Hey everybody, Colin Morgan here and welcome back to another episode of The Daily Grind. Today we're sitting down with Nick Bradley, who's a world-renowned business growth and scale-up specialist who helps exceptional business leaders unlock their full potential. If you're a business owner, if you're in business, this episode is for you. Nick is amazing.
You guys are gonna love this episode with Nick Bradley. Hey everyone, just before we jump into today's episode, as you would have heard a couple of weeks ago on our last episode, I was doing a podcast course that I was giving away to 20 people for a discounted rate, which is gonna show you how to make money with your podcast. This is a super unique opportunity that I'm doing. And exciting news.
I'm actually turning this into an online course. So the online course is in the makes. If you want to get on the wait list to get the very first special rate of this online course, just visit my website and email me directly. That is ColinMorgan.biz.
C-O-L-I-N-M-O-R-G-A-N.biz. Really looking forward to seeing you on the inside. Well, welcome back to the show. As I mentioned, we're sitting down with Nick Bradley.
Not only is he a world-renowned business growth and scale-up specialist, he's the host of UK's number one business podcast called Scale Up Your Business. Has over a hundred thousand downloads. He's had amazing guests, a lot of them that I've had on as well. So you got to go check that out.
Nick also works in private equity investors across UK, US, Southeast Asia, leading business turnarounds, mergers, acquisitions, and scale-ups. Over the last decade, he has bought, built, and sold multiple businesses, creating significant value for himself and his shareholders. This includes enabling 22 business acquisitions, completing over $5.3 billion in deals across eight business sectors in 11 countries. Nick knows what he's doing.
If you share his knowledge, you have a pen, piece of paper, sit back and dive deep into today's interview with Nick Bradley. Enjoy. Well, Nick Bradley, welcome to The Daily Grind, my friend. How are you?
Hey, Colin. Really, really great to be here. Thanks for having me on the show. Of course, Nick.
We're all super excited. And for those kind of listening, not knowing who you are, being introduced to you for the first time, if you wouldn't mind just kind of sharing a little bit as to who Nick is and what it is that you do. Yeah, my thing, so to speak. Yeah, so the boring title, the boring title is Business Growth Expert, right?
But we can move away from that very quickly. No, I did 10 years working in private equity. And for people who don't know what that is, that's where you usually get sort of high net worth individuals. They put their money into funds and then, you know, we go and buy businesses, grow them, scale them, combine them with other businesses and then sell them usually to create a lot of wealth for both investors and for entrepreneurs.
So I did 10 years doing that. A massively fun ride. Very golden gecko from Wall Street-ish, which we can get into. But these days I've jumped ship a little bit.
I tend to work on the side of the entrepreneur. So I work with businesses that are already good businesses, but they need help. They need to be optimized. They need to grow quicker than what they're growing at the moment.
And usually with a founder, with a leader, if you like, who has the intention of selling that business for eight to nine figures over a specified period of time. So I help them build that up, navigate all the way through to doing the deal and then often celebrate with a bottle of champagne at the end. Very nice. What made you make that transition?
I'm curious. Yeah, I mean, the world of private equity, if anyone's ever seen Billions, you know, how Bobby Axelrod and all that sort of stuff. It's kind of like that, right? It's pretty much pretty sort of linear and ego driven.
You can make a lot of money, but at the same time you can sell your soul doing it. And I had a situation about five or six years ago where I was just running myself too much into the ground and living a life full of stress. And I had a moment where I literally cracked all the teeth in the right side of my jaw one evening just because we're closing a deal. And after that, after that moment, I decided I needed to do something else, which is a little bit more balanced.
So, yes, I went on my own journey to bring the skills of what I've been doing in private equity closer to entrepreneurs. Interesting. And how long were you in private equity for? Around about a decade.
I mean, I was in and out of it in different ways. I had a corporate career before I got into the investment, but I wasn't to be super clear. I wasn't like the finance sort of MBA dude who got a spreadsheet out. I was the guy that they put into businesses to do the turnaround.
So I would often be like, come in there, look at the current leadership team, sometimes go into the chief exec myself and effectively have to rebuild the business from the inside. Gotcha. So when you like crack your teeth on the right side, you kind of consciously made that decision. Like, I need to do something else.
What was like the first step that you was it kind of like a I'm quitting. I'm done right on the spot. Or did it kind of take time for you to get out of that role? Yeah, no, I mean, you know, it was actually building up.
So what was happening over time is I was getting more and more impatience and more and more frustrated with being in that environment. And the longer story, Colin, is like I was a bit of a sort of frustrated entrepreneur myself. I started my first business when I was 18. I sold it at 21.
I then decided to run in the total opposite direction of entrepreneurship and go work in the world of corporate. And I went to work for Rupert Murdoch in News International for years. And so I was kind of like this guy who was kind of living in this different world anyway. And anyway, so I started to kind of feel this sense of frustration.
