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

The money hits the bank account. Yeah, it's everything that you've been working towards. All you're like, "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 £5 million. 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? They 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. And from a rough mining village in South Yorkshire, if someone told me that I 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 book here and you crack on. Pull the car over, side of the road, on my hands and knees, in tears. And I just got an email and that was it, it was like, "Thanks then, just leave you up to the desk." And you're out there all. These guys, and we're 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. But 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? There's a good question there, and I always struggle with that one. So he's rather than saying who I am, I can't tell people what I've done. That's sort of done if that's the right answer. But I'm an entrepreneur, and what I do now is I invest in businesses and support and help other entrepreneurs to can 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 was, 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 doing, or grinding it, or working all these many hours a week. They're not kids, just like, "Shit, the fuck up, you have no right to tell me what to do." When you're raising kids, and Daniel Priestess talked about this, and gave me the language to understand this, which is if you've got babies or young children, their startups as well, they are 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, hand 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 come to you or you get involved with them, when you look at all the bullshit that they might be feeding you into, or the problems that they're facing, what is one that's just unanimous with all of them that they can't really come up on? Where, so I built a software business, and the way that came about was that 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 fast with, they can shorten that process, if they can package more things up, charge more sell more, raise the price, etc. That will solve most of the other problems in that business. If you bring it back to, that set selling is nearly always a 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'll have this baggage around sales. And so I was just solving this problem for business after business, and then eventually, family went to the accounting industry and solved the problem for them. And they thought they had a crack, they thought they had to figure it 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 a more clear the deal. So it's priced, you sold, you signed, you produced the proposal, the engagement letter, and you're at a point in red to say payment from them. In under five minutes. Wow. So then take a second. So the mindset as the barrier, that junior sales person, maybe having some reluctancy to do that. But 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 going to be a person, how do you understand it, how to do it. And so, and they may have reluctance to sell. They may have the issue around that, you know, especially, you know, spot on this, especially if they're names of all the door, if they'd 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, 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 Sam, do you have an issue with a sell-in-git 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 of them. So they want to be able to do it. So the analogy is, it's 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 issues, no emotion in it. You know, and kicks off and says, "Can't believe you'd charge me this much for a bottle of champagne." If you don't understand that much, you can have a Prosecco, right? It's all there for you. But the way that most businesses work is not like that. So a countancy firms typically, if you look at the restaurant as an analogy, it's like, walk into a restaurant and say, "Have you got a menu?" They're like, "No, just like. " "What did you have in the last place you went to?" Well, I have burger and fries. Okay, and they then go and test the busiest person in the restaurant. She's a head chef and say, "We've got someone out here who wants a burger and fries." "What should we charge?" 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 a counting firm, right? And then they'll come out with a price. Well, because no one's confident in it, now I can say, "Well, it seems a bit much like coming to drop the price." Or, "Don't 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, this initial sales meeting, I'm in control now, so it should be in a 45-minute meeting, but now it's room to an hour, 15. And 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, "we just value what we do, "just appreciate our time and all this stuff." And it's like, "Yeah, you trained me how to do that." Well, you have to turn it up, because you drop your price, we've proved to me that you don't value your services, and you gave me all the sets of 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, it's to train me to become a good client, and very often when you look at the bad client yet, because you trained to be bad in the first place. So you solve that problem for one business, and then they'll, oh, I wouldn't be able to do other businesses. How did that happen? It worked. Yeah, so I was working at the business consultant at the time, lots of that bullshit name, but that's had to think. 