay back and do the admin jobs and that was even at like 15 and as i've got older like i'll tell you who it was off air and you'll say yeah i agree with that um but but he was just like yeah that's what i'm gonna do so all of a sudden and it's not to say like well i'm i'm more ambitious and you're not so i deserve it or whatever but from a young age only only now fucking 18 19 years later do i realize there's probably that level of like agency whereas i'm like a show me a problem and i'll i'll find a ladder to get over the wall yeah whereas even from such a young age people are going my life probably won't be that and that's okay i'm settled to that the key is like is he like content in that like if if he's if you're content in it like surely there's no problem like like you know the pursuit you know not to make it overly wishy-washy but why'd you do anything if you're not happy like genuinely and so if there if people can be lawyers if people can be you know admin people we need them great you know like value add no mental health problem like brilliant but there's loads of people that just aren't that and there's loads of people that have been doing that before that didn't like it anyway either so nothing's ever been like all okay it's just being unveiled and like you said like companies are forcing people to be like yeah you're not gonna have a job and it's like it's it's just really intense at the moment but you so you're on this mission and i and i think that what you're doing is funneling into these highly ambitious people and giving them this skill gap and i think you will you will succeed but i think there will be this hub in this next generation i think you see in every generation of low agency unambitious people yeah and i imagine that you probably do also spend time trying to fire these people up motivate them and there's probably like a small funnel of those that you can get through to the other side but actually do we just accept as a generation that there are going to be people that are going to have to stay and do those mediocre jobs and probably not be content in life because that's the way it's always been yeah i mean it's yeah it's a huge question which i obviously don't have the answer to but um so i can only speak to my experience with the graduate guide um prize caliber is that you know i i i don't know it's definitely not it wasn't a waste of time but i actually gave myself a lot of problems and you know even you know just like i stressed myself out for a long time because i was trying to help everybody um and even just the way that we branded ourself and narrative was it it was really uh we were trying to help everyone so we weren't helping anyone it was the reality and and so we've lived lots of different lives done i mean tried so many different things and ultimately the thing that the place that we're in now like i'm really privileged that the graduate guide can remain this completely uncommercial very collaborate collaborative brand partnership based community that's hugely top of funnel where everybody's welcome and it's meant to be this sandbox experience for careers that everybody hopefully everybody that wants support can go in there and feel like oh there's something i can go to this week where i can get exposure i can take that exposure i can apply it with the upskilling that we've got in that community and then i can actually like be exposed to different career paths and jobs off the back of it and that's like the dream on that side but fundamentally the only place the reason i got to this place with a graduate i could be that was that i built a commercial model that works for businesses and i and in that i actually only help the people that i can place and i only help the businesses and we do apprenticeship training um we do much bigger consulted projects some companies but fundamentally we're still trying to get people into work and you can in that process you can only help who the employers want and so you know for me that like i was just a really you know we're all whacking the face uh working out okay i want to do it for everybody but what in what order do i have to do it in order to actually make that a viable dream fill your cup first kind of thing so then take us back to the the earlier days so you you say um we're trying to help everybody so we were kind of helping nobody talk us through maybe some of those different stages of the graduate guide and what that looked like uh yes i started as a podcast um i was in the pub where all great ideas happen uh and i saw my old head boy and i was like that guy's smashing in life i need to spend more time with people like him and that was literally the idea uh you know i got my brother to make a no offense to him quite crappy logo in a week found my uh like a studio blow a pub near my university um and i just started inviting like everyone anyone like i don't know again i was like back against the wall denusal optimist like down to a tee um i think my third episode was with the md of google which is just hilarious um because like i i was definitely not a good host the equipment was definitely bad and he was just so nice about it and i was like it's those moments like maybe if he was you know addicted to me like it just might not have happened i might be like why am i doing this but i just i i don't know like in the beginning it was amazing because it was like you know my friends kind of knew me as the person was always going to do something different and so it wasn't completely out of place um but I just like I just loved it like I was still at university I spent no time doing work like uni work um but still managed to like get a 2-1 that's yeah all you kind of need um and uh yeah I like built a water filter business that same year like you know I was just like I was just in love with like this new sort of way I could explore my curiosities on LinkedIn like just messaging people going oh my god he replied like i can speak to him now i could like maybe get to know him i imagine and so i just ran with it and you know i never made it my business and never made it my career never claimed to be a founder or anything um i took a grad job putting on events in the us which came from the podcast as well the water filter business came from the podcast which bear grills now owns which is mad um nothing to do with me really but um still quite cool uh and yeah and then when i decided to go full-time on it eventually it was like okay it was still like what's this going to be i have no idea but i enough people were brought into my journey where they felt like an inevitability of it um and so we but we tried you know communities tried to be in events and podcast media business turns out there's not a huge amount of money in that um unless you're like the top dogs and i certainly wasn't um you know we tried to make people pay for the like community we did and then end up refunding everyone because we're like this is just bollocks uh we you know we built different prototypes i was basically we just no one could ever tell us that we weren't trying but nothing was really sticking and it was when basically like the raising investment process was really where we got clarity on what we wanted to become um you know we'd work with big clients we place people in roles but whether they went on to succeed or not was completely out of our control and which is basically just what recruitment is they just go like yeah have them like it doesn't work come back we'll give you a free replacement and I hate that through recruitment and why I'm trying to change it with ops killing and training and development and like really like putting an onus on making that person work you know both for the candidate and the employer and I think the combination of my network the voice i'd built on linkedin um the rabbit holing i'd done like how long i'd stayed in the game when i had no right to that caught the eye of apprentify and they basically were like yeah your business model is shit like but and like at this rate you know it's not you're not going to make money doing it the way that you think you can do but that was when everything changed because we were getting people were angel investing in us but i genuinely i look back and I'm like, what were they investing in?

