The Brutal Reality Of Building A Business To Sell - James Ashford

0:00The money hits the bank account. Yeah. It's everything that you've been working towards. All your life. Yeah. I achieved everything I thought I'd ever wanted. It's not the payout. It's not the car. It's not the house. It's not the thing that you want. It's the feeling that you think the thing will bring. The figure we came up with was five million pounds. We're not in this to take part. We're in this to take over. So I'm like, I'm just going to take over this space, right? Our competitor did something that meant we were going to lose about 25 % of our customers within weeks. Where's the gift? Where's the gift in this?

0:28they can fuck off i'm not working with you now and they went okay well could we discuss buying you instead then my confidence hit an absolute all-time low and it got to the point where i had a full breakdown i'm from a rough mining village in south yorkshire if someone had told me they had a breakdown you'd say get a grip and get on with it i'm teaching that if you feel sick you grab a bucket and you crack on pull the car over side of the road on my hands and knees in tears I just got an email and that was it. It was like, thanks then. Just leave your laptop on the desk and you're out the door.

1:00These guys, they were trying to figure out what connects successful entrepreneurs together. What is the theme that connects them? They all wake up at 5am. They all have an ice bath first thing. They all super fit and they couldn't find anything. The connecting themes were... Ladies and gentlemen, if you're listening to this episode of We Have a Meeting, thank you so much for listening. But I have some bad news, but don't worry, don't switch us off just yet. Unfortunately, there were some technical errors. Somebody didn't plug one thing into another thing, which means the first 15 minutes of audio from this episode are, as we say in the industry, pretty crappy.

1:35But stick with it because after 15 minutes, it does get so much better. And it's an incredible episode. You do not want to miss it. I really hope you enjoy this one. James, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Thank you for joining us. So we kick off the same way every single time big question who are you and what problem do you solve it's a good question there and i always struggle with that one except he's rather than saying who i am i can't tell people what i've done and that's i don't know if that's the right answer but i am an entrepreneur and what i do now is i invest in businesses and support and help other entrepreneurs to kind of navigate the challenges and the bullshit that's out there to ultimately get towards the goal that they want to do what was the second part of the question who are you what problem do you solve yeah so helping entrepreneurs i think specifically i've just naturally gravitated towards this whether it's the people i've been working with or not but entrepreneurs who have children because i just think that's the like you see all these gurus out there who talk about what is they're doing or grinding or working all these many hours a week they don't have kids just like shut the fuck up You have no right to tell me what to do when you're like, if you're raising kids and Daniel Priest has talked about this and gave me the language to understand this, which is if you've got babies or young children, they're startups as well.

2:55They're like your primary startups. You've got to focus on and make sure you don't mess them up. Right. And then you've got these business startups as well. So if you've got two or three kids and a business, you've got three or four startups that all need your attention all the time. So the businesses that you work with now, typically when they when they come to you or you get involved with them when you look at all the bullshit that they might be kind of feeding into or the problems that they're facing what what is like one that's just unanimous with all of them that they constantly come upon where so i built a software business and the way that came about was i was just solving the same problem for business after business which is very much aligned with what you guys do which is around the sales process So if a business can sell more, if they can empower more people on their team to sell, if they can close the deal faster, if they can shorten that process, if they can package more things up, charge more, sell more, raise the price, etc.

3:52That will solve most of the other problems in their business. If you bring it back to selling is nearly always the number one problem. And it's not always like a technical issue or a strategic issue. It's very often a mindset issue because we all have this baggage around sales. And so I was just solving this problem for business after business. And then eventually found my way into the accounting industry and solved the problem for them. And they thought they had it cracked. They thought they had it figured out. And this was like a firm of 13 staff with one partner. yet he was the only person that could price and sell the services and so I set a goal which is I'm going to help the most junior person the most junior member of this team to be able to price and sell the most complicated client you'll ever get within five minutes of them walking in the door so it's priced you're sold you're signed you produce proposal the engagement layer and you're at a point ready to save payment from them in in under five minutes wow so then take a certain

