Scaling Insights: From Mobile Industry Booms to Modern Growth Challenges with Paul Donovan

In this first episode of the Scale2Day Podcast hosted by Scott Bewley, where we delve deep into the strategies and insights behind successful business scaling. In our inaugural episode, we're thrilled to have Paul Donovan who has over thirty-five years of experience in senior executive roles across the technology,media and telecommunications sectors.

In this episode, Paul draws on his extensive career spanning multinational giants like Vodafone, transformative private equity roles, and his current endeavors in investment and philanthropy. We'll explore insights on the importance of ambition, capital, and leadership in scaling businesses, with lessons from the mobile communications boom and case studies like Revolut. Additionally, Paul reflects on work-life balance and lifelong learning, emphasizing the value of personal development and adaptability in today's fast-evolving business landscape.

Whether you're an entrepreneur looking to scale your business or a leader seeking practical wisdom, this episode is packed with actionable insights. Don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast, and share it with other aspiring leaders. More resources and information can be found at scale2day.com. Let's get started!

Scott Bewley [00:00:01]:
Hi. I'm Scott Bewley, the founder of scaledoday.com, where we help you scale your business to new heights. This podcast is a 30 minute master class on how to scale your business across borders. It's where I interview seasoned executives and entrepreneurs who have built, scaled, and turned around businesses. Listen in to get great nuggets of knowledge from experts in 30 minutes by joining the podcast.

Paul [00:00:33]:
Paul, it's fantastic that you can join us today. Really appreciate the, giving up the time. I know you're a very busy man, so it's it's good to reconnect with you and, after working together many, many years ago at this stage. So, yeah, you're you're very welcome to the, Scale of the Day podcast, which is about using the, the great experience and expertise and knowledge of experts like yourself who have, vast experience in scaling businesses, either in the corporate or entrepreneurial side or or both. So you're you're very welcome. So thanks for joining me today.

Paul [00:01:06]:
Oh, you're welcome, Scott. It's a pleasure to be here.

Paul [00:01:07]:
Great stuff. So, look, Paul, I think what would be what would be great would be to, you know, tell us a little bit about your background for our listeners. And and, obviously, I know you very well from your your telecom days and, and, you know, your prior experience. But, if you give us a rundown of of the vast experience that you have, it will be really helpful.

Paul [00:01:26]:
Sure. Well, you know, it's a sometimes scary thought. I think that I've now been in the workplace for over 40 years. But in that time, I've been blessed really with the career that's taken me all over the world and, it's given me the opportunity to work in many different sectors of business life. I guess I think of my career not as one career, there's 3 separate ones, really. So up until my 40s, I worked at large multinational companies, initially, and fast moving consumer goods businesses such as Mars and Coca Cola and Schweppes, before moving into technology sectors, first with Apple Computer and then into telecoms with BT Cable and Wireless, and lastly Vodafone where I spent a decade during telecoms growth period of the noughties. 5 of those were as a member of Vodafone's group executive committee overseeing a portfolio of 15 or so high growth businesses in Europe, Middle East and Africa, India, and Asia Pac, including the major acquisitions during that time that Vodafone made in India and Turkey as well as Czech Republic and Romania. So, during that period, I I guess I developed from essentially a sales and marketing guy, which is where I started out, to much more of a general manager, along the way gaining some unique experiences and working with some truly, truly amazing people.

Paul [00:02:46]:
Based on those global kind of corporate experiences, in my fifties, I changed direction and became a private equity CEO. If you look me up, some people will describe me as a kind of a company doctor where I really specialize in creating teams to take on a series of companies challenged by a combination of changing market conditions and too much debt, which is a pretty nasty kind of combination. The first of those businesses was Aircom, now known as Air, the incumbent Irish telecommunications business that I joined during the global financial crisis in 2009. And that was described then as the grease of European Telecoms. And indeed, the Irish Times described me as the red adair of the sector running towards the fire rather than away from it. There, the team and I helped refocus and restructure the business before taking the company through a scheme of arrangement that resulted in the write down of €1,800,000,000 of debt, which was the largest financial restructuring of 2012, leaving the business both stable but importantly investable and with a proper plan for the for the future. My next assignment was was completely different, and that was at ODIN and UCI Cinemas Group, Europe's largest cinema operator with over 250 sites in 7 countries. The business had been owned by Terra Firma Capital Partners for the best part of a decade, which is a long time in PE circles and had been through 3 failed sales processes along the way.

