Mission leadership – Andrew Pooley from Torbridge Capital

After serving as an infantry reservist in Afghanistan, Andrew Pooley managed and grew businesses in the patient transport sector, culminating in a sale to a private equity-backed buyer following a successful turnaround. Now, as CEO and founder of Torbridge Capital, he invests in healthcare and learning and development businesses. 

In this episode, Andrew shares his career story and reveals how he has applied a ‘mission leadership’ model in the business world. He also discusses the highs and lows of selling a business, and what armed forces veterans can bring to the private sector.

Transcript

Mark:                    Today I am delighted that our guest is Andrew Pooley, CEO and founder of Torbridge Capital, which provides funding and support for growing businesses. I'm Mark Reeves from PKF Francis Clark, and I'll be your host. Don't forget to follow this podcast to get updates and notifications on when our latest episodes are available. Hi Andrew, how are you today?

Andrew:              Hi, Mark. Really good, thank you. Yeah, really good. Busy, busy as always, but very good.

Mark:                    It's always good to be busy. So let's start with that busyness at the moment. How would you describe Torbridge Capital?

Andrew:              I'd describe it as a vehicle for me to make investments in businesses I find interesting and sectors that I have experience in, and I see that are underserved and can ultimately generate value in the future.

Mark:                    And what do you do day to day?

Andrew:              So right now we're fairly early stage, so we are essentially starting up two main projects. One in healthcare, which is predominantly my background, and one in leadership and strategy development. And on top of that I made a number of smaller minority investments in other startups, which I'm active in various different ways because I like to play a role where I can, where I'm useful.

Mark:                    It's always a difficult judgment, that type of thing.

Andrew:              Yeah.

Mark:                    Well, you mentioned your healthcare background. Let's go back to that start. Much of what you've done comes from your early time as a reservist in the army in Afghanistan. What resonated about your time there that has driven you?

Andrew:              Ultimately, my time in the infantry as a reservist laid the foundations for a lot of what I've done in the last eight or nine years. I actually came down to the southwest and to go to university, and I've stayed here ever since. And after uni, I suppose lots of people, you didn't really know what I wanted to do as a career, but loved the army, loved like-minded people being outdoors and ultimately it's about teamwork. It's about people managing people, achieving an objective. And yeah, I really enjoyed it and I did that for a number of years in various different roles in full-time and semi full-time roles. Ultimately, yes, I went to Afghanistan on Herrick VIII in 2008, and one of my roles as an infantry soldier, as a rifleman was on the force protection team of the medical emergency response team. 

                                Now this is a helicopter, so it's essentially like an ambulance, right? It's got the aircrew and it's got a team of medics in the back and they would fly to a casualty, pick them up and return them back to a hospital or medical facility. And what they did was absolutely remarkable. And I was in the back with a team as force protection, they're not clinical at all, but would watch these men and women do absolutely remarkable things at 300 miles an hour, just a few feet above the ground, rocking and rolling. And I remember one particular time actually where there was a doctor and he was trying to save this guy's leg, so it was a really serious situation.

                                And we were absolutely full tilt back to the hospital and he looked at me, he said, "Andy, I need your help here." I thought, oh my god, okay, what's he going to need? I got stuck in and he said, "Hold this." And it was his sick bag and he actually got air sick. So he was doing this complicated surgery to save this guy's leg while turning to me and vomiting in a bag. And it was just the most remarkable thing ever. And at that point I thought that's something that you can really aim to be. To do something good in healthcare would be something remarkable to aim for. So when I got back, that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to get into healthcare and sort of emulate, at least at some level, what these men and women did out there.

Mark:                    Well, when you came back, I think you originally applied to be a paramedic, but then you joined Patient Transport Company as an operations manager, what was the thing that attracted you there rather than being a paramedic?