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 a business, but I did. And so I'll go in, change some mindset, make some cultural shifts, implement some technology in 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's turned out to be bad, so they have this step in the way to make sure that they don't get any more bad clients like that. And then in doing so, they punish every other client that comes on board. So all of a sudden over the years, it gets layered up with friction, and sometimes it just needs someone to come in from the outside and say, how would it just cut through this? I think it helps that I'm a really impatient person, right? I just want it now. Like if I've turned up to have a meeting with you, I don't want you sending me a proposal, close a play on Friday. I want to get the deal done, 'cause I'm off to do my next thing, right? And if you can't close the deal now, and you're gonna let me go, because you're gonna send me a proposal later. I've got, if you've got kids, my kids are 14 and 15, and they enter every after school club, the athletics, netball, football, like if you let me walk out of that meeting, and then you think you're gonna call me and get this deal, like when are you gonna ring me? When do you think I'm gonna answer the phone? 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 to expend and you too much. So you'll ring me up and drop the prize, or whatever. It's got nothing to do with that. It's 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. The ultimate point of the day, of any system in a business, but it's a sales system, a marketing system, whatever I'm bored in system, the ultimate level of systemization is to create an incredible experience. I only wild 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 about another accountancy firm who 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 along. And I think up to that point, everything that I thought was a business that 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 accountancy 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 onto 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. If I'm listening to this, who am I? What does that actually mean? So they have a job at best and a charity that we're in a charity at worst, 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, it's still a very low bar shop where I come onto. 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 kind of run smoothly? Could you go away for three months and do it? Okay? But even that definition is, for me, isn't strong enough because you actually need a business to not only run without you, but grows without you. If it just runs without you, nothing stays the same. See, they're getting better, it's getting worse. So if you expect that you 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 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? So that, for me, is the definition of a business. Now, you may have a role in that business, 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 the marketing in my business for a long time because I just loved doing it, okay? There was a point when I had to hand it over, so I had a business, I had a job within that business, but it was a decision. Very often, people will have a job within their business, it'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 relied on any person, a business should be relied on systems, and then the people should rule the systems. But very often, people think that, yeah, no one can do this, and it's like, yeah, we can. Yeah, right. It might be multiple people, but 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't take this away from you. So you've had this app on the head moment, okay? And I'm guessing that a lot of your finances was coming from 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, a couple of holidays and stuff, but very modest life. Not from wealthy backgrounds or my wife or I, my wife was a nurse at the time, so I was bringing like a few grand a month through in this job. 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, I'm only kind of training these in product designs, physical products, but I know I have to do interface design, so I designed it all the app myself. And I had this idea to do it cheaply. So I just held this idea. So the first versions of the app that I developed was actually a plug-in for 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, WordPress website, so there's two versions of a WordPress website. There's a conventional standalone WordPress website, and 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, password, like the engine was already built. So the way I kind of pictured it was like, rather than building a software, a SaaS business, and going and building the engine and everything from scratch, I've gone to Mercedes and said, can I just take this cart, there's like this engine and everything? And also, will you maintain it for free forever more for me? It's got perfect, right? I'll start with that, and then we built the chassis on top for foreground. 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 qualified prospects all day without any wait time. How have you been doing it? 'Cause I've been co-calling people on my mobile, and I reckon I've spoke to one person. - Oh no, no, no. Stop that right now and use nux.ai. - Wow, what does nux 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 nux.ai and I can just be speaking to qualified decision makers all the time. - Know the better connection, right? - Wow, nux.ai. - Where does the team come into it? And 'cause obviously it's 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. So 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 doing some consulting as well until I got to a point where that was making enough money and to me to stop the other job. And that happened quite quickly. So the model I did, again, I mentioned down your price earlier but I'd learned this model of 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, look in the accounting space, launched a waiting list to the book and my social post drove people back to a waiting list whilst the product was being built at the time of launch within a month, had a hundred people signing up and within 30 days, they were paying up, like I was up to 10 ground a month quite quickly from that initial launch. And so that was how I got a book, 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 with that AI, right? So you should 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. And so I was doing everything to start with and then after like, I think it'd be a couple of months, that's when I got