Mortgage Advice Bureau - Peter Brodnicki

Victoria  Hi, I'm Victoria Stevens, and welcome to this podcast, Stock Exchanges. In my day job working as a fund manager at Liontrust, investing on behalf of our clients in UK stock market listed companies, I'm fortunate enough to cross paths with some of Britain's most inspiring entrepreneurs. It's a huge privilege to sit across the table from the people who are running and growing these businesses. And in this series, I want to share that privilege with you, our listeners. Today, I'm delighted to be joined by Peter Brodnicki, the CEO, chief executive and co-founder of Mortgage Advice Bureau. Peter founded Mortgage Advice Bureau or MAB, in the year 2000 with a very clear vision; to build a high quality, scalable mortgage intermediary focused on professional advice, strong lender relationships and long-term customer outcomes. And at a time when the mortgage market was still highly fragmented, he spotted that opportunity to create a nationally recognised brand underpinned by a partnership model with advisors. More than two decades on MAB has grown into one of the UK's leading mortgage networks, supporting over 2000 advisors across the country and facilitating billions of pounds of mortgage lending each year. And Peter remains the largest shareholder with almost 18% of the equity in the business. So he's very closely aligned. With the long-term success of the business that he founded. Thank you so much, Peter, for agreeing to come and join me today on the podcast. 

Peter Thank you, my pleasure, Victoria. 

Victoria  So I think we'll start with a little look back at when you founded Mortgage Advice. And what I really want to know is, lots of the founders that we meet on the podcast have started dabbling in entrepreneurial ventures right out of school, right out university. But you came to your entrepreneurial venture a little bit later in life. You were 40, I believe, when you set up Mortgage Advice Bureau. 

Peter That's right. 

Victoria  So what I really want to know is, do you feel that there was something that that gave you, an edge that that gave you coming to that a little bit later in life? 

Peter I always knew I wanted to be in this industry, and my career took me through different aspects of the industry and I learnt a lot about it. I think everything in life is about timing. I already had established my own business prior to that in the form of a mortgage broking business, so although I was working at Legal & General, my partner at the time set that business up for me and it was something that I felt I was always going to move into when the time was right and I learned and got all the opportunities I needed to from where I was. But then the opportunity for Mortgage Advice Bureau came up, and it came up at a time where there was quite a lot of disruption in the sector. The insurance companies had most of the distribution, they were sort of pulling out of owning estate agents and mortgage businesses in that way, and then it was like a new generation of mortgage networks came up and I thought there was a real gap being left by the insurers when they pulled out. And so that seemed to be the right opportunity to build something that I always thought would be, you know, a great model to have. 

Victoria  Yeah absolutely. And so you've told us a little bit about your career before that, but how about the point at which you embark upon the Mortgage Advice Bureau journey? You obviously made that decision early on, that you were going to adopt that appointed representative model with your advisors. Can you tell us a bit about that decision, what that means for your advisors and what it means for you as a business? 

Peter So right at the beginning we decided to take a slightly different view of things. Your typical network was just an aggregator of firms providing compliance services and a sort of basic CRM system. From my perspective I was always fascinated and felt every business started with understanding how to capture customers. To me that's always been my passion, how do we attract and retain customers? So rather than being generalists we decided to set up our business and become a specialist in the estate agency sector and estate agency related financial services. So, it's where customers became most visible when they were in market and I could see from my experience in that sector that there was huge opportunities missed, but great opportunities to scale businesses in those environments. So we sort of set up a business where everything we did, whether it was the technology which we built from day one, whether was the marketing, whether is the recruitment and training and everything else we did was tailored towards the stakeholders in that sector. And we wanted to go out there and say, look, you know, everybody else is a generalist, we've taken the time to really understand your sector and deliver everything that you need, whether you want to introduce financial services to a broker or whether as an estate agent, you want run it yourself in-house. Either way, we want to be that business partner for you. So it was a completely different avenue. We didn't want sort of lots of smaller business joining us, we wanted entrepreneurs that saw opportunity to scale and pay more for a product that was very specialist for that sector and gave them real value, which a one or two man band is never going to pay extra for. So we set ourselves right from the outset being a sort of premium service for a specified sector, a market leader from day one, that was our ambition, and with longer term contract, longer term commitments, and a very clear strategy in that sector. 