Andrew:              Well, I needed a job, ultimately. But I think yes, I got put in a holding pool for the paramedic vacancy and this job came up in patient transport. And I don't think anyone really thinks, "Oh, I'm going to be in patient transport when I leave school," do they? It's not something that's up there, but I started it and I was in charge with a relatively small team mobilizing a small fleet of ambulances for Plymouth Hospitals Trust at the time, and I really enjoyed it. It was again about managing people, your team, motivating them, make sure that the logistics work and managing people on the stakeholder side, so the clinicians or the operations managers in the health system, and of course the patients and whatever level of need they might be. Clearly there's some need because they're on an ambulance, but you never know quite what's going to happen day to day because things change so rapidly. And I just found it really interesting and I think I had a skill set that I could apply to that. And things really, really took off from there.

Mark:                    Well, probably one of your roles wasn't holding a vomit bag bag ongoing at that stage. Hopefully that was just a one-off for that moment.

Andrew:              That was definitely a unique experience. Yes.

Mark:                    You spent some time with the ERS, spent some time with some larger corporates, but you then came back into another business in the patient transport arena, First Care Ambulance, and then try to put First Care Ambulance in the ERS back together again. How did that deal arise? How did that opportunity arise?

Andrew:              It's a really interesting and fairly short journey, I suppose, because I started in 2013 working for, like I say, ERS Medical who were owned by Stericycle American Corporate at the time, and then moved around to several different larger corporates doing similar things in healthcare, that sort of mid-management level and learned a lot with no business background, learned a lot about managing a P&L, bidding for contracts and bidding for new work, managing customer relationships and all that sort of thing. And then the directors of First Care Ambulance approached me. Now, First Care Ambulance was a great little business in Exeter at the time. I had about nine ambulances and about 20 staff and John Fraser. He said, "Okay, I want to bid for the Devon contract."

                                And I said, "No." And he said, "I've heard through the grapevine you're a person speak to because you've managed it before and you know how it works and all this sort of thing." I said, "No, John, these kind of contracts are won by the big fish, right? The G-forces and so on who have big teams so you can throw resources at." And he said, "No, I want to do it. I want to go for it, and if you help me, you can come on board and help me run it as a director." And it seemed like an opportunity that was too good to miss. And I suppose the short story is we did win that contract. We did mobilize really well. We grew First Care pretty much overnight to a much larger regional organisation. And it was really successful and still is. It's still a great company. John's doing a fantastic job of managing it now.

                                And once we'd done that and we got over the chaos and the speed we had to run to do all that, we were looking at how to grow. And I suppose there's two main approaches, isn't there? You can follow an acquisition approach or you can grow purely organically or a little bit of both. And it just so happened that ERS or Stericycle that owned ERS, the company I started with originally was looking for a buyer to sell it on. And it had some real challenges. It was heavily loss making compliance wasn't where it should be, hence I suppose why they wanted to get out of that particular sector. And we looked at it and we thought if we applied the same model that we applied for first year and that had been so successful, just maybe we can take that on, turn it around, and then bring the two together. 

                                And so ultimately that's what we tried to do. We bought the trading assets, so that included about 800 staff, about 500 vehicles, no, 400 vehicles across, just over 20 sites across the country. So from Fife in Scotland, all the way down to Southampton and brought them into a new entity with new systems, new processes, whole shebang in a period of three months. And that was a really intense time, really intense restructured as well because we needed to reduce those losses fairly quickly, but it was still loss making. So we started off in that first year making a loss, I think about one and a half million. So the pressure was really on, the runway was relatively short to turn that around. And yeah, I suppose slightly naively, we had approached this and then reality struck and yeah, we had to really dig in and that was a real rollercoaster from there.

Mark:                    That is a hell of a trajectory to do. I know that you bring some of your military background into it, and could you explain to our listeners what mission command means and how that got applied into a business situation?

Andrew:              Yeah, sure. So clearly management wasn't functioning for various different reasons, otherwise it wouldn't have been in the way it was. And we needed a way of managing a relatively large workforce that's disparate across the country and not uniquely, but is very particular to healthcare is decisions must be made. Oh, I suppose a lot like the military decisions must be made on the ground because of that ever-changing nature of operations within healthcare, again, just like the military, a decision around a particular decision point can't go up to the centre because it'll take too long and the person in the centre won't know the answer anyway. So by the time it gets back down again, it'll be wrong. And then the outcomes can be very, very bad, ultimately someone's care that you are looking after. So, we needed a model that we could push out across the business that would allow us to not just manage daily operations, but also manage that turnaround, the significant change that we needed to implement quickly.