my first employee to take all the client support and onboarding off me. - Wow. So you got just you and a developer. - Yeah, 100 clients. - Yeah. - Wow, it's impressive. - Yeah, thank you. - It felt like everything I've been doing up to that point and like, because I've been helping other businesses to solve all these problems of sales, of 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 through it. - Have you found anything then that top of an all piece? I mean, we talk about it a lot, but it feels like a lot of businesses go, I've kind of cracked that piece, 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. Like 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 gonna really drive revenue. And what a lot of people do is they prioritize bringing in new customers, especially software businesses, our priority was retaining existing customers always. It was always the main thing. If ever I go into a business now, the number one thing is stop the leaking bucket, stop you 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. Like 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, but going grab the logo off your website and put it into the app for you, they'd get your brand colours and put those in, if they could get a testimony 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 go proposal, just making sure everything's cool. I've sent you first proposal over, let's get you booked onto the first webinar." Then what we'd do is we'd package up what we'd called our "shock and all pack." So one of my key roles in the business was head of Bullshit Wanky Names, so "shock and all 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. At a golden ticket for our online community, to give a physicality and turn what was essentially a Facebook community, make it feel like a real thing with a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory style golden ticket, and then a signed copy of my book went in there as well. So, Pitch of this, you've signed up for an app, you've not put your car details in at all at this moment, but because our cost of acquisition, not because our marketing was so good, our cost of acquisition was so low, we just saw this as an extension of 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, this turned up in the post, like no, no, all the software community was doing that. Wow. So if I was sat with you, after you've got to this, you've all of this training's 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 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 that I wanted to bring my wife along the journey with us, so not, she wasn't going to be involved with the business anyway, but I had a previous business that 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 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 had the same page, so we did a financial planning exercise to figure out how much money we would need for the rep, if we sold this business for the rest of our lives, and with the figure we came up with, there's £5 million. So if we could sell this business for £5 million, that would kind of ease the financial pressure, offers for life, and allow us to kick on with something else. So in terms of the potential I thought it had, that was as far as I could see, that was like as far this mountain as I could look to where the clouds form, 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? Yes, 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 economy, Gregor 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, et cetera, and I just thought I'm just going to come through a 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 basically 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 firm, 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 account industry was born in an accountancy firm. But it meant that when he was going for a coffee or having lunch or whatever, he was around the accountancy, 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 across the desk and get the answer. So it immersed us 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 saw, I would ring an accountancy 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 them 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 accountancy 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 cooked through all the crap and got to 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, you've created that, you do 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 account if you 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 your favor, I'll sign you up, you cause so many problems by discounting because what happens is that client think it's happy that you've given me discount. So they walk out the office and I think, brilliant, I got this account, I'm bulls it right, great, really happy with this. To get to the car and they think, could I got it for 450? And then by the time I go and they think, if it was only worth 495, why didn't they charge me 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 on a county firm and you, I'm going to get probably a mastering here, you make 20% profit. So on £550 a month client, you're making a £110 profit. Well, you've just discounted me by £55, you've just halved your profit. So you now need twice as many clients, double the number of clients to make the same amount of money. And I hate you in the first place. I don't just do. 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, is it for a software vendor on LinkedIn. And 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. 