Identifying potential fraud – Oliver Crofton from Continual

Using AI to detect and prevent digital fraud is the latest business for our guest Oliver Crofton, a serial technology entrepreneur known for his ventures in cybersecurity and safeguarding businesses.

Oliver shares his journey for founding multiple successful businesses, often seeing the potential before it becomes mainstream (cybersecurity is just one example). He also discusses the challenges and triumphs of starting and growing these businesses, highlighting the importance of foresight and adaptability in the ever-evolving tech landscape.

Throughout the conversation, Oliver emphasises the need for innovation and resilience in the face of adversity, sharing valuable insights for aspiring entrepreneurs.

Note - Since recording this episode, Meysey has rebranded to Continual.

Transcript

Mark Greaves:

Today, we are talking to Oliver Crofton, a serial technology entrepreneur whose latest business is Meysey, which creates AI-powered fraud protection software for SMEs. I'm Mark Greaves 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, Oliver, how are you today?

Oliver Crofton:

I'm very well, thank you, Mark.

Mark Greaves:

I described you as a serial technology entrepreneur. Where did that entrepreneurial impetus come from? What led you to your first business?

Oliver Crofton:

That's a very good question. I've always been interested in companies and making a living on your own, really. I think I was inspired by my mum. I remember, as a kid, coming home from school, and she'd be doing some weird and wacky product that she was selling or some service she was offering. And I remember one day coming back, and our living room was full of houseplants, right to the rafters of the living room. And she'd managed to get hold of a truckload of houseplants and was flogging them to her friends and family. So I think, from an early stage, I saw what she did and that inspired me to realize that I could do that myself.

Mark Greaves:

Now, I'm feeling slightly old here at the moment because I'm going to try something in terms of that. That sounds like you had Del Boy for a mother at that moment, from the Only Fools and Horses series of, yes, we'll find something and we can sell it. But you're not the first. The most recent guests we've had on has been a consistent mother influence on, whether it's business or cookery or something like that. But then, your first business, which has got a brilliant name, Vigilante Bespoke, where did the idea come from for that? And what did Vigilante do?

Oliver Crofton:

Like all good businesses, it started on a barbecue in Brighton Beach, having a few beers with some friends. And we were joined by somebody who had just sold a cyber security business. And it was when cyber security wasn't really a thing. No one was really talking about it. And this was in, what? 2006. So I got talking to him, got on really well, and I saw his flash car and the trimmings that he had with selling a business. And I thought, "Hang on a minute." So I followed up with him, and we became good friends. And he thought he could do another cyber security company. And I knew nothing about cyber at the time, and I thought, "Hang on a minute. I can get involved in this, and I can sell this problem that I see growing." And so it started from there, and we built it out over the few years together.

Mark Greaves:

And what did Vigilante do?

Oliver Crofton:

Essentially, it was a secure cloud platform, but before the cloud existed. So we hosted secure email file sharing, made secure phone calls, et cetera. But it was before the things like Office 365 and Google Cloud came along. So we had our own data center in the UK, one in Los Angeles. And we were for high profile people and businesses that required additional levels of security to keep their data safe.

Mark Greaves:

Cyber was unknown, as you say then, that was really early. What gave you the belief that you could do that? You see someone else do it successfully to then set up something in the mid-2000s, especially technology. You mentioned Los Angeles. What gave you that belief?

Oliver Crofton:

I think seeing the news and seeing cases where data had been stolen. And I'm always a great believer in you want in an industry, in a business, that no one else is doing. I don't want to compete with others. I want to try and get into some greenfield so we can develop something on our own and lead the way. And it was because it was early, the problem was very young, but I could see how easy it was for criminals to make money. And where there's crime, there's money. And that drives the problem of cybersecurity and hackers to expand. And I could see that being a trend that wasn't going to go away. The genie was out of the bottle at that point. And I thought, "Well, let's try and help clients with a solution and grow it from there."

Mark Greaves:

That's pretty foresighted. Everyone, nowadays, cyber is just a known quantity, ransomware, et cetera. But if you're going back to the mid-2000s, everything was just positive. We're joining everybody up, what harm can come from everyone being able to email each other? And all that type of stuff. So you developed that business over a few years. And then you exited, you sold out to a lawyer firm. I imagine, the reference to the very nice car earlier, I imagine that was always the goal.