Paul [00:04:23]:
The revenues were flatlining, customers were defecting to other offerings in the marketplace and costs have been cut in all the wrong areas, notably those around customer service. Now less than 3 years later, the business had been turned around both operationally and financially but importantly culturally, and was in 2016 was sold for $923,000,000 to AMC Cinemas in the United States. And that business went on from strength to strength with AMC making significant investments and, in fact, buying Nordic Cinemas Group and putting that together with Odeon and UCI. And indeed, it still remains, and is the largest operator in the world. My my 3rd PE role, was a little it was a bit of an accident really, and that was CEO of a company called Arkeva, which I often call the most famous company you've never heard of because it actually delivers the majority of broadcast infrastructure for the UK, so all digital terrestrial TV and radio as well as operating dedicated wireless networks that support smart metering infrastructure for gas, electricity, and and water. So pretty much everybody is a customer of Arkeva indirectly at at some point. I joined the board in 2018 as a non executive director. And as part of that process, I helped to oversee the 2,000,000,000 pound sale of our mobile phone towers business to a company called Cellnex.

Paul [00:05:50]:
That represented about a third of the company's business. And our CEO at that time declared he wanted to step down. Now all of that happened just as COVID hit. And so I was asked by the board to, to join to join the company and to move into the role of CEO literally a week after COVID hit the UK with a brief to reposition the remaining business to build a new leadership team and to create new revenue streams in order to realize a potential exit for the for the business within a kind of 3 to 4 year time frame. Just over 2 years later, we realized an exit for the majority shareholder, which was a large Canadian pension fund, And I handed over the reins to my number 2 and rejoined the board as a representative of 1 of the, the existing, PE owners. And I am and I am still there. That's 3 successful turnarounds during a 12 year period, which then leads me to my 3rd career, which is essentially a plural, a plural one. If you look me up on LinkedIn, you'll see that I describe myself as a businessman, an investor, and a philanthropist.

Paul [00:06:55]:
And indeed, those three areas represent the kind of 3 legs to my 3rd career stool, so to speak. So I'm, as I said, I'm an executive director at Arkeva. I'm a board member at Nordic Aviation Capital, a leading aircraft leasing business based in Ireland. And as an investor, I own stakes in around 50 early stage businesses. In fact, I also chair the investment committee of the Oxford Innovation EIS Growth Fund, which is a leading supporter of early stage tech and life sciences businesses, many of which have spun out of the Oxford University and surrounding ecosystem. So the third aspect, as I said, to my career is is philanthropy. And and following my earn out from from Odeon, I use some of that payout to establish a philanthropic fund, the family fund. This is focused largely on education, supporting charities that offer life chances to disadvantaged kids.

Paul [00:07:52]:
And I use both my money and my business knowledge and expertise to help those charities grow and scale. I'm also a founder of the Centre For Social Justice Foundation, which identifies scalable innovative charities that can ultimately influence policy. A good example of the work that, the CSJ have done is the introduction of universal credit in the UK in 2013, which completely changed the landscape in terms of the way that benefits were actually delivered to to, to people in the UK. And that was a change piloted and innovated by a small charity based in Manchester. So not all the great ideas need to come from from government or on a top down basis. So CSJ has demonstrated they can happen on a on a kind of a bottom up basis. And then and then finally, I'm also involved in higher education as a member of the governing council at the University of Bradford where I did my MBA back in the late, 19 eighties. And that's a a sector which is going through some some real challenges at the moment with grant funding in the UK having been having been, you know, essentially frozen for the last 8 years and a collapse in the number of international students who pay a lot more coming into coming into the sector.

Paul [00:09:01]:
So that university is going through some significant restructuring right now. So so you know I'm really lucky to have had these kind of 3 careers. They've all been interesting and all had different challenges and different different opportunities, along the way.