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 was going to believe this, like it's just all playing sailing. Well, there's got to be bits along the way that were, 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. And so I like to live with a healthy, a healthy amount of paranoia constantly, right? And I think most good entrepreneurs do. You're always thinking, where does this shit go? So I'm always kind of scanning the horizon for what could, what difficulties we could encounter. Just 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, which is just a sticking, but we just couldn't get past 18 grand a month. And then just drop back, hit it, and get back and just, I'm like, what is going on here? 53 grand was another amount that we just couldn't just hit these sticking points. And I learned from a friend of mine when these 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? So 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 challenges more quickly. There are a couple of real sticky moments along the way, like things that, I think the big things that blindsided me, that I just want, like, you plan through all this shit that can go wrong and then just something comes from side to side of the head. Because we're on our blind spots, right? And I had a great mentor in the business and non-exec who was fantastic in the board meeting with us that would really hold me to account with these blind spots. So I had a really good team around me, had a fantastic financial team, not in the business, but we outsourced the entire finance function to the account and see 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, 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. So because I've had things to go wrong in the past, I think we've 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 I saw in our competitors was, you've got to build like your priceless 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, oh, fuck you now. Like this has been the issue of the battle along. So what we gave them was the list of services and prices from our account, and see if we were using them, and said, well, there you go, that's the starting point, go and figure it out from there. So we did that for the first few months. And then someone said, how did you get around price fixing? And kind of monopoly and merges, like, you monopolize an industry, you can't do that. Like, fuck, can't you? Shit. So looked into that and became really panicked that you can't be seen to be fit out. I didn't know that's what we were doing. I just thought I was saying, uses the 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 account, and see for them, 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 of the prices were based off, which is bookkeeping, that returns, and I think it was annual accounts. So if I knew what you charged that profitable client for those three services, oh, payroll was the one, sorry. Bookroll, bookkeeping, payroll, and annual accounts. If I had those three services, using this algorithm, I'd develop, 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 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 was 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 price in 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 realise it, and it's to look for that gift. So another big thing that happened was, I don't, it's just boring to get into the, I'm not like I'm avoiding it, but it's just a book quite a boring subject, but I'll competitor to this 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 a move one. The next move it would put it in half because of this alliance they had with this, with a governing body, that was it. So I'm not getting to the book, I'll try and keep this not as boring. When an account for producers, 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 caught us out. And it was just, it was Tuesday afternoon, I've just got an email, then a text off a client said, "Have you seen what they've done?" Right, no, what's this? And I read it and I start, "Fuck, that is so good, "such a good move." And I wasn't sure if it was even legal to have been done. And it's so easy to have 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 beat me because they're 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? I just started to smile and just 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 caught too, is why do accountants need to go to their governing body to get an engagement layer? Who wrote the engagement layers for the governing body? Like, 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 layers for all the governing bodies. And it was through COVID and I contacted them, and I said, have you written these and getting, should you? I said, could you write them for us? In should you, on one condition, you maintain the health of them and you develop them on a regular basis because we did this for these governing bodies years ago. And they've never updated them since. So I'll only do it for you. If you update them and invest in them on a monthly basis, might, yeah, game on, let's go. So within three months of that issue, hat them, we developed our own engagement letter. I come with a name for the product, which was called OverSuite, so I developed this whole new range of products, which was, through our own engagement layer, ran a webinar, launched it, and within a month of launching that, I had that at 10 grand a month, bringing 10 came up as well. So it launched a whole new product. And when we came to sell the business, the revenue was stronger because of it. We had a separate product that could potentially be 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 reality there of, so you've developed that product, and you've come to, is it time to sell, or is it more, so one knocked on the door and said, "You've done an amazing job here without, let's grab that." How does that actually selling work? So we developed a lot of strong partnerships early on in the business. In fact, if I just write it right back to when we first started the business, it was always built to sell. It was a great book by John Rarillo 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. Every employee I got, I told them on day one, you are joining a business that will be sold. You'll be looked after them on the way, and you'll have a place in the business that acquires us, but you understand that 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. It would 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. I just 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 humbling again. 