4:50James Ashford:And so the mindset as the barrier, that junior salesperson maybe having some reluctancy to do that. What are you spotting there and what are the wins? It's not normally the junior person. The junior members of the team will want to do it. It's normally like the business owner because they believe that they're the only person that can actually sell, that they're the only person that has the understanding of how to do it. And they may have a reluctance to sell. They may have the issue around that. you know especially you know i spotted this especially if their names above the door if they name their accountancy firm after themselves it creates a huge problem right because then if they try and sell to their client and the client says no because this is what the ultimate fear is the fear of rejection and so it's not just that they're rejecting your company they're rejecting you personally and all the triggering that that may cause so they have this deep fear of selling and they then project that onto the team but very often when i speak to the team so i say to 18 year old sound do you have an issue with selling to your client it's like no get out of my way i'm doing too much work for them as it is i should be charging more for them so they want to be able to do it so the analogy is is like you go to a restaurant you can walk up to any waiter or waitress and all of them can price and sell you the most complicated meal in that place to a complicated table whatever it is that you want there's no issue there's no emotion in it you're not no one kicks off and says i can't believe you've charged me this much for a bottle of champagne like if you don't want to spend that much you can have a prosecco right it's all there for you and but the way that most businesses work is not like that so accountancy firms typically if you look at the restaurant as an analogy it's like walking into a restaurant and saying have you got a menu and they're like no just like what did you have in the last place you went to well i have a burger and fries okay and they then go and pester the busiest person in the restaurant which is a head chef and say we've got someone out here wants a burger and fries what should we charge them and they're like well what do we charge the last person that came in this sounds absolutely crazy right it's exactly how it works in the county firm right and then they'll come out with the price well because no one's confident in it now i can say well it seems a bit much that can we drop the price or do i need to spend this much and now what happens is you lower the price because you want to win my business okay and maybe in this meeting i'm this initial sales meeting, I'm in control now, so it should have been a 45-minute meeting, but now we should run to an hour 15.

7:17And then six months down the line, you're pissed off with me as a client, and you say, this client doesn't respect what we do, he doesn't value what we do, doesn't appreciate our time and all this stuff. It's like, yeah, you train me how to do that when you have to get turned up, because you dropped your price, which proved to me that you don't value your services, and you gave me all this extra time for free, which proves to me that your time is in value. So I've got this big belief that good clients and bad clients don't exist. They're trained. And so one of the key parts of the sales process is not just to sell your services.

7:50It's to train me to become a good client. And very often when you look at the bad clients that you get, it's because you trained to be bad in the first place.

7:58James Ashford:So you solved that problem for one business and then thought, oh, I wonder if there's other businesses. How did that work? Yeah, so I was working kind of a business consultant at the time. well that's a bit of a bullshit name but that type of thing just like working with businesses that i knew and just solving this problem over and over again and i got into some big businesses that were turning over tens of millions even hundreds of millions i don't know quite how i got into these businesses but i did and so i would go in change some mindset make some cultural shifts implement some technology and a bit of a strategy remove friction from the process because very often friction will build up in a sales process and they don't even know where it's come from it's just that they've got this one client that turned out to be bad so they have this step in the way to make sure they don't get any more bad clients like that and then in doing so they punish every other client that comes on board right so all of a sudden over the years it gets layered up with friction and sometimes i just need someone to come in from the outside and say how would us cut through this i think it helps that i'm a really impatient person right i just want it now.

9:04If I've turned up to have a meeting with you, I don't want you sending me a proposal, close the play on Friday. I want to get the deal done because I'm off to do my next thing. And if you can't close the deal now and you're going to let me go because you're going to send me a proposal later, you've got kids. My kids are 14 and 15 and they're into every afterschool club, athletics, netball, football. If you let me walk out of that meeting and then you think you're going to call me and get this deal up when are you going to ring me when do you think i'm going to answer the phone right i've got all this shit going on so what you'll then do is assume that i'm not interested in signing up with you anymore or you assume you're too expensive i'm too much so you'll ring me up and drop the price or whatever it's got nothing to do that i've got life going on right so i'm really impatient i want things doing now and the other thing is i expect an incredible experience.