Paul [00:09:17]:
That's fantastic. Well, you got an amazing career. I'm sure that a a listener would love to hear about a few other things. Just just for a moment, a little bit outside of the business side of things. What do you think is something that might surprise our listeners about you with having such a a an amazing career?

Paul [00:09:34]:
Well, you know, as as proof that what you study at uni doesn't necessarily need to define the whole of your life. My undergraduate degree was actually Scandinavian studies, which I did at the university, University College London, and then at the University of Lund in Sweden. So I, the my unknown fact is that I still speak fluent Swedish, and, I have a great cohort of friends from the 19 seventies with whom I'm in almost in almost daily com daily contacts discussing what's going on in football and other aspects of, of life. So, yeah. So I'm a Scandophile, I guess.

Paul [00:10:09]:
So so I'm sure we'll probably get to it later. I think there's a there's a football team you've had an association with for some time. I remember back in the Vodafone you might wanna talk about for fans of that particular club maybe. Oh, well,

Paul [00:10:20]:
I'm a I'm a great fan of, I'm a great fan of Arsenal. My son and I are season ticket holders and, we like nothing better than spending an afternoon, at the Emirates cheering on our perennially second team. But, but no, but I had a bit of a flirtation with potentially becoming CEO of, of the Arsenal back in, in 2008. But, Arsene Wenger didn't like the prospect of that too much, so that never actually, never actually happened. But, I think that's that's probably a probably a good outcome actually given everything else I've done since then.

Paul [00:10:53]:
Very good. And a quick one, I know that you're involved with a sponsorship deal with a certain football team, at that time in Vodafone, for for the

Paul [00:11:01]:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. When I when I was, running the commercial side in the UK business, I I inked what was then the world's largest sporting sponsorship deal, which is a £36,000,000, deal with Manchester United, back in 2001, which hit a real sweet spot because that's when David Beckham became a kind of global celebrity. And so the sponsorship itself was worth, worth investing in, but it was the payback was made immeasurably larger by the global coverage that Posh and Becks managed to to generate. And and indeed, David Beckham showed up in some, vertical advertising as a direct result of that as well.

Paul [00:11:38]:
Fantastic. Yeah. I remember that at the time. Absolutely. So, look, you've you've had an incredible career, amazing successes, Paul. And I guess, you know, I'm sure then there there's there there might be 1 or 2 little things. So that would be interested, interesting to the listeners as well, which is, just wondering if you'd share a time when you faced your biggest failure and what did JT learn from that?

Paul [00:12:01]:
No, Scott. That's a that's a a really good question, because all of us have them, even if our carefully curated CVs focus on the successes. You know, success is seldom a good teacher, but failure can be. And, back in the nineties, I learned just how difficult it can be to shift deeply embedded cultural norms even when there is a burning platform. I joined, BT in 1993 in a marketing role and was quickly recruited then to run the commercial aspects of the CEO's change program, which was called Breakout. They all have a name like that. And that was designed to render the company more agile and more customer focused, but would also require the business to fundamentally change the way that it thought about operating. It was a classic case, I think, of you can take a horse to water, but you can't necessarily make it drink.

Paul [00:12:57]:
And the situation in BT may well be different 30 years on. But at that time, despite the kind of the force of logic, some great proposals for change and some top level, board level support, I found that the the values of the people in BT were so deeply rooted in the past at that time and so risk averse about doing anything different from the future that I was literally banging my head against the brick wall. So after 2 frustrating years working in a business whose values I think were fundamentally different to my own, I gave up the ghost and left. So that was a failure. Later on, Scott, I learned I was far from alone with multiple external recruits failing to decode the culture and ultimately failing to thrive in BT. But but there there was a silver lining to it because, you know, back in 2009 when I became the CEO at Aircom, which had many of the same issues as BT, there I did use that experience to help crack the code to change culture and customer orientation, which is really all about listening much more closely to what people think and feel in the business and helping them to be the ones that drive the change themselves rather than imposing it upon them. So learnings from failure, are not success by any stretch of the imagination imagination all of the way.