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. So I spoke at all of their events, because we had a real proximity to our market. I went and gave fireside chats to their sales teams and helped their sales teams to understand how to better sell. And I just went and met their leaders. And if my team were struggling with anything, I would encourage them to go and reach out to their equivalent in these far bigger companies to learn from them. And they were very kind and shared their learnings with us. So over the years, we've forged very close strong relationships with all of our potential acquirers, which was half strategic and half look looking back on it. Right? And then we were doing it, it wasn't one of these companies as another company, but we were doing a deal with them where they were going to pass us a load of leads and the new our profit margin was when they came back with a deal structure, they said they were going to create this win-win situation for us. They were a huge huge company and they came back and presented how they were going to pass the lead to us and what percentage of the sale they wanted for life. And like, that's not a win-win. That's a massive win for you and we're going to lose money with this deal. I'm not doing that. And then yeah, okay, well, it's just a starting point. Let's negotiate. I went, "No, you can fuck off. I'm not working with you now because we entered this discussion to create a win-win and you've just, like, you've ruined it." So no, I'm not prepared to discuss it with you at all. And they went, "Okay, well, could we discuss buying you instead then?" I'm like, "Yeah." We could have that conversation, but it was just standing up for what I believed was right and then we started that conversation with them. And then they threw me because they then said, "I remember this question. It's a naughty question by them." He said, "And what's your want for the business then?" I'm like, "I don't know." And he went, "And what would your wife accept for it?" Fuck, that is the question. That is the real question. So I knew what the figure was in my wife would want me to accept this business, like at anouth short. And then we started a conversation with them. One of the key things that had happened at that point, we'd got over a million pound in revenue. And I think the moment, especially a software business, or any business really, gets over a million pound in revenue, you are serious at this point. You've had to jump through hoops, you have to have things in place, there have to be systems and processes. You're branding us to be right, you're marketing us to be right, you sales us to be right, you have to have a good team in order to achieve that amount. So we were considered to be serious at that point. And then, whether by look or by judgment, within a month of that conversation, two of the companies approached us and started having conversations about potentially biners. And this was on the run up to Christmas. So we were starting to have conversations, the numbers that were getting banded about were more than our goal of what we wanted to exit for. So I'm like, here we go, we're in the ballpark, and they all fizzle to nothing. So I entered Christmas on this, like the start of December on this high, and then hit Christmas with all the conversations ended. I mean, I hope I can ask a follow-up question. It's the new year. What's happening? I'm on the edge of my seat, it's, so don't leave us hanging. So another business in our space that was of a similar size to us had been acquired. And I kind of got wind as to what roughly an amount that might have been acquired for. So I found out who the M&A company was that they'd used to go through to sell that business. And I just thought, maybe we are at the point to sell. One of the other things that was like, you think you've got bachelor question earlier, you think you've got everything right, you think you've figured it out, you think there's nothing else going to blindside you, but you don't know, you just don't know what could happen, right? There could be some technological advancement, you could have had a legal issue, you could lose staff, whatever, you could be hacked. Like there's so many unknowns in business, it's a constant panic. So my paranoia was maybe increasing. My team were asking me questions. We're up to that point, they're like, what should we do about this? And I'm like, what we should do is, what we should do is this. They were starting to ask me questions and I didn't know the answers anymore. I'm like, we're going to have to go and ask someone else, because I've winged it long enough. I don't know what the answer is anymore. Let's go and find someone else. So I was starting to get a little bit more uncertain with what we were doing. And I've seen this other company sell. It was for a good amount. And I just thought, you know what, maybe now is the right time. We were still really excited about what we're doing. I had a great team, I had a big roadmap of things we were doing. Still really passionate about it and the team were as well. I thought the analogy I had is, maybe we just need to put our best suit on and go and ask the girl to the prom. Like, let's go and find the girls we could take to the prom. Let's get dressed up and let's go and ask them. And if it does, if it fizzles to nothing as well, not a problem. We'll have learned something from the process. And we'll just dig back in and try again in a couple of years time. So when did this M&A company and said, do you think you could achieve something similar for us as you have done for the other company? And they said, yeah, we think we can. So we then engage those and then they take you on a journey. So for the first three or four months, you're just paying them money to kind of knock your business into shape. And what they do is they look at your business through the lens of an acquireer and all the questions that maybe asked of your business. And they just ensure that everything or the accounts are impeccable, your tax situation, every board meeting you've ever done, like absolutely everything they go through. And