34:03Because they were just, I guess, investing in me to figure it out. But I'm so grateful that it's all materialized this way because the group are so amazing. They're all excellent founders that are building it. There's 250 people, a great culture of young people who are really ambitious. But I'm still a founder and I have all the empowerment I need to solve the problem that we've already been speaking about a lot. And I think the skills gap, you know, even from the beginning, that is what I cared about. And it's just gotten worse and worse and worse since I started. So the market's kind of gotten, you know, as much as it's not a nice thing that skills gaps happened.

34:43The business came from just staying in the game long enough, if that makes sense. And I think people say this to you, right? And it doesn't mean much when you're in that phase when nothing's happening. And, you know, like you're like, oh, you know, people are questioning it from the outside. but that's why I think you just have to be in love with it more than anyone could like imagine you know why I kept doing the podcast I was like even if I had a bad day even if nothing was moving forward I could I could scale my network if I couldn't scale my business you know so I think just have been aware of all of that like it's so useful for this point I'm at now and like yeah like obviously I'm only 24 and even just talking about now we have it's mad how much actually happens even when at times it felt like nothing was happening right there's there's a lot of people who want to make the ask on linkedin like you've done asking for guests maybe there's people who want to ask for a sale or whatever it is yeah in terms of you reaching out to people what did you find really worked just like like playing into absurdity a little bit like obviously you all guys content as well like it actually gets referenced in our business like yeah these guys are like great because within sales it's so like you know but like just having fun with it like putting your person like what's the worst that can happen especially if you're not attached to a corporate brand like where obviously in that case you do need to you know play within the guidelines if you're not like what excuse do you have not to like put some effort in and you know i send people videos like i like now with our producer like we make way too overproduced videos to like send to people to like just ask to go for a coffee or like you know just just things that even with the content i put out it's trying to like be super critical would i respond to that would i stop scrolling with that and you have to be so honest with yourself and go like i mean i've put out content i'm not proud of but i've always tried to not be like everything else on platform and if you can do that it's so easy to win on linkedin like because genuinely so few people are doing it give us some examples of people you've reached out to and had positive results with uh well with my documentary that i'm doing now um like and i would just like in case it doesn't happen now just like caveat it's like i got their attention it was like messaged the ceo of ibm with this like me opening the door going like hey nicola and then like basically proceeded to tell them about you know what the documentary was you know with like techno music in the background and like and then uh yeah she was you know she was like sounds really cool like can you speak to my head of comms and they're like thanks for the innovative approach like it's really refreshing and you're like well if that kind of company and that kind of person is appreciative of it probably every like yeah everyone will be um so but then you know if they're not what you know whatever like you know just crack on and on to the next the way i've been thinking about it at the moment is like swinging big and i know that's like a real like baseball phrase or something like that but you just sometimes you just gotta throw so much shit at the wall but like but like okay you say i'm gonna email the the ceo of ibm yeah there are 99 kids in their bedroom who probably want a job at ibm who would never even think about sending that message and you're talking about like you don't need a cv but if you pick up the phone or even if you stumble through or you struggle with it just by showing that initial i thought to do this and like the video and stuff like that i think that there's a there's a fine line but what you just told me there doesn't scream cheesy i had another guy sending me a meme the other day of a cat crying because i didn't reply and i think like that's fucking well annoying yeah but i think like it shows the the thought and the um i'll send you the name is the reciprocity um so let's talk about the acquisition because people will be watching this and people will be wanting to be in your shoes they want to know how you did it so you've been building this platform the graduate guide and then they'll want to know you've got this opportunity on the table i guess one what does that opportunity actually look like behind closed doors and two how did it come about so i'll answer how it came about first because that just makes more sense in my brain um it was from the podcast again i interviewed someone called sarah skeleton um who was just an md uh of their sales company i didn't know who the apprentified group was or anything and the reason why i interviewed her is because previously to that i interviewed james wise who is the principal bolton um which is a vc turns out you know his his stepdad is is is the CEO of the group and like Sarah saw it and so I started getting friendly with them I came to their Christmas dinner not thinking any of it and like you know this whole time I'm like I'm trying to raise investment and I'm like you know we were just kind of I guess it was quite natural authentic because we were just basically dating in business terms and like I said like I think everything like