9:58The ultimate point of any system in a business, whether it's a sales system, a marketing system, whatever onboarding system, the ultimate level of systemization is to create an incredible experience. I want to be wowed throughout that process as well. So I was going to these businesses as an impatient person wanting an incredible experience and solving the problem for them, just doing it for business after business, met an accountancy firm, did it for them, didn't think anything more of it it was only when another accountancy firm had heard about it that contacted me and said how are they doing what they're doing that I just thought this is it this is what I've been looking for all along and I think up to that point everything that I thought was a business that I was starting wasn't really a business it was a job and most people if they're honest they don't have businesses they have jobs and this was the first time that this other accounting firm said can we have what you've done for them I thought this is it this is the business so let's just go off on like a little tangent before we get back into the story because I'm excited to see where this goes but most people think they have a business but they have a job yes well if I'm listening to this who am I what what does that actually mean so they have a job at best and a charity they're running a charity at worst is the life is the likelihood so for me the definition of a business is a profitable enterprise that runs without you and a lot of businesses run and they're just not profitable and very often it doesn't run without you at all but even to have a business that runs without you is still a very low bar which I'll come on to so a good test of this is could you go away for a month in your business and it runs entirely without you could you leave your phone at home go away for a month and know that everything will run smoothly could you go away for three months and do it Okay.

11:47But even that definition is, for me, isn't strong enough because you actually need a business that not only runs without you, but grows without you. Because if it just runs without you, nothing stays the same. It's either getting better or it's getting worse. So if you expect it to just run without you, it will be getting worse and it'll be declining. So ultimately it can't run without you for long. The true definition for me is, do you have a business that grows without you? Does it solve problems without you? Can it innovate without you? Can it recruit staff without you? Could it get rid of staff without you and do all of these things without you being there?

12:21So that for me is the definition of a business. Now, you may have a role in that business that you fulfill that role. So you have a job in it, but you've elected to have that job. So you may love marketing, right? So I kept all of the marketing in my business for a long time because I just love doing it. okay there was a point when I had to hand it over so I had a business but I had a job within that business but it was a decision very often people will have a job within their business that's not a decision it's because they think they're the only person that can do that thing and they've not figured out how to unpack their brain and to put a system in place because we don't no business should be reliant on any person a business should be reliant on systems and then the people should assistance but very often people think that yeah yeah but no one can do this and it's like yeah we can yeah but it might be multiple people like you might be so good at this one thing that we need three people to replace you but you have to start with a premise that yes other people can take this away from you so you've had this apple in the head moment yeah okay and i'm guessing that a lot of your finances was coming from like the consulting work you're doing so paint a picture where were you just before you were like right okay I'm gonna go all in on this idea finance finance wise or well just as a whole I guess yeah so we were just kind of as most people do live month to month and had enough money coming in to live a nice life couple of holidays and stuff but very very modest life um not from wealthy backgrounds at all my wife or I my wife was a nurse at the time so i was bringing like a few grand a month doing this job um and then had this idea for this tech to start this tech business i've never done a tech business before i don't know how to code or anything like that i can design my only kind of training is in product designs physical products but i know how to do interface design so i designed it up all the the app myself

14:22and I had this idea to do it cheaply. So I just hit on this idea. So the first versions of the app that I developed was actually a plugin for a WordPress website. So kind of had a bit of a pricing tool, a bit of a menu on their website and it worked like that. So I had this site, you know, WordPress websites, right? So there's two versions of a WordPress website. There's a conventional standalone WordPress website. Then there's a WordPress multi-site. and i had this idea that i thought the dna of a wordpress multi-site has the same dna as a software product in that it runs off a central database but it has separate secure installs that runs off that central database and also within wordpress you've got the concept of new users passwords like like the engine was already built so the way i kind of pictured it was like rather than building a software a sas business and going and building the engine and everything from scratch i've like gone to mercedes and said can i just take this car like this engine and everything and also will you maintain it for free forevermore for me as well perfect right i'll start with that and then we built the chassis on top for four grand so that was what it took to get above ground and start making money oh god i'm so tired i've just been talking to

15:36James Ashford:qualified prospects all day without any wait time how have you been doing it because i've been cold calling people on my mobile and I reckon I've spoke to one person. No, no, no. Stop that right now and use Nooks.ai. Why? What does Nooks do? It finds me the right people to call and it calls them and it connects with them over and over and over again. So you're saying it's Nooks.ai and I can just be speaking to qualified decision makers all the time? No other better connection, right? Wow. Nooks.ai. Where does the team come into it then? Because obviously so far it's just you. Yeah, so I approached an external developer that I'd worked with for a few years, and then I was the team.