                                And to do that, we brought in a model called Mission Leadership, which is based on mission command, and that's the understanding of intent. So what does the organisation intend to do and how does that filter down through the organisation? So you've got that high level, the business intent, what do we want to achieve? What does the next person, so the CEO, intend to achieve? What does the ops director intend to achieve? And then so on and so on and so on. And how did each of those missions, as we'll call them, align behind the one above it so that everyone understands what they've got to do in the context of the overall intent, or mission, or vision, and the constraints and boundaries that they have to work within. And that allows you to push down responsibility to the lowest possible level. People can make decisions, understanding the freedom they have, but also the constraints they have, and hopefully the idea is that they make decisions that align with your overall objectives.

Mark:                    That's a really good description that I've seen it described effectively as alignment with purpose. As long as you're really clear on your purpose, then you can actually roll it down. And quite a lot of the problems you've seen in some businesses are because no one really knows what the purpose is.

Andrew:              Absolutely. And especially in the last couple of years since I've exited ERS and I've seen a number of different businesses, people do it in all sorts of different ways, and very often they have done it with best of intentions. They've gone through a workshop and created a vision and a purpose and missions, and they put it on a poster on the wall, sent out an email, and then it stops there. And what we wanted to do was to make sure that first of all, it's cascaded through the organisation and secondly, that people were absolutely held accountable to them. That's the really key bit. And then hold them to account, and we use that very much as carrot, but also stick as well, particularly in the early stages to make sure everyone was performing as they should.

Mark:                    Well, as part of that, and it's one of the key bugbears at the moment, is management and certainly directors getting divorced from front line and not understanding what a customer experiences. So you used to occasionally spend time on the front line. Why was that important to you?

Andrew:              Well, I think it's always important to understand how your business operates. And I think I had a fairly unique journey in that I did really start out as, like you say, a team leader operations manager role. And I was doing shifts on the ambulances in the first year or so. So it was good for me to go back to sites, talk to the teams, spend the day on an ambulance, because you go to a staff meeting or meet and greet as the CEO or the managing director and everyone freezes up and tells you what they want to hear, don't you? But trust me, when you spend six hours on an ambulance with them, they quickly open up and tell you what they think, which is great. That's what ultimately you want to hear and what you want to understand. And then it gives me, me as the CEO and the management team, that important context for decision-making.

Mark:                    Very much so. I think we've only recently as a society become properly aware of the important role of ambulances. I think it took the 14 ambulances queuing outside a hospital for people to actually wake up a little as to the critical role that they actually played. One thing you've also talked about is the value of data within the business, which again is a really current topic about the use of data and training of AIs. What sort of data were you tracking and why was it so important?

Andrew:              Yeah. So again, we were in a pretty unique position. The wider patient transport market is quite fragmented, lots of smaller companies. And then the ambulance trusts still did quite a lot, certainly in the early days, and we'd grown to a scale where we were collecting a lot of information, patient journey information to the point where we were doing about three quarters of a million patient journeys every year. So a lot of data, and this part became useful for us from a competitive point of view because we could establish those models really well and drive efficiencies from them. But particularly when COVID struck. 

                                So we were a couple or three years into our project by that point, when COVID hit and we were able to look at our information, we were able to essentially reverse engineer it and show how if you change certain parameters, for example, if you think back now to something people are trying to probably forget, but the restrictions on vehicles changed, the distance people could keep between each other, that would affect how many people on ambulance. Therefore, that would affect how many ambulances you needed. We could show really clearly what impact that would have and we could pass that information to the NHS and say, "Look, this is how it's going to impact it." This is how you need to forecast and all sorts of variables. And it was really interesting. So we essentially coded that up into a tool and then handed it out for free for the NHS to use. And yeah, I think it was really useful.