Oliver Crofton:

I think maybe a flippant remark, but I remember when we started Vigilante Bespoke, I had a nice car at the time, which I had to sell and get a cheap car because I couldn't afford to take a salary for three or four years. And was living with my girlfriend at the time that was subsidizing me. And when we sold to the law firm, it did give us a little bit of financial freedom. But, of course, I start businesses, so I immediately looked at what's next, and put it into the next thing. And you actually never end up getting yourself a nice car again, and I still don't have a nice car. But it certainly gave me a bit of freedom to think about, "Okay, what's next?"

Mark Greaves:

But you sold it to a law firm, and then you stayed around for a couple of years with the law firm afterwards. How was that transition, going from the founder, entrepreneur, boss, to an employee? Because I know many people look at that as, "Oh, I couldn't do that. I could not be the not boss anymore."

Oliver Crofton:

Yeah, so a law firm is particularly challenging for someone who is perhaps the naughty boy in the classroom, I think. I really enjoyed my time working with the law firm. It was their first time that they had purchased a business. They were one of the first law firms in the country to get an alternative business structure license, so they could offer services outside of just legal. And I really enjoyed the intellectual conversations that you have with lawyers, even just making a cup of coffee in the kitchen. They have an opinion on things, and it's normally quite well-informed and considered. And just the general level of work ethic in the organisation was brilliant to be exposed to. But, quite rightly, as you say, I don't know anybody really that can sell a business and stay on for a long term, especially if it's in a structured environment. I think when you do look to exit, you've got to be comfortable with what you're leaving with because the chances are you won't be there in 24 months' time.

Mark Greaves:

I suppose you're hinting there that sometimes the entrepreneurial journey can be a bit lonely. It can be somewhat difficult for those decisions. And having other people around to talk to on that level, actually, is a pressure valve, a way of coping with stuff, can help. But you didn't stay around for that long.

Oliver Crofton:

No, I didn't. And you're dead right, running a company is incredibly lonely. Even if you've got business partners, you on your own, and you want to protect your colleagues. I remember with Vigilante Bespoke, my business partner was also our investor. He put the money in. And so I didn't want to be completely transparent about how hard times were during the journey. And I remember, we had a cupboard of a office on Wardour Street that I managed to beg, borrow, and pay peppercorn rent for from a mate. So we had a brilliant location. But there was four of us in this office, and I could reach the back of the chair for the guy in front of me. But I remember, I used to walk to Waterloo Station to go home, and I remember walking across the bridge, in tears most nights because how hard it was. And how we weren't getting the traction number I thought we were going to get.

And you just have no one to confide in. Your colleagues are there, and you've got to put on a brave face. Your investors, you've got to shield them from some things because you want to be able to make them think that you're moving forward. And when you take a step back, you are moving forward, most of the time, but when you're in the granular detail, it can become overwhelming. And so being a part of that law firm, that really helped. But, as you say, I lasted two years, and then was on to the next thing.

Mark Greaves:

I think there's quite a few things then there. That's a really good illustration of how lonely that journey can be. But it also comes in terms of having the right advisors, having the right other half, et cetera, to take some of that pressure. But it all comes down to you at the end. Okay, you then went on to wrap another couple of businesses, which we'll quickly go through. You developed a business called Select. What was that business?

Oliver Crofton:

So that was with a business partner who managed to get a Mobile Virtual Network Operator Licence with Vodafone. So that's where you can use a major network and have a branded subnetwork on top of it. And we were working with a similar client base around high profile individuals. A lot of footballers were using us for their phone contracts, and celebrities. And it was a great business model because you've got a monthly recurring revenue. We had a very good customer service function so people weren't holding on the phone to get hold of their phone operators. And we had a great relationship at the time with BlackBerry, which was the main phone that everybody wanted, and all the footballers were on BlackBerry Messenger.

And so that was a good business, but we just overstretched ourselves. And my business partner was quite frivolous with money, and we got a box at Liverpool Football Club. And we got carried away and just ended up overspending, and I didn't have a grasp on it. And it was a good learning for me to know that, actually, when you go into business with somebody, it's important both of you have access to a bank account. And both of you have a shared sign-off on the expenditure, which we didn't. So it ended up being a bit of a fire sale at the end.

Mark Greaves:

That's lessons in life. I think the story of yours, as I go through it, is that learning those lessons, but then applying those lessons to further success as you go forward. Because you then went on to Flexy, I think, next.