Scott Bewley [00:14:13]:
And I saw a great example

Paul [00:14:14]:
of that, obviously, obviously, when we're back in

Paul [00:14:16]:
the day when we're both in Vodafone Island,

Paul [00:14:17]:
when the, rebranding from ESL to, to Vodafone was was at play. And, that was a highly successful program in terms of the transition of an Irish culture to a global multinational culture. So, so I can say I absolutely witnessed that firsthand, Paul.

Paul [00:14:37]:
At the end of the day, Scott, nobody really goes to work wanting to do a bad day's work.

Paul [00:14:42]:
Yeah.

Paul [00:14:42]:
But sometimes companies make it really easy for people to do that. And you if there's a misunderstanding or a misalignment between what the owners of the business, the management of the business think is important and what people who work in it think is important, then that's going to be a recipe for failure. And so anything that you can do to close that gap is ultimately likely to make the process of change a much smoother one.

Paul [00:15:05]:
So just just from from that, well, what do you think has been your favorite job so far? What have you got the most kick out of? What have you enjoyed the most?

Paul [00:15:14]:
I've been asked that question because I've worked in so many different places. I've been asked that question quite a few times. And I struggle with that question, Scott, to be honest, simply because with the exception of the experience of BT that I just talked about, I've literally loved every day I've been to work and I've had the privilege to have worked with great people all over the world in a multitude of sectors. So so there's no specific favorite job but I guess I'm happiest when I'm, solving problems and helping people to be their best. And if I can combine those two attributes at the same time, then I'm then I'm doubly happy. So I think it's the it's the nature of the challenge and the environment in which that challenge takes rather than the company or the job itself, which is, which is there. I I do enjoy the the the role of CEO. I like the accountability of it.

Paul [00:16:02]:
It's it's it's tough, but it's a very satisfying job.

Paul [00:16:04]:
Yeah. Absolutely a bit. So so, look, Paul, I guess, really, what what this podcast is about and, it it's about how do you scale a business and what kind of lessons would you learn along the way. So just wondering if you take us through an example a good example of where you've scaled a business, which you've which you've done many times. What would be a good example that you would point to? And, I guess some of the gems and, kind of nuggets that would help people who are in a similar position where they're either an entrepreneur or as listening to the podcast, they could be in a corporate as well. What what what, you know, what lessons have you learned along the way in terms of scaling businesses that will be helpful for people listening?

Paul [00:16:44]:
I I think I think the the simple answer is that there is no there is no formula or, or no kind of playbook, or we'd all be doing it and we'd all be fantastically successful at it. But I did spend a decade or so in mobile comms during its kind of hyper growth phase, from the kind of mid nineties to the to the mid noughties both in the UK and elsewhere around the world. And that's where the annual growth rates of businesses that I was involved in terms of revenue growth with with were in the 20 to 40% kind of range. Now, of course, in some instances, the strategy in those businesses differ depending on whether the business was a market leader, an incumbent, or or a challenger. But but but I suppose the learnings are are all pretty similar. And the first one is really about ambition. It's easy to scale back on a bold ambition, but much more difficult to access the resources in terms of capital if you undercook the ambition at the outset. So if the market is running ahead of your ability to grow, then you're going to be in trouble because you won't actually be able be able to scale.

Paul [00:17:50]:
So it's really important to ensure that you have the funds available to go faster if the need arises. So so capital is important. And access to finance is not always easy, particularly at the moment. And so having that available in advance is key. So making sure that your tanks in terms of funding are full. The second is about people because the people who found a company are not necessarily the ones who are best positioned to be able to scale it. Early ideas and innovation have inevitably to give way to the rigor of systems and processes, to and to enable that growth to be able to be managed in a profitable way. So don't be afraid to cycle in leadership capability equipped for tomorrow's challenge rather than the challenge of today's business.

Paul [00:18:45]:
So think about scaling your leadership and your managerial capability ahead of time so that when growth comes, you're well positioned to to take advantage of it. And I and the third is is is it's about the is about the business model itself relating to scale effects. I find that a lot of early stage businesses with great ideas ultimately end up relying on a few large sales to a few customers and those large customers can often be organizations that have incredibly long procurement and review processes. And a business with a great idea can actually just run out of cash by the time they actually get the order. And the the great thing about the mobile industry was that it was able to grow so fast because there was an unshakable belief in the fundamentals of demand. It was it was relatively easy to acquire and deploy capital at scale. Because it was a growth sector, it was easy to hire people in. We both joined that sector at that particular point in time.