Mark:                    Well, that ties into one of the themes of this podcast is the positives that came out of that horrible time that pandemic, and we've seen various people see either positives in it or positives that have come out since such as the more flexible working, et cetera. What other positives did you see from the pandemic side?

Andrew:              I think there was much better communication between organisations think it still or certainly was very, very siloed. So you have private organisations have the public organisations and third sector in and so on, and no one really talked to each other and that had to change during COVID, people had to start coordinating. And I think that was a really positive change and we certainly saw that, and we saw that continue to a certain extent, not quite as much because people still draw back, don't they? But I think it was positive and it makes such a difference as well when people are talking.

Mark:                    Well, that siloing of data and little isolated silos over the country is probably the biggest current problem the NHS actually has and is trying to tackle with not a massive amount of success to date.

Andrew:              Yeah, I'd say it's right up there, I think. Yeah, you're right, they are. And it's a really tough problem to tackle.

Mark:                    I must admit, I wouldn't like to even think about how to tackle, but it's one that we've got to actually get through. Come back to that frontline role with the ambulance staff. Then you've got these staff who are doing an incredibly difficult job. You talked about mission earlier, but how did you actually motivate them? How did you keep them motivated, make sure that they stayed within the role?

Andrew:              Well, it comes back again to clear communication and we put a lot of focus on communicating. And as you remember, information was changing daily, sometimes hourly basis. So it's very confusing. And when there's confusion or a lack of information, that breeds fear. And it was a very fearful time, wasn't it? And that's lack could have had a very dramatic impact on operations if people decided not to come in and do their job. But also if you don't provide correct and timely information, other people fill that void so you have bad information or misinformation and that's an equally bad problem.

                                So we work really hard on that and we did an okay job. I think of course you can do better, but given the circumstances, I think we did okay. And I think again, one of the positive things certainly for ERS as an organisation was that we established a really good relationship with our customers during that period with the NHS as a whole and built a reputation. And then while we didn't benefit during that time, certainly when the market opened up again and procurement started up again, we were up there, our reputation for higher quality, good communication, transparency was at the forefront. And that really assisted us in commercial growth.

Mark:                    I can't believe we've covered so many current topics because communications is obviously one of the key issues, and misinformation and disinformation is one of the biggest society issue at that stage. So we're certainly going through all the issues here.

Andrew:              Probably always will be right there I guess in some form.

Mark:                    I think there is an issue with the old free speech argument is really good, but I don't think it was ever really designed for anonymous free speech. And I think until we learn lessons out of that, I think we will always struggle. Given your background, you've talked always about employing ex-armed services staff. What more can our listeners can they do to actually properly utilise that resource?

Andrew:              Yeah, I think veterans service leavers and the wider forces community, so that might be family members of service members, have a really great set of skills. No one does leadership manner management training like the forces do. No organisation puts people in situations so far out of their comfort zone like the forces do, and I think that builds skills in that population of people that aren't found elsewhere in the wider population. And I think that should be utilised, and we certainly try to do that. So we had a number of ex-service people in our business.

                                So my chief operating officer, Mark Hughes, ex-artillery, our quality and governance director is ex RAF, and a number of people throughout the organisation were in the forces or ex-forces in some form. So we try to formalize that by using the networks that are available, so aligning ourselves with the Armed Forces Covenant, the Employer Recognition Scheme, and we built ourselves up to the Gold Award, which I'd thoroughly recommend. It's not onerous. And actually what it does is assist you and guide you in writing policies that are friendly to that community and therefore helps you bring more of those people into the organisation. So I think it's a win-win.

Mark:                    That then brings us on to the deal you referred earlier to where there was a big merger, a big complicated merger with a private equity group. Do you want to talk about your plans that led up to that?