Victoria  And I always think you can think about it a little bit like a franchise model, can't you? Because you're effectively, you're not the only one in the room that's the entrepreneur, you're actually tapping into a multitude of different entrepreneurs, smaller entrepreneurs around the country, who are all, as you say, focused on scaling and growing their own businesses as well. So you almost get a double whammy. 

Peter Well it is, that's what I get motivated by. I really love to see people that are the next  generation entrepreneurs and look at their vision and how can we sort of enable that vision to be a reality. So yeah, it was absolutely, that methodology has followed through the whole business for the last 25 years. 

Victoria  So what did Mortgage Advice Bureau look like in those early years? I mean, it must have taken quite a lot of blood, sweat and tears to build it up from those humble beginnings to the point where some 14 years later you reach the point where you listed it on the stock market? 

Peter Yeah, we didn't go out and raise money, we raised our own money in this business, we grew organically and I remember one of the first key appointments and I think everything about success in business is the people you have around you, so at quite an early stage I knew I needed someone operational with that strong structure, a process that could deliver what my vision was. I remember meeting a guy called David who had a board position at Britannia. And I'd reduced my salary significantly when I left L&G to run this business. I told the recruitment agency I need someone operational, local. And I said, look, I'm only paying myself £50,000, so look, I’m prepared to pay someone sort of £49,000 but I can't pay them more than that. Anyway, they introduced David and David was on the £250,000 package at Britannia with share options and everything else. But I caught him just at the right time because he was fed up with corporate life, and just liked the idea of our vision and our brand and what we wanted to do. And he goes, tell you what, I'll just help you out for three months, maybe six months, and I just need a break from corporate life and I think I know what I can do to help you. So he was a key appointment for me. And then he was a non-exec director, right, up until only a couple of years ago. So he's been with me all that time and even bought shares in the business quite early on as well because he really believed in the businesses. And I think it took me about probably about 14 years to get him up to the salary he was when he left. But he did do exceptionally well obviously with the shares he bought. So overall I think he did well but he really enjoyed it and that was sort of a bit of a lucky break in a way. Having that person put in front of me when I didn't ask for him and someone I got at the right timing again and saw the opportunity, and gave me some fantastic expertise and grounding when you're at that early stage and sort of keen to do everything. 

Victoria Yeah. 

Peter He put that structure in place for me so yeah that's one of the things I look back on and I go yeah that was really important. There have been other really key people since then too. 

Victoria  Yeah it's almost like a mentor figure to you. 

Peter Yeah exactly at that time he was everything I wasn't which is exactly what you need in business. 

Victoria  Absolutely. You need to leverage your strengths and then know when to appoint other people to fill those gaps. 

Peter Exactly. 

Victoria  I'm really interested, Peter, just along that journey, I've heard you speak before about your experience of the 2008-9 Financial Crisis and how that was quite a defining moment for the business. Your approach to it, your attitude during that difficult time. Can you just explain to us why you think that was a bit of a formative experience for you? 

Peter Yeah, I mean it was a scary time because obviously, we put our head down and grew this business organically and I think the year before was the first year that we'd actually made any form of meaningful profit. And the team I'd got around me took time, and I loved the team and I could see the potential. It was sort of at that spring board, ready to go to the next stage. And then literally, you now, purchase transactions sort of fell by 60-70%, refinancing by about 70-80%, I mean specialist lending disappeared overnight. So, you sort of go, everybody around you is panicking and also cutting back and everything else. And I sort of took a bit of a, I think you have to take some gambles in life sometimes, if you want to achieve something extraordinary. And I think at the time I was just really looking at the situation and going, look, our model is about helping people grow their business. At the moment they don't need to grow, they need to replace the business they've just lost overnight. But the same principles apply. So we decided to pivot our model and target the market with that message clearly in mind. And I got my team together and I said, look, we could cut right back, but I think what we need to do is give ourselves 12 months. I'm prepared to put every penny we've made on the line, but no more. If it doesn't work in 12 month’s time, we're going to have to cut, or before we can see it clearly isn't going to happen, we need to cut back and do what everybody else does. But in the meantime, we've got a huge opportunity to really scale this and take our message out there. At the top, more standard networks are cutting their costs to try and attract people who are doing far lower volumes. That doesn't seem like a good methodology to me. So we kept our prices reassuringly high, because we're delivering a strong product, and we grew really strongly and the team really threw themselves into it. We knew we had a target to achieve. And actually, believe it or not, that year I think we made about 50k, which I know is nothing in the scale of things, but we were prepared to lose, I don't know, up to a million at that time. 