16:16So I did everything else. So I did the marketing, the videos, the social media posts. I did the sales webinars, the sales calls. I did the onboarding, the client support. I just did everything, right? whilst kind of doing some consulting as well until I got to a point where that was making enough money for me to stop the other job. And that happened quite quickly. So the model I did, again, I mentioned Daniel Preece earlier, but I'd learned this model off him, which is you write a book before you launch the product and you build a waiting list before you launch the product. So I wrote the book, looked in the accounting space, launched a waiting list.

16:59So the book and my social post drove people back to a waiting list whilst the product was being built. So at the time of launch, within a month, I had 100 people signing up. And within 30 days, they were paying, I was up to 10 grand a month quite quickly from that initial launch. And so that was how I got above ground. But it was just me doing it. I got to a point where I could do a video, a social media video, film it, edit it. this is like before AI right so it feels like horse and cart stuff without AI right so I used to be able to film it edit it take the copy from it produce an email in my email nurturing sequence create a blog article on the website and a social media post and have it all live within an hour within 60 minutes from turning the camera on to everything being published and going just being really efficient um and so i i was doing everything to start with and then after like i think it was maybe a couple of months that's when i got my first employee to take all the client support

18:01James Ashford:and onboarding off me wow so you got just you and a developer yeah 100 clients yeah wow it's impressive yeah thank you pleasure it felt like everything i've been doing up to that point i'd like because i've been helping other businesses to solve all these problems of sales and marketing of doing video, of writing books. It was like it'd just been a playground and I'd just been getting ready for this moment. So the moment I saw this as an opportunity, all of my training just kicked in at once and I just went for it. Have you found anything then, that top of funnel piece, I mean, we talk about it a lot, but it feels like a lot of businesses go, I've kind of cracked that bit.

18:41James Ashford:It's keeping them around, like making sure they don't just go in with a competitor or leave us after three months or stop using the software after a certain amount of time? What have you found works in keeping them around? Yeah, sure. So if you look at the three ways to kind of generate revenue, so let's say, so bringing in new customers, selling more to existing customers and then retaining customers for longer. Like if you can hit those three things, you're going to really drive revenue. And what a lot of people do is they prioritize bringing in new customers, especially software businesses.

19:11Our priority was retaining existing customers always. It's always the main thing. If ever I go into a business now, the number one thing is stop the leaking bucket. Stop, you're trying to bring more customers in, but you're losing more customers than you're keeping. So fix the leaking bucket first, then let's start selling more to existing customers. And then let's start bringing new customers in. It just makes perfect sense, right? And so our priority was always the retention of existing customers by delivering, by trying to have the greatest impact we could have on them. in their business by deeply caring, by providing the most incredible levels of service and customer support beyond anything that I've seen in the software space.

19:53Like the whole thing from the moment you signed up with us, I just wanted to wow you. So for example, if you signed up for our, so it was proposal software in the accounting space. So you signed up, what our team would do is they would log into your app straight away. They'd go and grab the logo off your website and put it into the app for you. They'd get your brand colors and put those in. if they could get a testimonial off your website, they'd drop that in as well. Then they'd send you a proposal, ideally within like four hours of you signing up for the app. Then they'd ring you and say, hey, I'm just welcoming you to GoProposal, just making sure everything's cool.

20:28I've sent your first proposal over, like let's get you booked onto the first webinar. Then what we'd do is we'd package up what we called our shock and awe pack. So one of my key roles in the business was head of bullshit wanky names. So shock and awe pack was one of the names we came up with, right? And in that was an onboarding booklet that guided you through the journey of using the app and actually getting to what we call the golden moment. Had a golden ticket for our online community to kind of give a physicality and like a turn what was essentially a Facebook community and make it feel like a real thing with a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory style golden ticket.

21:04And then a signed copy of my book went in there as well. So picture this, you've signed up for an app, you've not put your card details in at all at this moment. but because our cost of acquisition because our marketing was so good our cost of acquisition was so low we just saw this as an extension of that that cost of acquisition we'd go and get your address off your website your office address and within three or four days of you signing up the app this gift this physical gift has turned up in the post like no no other software company was doing that wow so if i was sat with you after you've got to this you've all of this training kicked in you've got to your 10k a month which is as we know from bullshit gurus that is the golden land that's where everyone wants to be 10k a month is the promised land so you're there if I was speaking to that James now and I was saying like how much potential do you think this has what what would what would pass James be telling me yeah that's a really good question I felt it had real potential at that point and one of the things that we did at that point was I wanted to to bring my wife along the journey with us.