Andrew:              Yeah, so like I said, right at the beginning when we took over in 2018, we set out this very clear five-year plan. So the vision aligned with this mission leadership methodology. So that was our vision was to grow a profitable patient-focused ambulance business. And then we set really clear metrics underneath that, so what does that look like? So financial quality and people. And then we broke those down. So into annual missions, again with very clear metrics that fed into that mission very clearly. And then we broke those down for each individual member of the team. And remember, this is a management team of 60 to 70 people so that everyone knew exactly what they had to hit every month, it's every year, to achieve that five-year plan. Looking back, it was ridiculously over-ambitious.

Mark:                    Nothing wrong with that.

Andrew:              And the first two years did not work out as planned. My good friend and mentor, Jed Stone, who is actually ex-Royal Marines and guided us through this methodology, he would always put up a picture of a mountain, and there's ups and downs and you are heading to the top, but it's a rollercoaster. And that was very much what we experienced, so we went through some really challenging times. But ultimately, remarkably, he kept, or the team rather, kept their heads down and did achieve exactly what we planned in that five-year vision. And at that point we were coming out of COVID. Healthcare is a really interesting investment opportunity for funds, PE, and so we were getting lots of offers, and it was very clear that it was time to exit, to move on to hand over to someone else who would take the business on that next step. And also me personally, we'd gone from nothing and created real value from a business point of view. So all the indicators were that it was time to sell, but even that was not straightforward.

Mark:                    I understand it took a few times and you had few world events interfering. Talk us through it.

Andrew:              Yeah, indeed. So we put a business on the market in a very planned approach actually with Francis Clark, Matt and Andy and the team. And we had a really good offer, I really liked to buy. I think that's important. And we had a good offer and we were going through due diligence. It looked pretty nailed on, and then Russia invaded Ukraine. It was a European PE group, markets tanked and everything stopped. And it's like, "Oh my goodness," that was a stressful time. We then had another deal lined up and it was a UK private equity firm, again, very experienced in the sector and very good offer, really liked them. It looked like I would actually stay on in some way and assist. And then Liz Truss did her thing.

Mark:                    A very mild phrase, Liz Truss did her thing.

Andrew:              Yeah. And that caused some panic, didn't it, at the time. And everyone put everything on hold then, but we persisted as always. And yeah, we had another good buyer, a good offer, and we saw that one through. And in the end it was a trade backed private equity deal and merged with our closest competitor. So I wasn't needed the head of management team, which is really unique, and I think actually in hindsight, the best thing for me. And so we did the deal and then once it completed, I was out.

Mark:                    So what was it like dealing with the equity house? I think you dealt more with the equity house than the actual trade entity itself.

Andrew:              Yeah, so I suppose not very many people, it's business people, go into these deals with experience because, right? More often than not, you've grown a business over a period of time and then you settle and that's it, right? So it's a real eye-opener, isn't it? And you rely really heavily on advisors based on the accounting side, on the legal side. You try and pull in people who have been to it before as owners and have had an exit to get their experience, but you to a certain extent, just relying on working through it, aren't you? 

                                And I think it's really challenging because everyone obviously has competing ambitions and it does get stressful. I don't think there's anywhere around that really. But I think ultimately it's about at the end of each day taking a deep breath and looking at the numbers rather than getting emotional about it because it is, again, ultimately an emotional experience. And working with PEs particularly, they do do this, they endow. So they are very experienced. And again, I think that's where you have to fall back on advisors and say, "Okay, they're saying this, is this correct? What do I do? Or give me a range of options so that I can at least pick the best one for me." And I think I had good advice and I think we got through it.

Mark:                    I'd obviously talk about good advisors being essential in that, but I did like that phrase, "Take a breath." I think that is really important. You can get really caught up in a deal and everything feels like an avalanche pouring down the hill. Occasionally just stopping, deep breath, pause for a little while, nothing's going to happen if I don't do anything for an evening or an hour. And just really reminding yourself why you're there.

Andrew:              Absolutely. Remind yourself why you're there. Remind yourself of the bigger picture. What are you actually trying to achieve? Does that extra X percent really matter? If you're going to get a deal done and done within time, why are you doing it? Well, I don't know about other people, but for me it's family, it's security. That is the end goal. So are these changes relevant to that in any way? No? Okay. Carry on. Take a deep breath, carry on. So yeah, it was a very stressful time, but fascinating dealing with people. Again, dealing with people. It's all about people.