Victoria   I was going to say it's a profit. 

Peter So to me that was a massive win. And it gave us a bit of a springboard really, because just before that happened we had quite a few offers for our business, because they could see the trajectory that was going on. And I think out of all the businesses, there was about three that were interested in us, I didn't think any of them survived more than three or four years after that. So yeah, it was a springboard, it gave the company some real energy, we came out with some real momentum behind it. So yeah I think sometimes an adversity is your opportunity right, it's just what we did. 

Victoria  Never let a good crisis go to waste, as they say. 

Peter Absolutely, you're right, yeah, yeah. 

Victoria  I'm quite interested in that attitude of calculated risk-taking. Is that something that you feel is a necessary ingredient for being a successful entrepreneur? 

Peter Yeah, I think I do. If I look at all the key milestones or points in my journey, they've all included a bit of risk taking. When I say risk taking, I guess doing something completely different to what everybody else has done. So I haven't really followed the norm, I've sort of backed my gut. It's not gambling, it's a calculated risk. You have confidence in yourself and your team, what you're trying to do in your business, you give yourself set time scales and objectives and you take the risks. I remember when we listed the business that was another such a example really. 

Victoria  Absolutely it was, it was. And it's a particularly brave thing to do I think when you own such a large stake in your business yourself and it would have been much higher of course at that point pre-listing than it was than it is now. 

Peter Yeah, but I'm always looking to take business to the next level and it's not about risk just in terms of growth, it's about securing the future and then creating a strong platform for further growth and trying to anticipate where the market is going, where the opportunities are. Again, when we listed it was an interesting one because obviously when we decided to do that, you know, that was sort of, it was like a six, nine month process. The market was flying, everybody was IPO-ing and the week we listed, the market crashed. 

Victoria  Typical! 

Peter And Miller Homes and Virgin pulled out that week and I was sitting on a taxi halfway through my investor meetings and was going, what do we do? You know, we're on our way to our first investor meeting, so again, a calculated risk. You know I thought, let's go and see the investors. They're either going to think I've got something really interesting to say or a complete lunatic, but they're going to see me. 

Victoria  Well they obviously did think you had something interesting to say, and I agree that decision was a bold one and another good example of that calculated risk taking approach. Out of interest, why did you want to be a publicly listed company? 

Peter I didn't have that as an objective at any point, you know. My father back when I was you know, he played on the stock market a lot and he got me interested in it. I remember when I was, I think I was 13 or 14, he started giving me small amounts of shares in businesses for me to track and follow as presents, right. 

Victoria  What a great idea. 

Peter So I always got interested and it got me interested in the stock market then and it got me to follow how companies grow and different models work and you know, decisions they make and when to buy and sell the shares. I was always fascinated in it, but that's not what drove the decision. The decision obviously we had some offers before 2008. I didn't take any of those because I didn't really see that they could offer me anything different and I'd built up a great team and also some great firms working with us. I saw some of them maybe being a conflict to what they were about, but I couldn't see the value add. We got to a position where we could fund what we wanted to achieve, so we didn't need the money in. So what was the strategic value of doing it? But at the same time, a lot of people have been in my team a long time and worked hard and I wanted to give them some recognition. And after we've come out to 2008, done so well, we also had some more offers again so we went through that whole process again. At that point I was considering that and thinking well again for the same reasons I didn't really want to do it and then I considered looking at the listing option because that still gave me full autonomy to make the decisions that I need to make in the business but also gave something back to my team and people that had shares in the business and all my staff. I remember being at L&G, everybody used to get L&G shares and they'd always follow the share price and be interested how the company was doing and I wanted to see, I thought that was another great opportunity to bring my staff more on the journey, get them more involved and wanting to be part of that journey. So that was a big part as well for us. So yeah, and I haven't looked back since and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It's been a massive learning curve, but I've met some fascinating people on the way and I still do.

Victoria  And do you think it helped to embed that culture of long-term thinking about what's going to make the business successful down through the ranks below you as well? I mean you talked obviously there about how many of your staff had and have equity. 