we were already in good shape, but we're in good shape for our business. What they're preparing you for is for PLC to buy you. And PLC is scrutinized to a far higher level. So they're preparing you to withstand that level of scrutiny. And that's what we did. And then they took us to market. We made a list of all the acquires. We thought would be interested in biners. They approached them, six of them wanted a management presentation. So you go and sit in front of their board and you make a presentation to them. And then two of them gave us an offer off the back of that. Wow. So then we've sat with a few entrepreneurs that have sold businesses. And it's all mixed. It's been mixed with reviews in terms of the feeling. So take us, I imagine the selling process from there is lots of hoops to jump through and bits like that. You get to a point where the business is actually sold. Yes. Yeah. It's everything that you've been working towards. All you like. Yeah, I'm imagining it's more or the same amount as the money that you agreed that you wanted with your wife. Significantly more. What's the feeling? How does James feel in that situation? Absolutely no different. And this was a big problem for me. Because we told that we should be working towards these things that we should achieve wealth or we should have time. But whatever we're working towards. And so I achieved everything I thought I'd ever wanted. And then and what I understood what I've been on a big journey since then is that it's not actually the thing that you want. It's not the payout. It's not the time. It's not the car. It's not the house. It's the feeling that you think the thing will bring. And so I got the thing. Thought I would feel different. Well, could be the next day. It felt exactly the same. Right. Not like what was the point, but what was the feeling that I thought that I thought needed to change? Like what is what is this I was looking for? Johnny Wilkinson talks about it in one of his podcasts where he like a played football. We'll be with his brother all his life. And imagine kicking the the World Cup winning goal. Playing with his brother in the park. And then got to that moment. Kick the winning World Cup goal. Thought it'd feel different. World Cup the next day. It felt exactly the same and crashed. And sports people talk about this a lot. I just want to explain to me as well through a boxing lens where I can't which boxer it was. But they had a crash. And it was because all the life had trained to become the World Champion. They'd never trained to be the World Champion. And so you go through a change. You achieve this great thing. This amount of cash. Freedom. Whatever it is. However you interpret that. But with that also comes loss. And I didn't acknowledge what the loss was at the time. It took me a while to understand that there was loss that came with it. You've lost your purpose. You've lost a team. You've lost people that look up to you and ring you and ask you for help and support. You've lost your community. You've lost your audience. I'm a creative person. You've lost your ability to create, to build things. Whether it's a business or systems or processes or videos. So you've lost all of these things. You've gained this huge thing that's way beyond anything in my family or my close friendship group has ever achieved. So therefore I have no right to complain as either. I can't win about it. So I felt very isolated and I'm very alone. You go from being making money to now managing money. So I got to be very proficient at making money. And now I'm an absolute amateur at managing money. And the analogy I came to understand was that before I was an apple tree, caked with deep roots, strong foundations, capable of producing apples. Now I had apples and I was shit scared of losing them. I had them stolen, some getting rotten. And I had no idea what the fuck to do with them. So I'd gone through this. Which was a squeaky chair, by the way. So I just had to redo that. And then the other thing is you then move into a corporate world. At the same time. So now I had an earn out period in a large PLC. And the difference between entrepreneurship and a large corporate is that in entrepreneurship you're playing to win. In a corporate environment you're playing not to lose. So very sort of different. And it's not a criticism. They have shareholders, they have audits. I understand what you know they have more to lose. A multi billion pound company. But it was not my mindset. And also you know in an environment where you've got all this bureaucracy before you could just, I could, we private ourselves on how fast we could move. We would go to an event, do a wrap up video for a large zero, or whatever. And if the event finished at 5pm, my video was posted at 6pm. Because that was the peak of relevancy of that event. So people don't talk about speed enough in business. But speed has real value. value. So we became great at moving fast. Fast in a corporate environment does not happen. Because now I got when I published my first book, I wrote it within two weeks, started writing it, finishing it and publishing it in two weeks. I had another book I said I would publish and write when I wanted to got acquired. You can't do that in two weeks when it's got to go to a legal team and HR team and the other thing as well is like this policies, the fuck a policies, right? I used to post the fun social media or everyday, I would post everyday on social media and largely it would land right. If I got it wrong, someone would ring me up on my team and say James, you sound like a prick in that video, take it down and redo it. Thank you. And you'd go and take the hit and you'd make the adjustment and change it. Now you're in a corporate environment and that's not the case. You get reported to someone and someone has to have a meeting with you and you have to read a policy and sign something. So there's so many changes that you go through, from playing to win, to playing not to lose, to be an apple tree, to have an apples, to be where you can move quick, to where you've