Mark:                    I often hear from management teams and clients that they didn't really enjoy the experience, they certainly wouldn't want to really do it again, but it achieved what it was meant to achieve. And I think that's the bearing that in mind gets you through the deal. So that brings us up to date with Torbridge itself. What sort of companies are you looking for? What do you bring to the party as Torbridge? Yeah.

Andrew:              Well, so the two projects that I wholly own, I suppose, the two startups that I'm working on at the moment, one is, like I said at the beginning, in healthcare. And we are working in domiciliary care projects, very similar actually to the patient transport market, fragmented lots of owner/manager. This is quite hard to make work at scale for the same reasons we've already talked about in that healthcare regulatory environment, which we know very, very well. And so we are essentially going again in that space. And what's really great, and I feel very privileged to be able to do is I can dictate I suppose the terms of that in some ways of the vision, if you like. So a personal interest of mine is applying emerging technologies, seeing how they can actually add value. There's lots of buzz around things like AI and virtual reality, but where does the real value lie?

                                And I personally think a lot of that value certainly at the moment is in enterprise applications. So improving efficiency, operational efficiency. And so we're trying to do that in the healthcare company itself by building an app to support frontline workers. And the second project is actually taking what we learned from that mission leadership methodology. And there's two parts to it. One is that we have built essentially the dashboard that we use to track it into a software as a service platform, which is useful in itself, useful for my other investments, and be able to track and then teach the methodology around that as a service as well. And again, applying AI to that. At first we thought it'd be really good if you didn't have to mess around with dashboards and dashboard builders and you could just ask in natural language to build a graph based on revenue, for example.

                                So we built that and that works really well. That's great. And then we were like, actually this is fascinating because what we found that we'd done was we'd actually structured relevant information for the target company naturally, which is a big problem when you've got lots of unstructured data. And not only had we structured the data, we'd added context. So as part of the process, every month the manager goes in and they write why they have that KPI or we've missed the KPI and what they're going to do about it. And all that information is chunked up and passed to a large language model through what's called retrieval augmented generation. And that is really interesting because what it's doing is allowing us to surface information with context from across a disparate business really quickly. And actually that is proving to be really powerful. So it's a really interesting project.

Mark:                    I can't believe we've ended on another current buzz topic in terms of AI data context and all that type of stuff. We've certainly covered an awful lot in the last half hour or so of your journey. I just want to end on one thing, on a slightly lighter note, which we mentioned earlier. So you got to the deal end with Ken Gorm. You've made that success after all that hard work after all those difficult times through there. What did you do to celebrate the deal?

Andrew:              You know what? It's so remarkably unexciting, it's probably funny. So I did have a bottle of champagne sat on my kitchen sideboard as it's probably most of these deals go. It took forever. And not just the period of a year and a half or whatever we spent getting it there, but that particular completion day. So I was still sat there at 2:00 in the morning with my bottle of champagne, which I'd managed to just brave enough to take the wire off the cork and then finally was done. And the elation and everything else was probably subdued by exhaustion. I went to bed. But yeah, we did go out for a nice meal afterwards later in the week.

Mark:                    I've seen enough of those where you end up in foreign cities at stupid times in the morning and everyone just eventually signs and goes, "Okay, fine, that's it. Let's just go to bed. We'll sort out everything else."

Andrew:              It's not quite as glamorous as in the movies.

Mark:                    I think we'll end on that note. So thank you, Andrew, for joining us today and for also sharing your fascinating story with our listeners. I hope they've enjoyed it as much as I've had. And I hope other people will be inspired by that story and brings some of that military thinking and logic to their business decisions. And thank you to our audience for listening to our latest episode of Business Noodles. We hope you've enjoyed the conversation. Don't forget to follow this podcast to get updates and notifications on when our latest episodes are available.