Peter I have and it did, but also it sort of grew us up as a business, grew up as a business you know there's obviously a lot more governance and to look at and again I think it was it made us understand how many more foundations we need to build in the business to scale the way we wanted to. So it sort took us on it, it was definitely a new part of our journey, it built a very new platform for us in terms of where we were heading to. And everybody right through the ranks you know was really brought into it. I remember even going out on listing day and you know and bringing the team out with me and their partners and stuff and that was just one of those memorable days that you think right we've achieved something, this is fantastic but it's just the beginning of a journey as well so it was like you've achieved the pinnacle but this is only the smaller mountain but now there's a there's the bigger one for us to climb and scale. 

Victoria  Absolutely, and we're still on that journey. So we're going to fast forward you over a decade to the Mortgage Advice Bureau of today. And as I said in my introduction, you've now got over 2,000 advisors within that appointed representative network, you've got a market share of over 8% of the new lending market here in the UK, and you've made a real point in meetings and in presentations and we've had discussions over the couple of years Peter about really wanting to embrace technological change that's happening, that's occurring in your industry. So can you give us a sense of how you feel that technology is transforming the mortgage industry? 

Peter Yeah, I mean, starting off with technology, because we focus on each sector at a time and we wanted to become specialists and tailor our proposition to customer types and introducer types, we just felt having our own technology and having control of that process, not being dependent on anybody else is absolutely key. It was our IP and it was a big part of what we did and the efficiencies we could bring into the business. And again, when you're trying to bring firms that want to scale, they want good technology. Technology can be, you know a fantastic aid or it can be the bane of your life. It can be a nightmare and I've experienced both obviously. By taking the risk of building it ourselves, we've made a lot of mistakes along the way and you learn as you go but I have no regrets of taking that challenge on and being where I am today especially when I look at the competitive environment around me where they don't have that level of control and that learning of what we've been through has put us in a great position. But more importantly now and what we've seen in the last few years and the fact that the vision has probably sort of been even more clear in the last four or five years of where this technology can go, but added to a really strong data strategy and obviously then on the back of a strong data strategy what AI can also do to enhance is that combination of technology, data and AI that can help us learn so much more about our customers, just hyper personalise that experience to those customers. Help us have far wider reach in terms of the customers we can add value to, not just those that are in market, but those that our pre-market and researchers. That's just a huge opportunity for us and we've been really building and aiming towards that over the last four or five years and only now moving forward we're going to see the real value of it. So to me it opens up so much, it sort of turns our industry more into an exact science. And that's really exciting for me because up until now, you know I've spent 25 years trying to influence people to change behaviour, do things differently. And now I can use technology and data to help people understand that these are the right things to do and how to do them. This is probably the most exciting time. I know we've done things better than others and I'm pleased that we have, but there's been nothing really revolutionary in our sector in terms of how it's progressed. And in a way, the sector, everything around you has to progress for you to also be able to benefit. I think now we've got a really exciting vision of how we're going to utilise all this to increase efficiency, improve the customer experience, widen our customer reach, increase productivity, drive lead flow, de-risk the business model entirely, move it away from being what it was initially, which was very housing stock related because we focused on estate agency builders. In a way we still have that tag, but actually, you know, two thirds of the entire mortgage market is refinancing, which isn't exposed to any sort of market conditions, interest rate changes or any crazy budgets. So, and our opportunity and growth in that and protection again, which is not mortgage related is massive. So we've grown our business in a way that is completely sort of de-risked compared to where it was. It's got far more avenues in terms of where it can head to. And the cost efficiency of running that business in the future will be so much greater. It's great to have 2,000 advisors, but I'd like to do the same business with 1,000 advisors. We're on a very clear trajectory to double our revenue and profitability and etc. over the next four years or so. We don't need to double out advisors to do that, we might not have to double them at all, we may only have to increase them by 10 or 20 percent. But that's all down to the efficiency that technology data and AI will deliver and those advisors will be doing far more business than they've ever done before. And I think the whole compelling proposition of the intermediary would be supercharged with what we can now deliver and put together in the next few years. 