22:11So not, she wasn't gonna be involved with the business in any way, but I had a previous business that had failed and it failed because we didn't get the finances right. And we didn't have an aligned journey. So she didn't know why I was up late at night doing things and it caused some huge problems. So with this one, I saw the potential and I wanted to get my wife and I on the same page. So we did a financial planning exercise to figure out how much money we would need for the, if we sold this business for the rest of our lives. and the figure we came up with was five million pounds. So if we could sell this business for five million pounds, that would kind of ease the financial pressure off us for life and allow us to kick on with something else.

22:51So in terms of the potential I thought it had, that was as far as I could see. That was like as far up this mountain as I could look to where the clouds formed. I couldn't see beyond that. And so we kind of made some estimations as to what that could look like financially. and I think it was maybe like a million pound in revenue, in annual recurring revenue. So if we could get to that figure of a million pound annual recurring revenue, that was what we were going for. That's what I believed. No idea I was going to get there, but I did believe we could do it. So then when it comes to scaling and like the next steps, what did you have to bring into your wheelhouse that you weren't already doing to take it to the next level?

23:36Yeah, so one of the big challenges was that we were in the accounting industry and it's, as many industries, it's kind of a closed industry. Like if you're an outsider, like I'm not an accountant, like how on earth can you know what our problems are? So I had to crack the accounting industry and win it. And I love the Conor McGregor phrase, which is, we're not in this to take part, we're in this to take over. So I'm like, I'm just going to take over this space, right? So we had a couple of competitors. There was a company that had a bigger proposal, software company that had 76 million dollars of investment seven years head start there were kind of prominent authors in the space keynote speakers etc and I just thought I'm just going to come through the lot because I'm going to what I'm going to do is I'm going to understand the problem deeper than anyone else can understand it and the way I did that was I got closer to my market closer to the audience than anyone else was going to get so we're based in Manchester and the first accountancy firm that I solved this problem in what I did was I gave him 10 % of the software business in exchange for me getting 10 % of his accountancy firm so now I had an inside track into an accountancy firm it also meant I could stand on stage and say as the director of an accountancy what we do in our firm is this right I just had it for like a week but then what I did and this was just an accident but it worked so well was I didn't have any office space so I said to him have you got any office space i just need like a desk in the corner so i set up jack who was my first employee in the corner of the accountancy firm and again i think this was completely unique to us but just worked so well in that the the software company that served the accounting industry was born in an accountancy firm but it meant that when he was going for a coffee or having lunch whatever he was around accountants he was around the people that he was serving and so was i and so if we ever got a question about some bookkeeping thing that we didn't know the answer of we could just go reach across the desk and get the answer so it immersed us in in our market and then from there i just forged great relationships with the accountants and i would ring them every single day for the five years that we were growing to the point we sold i would ring an accountant every day for no reason not to sell them anything just an existing customer because they'd done a post in our community or because they'd like something or achieve something i'd just ring him see how they're getting on and through that and through my understanding of psychology and i say when i say psychology i mean like really basic psychology right but just understanding how humans work doesn't matter what industry is doesn't matter whether i'm outside of the accounting industry or not the human beings with hopes and dreams and fears fear of rejection and fear of all this shit that we're all dealing with right and so i just cut through all the crap and got to the the essence of what human beings are effectively and i think i was i was able to this is one of the big things if i can explain your problem to you better than you understand it yourself you now have to conclude that i know your solution better than you as well because you're like i never i never even thought about it like that i never even realized that that was the problem i was causing so like what i was on about earlier saying that all these clients that you've got, you're pissed off with because they don't value you, they don't value your time, they don't pay you enough.

27:01You've created that. You know you've created that. I'm like, never realized that before. And like, one of the big things was discounting. Everyone discounts, okay? Like if I've, let's say you're about to sign me up, maybe I'm a big client, okay, and it's going to be 550 quid a month for your accountancy firm. And I say, if you can do it for 495, I'll sign up. and you think, yeah, do you know what? I'll do you a favor. I'll sign you up. You cause so many problems by discounting because what happens is that client is happy that you've given them a discount. So they walk out of the office and they think, brilliant, I've got a discount.