got to move slow. And so I found it really difficult and my confidence got knocked. You'd think that you have an achieved the thing that very few people achieve, that your confidence would go through the roof, my confidence hit an absolute all time low and it got to the point where I had a full breakdown. And I just don't say this like, I'm not saying this lightly, I'm from a rough mining village in South Yorkshire where if someone says, if someone told me that I had a breakdown, you'd say, get a grip and get on with it. We don't have a medicine cupboard in our house. We just serve our kids a cup of shut the hell up and get on with it, right? I want my son school phone up and said, Leo's feeling sick, can you come and get him? I went to school and I said, this had your honest to bring him out. I said, I don't know, I go in and see him. He was like eight at the time. I said, you're right, buddy. He said, yeah, I just feel sick, Dad. He said, cool, wait there. So I went and rummaged around and I found a book here and I gave it to him. I said, get back into the class pile. I'll put you up at home time. And the receptionist said, you're not taking him out. I said, no, no, I'm not teaching my son that if you feel sick, you grow home. I'm teaching that if you feel sick, you grab a book here and you crack on. I see him at 3.30. And that was it. So I just wanted to understand the robustness of my upbringing and I had a full-on breakdown, pull the car over side of the road, on my hands and knees, in tears, thought everything must come into an end with my wife next to me, consoling me. And I don't think this is just likely for entrepreneurs. I think it's inevitable that an entrepreneur has to go through this. The term breakdown, especially I think for a man, especially a northern man, is something that we would say we should resist. But really, if you're having a breakdown, you have to go through it. You have to fully break down because the version of you that was in the first half of your life is now going to be different to the second half of life. So you have to go through that full breakdown process, which I did while I was in half time. And I then rallied some great people around me, a therapist in the first instance, and then two mentors in the second instance. And they, the first person pulled me out of the hole. She grabbed the hole to start with and I knew she had me. She pulled me out of the hole. And then the other people helped to kind of a wreck scaffolding around me. So I wouldn't blow over again or fall down. And then it's taken me kind of a year or so to kind of, it took me about a year to rebuild up and to understand what I was going through and then to prepare for the second half of life. So looking back on that to use your question, but where was the gift? It was all a gift now. I wouldn't have wanted it to be to be any other way. I think one of the gifts I've got is I believe I can help other people on this journey. So if I ever see now, someone on socials post just saw my business. The first thing I will do is I will message them privately and I'll say congratulations. I just want you to know I'm here. If you need someone to talk to any part of the show, I'm sure it's going to be okay. I'm sure everything's going to be great and all your dreams are going to come true. But if you ever hit a low moment, I want you to know that someone outside of your circle that has got nothing, nothing to gain from this. I want you to know there's a person here that if you want to go for a walk, you want to have a chat, you want to offload, we can go through it. And I just don't think that gets talked about enough. And again, I don't think people think you have the right to be in that position either. Yet you've created all this value in the world. Go propose, I've got chat GP chat GPT to figure this out for me using the most conservative estimates possible. And I think our product in the over the seven year period to where I'd left the business, a generate over a hundred million pounds of additional revenue for the account and industry. So not only did the account and industry make a hundred million pound more, but all of those businesses that it served were getting now served to a higher level with better quality services, the businesses were getting served to a better degree. All of the team that had worked with me got significant pay rises, the all got retention bonuses paid to all the benefits for all the customers, all the businesses, all their clients, all of my team, all this value is generated in the world. And then you've got the entrepreneur that ultimately sparked this whole thing. And when I left that business I rang and told them I was leaving and I was got an email and that was it, it was like, thanks then, and that was the end of it, leave, just leave your lats up on the desk and you're out the door. And there's no consideration for the support that that person might perhaps need to adjust so they can crack on with their life. I think I figured it out. Cool, go on, tell us about that, what have you figured out? Where's the purpose? I read this thing a few years ago by these guys that were trying to figure out what connects successful entrepreneurs together, what is the theme that connects them? And they looked everything, I think they wanted to find that they all wake up at 5am, they all have an ice bath first thing, they all super fit, they all are on carnivore diets, whatever it is, they're trying to find something that connects them on, they couldn't find anything like some woke up early, some woke up late, some were fit, some were fat, they were all over the place. The connecting themes were that they had an unrealistic view of what was possible, they believed they could achieve incredible things way beyond their current skill set that was unrealistic. And then conversely to that, they also had a deep sense of inadequacy and didn't feel good enough. And it was the fluctuation between those two things. I'm going to achieve this, I'm going to conquer the world, fuck, I don't know, even I just thought I'm