Victoria  Yeah, and as you say that that manifests across lots of different areas of your business, doesn't it? So it's not only the kind of internal efficiencies and advisor productivity at an individual level, but it's also involved with there's a lot to do there with improving lead generation, engaging with the customer more regularly in a more personalised way. Capturing intent, if you like, at an earlier stage and making that more formal. I'm also interested in what your thoughts are with regard to the evolution of advice channels because mortgage advice is something that clearly always used to be done you know back in the day, with two people sitting in a room in person and that then evolved didn't it, to kind of telephone advice and increasingly probably now is a little bit more hybrid so there are elements of it that have moved partly or wholly digital. Partly it's kind of telephone advice and then still a little bit of that that core kind of in-person advice as well. So just talk to us a little bit about how you see that evolving perhaps over a longer time frame you know let's talk a decade. 

Peter  Obviously it will evolve. Everybody's trying to make decisions today about what AI is going to do, you know, in the future of AI. It will evolve and great businesses will take it and use it to enhance their model and to deliver better outcomes and increase their reach. So to me, this is something that will take time to deliver, but you've got to have a very clear vision of where it's going to get to. From a customer's perspective, if we want to stay relevant to a 100% of customers, we can't just have one way of transacting. Everybody wants speed and convenience in today's society and they're even prepared to pay for it in many ways to make things easy, but it shouldn't be at the cost of getting the best possible outcome and I think sometimes that's what's being portrayed here. You don't get the same choice but it's quick and it's easy and I go well it can be quick easy and you get the choice and you make sure you never pay more than you need to and you're getting proper protection advice which is so crucial on the back of the mortgage, which is very much a human interaction rather than a digital one. But if you sort of take a sliding scale in terms of use of the human being compared to digital, that's exactly what our proposition needs to be. Where it was 100% human, like you mentioned, it's probably now 50%. And then you've got a scale between 50% and sort of 90%. And depending on the customer and their experience and the complexity of transaction, they might want to go down to sort of 90% digital and 10% human. Someone else may want more handholding. And just because things can be done quicker doesn't mean every customer is ready for that. And we need to be able to offer that along that range, the service the customer wants and pivot to each customer type and what they need. Certainly what we're now doing from being just a transactional business at the time someone transacts to remortgage or a purchase, we're now involved in the whole research process, you know nurturing those customers for months, years before they purchase and using that same tools and technology now to engage with that customer and start pushing solutions and opportunities to them rather than just waiting for a remortgage opportunity further down the line. So to me, all this does is just increase customer options and those customers can evolve as quickly or slowly as they want and they will all have the choice of the service we provide and how we provide it and how they want it. 

Victoria  Yeah, and for the advisors, of course, that makes it probably all the more important to be part of a network with scale. 

Peter Absolutely. 

Victoria  Because with scale and established market share, and relatively speaking, deep pockets to invest in technology in order to drive these efficiencies, it becomes ever less competitive actually to be trying to go it alone, doesn't it? 

Peter Exactly. At our conference last year, we were talking about the importance of data. We just say every bit of data, positive or negative, human or digital, is valuable now. So we can really hyper personalise this experience. As I say, and then on top of that, decide how much of that is digital and human. So this is really exciting. I'm not just to me that just, you know, you take the USP of an intermediary having access to 33,000 mortgage products, you know, and monitoring that mortgage that customer has, not just for when it's fixed rate comes up in two or five years, but telling that customer every single month whether they can actually swap out that deal early. Now, no lender is going to do that. You know, you can go digitally direct to a lender. They're not going to tell you to come out after a year or two of a five-year fixed rate because your loan to value has increased and you're reduced and your salary has improved, your credit rating has improved and you are now entitled to a better rate and rates have come down. That's our job. We do it at the point we first meet the customer, we do it every month thereafter. We're constantly searching the best deal for that client and then obviously separating the protection journey out very separately, which is again a different type of engagement strategy which doesn't rely on the mortgage at all. 

Victoria  Yeah absolutely. And I think you've always had quite an interesting strategy and I might be describing this in a way that you wouldn't want it described Peter, interested to know if you'd agree, but I always think of it as almost like an incubator strategy for interesting smaller businesses in your industry that you can take in small equity stake or a larger equity stake or even subsume them fully into the group via an acquisition but they're operated as a smaller subsidiary. And you've done that quite repeatedly over the years. Just really interested to hear why you decided to do that and what you think it brings to the business and its approach to innovation and evolving? 