And then what sort of happened? And this is this is the kind of interesting pivot, if you like. My body was starting to show physical signs of this stress. And I wasn't being present at home with my kids.
And I just wasn't a very nice person to be around. And so I had this situation where literally like being punched in the face. I got up in the morning. Jaw was swollen, went to the doctor.
All sorts of stuff was going on. The dentist eventually said she'd never seen anything like this other than another guy like me who was in private equity who was stressed. And anyway, what happened was I called up a mate of mine who retired pretty early. He sold his shares in Love Film, which was sold to Amazon Prime.
And I knew him from university. And he was always a bit weird. He was always the guy at university who we were out kind of hustling and pull holes and drinking beer. He just never came out.
And it wasn't because he was studying. He was planning. Right. And what he was really doing was doing personal development.
He was doing a whole heap of stuff with Tony Robbins and he was doing other stuff with John Demartini and he was working on himself. And I didn't know this. But after I had the teeth incident, I called him up and said, listen, man, you've always been really balanced. You've been successful.
You've made money. You've helped others. You've always been really balanced. What is it?
And he said, he said, get yourself to a Tony Robbins event. Right. And I was like, OK, what are you serious? Like, you know, I read the books, but this is going to be cheesy as hell.
Anyway, you know, egg on the face. I ended up going and doing it. And I realized that the path I was on wasn't what I wanted to do. I realized that I needed to get more balance back in myself personally.
And that's when I made the decision. But all of this happened within about two months of the teeth incident. And I came back from Tony Robbins, gave up what I was doing in private equity and then went off and started to do some other stuff. And when you started to do some stuff kind of on your own, you got out of private equity.
Was there like a gap there? How long in between? Like how long were you planning on kind of next steps for you? So I made the decision when I sat in the Tony Robbins event in Chicago.
So I live in the UK these days, but I flew to an event over in the US. And but what I didn't do, and there's a lot of people who kind of hear this, this terminology, burn the boat, right, which is the romantic ideal of like, I'm going to throw it all in and I'm going to have no plan B and all that. And I wasn't brave enough for that. Right.
I had, you know, after working in private equity for a number of years, you end up having big houses and nice cars and private schools. Right. So. So I thought I'm going to make the decision and then I'm going to have a very, very detailed plan of how I implement this decision.
So it took me just under 12 months to build a totally separate set of businesses, including the stuff I do with my personal brand, that allowed me to build enough income to supplement what I would have been earning through private equity. Wow. Looking back on that, like there's a lot of people who are looking to kind of make that You have to have a little bit of that in you in entrepreneurship. And I'm not promoting like stepping on someone's throat and like kind of throwing people off the side, but you have to have that hunger.
You have to have that drive, that inner drive. Don't you agree? Yeah. I mean, entrepreneurship is difficult.
I mean, it's difficult because of the level of uncertainty that is that is just, you know, to use a bit of a golfing term part of the course, right? You can't go into that world without expecting the highs and lows of the roller coaster. OK, so that's first and foremost. So what does that really mean?
Well, it means you've got to be resilient. You've got to have a certain degree of grit, confidence. You've got to be able to understand the context of fear, right, and uncertainty again. And so what I learned from private equity because it's not I don't want to come on here and say that private equity is bad.
It's not. I mean, it's a great ride. It's if anything, the best thing about it is there is no ambiguity about as to why you're there. You are there to increase value and make a return.
There's nothing else. Right. And that's also the pain of it. But to survive in that environment, you've got to have some edge.
You know, it's not a place for people to just to sit back and let things happen. You've got to be hungry, to your point. Yeah, makes sense. So let's shift gears now to kind of what you do.
So when someone asks like Nick, I mean, you kind of mentioned at the beginning, but what's kind of like the breakdown of what you do, what you help businesses with? Yeah, so as I mentioned beforehand, I still work with investors these days. I get brought in to focus mainly on turnarounds. So the private equity firm has a business, which has been this amount of money has been paid.
And all of a sudden it's not worth that anymore. It's kind of Nick, can you just come and kick the tires on this and actually rebuild the bloody thing? So I do that. But it's a very different relationship.
The majority of my time, though, is with entrepreneurs, business founders who have got businesses that have, as I said, they've grown to a certain level. They've had early success. And I often say that people who can start a business are not necessarily the same people who can scale a business. It's a very different point where the transition happens.
And a lot of it's about who you then become as a leader. And sometimes those founders, you know, they can't make the step. So you see that with the Google example with Larry and Sergey. And obviously, bringing people to do that for them, it's quite a common piece.