doing good, but I'm going to do this. But where, so it's that through those two things that you create this huge momentum and this huge force to drive forward, the third thing that you need that I didn't have for a long time was focus, because if you're just bouncing about all over the place, you will never progress, but if you can take that energy that gets generated and apply it in one direction for long enough, you will get to that point. The feeling that I said that I was looking to change, I think, when I'd solve a business, was that feeling of inadequacy, that feeling of not being good enough, of having someone validate you and say you are good at what you do, I think that was the feeling that was ultimately looking to solve. So if you look at that and think, well, if that's the makeup of an entrepreneur, when they sell, that feeling isn't just going to disappear, but there has to be a breaking down of you. And you have to dig in because you have to think, well, where does this come from? And what I concluded was I found this great mentor in Australia, a guy called Ryan Mosby-Wine, and he introduced me to this concept of small tea trauma. So with all experience trauma in our lives, some people sadly have experienced capital tea trauma in their life. Fortunately, I've only had to deal with a small tea trauma. I'm understanding of that, and I'm not a psychologist or a therapist at all, but my understanding of that is that as a kid, you've experienced things that you couldn't understand as a kid, that you couldn't just file away, that, so let's say for me, for example, and I love my dad to be, it's a little less him, I love him to be, he's still alive, great guy, I love him to be. But let's say your dad comes home from work, late, short tempered, pissed off, and you're just excited to see him as a kid and you get shouted out or scolded for whatever, right? As a kid, you can't process that. As an adult, you can, you can say, oh, he's busy, they were struggling to make ends meet, he got stuck in traffic, he hated his job, you would just a little brat, and he, he, he shat, he lashed out at you, whatever, right? As a kid, you can't process that, so rather than be able to file it away somewhere, you just store it internally and emotionally, and then you only need something in life to trigger it and it, it comes out, right? What they explained to me was, we've all got this inner child within that needs healing, and like these Japanese soldiers that were in the jungle hidden away, and long after the war was over, they were getting letters dropped on them saying, the war's over now, you can come out, we've got this inner child that still thinks that war's happening, that still thinks that, you know, they've been shouted out or they're afraid, and we've all got that inner child that needs healing to some degree, and we need to let the child know that I'm a big strong man now, it's okay, you can come out, it's safe, we're good, we're golden. And so I think we've all got inner work to do, I don't think it should be too indulgent, I don't think it should be in therapy for the rest of your life, but I do think it's worth just unpicking some of these things and why we feel like how we feel. And so the journey that I went on was with this great therapist, and then she was an equine therapist, while this crazy therapy with these herd of eight wild horses down south for two days, it was the most mad experience, and then I did this work with Ryan about healing the inner child that involved breath work and meditation. And so all of those things I've taken with me, I go and see some horses near me regularly, I ground myself on the earth every day when I get up, I go and do breathwork, I do meditations, and I just try and kind of process a little bit more each time. It didn't mean to get as deep as I meant that, sorry, but I loved it. I think if that lands or. James, thank you, says, I've loved this, like I feel like I've been on the edge of my seat. I think like. Great story. There are conversations where sometimes we. Sometimes we'll do loads and loads of research and we'll know the full story. And I think like just being able to sit here and experience out with you, it was beautiful, so thank you so much for being so open and so on. I think there's loads of like lessons in there as well. We always end our podcast the same way. If anybody's listening to this and you can get them to ask themselves one question, what would that be? I think if they're struggling with something or something's going wrong at the moment, it's a look for the gift, though, is I think to change their mindset. I think I learned this from Tony Robbins, but it's whatever's going on, whatever challenges you face in, even if things see out of our control, and there's so many things that can happen towards their outside of our control, whether it's with the economy at the moment or crazy taxes that are coming out or whatever shit's going on, right? It's just the thing that is always within your control is what am I focusing on and what does it mean? And that is something that you can always shift. So whatever challenge that you're facing right now, it's just to bring to your attention what am I focusing on things I can control or my focusing things I can't control. Am I focusing on the present or my focusing on the past? Like we can always bring it to something that we can control. And then once we've understood that, what is it that I'm focusing on, it's then what does it mean to me? Does it mean it's the end? Does it mean it's the start? Does it mean it's all turned to shit? Or does it mean that it's a gift that I can use to to grow from? Love this. Thank you so so much. If people want to find you, get in touch, how can they find you? Yeah, they can find me on LinkedIn, on Instagram with the search for James Aschford. On Instagram, I think I'll take a look at the James Aschford. I don't mean that to be like, it was just that James Aschford was gone and I just needed something else to go up the start of it. So, VJames Aschford on there. Thank you so much. Thank you.