Paul [00:19:55]:
But the reasons the mobile industry was able to grow so fast was a belief in the fundamentals of demand. That meant it was easy to both acquire and deploy capital at scale. It was relatively easy to attract great people from other industries because you had a good growth story. And there was also a scalable model that had a strong network effect because once you went past 50% penetration in a market, everybody had to have a mobile phone. And the market grew way beyond most of the predictions from the, from the analysts. And a critical factor in that was changing the commercial model, introducing prepaid mobile phones, which enabled growth not only in the emerging markets world but also to access the segments of the market in developed markets that would otherwise never have owned or had a or had a mobile phone. And so, you know, I think that that's the important thing. So access to capital, making sure you have people who are able to operate ahead of the growth curve, thinking about the scale effect and and actually, you know, understanding what the fundamentals of demand are for your business.

Paul [00:20:57]:
I think those are 4 things. If you you keep a weather eye on those, then you're able to you can put them in the context of your own particular growth and scaling challenge.

Paul [00:21:05]:
Brilliant. Great stuff. Great stuff. And I see and if you look at markets today, you know, what what's happening in the marketplace and what are the areas that are scaling? And and, there's a there's I I just don't really see the same growth that the mobile industry faced. There's very few industries that are that are facing that scale of growth today.

Paul [00:21:28]:
Well, that's that's been dominated, you know, by the by the US tech giants. But but there there there is there is one company I'm, both a fan of and and a keen observer of because my, my daughter-in-law, works there, and that is, the Challenger Bank Revolut, which is, is growing really, really fast at the moment. I think something like 60% of the population of Ireland have got a Revolut card and and roughly and roughly 8 out of 10 customers that come to Revolut come through personal recommendation from existing customers. So I guess that if you if you can have that recommendation model as your fuel, that means that your cost of acquisition is low. And and there is really strong trust in personal recommendation. So I think they're they're definitely a a business that I think is gonna continue to go through hypergrowth, and they're slated to IPO in in, you know, 2 or 3 years' time.

Paul [00:22:19]:
Yeah. Absolutely. You know, I see they've recently got a banking license in the UK, and, and they have, got it outside of, I think, Lithuania, which is previously their their base. So, yeah, that's on an upward trajectory.

Paul [00:22:31]:
They're they're becoming a proper grown up financial services company now and not just a start up. And, I think they're going to, they're gonna give a lot of the traditional banks a, a run for their money.

Paul [00:22:42]:
And I I think that their member get member promotions are pretty good. And and also they're they're pretty switched on. I registered at another company the other day, and, within 4 hours, I received a, a phone call from a salesperson from River Leader asking if I'd like a business bank account. So they're they're pretty.

Paul [00:23:02]:
You snooze, you lose. And if you don't, you win.

Paul [00:23:04]:
So just probably next question I'm thinking about is really, you know, what what do you think one lesson that you've learned through your career that you believe everyone should learn in their in their lifetime?

Paul [00:23:14]:
Really, it would be about achieving balance in in what you do. Let let me just explain. In my thirties and early forties, I was incredibly ambitious, personally ambitious. I'd come from a not particularly wealthy family. I was state educated. I was the first member of my family to go to university. So success was expected of me. And I set out to single mindedly achieve recognition in my professional life and make money along the way.

Paul [00:23:47]:
And I did that by adopting in retrospect what was fundamentally a kind of me approach to to life. That worked to to a point, but I did learn there's only so much that a person working alone can do. And indeed, I think I had to a certain extent been chasing the wrong ball. And my personal ambition was actually getting in the way of how others saw and related to me. So, you know, excessive personal ambition and trust don't necessarily go hand in hand, and it can lead to other people second guessing what your motives are. So I guess that's when I learned that success really is much more about the we than the me and things changed that creating talented and aligned and and motivated teams is really the way to get things done. And in reality, the key professional wins in my life have seldom been self generated. Instead, they relied on the goodwill, talent, and efforts of others.