But before we go there, it's best to understand what needs to happen. So so what I do is I look at a business first and foremost through the lens of what a investor would look at. And there's six different things that I look at. And some of them you would have heard before, but it's the way that I try and look at it, which makes the difference.
And I assess the business through these six different lenses while I'm doing that. I'm also unpacking, if you like, what that founder is trying to achieve, because what happens and this is this is the common pitfall more often than not, it's not necessarily the business that can't do the marketing any better or its operation processes aren't working or it hasn't got the right financial gearing. That's not normally the problem. It's normally that founder has either lost passion for the business, has lost clarity of the vision of what they're trying to achieve with it.
Quite often, they're not talking to the market anymore. So they've got no idea how the market has changed. And then everything starts to become compounding on them. They start to become super stressed.
They show up as a poor leader then. And then what happens is like a house of cards. Once that important cog isn't working very well, the whole thing collapses. So even though I don't talk about it explicitly through the stuff I'm doing, because, you know, I talk about growth and scale up quite often, I focus on the mindset and I focus on the intention of the individual leading it.
And I work on them as much as I do the business. Interesting. And then when you're like diving into the business, like you've kind of worked on the entrepreneur, but then you're looking like internally at the business, how it operates. Are there some commonalities between where you see a lot of businesses making maybe similar mistakes?
Yeah, it's what happens with. And I'll go through the six lenses. The six pieces. I call it the six pieces of value creation, which is a very technical kind of private equity term.
But more often than not, businesses are sold on the ability to create value. And if I come in and I look at an information memorandum or I get someone pitching and I've had years of this, and I should probably say to everyone listening, I've sold three separate businesses through private equity. I was involved in a really big exit in 2017, which was in just over two billion dollars. So I've been both through the process of scale up and then to the exit.
So that whole point is quite interesting journey. Now, the lenses of this and to your question, not every single one of them is broken, but usually there are two or three of the six which aren't optimized. And that's what we're looking for. We're looking for that incremental improvement that when they all start to work together, it's like an engine that really sings, really hums along.
So the first one is purpose. And it's really understanding two things. It's understanding that the vision actually exists and the vision is clear. And aligned to that, there's a really, really clear plan to enable that vision.
So it's an A to B. Now, it sounds simplistic when I say this to you, right. Of course, everyone's got a vision and a plan. But you know what?
They might have it startup, but then they hit a plateau and guess what happens? They lose it. And instead of going back to the thing that got them the business successful in the first place or had it growing, they do the opposite. They dig in and they try and change things that don't need to be changed.
What they should do at that point is step up. That's the first thing purpose. Second thing I look at is the profit, the profitability. And there's two parts here.
One of them is very important in terms of where we are today, which is this landscape of uncertainty anyway, because of global pandemics. But the first thing is around cash runway. And there's a psychology that sits within each of these points, Colin. So the reason a cash runway is important is obvious.
If you're running on vapor, you're not going to have the strength up here that the character here to be able to step up and look at the business from a different perspective. So I advise people to have at least six months. Minimum is three months. And what's happened recently is, as I'm sure you would have seen, is a lot of people got caught, particularly smaller businesses, who have not weeks of cash.
And all of a sudden, that's where the problems have existed. So, so there's two parts of this. It's that cash runway and it's a relentless focus on profitability. So a guy that you might have had on your show called Mike McCallum.
I've had him on my podcast. He talks a lot about the profit piece. And that's very important. I think with his book profit first.
So I'm a very big advocate of that. Third area is, is the proposition. And this is not just a product or service. So if you've just got a product or service and you think that's going to get you to the panacea of a really strong exit, then that's, that's not the case.
You have to have an ecosystem. And that's a way that ladders and brings people into, into your business. And when I talk about proposition, I'm often talking about the product and service and the experience that your ideal customer gets when they come in. And what I find quite often, and this is the watch out is really good businesses have a very, very clear audience.
So sometimes called, you know, a single avatar or persona. You would have, you would have seen this businesses that don't have that tends to be generalists. And I'm now coining that the death of the generalists like that. There's no, there's no way that can work anymore.
Okay. So the proposition has to be about clearly identified problem that you can solve in that way. Then you get into the fourth area, which is, which is probably the one that I work on the most, which is what I call predictability. And this is the one as a private equity guy, you really want to see.
And that's a predictable flow of the right customers driving recurring revenue. So arguably it's your marketing and your sales processes, but it's a little bit more than that because the two keywords there are predictable and recurring. So you may know this, but businesses are only sold on two main metrics. One is recurring revenue and one is profit tech businesses that don't have a lot of profit because they're still building the machine.
They're bringing customers in can be sold on really large multiples of recurring revenue. So let's say, for example, you have a business, a technology business that's making 3 million in recurring revenue every year. You can sell that business for anywhere upwards of 30 million, 10 times as an absolute minimum. Along with a few other things.