27:39I'm buzzing, right? Great, really happy with this. They get to the car and they think, could I have got it for 450? And then by the time they go home, they think, if it was only worth 495, why didn't they charge them that in the first place? Why are they trying to rip me off? So now all trust has been broken. I'm pissed off with you deep down because you've done this, but you don't realize what you've done. Let's say you're an accounting firm and you, I'm going to probably get a math wrong here. You make 20 % profit. So on 550 pound a month client, you're making 110 pound profit. Well, you've just discounted me by 55 pounds.

28:17You've just halved your profit. it so you now need twice as many clients double the number of clients to make the same amount of money and i ate you in the first place i don't trust you so you've just created the worst scenario and this seems like basic stuff but no one was talking into this no one was explaining this to the accountants so i went on social media and explained this problem to them i went on stage and explained it we produced video content and so within a short space of time we were producing more videos than all of the other software providers combined. I was the highest, like the most, what's the number one influencer for a software vendor on LinkedIn.

29:00And I was the top rated speaker at every event that I spoke at. And that was all very intentional because I just spoke into a problem that no one else was talking into.

29:12James Ashford:Wow. So, so far, right, if I've got this as a script, I'm Steven Spielberg, I'm going, there's no friction here. I wasn't going to believe this. It's just all plain sailing. There's got to be bits along the way that we're, oh, shit, are we going to keep the lights on or those sort of moments that add to the story. What would you say those moments are? Yeah, constantly. So I live with a healthy amount of paranoia constantly, right? And I think most good entrepreneurs do. You're always thinking, where does this shit go wrong? Yeah. So I'm always kind of scanning the horizon for what difficulties we could encounter.

29:48just on a very practical level, just trying to grow the revenue monthly, we hit some sticking points. And I just remember certain numbers. I remember 18 grand was just a sticking point. We just couldn't get past 18 grand a month. Well, I would hit it and then just drop back, hit it. I was like, what the fuck? What is going on here, right? 53 grand was another amount that we just couldn't, just hit these sticking points. And I learned from a friend of mine, when this happens and we hit these sticking points in our business, we often think, what do I need to do? and it's not the right question. The right question is who do I now need to be?

30:22So if we can be this person, then we can do this thing and we can have the thing that we want. So the thing I want to have is to move beyond 18 grand. So therefore I need to do something different, but it starts with who do I need to be in this moment? What do I need to let go of? What understanding do I need to gain that I currently don't have right now or whatever it may be? and so when I started to learn to ask that question we started to move through these these challenges more more quickly um there are a couple of real sticky moments along the way like things that I think the big things were things that blindsided me that I just want like you plan for all this shit that can go wrong and then just something comes to smash you on the side of the head because we all have blind spots right and we I had a great a mentor in the business a non-exec who was fantastic in the board meetings with us that would really hold me to account with these blind spots.

31:17So I had a really good team around me. I had a fantastic financial team, not in the business, but we outsourced the entire finance function to the accountancy firm and invested heavily into it. People tend not to invest enough into the finance function. One of the things I learned is that you should be investing between 2 % and 4 % of your revenue into the finance function of your business, whether that's through people you employ direct or through an external team so that you've got full visibility, you know, all of your bookkeeping is reconciled on a weekly basis. You've got all the information that you need to be able to make informed decisions.

31:52So because I've had things to go wrong in the past, I think we got a lot of the things right. But a couple of things that went wrong, not wrong but could have really gone badly, was when people signed up for the app in the first instance, we gave them the difficulty that i saw in our competitors was you've got to build out your price list of services so you get this app that does it all but now stage one right what are your services that you've got and what do you want to charge for it i'm like i don't fucking know like this has been the issue they've had all along so what we gave them was the the list of services and prices from our accountancy firm that we were using and said well there you go that's a starting point go and figure it out from there so we did that for the first few months and then someone said how do you get around price fixing and um kind of monopoly emerges like this you monopolize in an industry you can't do that i'm like fuck can't you shit so looked into that and became really panicked that you can't be seen to be fit i didn't know that's what we were doing i just thought i was saying use this as a starting point and then so what we did was our response to that was I came up with a system that when we went into an accountancy firm I said right you are profitable you're just not consistently profitable so you do have a client that you're charging properly for and that's all really good and what I also concluded was there were three services that all the prices were based off which is bookkeeping that returns and I think it was annual accounts so if i knew what you charge that profitable client for those three services oh payroll was the one sorry book role bookkeeping payroll and annual accounts if i had those three services using this algorithm i developed i could figure out what all of your other services should be charged at that was completely unique to you so we developed this wizard so it changed our our marketing message it gave us an additional message to go with which is this idea that you are profitable you're just not consistently profitable which is really valuable and we developed this system that you went in you gave us your own prices from your business and within a minute it built you out this full pricing matrix so i've always had this question which is whenever something goes wrong or seemingly goes wrong it's to ask the question where is the gift there's always a gift in it even if you don't realize it and it's to look for that gift so another big thing that happened was um i don't it's just boring to get into the i'm not like i'm avoiding it but it's just a quite a boring subject but our competitor did something that meant we were going to lose about 25 of our customers within weeks and also it closed off 25 of our market moving forward and that was just going to be move one the next move it would cut it in half because of this alliance they had with a governing body.