Paul [00:24:45]:
So learning to chase the right bull, the we ball and not the me ball was was really quite seminal for me. And, I suppose the other learning is about balancing, work and home life. By the time I got to the executive committee at Vodafone, my ambition led me to a crazy amount of time at work, you know, being in the office at 6:30 AM and not leaving until late, working at weekends, working on holiday, and undertaking such vast amounts of international travel that meant I was absent for big chunks of time and too exhausted to be truly present when I actually got home. So I missed more than my fair share of sports days and carol concerts and theater performances for my kids, and my marriage was heading for the rocks. So I decided to change things, which resulted in my second and ultimately much more rewarding career where I was able to reverse those bad habits by focusing specifically on those areas where I could add most value rather than trying to prove to everybody else that I could do everything. And, I think today's younger generation, I look at my own kids, I hope it benefited from the hard won knowledge of those people who got work life balance wrong before the phrase work life balance really existed. So if I could wind the clock back, I think a a much more measured approach would have been, would have been called from.

Paul [00:26:01]:
Yeah. It's absolutely. You know, that's that's fantastic learnings and I think, without going into off on a sidetrack on COVID, I think that's really where it highlighted a lot about work life balance as well and it's it's now I think it's kinda getting the balance. So it's it's equal enough to the going too much on the, life sort of thing that's,

Paul [00:26:18]:
doing it Yeah. I mean, the the the the pendulum has swung. The question is where is the right point for it to to land, I guess, Yeah. Somewhere in the middle.

Paul [00:26:26]:
Absolutely. And and I think, you know, you you touched on there about, you know, healthy work life balance. How what do you do to kind of unwind and and, get that balance outside of work yourself?

Paul [00:26:37]:
Well, I, I mean, now I'm lucky because I actually only work for 3 days a week roughly. And and I'm largely in I'm largely in control of my own agenda other than the fixed timetable of board meetings and other things that you need to you need to do. And and to be honest with you, I gained my I gained my energy from the variety of things I'm involved in. So being involved in business, being involved in investing, and being involved in philanthropy, are all, you know, very different things. And I'm able to exercise my curiosity and my interest there. And at the same time, I still have time left over for for health and for family and for friends, which ultimately they're the things that really matter at the, at the end of the day. So, yeah, it's been it's been a it's been a kind of a long road. Maybe I was a late developer, but I think I've I've I've unlocked took what for me is a formula that works.

Paul [00:27:29]:
It wouldn't work for everybody, but it works well.

Paul [00:27:31]:
Sure. And so would it be fair to say that that was kind of the pivotal moment in your career that shaped your your style, leadership style or

Paul [00:27:40]:
actually, I think it was probably something else actually, Scott. So, when you're a CEO, you can sometimes focus less on your own personal development than you do on the development of your team. Life is busy and actually you don't always get as much feedback as a CEO as you as you should to kind of prod you in the right direction. Now I've always prided myself I think on being a good boss and a developer of people, but I came to realize that actually I was kind of using the same approaches over and over again, and I was managing my team more than coaching them. So, I I I guess that I looked in my in my toolbox and I saw a hammer and a wrench. So I need a the other one I need to have if I could do something, I need to have more tools than that. So in in 2012, I joined a program run by the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in coaching and leadership development. And that enabled me to build a fresh toolset and to ultimately become a, a qualified coaching practitioner.

Paul [00:28:39]:
Now the philosophy of the Tabby is around the psychodynamic approach to coaching, which means that you look at the whole individual, rather than just the individual in their job role. And not only did that give me a much greater insight into my own psyche and my own management style, I was also able to deploy those techniques in my job role, which made me much more curious about what makes other people tick. And I think if you're curious about what what motivates others, you become a better people manager, and you become a better non executive director as well where you don't have the power of the CEO role, but you have to operate through influence. So stepping back and if you like grafting on a brand new set of skills was something which enabled me to fundamentally change my approach to the management of people and the management of teams. And and I think I was a a better leader for it.