So again, where's the problem here? Lots of businesses that I look at either haven't got the marketing or the sales component joined. So I've sort of thrown the term away marketing and sales, and I just talk about customer acquisition now to force the issue to bring these things together because both of those things have to be So I made the decision, as I said, you know, sitting in a chair in the United Center in Chicago, the house that Jordan built, so to speak. And that was cool because I'm a massive basketball freak.
So there was a bit of a kind of around that. And I planned, I planned, I planned. And then I launched the podcast. I was still working.
I was employed by a PE firm as a chief executive of a company. And I said to my wife, and she's like, you know, you really, you know, you're floating close to the wind here because you're out there doing all this personal brand stuff. And I said, the day that the chairman, effectively my boss, calls me in and says, you can't do the podcast anymore and you can't do all this stuff that you're doing is the day I quit. So I wasn't making any money per se deliberately.
I was just building profile. And then eventually that day happened. And on that day, literally that day, I said, we're done. That's it.
And then I jumped in, ready to go. And that's when I started to turn that more into a business from there. So that's a couple of years now. Wow.
That's a pretty cool story. To be able to do that. Some people question it and go, Oh yeah. But you know, how did you feel about your levels of integrity and all this?
Because, you know, listen, I was still running the business. I was working in. What I, what I, I'm very, I feel myself as being very fortunate because of what's happened with COVID, because I've got a lot of friends who've been in financial services for years and a lot of them have lost jobs in the last six months and they're calling me up now saying, Nick, what did you do three years ago? And I'm like, I kind of had a realization first and foremost that AI had to change things, but more importantly, I also realized that I needed to be more accountable for my own income.
And I did the work around that. And, and that's, that's the thing that I always justify. My most important thing is really making sure that I can provide for my family. And I knew that I had to make change for myself personally, but also just the way the world was changing.
I had good insight, I think, and certainly good intuition that things were going to change anyway. What would you suggest like in terms of income streams for an individual person? How many make sense for someone? Because, you know, we're sitting here in a time where if you do have one income stream, you got hurt and you may still be hurting and it sucks, right?
So like, what would you suggest be like the correct number as many as possible, I'm assuming, but like, is there kind of like one of my mentors says 27 and a very high network. I've got seven, soon to be eight. I've got seven companies actually. So, but, but, but from that, eight separate lines of income.
Um, and that's taken a little bit of time to build and some of them are quite diverse. Um, so we've got stuff in Amazon. We've got stuff in housing and real estate, some in shares and whatever. But I often say, you know, first and foremost, start with another one, start with another one.
Which is what I like. Start with another one. And then, and then do that because, because one of the things that, that, um, kills entrepreneurship and, and really holds people back is focus, followed very closely by consistency. And one of the things I find entrepreneurs have, and you'll see this is the shiny object.
They just want to do everything. So, so I, I've said this to a number of people, focus on one, get that working, work out if you can get that secondary income stream to pay for all of your outgoings. Sometimes I call this vertical and horizontal income. So I want that secondary income stream to almost be semi-passive.
I don't believe in fully passive, semi-passive. And then all of a sudden, if let's say your outgoings are five grand a month, let's say, if that secondary income can pay for that, then you've got choice and then you can either stay with your job or do something else or create a third income. But then you're not having to, you know, give your time for money, which is obviously one of the real watch outs for people. Yeah.
Great piece of advice. Nick, if people wanted to learn more about you, connect with you, follow along on your journey, what's the best, where's the best place people can go? Yeah, sure. Well, um, well, first and foremost, listen to the podcast.
Uh, if you've got a business and you're thinking, God, how do I scale that bloody thing? I'm in plateau land. Uh, scale up your business. You can get that on all the usual places, you know, Apple podcasts, Spotify, et cetera.
Uh, if people want to join my community, I've got the scale up your business community on Facebook, a free community, a few thousand people in that really great group of people. We're very, very strict on it, which I think is a powerful thing. You know, it's there for the community to help others. So definitely join that.
And the best place to get me if they want to message me and say, Hey, listen, what you said there was crazy and I'm my mind blown. Um, LinkedIn, you know, look up Nick Bradley on LinkedIn. Um, I try and respond to everyone as quickly as I can. I get a lot of people reaching out, but, um, that's definitely the best way to get in touch with me.
Awesome. Well, I'll share all that in the show notes section of the podcast to make it super simple for everyone listening. And Nick, I can't thank you enough for taking time out of your schedule, sharing your wisdom, dropping some knowledge. I really do appreciate it.
Hey, I'm very grateful for coming on the show. So thanks very much for having me. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. Hope you enjoyed it.
If you did hit that subscribe button, leave us a rating and review. We'll be back next week with another episode until then everyone, as always, keep grinding.