Peter [00:27:12] Yeah, it was very much a strategic play. It wasn't like we need to grow really quickly and just acquire as much as possible. What we wanted to do was break into new sectors. So when we went into the new build sector in 2012, we acquired our first firm then to do that because It was far more specialist, however well we'd done in the estate agency sector, it didn't help us get into that sector. So we acquired a way in. So we've used acquisition to build expertise, to break into new markets and then sort of take the model that's been so successful and apply it to those new sectors. And that's what we've used it for. And we selected these firms very carefully. We didn't want to take out business owners that wanted to retire. We were investing in people. So those people still saw a big opportunity so they didn't want to sell all their shares. So we took minority shares and we incentivised them to grow and then we took further share holdings. And it's fascinating because then you've got that business owner also then working with another group of business owners where we're sort of sharing best practises and sharing that vision of what we're doing. And it's just taking that level of always working with entrepreneurial people to another level and getting more involved in the details of their business delivery. It's been fascinating and it was a bit of a departure for us to explain to investors initially but I think now that the results are really starting to come through and now we're not looking to grow that significantly, we're looking to scale what we have and really drive the efficiency of what we have. 

Victoria  Yeah, absolutely. I know that you touched a few times there upon entrepreneurial culture. Just interested to understand how you ensure cultural alignment and protection of your brand when you've got obviously multiple small entrepreneurial pods if you like within the business but also when you're operating as a network for appointed representatives and advisors that are one-step removed but nevertheless carry the super important job of protecting your brand image in the marketplace. 

Peter Yeah, and I think, you know, we've always had a very, very clear culture of that. And I think that starts with how you bring people on board, whether that's advisors or firms. And the first thing I look at is, is there a culture fit? And then you look at, you see, there's got to be a business fit and then there's got to a real growth opportunity and et cetera. But the culture fit is really important to me. Everybody comes up to Derby and we want them to meet the team and see everybody in the team. And everybody can deal with that team, we don't just put a local business manager with them, they can speak to me at any point or any one of my team. So we are very personal. We want to deal with less businesses, be more involved with them to be able to help them better. And that's a very different approach to either acquiring to scale quickly or to build a network just to scale quickly with just short-term contracts, lower charges and open up to a whole wider variety of firms. We've done it in a very, very deliberate way and that's how we've kept the culture. When you see lenders come to our conference in the ICC in Birmingham, we've now got 1,500 people go there, it's the biggest conference of its type. And even the lenders go there and they go, that's the one conference we're definitely going to be at, because we can just see the difference in the people that we meet, and not just the productivity of the brokers, but the whole actually they are wanting to learn and they want to do better, and that's what we've tried to build here. You can have all the best technology in the world, but you're also, entrepreneurs are still the people that are going to take all these new tools and toys and turn them into something that is going to mean a fantastic business and a sustainable business model. So everything is still around people and that's the key for us. 

Victoria  And that conference, I was going to mention it, actually, you referenced it quickly in passing earlier, but for our listeners, you know, it's worth just saying, I mean, that's an annual conference, isn't it, where the idea is to bring together people around the industry, your customers, your advisors, in order to kind of generate this, this learning environment, this networking environment, but also an environment where people can just have fun and get to know each other as people. I was doing some research for the podcast and I was looking at your LinkedIn and the number of times you're tagged by people in your industry saying what an epic party it was at the MAB conference and so yeah just interested in in how that germinated, that idea of doing that conference and how it's grown and snowballed into what it is today? 

Peter I mean, a lot of people do conferences Victoria, but I guess the bigger you get, you've got to try and still keep that culture going. You know, I remember we had our first ever conference at Derby Football Club in a room for about 200 people, and then we had the party in a room above a pub, you know. But the party, and the enjoying, and you know, tap yourselves on the back for what a great year you've had and how well you've done in maybe an adverse situation over the last 12 months. So it's important to celebrate who you are and how we've done and what we're going to achieve. And that's a really important part for us. That social aspect is key. It is still about people wanting to be part of something. We all go through tough periods. We make mistakes, people don't leave us just because we've got something wrong. They trust us now, they know we're trying to do our best. You know, if we get something wrong they won't just go to somebody else, they'll stay with us and they'll give us another opportunity because we've earned that right because we take an interest in them. And I think that's so important in a culture, even when you've got people in an office, you know, people don't lead for more money, they tend to leave more because of working environment. And I think the working environment is so important. And it's got to be an entrepreneurial one. It's fast-paced, it's fast moving. Things are constantly changing, the decisions you make to create that roadmap could be changing tomorrow. So you have to keep looking at other opportunities, but again you have be far better at making those tough decisions and saying right, what are you going to stop doing to be able to do this? 