we had other acquisition offers we had other you know people investing and each different step i now i'm so appreciative of because basically what but by the time we got to apprentice fight we'd been getting grilled by people on our business model for months and months and months and um learning so much about business in that process and and really like yeah just like refining something to a point that apprentice fight could take it and basically you know they're private equity backed um they they have a huge amazing clients they have a great brand name um and they saw us for they saw in us like what they couldn't have or what they don't have which is like that marketing brain that um that we are the age of the people we're trying to help you know just that that entrepreneurism that if they gave us the right investment but not just investment expertise as well which is why it was so big for us it's like they told us what was good and what wasn't they really saw us and understood us but they didn't just like say what we wanted to hear and i think that whole process probably took about a year um and it should have done to be honest like as much as you know oh i just want it to happen i got one announcer whatever like you know get all the validation online it's it's like when if you're trying to act with intent and quickly things will happen as quick as they can basically like and and and if it's not happening as quick as you want there's probably a good reason for it um so now basically the opportunity is we've built from scratch a business called caliber the purpose of that being that the graduate guide is a really powerful asset for us as a business in that it's a recruitment business could not create the graduate guide because they just scream of, you know, we're a recruiting business, right?

42:03But the graduate guide is always my baby. It was completely, you know, nobody had any control of it. It was just me for three years. And so we've taken all the commercial element out of it. No sponsors, no anything, just all partnerships, all, you know, like I said, this kind of sandbox experience for people to come in and explore different career paths. Should somebody want to join a startup or a scale up, we are you know and we've been there for them when nobody else was whether they're still at university or they're in a job at a corporate and they're like a very authentic way of discovering new jobs and then when they want to get placed we have this amazing funnel to then go right come get assessed in person um come yeah come like see what jobs you are meet some employers and then when you get in that job we've built a training boot camp with our 200 team of 200 trainers we're off-stared out standard rated like this is no influencer course this is like the the pinnacle of you know top one percent of trainers in the country and we get to bring that to market as something that hasn't yet been offered as a viable thing to scale ups um and so that's like i don't know even just saying it i just think it's so exciting and i can't believe like that pub you know university basement thing i just become this um and yeah and you know just aside from that like for me working within the group you know i also get to wear that hat apprenticeships i could i probably won't get into it but it's like crazy how misunderstood they are you know just a quick thing if you pay over a way uh if your wage bill is over three million pounds you pay 0.5 percent of that wage bill into an apprenticeship levy if you don't spend it within 12 months that's just a tax on your business if you do spend it you get free upskilling and it's not the thing that you do instead you go to university a huge huge percentage of apprenticeship spending is on leadership and middle management and you know on ai and but companies have no idea about it and it's just leaving their accounts and they're like me being able to speak to businesses now like it's crazy how i don't know like it's nice to have something that people actually kind of want right like early talent i say it's not that they don't want them but the world is not exactly screaming out for it like you said you got claude going like why would you do that why'd you hire that um but apprenticeships is it's an amazing upskilling asset and so yeah that's that's basically what we do now it feels like a really exciting time and i think like only in hindsight when you think about like this mosaic is like finalized years down the line so i think like in 20 30 40 years you'll see and there's probably going to be points wherever we end up with ai we might all be dead by then who knows but ai and the apprenticeships and the skills gap will probably kind of lead the way so i think you're you're doing some big exciting things and i think keep swinging big peter um really enjoyed this conversation if somebody has listened to this the whole way through what is one question that they should ask themselves why did you listen to all of this uh i i think just i don't know maybe something as simple as like you know has today feel like you were doing what you were meant to be doing you know and if it's not it's not to say that all everything's you know falling apart like how you know don't fall into that trap but just try and be a little bit like have a bit perspective be a bit critical of like you know what are you doing to make things happen because like i said i've had many i've had months years of like questioning what i even did in that period and now you know it's crazy how much can i can do in a week and i think the only difference between me then and now is like being super critical of myself but also like being kind to myself at the same time um so yeah that would be my answer thank you so much peter if people want to find you or work with you how's best to go about that uh linkedin peter wood there you go the place yeah i wouldn't follow my instagram that's not much thank you so much for joining us today