Paul [00:29:31]:
Brilliant. I think that's, that's incredible because a lot of the time, as you say, leaders are focused on managing teams, and they don't take that reflection, time to do their own self development because they get to that point in their career and say, well, you know, I know everything. Or, so so why do I need to learn anything else? I think I think that's a that's a really valuable lesson that, you know, investing in yourself and, lifelong learning is a, is a is a worthwhile investment and and, really should be something that's, you know, is a continuous part of your own development growth.

Paul [00:30:05]:
Scott, I think you're right. And it can be personal development, but it can also be, understanding, you know, at a much deeper level, some of the critical things that business leaders need to understand. So cybersecurity, really important. Artificial intelligence, impact of and potential of things like blockchain. Because if you sit around the board and you don't have a a decent enough understanding of these things, which have fundamentally changed in the way that business are operating today and will operate in the future, you're you're not you're not equipped to fill the seat. So you have so keep so keeping yourself current is a really, really important thing, when the pace of change has never been never been faster.

Paul [00:30:43]:
Absolutely. Massively so. So I guess another question just quickly for you, Paul, is, you know, there's a lot of people listening to the podcast, that would be starting out as entrepreneurs. And and do you have any advice for them that they should, consider, you know, bearing in mind your your years of experience and wisdom in that space?

Paul [00:31:03]:
Yeah. So, my advice for entrepreneurs starting out is that, you know, based on my experience chairing the IC with, of a fund which is now investing more than 38 early stage businesses is that, you know, 1 in 10 of those will knock the ball out of the park. To another another 4 or 5 might actually break even, and you can expect a good number of them to fail. So you should you you don't you don't have a god given right to to success. But I guess, there are probably, you know, 3 or 4 things. The first one is make sure you have enough cash at all times to iron out the bumps in the road because the the business will never will never grow in the way you think it is. And running out of money is the very worst thing that can happen to you. My second piece of of insight is for an entrepreneur is identify your advisers.

Paul [00:31:57]:
Who is it who you know who can help you along the way? And that can sometimes be more valuable than cash itself. And you'll be amazed how many people will share their knowledge and expertise with you for free if they like you and they like your idea. And then lastly, if you fail, fail fast and either stop or pivot. Investors are very intolerant of driven and unaware founders who fail to listen to the warning signs along the way and just carry on doing the same thing expecting a different a different result. So make sure you have enough cash, surround yourself with good with good people, and if you fail, fail fast.

Paul [00:32:35]:
Look. That's fantastic advice, Paul, and I'm sure that everyone listening would, you know, really appreciate that. And hopefully, they they take that to heart. And, I've also seen that with a number of organizations that I've worked with, as you say, continuing on the wrong path and, you know, not not kinda calling it a day or not pivoting. And, it's it's pretty wearing on the on the team, on the organization, and, you know, and people could be doing a lot better things with their client. So that that's fantastic. So look, just one final question, Paul. Is there a question that you wish that I had asked and haven't asked you, and and how would you answer that?

Paul [00:33:12]:
Well, as I said at the outset, I've had a I've had a career which now spans more than 40, 40 odd years. So maybe, what advice do you have for people coming to the end of their careers and thinking about retirement? So the most important thing I'd say is don't retire. Stay curious, keep learning new stuff, whether it's AI or blockchain, Start to think about transition a couple of years in advance and experiment with putting in place some different activities where your your values, your skills, your network, your unique value add can be deployed. And most people completely underestimate what a lifetime in the workplace can bring to other businesses or not for profits. So don't retire just transition to a different mode of being.

Paul [00:34:04]:
Well, that's look. Absolutely fantastic. And, Luca, I really appreciate your time, and there's some, absolute gems and and nuggets in there. And, look. It's, it's been it's been a great, experience, and I hope you enjoyed, joining us on the podcast today.

Paul [00:34:18]:
Scott, it's my, it's my pleasure.

Scott Bewley [00:34:21]:
Thanks for joining me, Scott Pearly, and our expert guests on this episode of the Scale Today podcast. I hope you're leaving with actionable insights to help you scale your business to the next level. Found value in today's conversation? Make sure to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast, and don't forget to share it with your fellow entrepreneurs and leaders who want to grow across borders. For more information, visit us at scale today.com. That's scale, the number 2, day.com. Let's keep pushing your business to new heights one step at a time. See you in the next episode. Bye for now.