Victoria  Calculated risk test. 

Peter Calculated risk test and quick decision making. It's really important. Decision making in business is key. 

Victoria  Yeah absolutely. 

Peter And if you make the wrong decision, it's really important to make those mistakes quickly and learn and change direction quickly. And I've seen a lot of people don't do that. 

Victoria  And so we get to, we're coming towards the end of the podcast, Peter, but after, I mean, you've been running the business for over 25 years now. And I don't think anybody listening to this podcast is going to be in any doubt that you've still got a huge amount of enthusiasm and energy and drive for what you do. How do you switch off? Because you're clearly somebody who lives and breathes the business. But as I understand it, you spend a lot of time in your working life commuting up and down to Derby. You don't actually live in Derby, I don't know if you knew this, by the way. I come from Derby so I'm not a Rams fan, although many of the people I grew up with were. But you live in Surrey and that's a long way. How do you relax? How do you switch off? 

Peter I've been doing that journey for 25 years, every Monday morning at sort of four o'clock or so, I'm up and leave at 4.30 and I'm into Derby. But I don't know, I've just got into the routine, it's no more a struggle now than it was initially. I do that two or three days a week now. I stay up there, I live up there now. My sales director stays with me as well, so we're all sort of still working at night and putting the world to rights, etc. You've got to look at work at something like this, is something, what am I more passionate about apart from my family and my football club, obviously. But it's a passion. 

Victoria  Not the Rams? 

Peter Not the Rams, but definitely not no, Fulham's my team. But no, my business is everything and the people in it are just extraordinary. I love those people and I've made some incredible friends over all these years. So it is my family, in a way, the business is my family and it's not a hardship to get up early and put those hours in. I think a lot of people have their own versions of what relaxing is, and I've got my own version, right? And, I do switch off, but you know I think people looking on the outside will just go, this guy's a machine. But I find my own ways of relaxing. And it works for me. 

Victoria  And then when you look ahead to the future, just in a very quick way, what do you still get really excited about in terms of the runway for the company over the next five, ten years? 

Peter I sort of feel that the last 25 years has given us the platform to get to where we are today because the experience we've built up, the team we have, the experience we've built, the opportunity now of layering, getting our technology to where it should be after quite a painful process to get it to where is now and to layer that data and AI on top of that, the plan is so clear. I've strengthened the team further to understand where we need to be and the sort of expertise I need in my business to support me, to take me to the next level, and I've probably never been more excited because I can see how much more we can do and how much greater our reach can be.

Victoria  Fantastic enthusiasm there, Peter, and it's great to see after so long working for the business. So I have one final question for you, and it's a question that I've asked every guest on the podcast, and its obviously I talk to a lot of people who have been very, very successful in what they do. I'm always interested in, had your life taken a different direction, what would you say if I gave you the opportunity to exchange places with one person in any other career just for one day, who would that be and why? 

Peter That's an easy one. I think if it's for one day, there's no point taking on someone who's got a huge business or Prime Minister or whatever it might be because one day you're not going to achieve a lot. So to me, one day I've got to get a phenomenal level of fulfilment out of that one day. So to me being a Fulham fan, I want to score a goal at Fulam. I don't care who it is, it can be a defender, it could be a striker. I want a swap with them just for one day, just to feel what that feels like. The peak of success, of joy, of achievement, that that gives you in that one single moment with everybody going crazy around you. So to me, that's what I'll change for that one day. 

Victoria  Yeah, proper euphoria. 

Peter You don't always see that as a business owner, it takes time to sort of get that tap on the back. 

Victoria  Prolonged euphoria. 

Peter Yeah, prolonged euphoria, right. Absolutely. So this is absolutely, yeah, so that's to me, that's the answer to that. 

Victoria  Thank you so much, Peter, thank you so for joining me. And for our listeners and viewers, I really hope you enjoyed this episode. And if you did, we'd be really grateful if you can hit follow or subscribe on your usual podcast provider, Spotify, Apple, or whoever it may be. And as always, please remember that nothing in this podcast should be construed as investment advice or a solicitation to purchase securities in any company or investment product mentioned. We'll see you next time.