34:48That was it. So I'm going to have to get into the book. I'll try and keep this not as boring as possible. When an accounting firm produces a proposal, they also have to produce an engagement letter and they get their engagement letter from their governing body. So there are various governing bodies out there. Our competitor did a deal with the number one governing body that meant that you had to use their product if you wanted their engagement letter. So it just cut us out. and it was just it was tuesday afternoon i've just got an email and a text off a client said have you seen what they've done what no what's this and i read it and i thought fuck that is so good such a good move uh and i wasn't sure if it was even legal to to have been done and it's so easy to then got caught up in that you could have i could have expelled so much energy like pursuing them or wasting cash or whatever and they'd have beat me because they had deeper pockets than me and people don't talk about this in business enough which is preservation of energy they talk about money a lot and they'll talk about time management but people don't talk about energy and so much energy can get can be lost one of the big ones is like if you've got a bad member of staff like you will just burn through so much energy around that member of staff everyone you talk to you'll you'll expel more and more energy with that you know and so i didn't expel any energy in that direction and after a couple of hours of calming down i just said to myself where's the gift where's the gift in this and i started to smile and said there's got to be a gift in this there has to be a gift so i started asking questions and the conclusion i got to was why do accountants need to go to their governing body to get an engagement letter who who wrote the engagement letters for the governing body like what they must come from somewhere and why can't we create our own and i just did this research and i found the person one person that had written all the engagement letters for all the governing bodies and it was through coven i contacted and i said have you written these and getting should yeah i said could you write them for us and should yeah on one condition you maintain that the health of them and you're developing them on a regular basis because we did this for these governing bodies years ago and they've never updated them since.

37:05So I'll only do it for you if you update them and invest in them on a monthly basis. I'm like, yeah, game on, let's go. So within three months of that issue happening, we developed our own engagement letter. I come up with a name for the product, which was called Oversuite. So I developed this whole new range of products, which was for our own engagement letter, ran a webinar, launched it. And within a month of launching that, I had that at 10 grand a month, beginning 10k a month as well so it launched a whole new product when we came to sell the business the revenue was stronger because of it we had a separate product that could potentially be as strong as the first one in its own rights the valuation of the business increased as well but all from asking that question of where is the gift could you then give us the

37:51James Ashford:the reality there of so you've developed that product and you've come to is it time to sell or is it more someone knocked on the door and said, you've done an amazing job here with that, let's grab that off you? How does the actual selling work? So we developed a lot of strong partnerships early on in the business. In fact, if I just wind it right back to when we first started the business, it was always built to sell. There's a great book by John Warrelo called Built to Sell. And it's the idea of building a business to sell very intentionally from day one. So I was building this business to sell.

38:23Every employee I got, I told them on day one, you are joining a business that will be sold you'll be looked after and on the way and you'll have a place in the business that acquires us but you understand then you're on this journey with us before we got any so the company was called go proposal and i kind of concluded that one of the companies that could buy us would either be zero sage quickbooks or receipt bank could be one of those they were the biggest players in the space so before we'd even got our first customer i got my logo and i wrote underneath a sage company a zero company a quickbooks company i printed it out and pinned it up as like to this idea of manifesting the future that you want people get confused in manifesting they think that manifesting is having a wish and sitting there and hum and getting there the definition of manifesting means to grab something firmly in the hands and to go after it so although i had this vision we then pursued it and one of the things we pursued was developing strong relationships with all of those companies.