Oliver Crofton:

Yes, I did, yeah. So Flexy was a bit of a tangent from cybersecurity and digital forensics. I remember walking around Winter Wonderland at the time, and looking at the stalls, and thinking, "How are they staffing this?" You've got a month or two months' worth of labor here that you've got to staff with hundreds, if not thousands, of people. And looking into it, and it struck me that the whole industry around temporary staffing was very analog. People were still submitting paper time sheets, making phone calls to book people in. And I thought, "This is crazy when, actually, technology can facilitate something much more streamlined." And it was the same time that Uber came out, which influenced and inspired so many other businesses around the Uber for this and Uber for that. But the ability to be able to see where your staff are during their shift, and be able to make sure they can check in, and that whole map technology that Uber became so famous for could be applied for temporary staffing. And that's why I started that business.

Mark Greaves:

Well, there's a nice phrase within there about a temporary work platform using psychometrics and nudge theory. What on earth is nudge theory?

Oliver Crofton:

Let me take a step back on why that became so important. Because when we were looking to develop Flexy, I spoke to some existing temporary staffing agencies. And I remember having a beer with somebody who owned a big staffing agency in the Ivy Club in London. Really nice club, nice environment. And he basically laughed at me. Because he said that technology can't organize people, and his team will call around everybody in the morning to make sure they turn up for a shift. And he was quite belittling. And at the time, I thought we might be able to do a joint venture or something together. But his comments about how it wouldn't work, inspired me to think about how I can actually turn that on its head. And so, thinking that it's difficult to motivate somebody to turn up for a shift on a rainy Tuesday morning in a transient workforce, how do you improve the chances of that person actually turning up for work? Boiling that down into actually using some psychometrics.

And I have a psychology degree, so I knew a little bit about motivation and how to use nudge theory, which I'll explain, just two seconds. How to use technology and messaging to promote and encourage somebody to do something was a big feature in our platform and, actually, separated us from the rest of the operators within the staffing world.

So nudge theory, in its simple format, is the prompting of messages and colours and graphics to motivate somebody to do things. And the government uses it all the time to get people to donate organs or blood and things like that, where you are opting out of certain things or you are being prompted to do them. And so we used that type of function within our platform to tailor the messaging, depending on the type of personality the worker was. So if they were extroverted, the shift reminder would be about them meeting new people, and how it's going to be a great experience. And if they were more introverted, the shift reminder would be more encouraging, like, "It's going to be raining. Don't forget to take a coat. They're a really friendly team." So just those slight nuances made us have a better attendance rate than a standard temporary agency would.

Mark Greaves:

That's pretty fast, I'll come back to your first business. So it's 2008, looking at cyber. 2015, starting to look at stuff which couldn't be more relevant nowadays, that bargain of trying to encourage staff back into the office. Because you can't just lay down the law, although some are now trying to lay down the law and say, "Oh, you've got to work in for five days." But quite a lot of employers are looking at that exact, "How do I encourage it? It's a two-way bargain. They're signed up to this, but I've got to make the working premises nice for them. I've got to make the journey attractive." That's quite far-sighted at that particular moment. And you spent a little... What, you spent slightly longer building that up, about four years?

Oliver Crofton:

Yes. In the scheme of things, still a short period of time for a business to evolve, but in technology world, it moves so quickly. And so we built that up over four years, became a national operator, had thousands of staff on it, and really made good headway. But, fundamentally, the economics behind staffing, especially in that temporary blue collar world, is really tight. You're working on thin margins, and you need scale. You really need scale to make it work well. One of our clients at the time was Blue Arrow, the high street temporary recruitment agency. And we actually ended up being acquired by their parent company called Impellam, who were a listed company, probably I think they were the fourth-largest staffing agency in the world. So they're a Goliath of a business. And they actually ended up acquiring us and rolling us out across several of their different brands.

Mark Greaves:

Obviously, a very different acquirer for you at that stage. If other people are looking at that type of deal, what lessons did you learn from dealing with such a large, massive organisation on the other side of the table?

Oliver Crofton:

The lessons around selling a business apply no matter who you're selling to, in some respects. The due diligence that we were put under by the law firm was as strict and thorough as it was with selling to a listed business. And in all cases, selling a business, it's very difficult not to get carried away and distracted by the sale of a business. You have to remain focused on growing the company, which is incredibly difficult, because you're thinking, "Well, do I want to make these investments? Do I want to expand into this area? Do I need to raise more money in the interim?" And it always takes longer than you think it will. It took us, both cases, over a year to sell the business. And that process is not just a formality and due diligence, it's actually getting to know each other and getting the parties to know each other. So I think the lessons learned is it takes a lot longer, and although it's incredibly difficult, you have to remain focused on growing your company.

Mark Greaves:

That type of destruction I have seen in numerous occasions, sometimes fatal to a deal, because you get too focused on what is the potentially exciting bit and talking about large numbers and all that type of stuff. You've got to make sure that there are no interruptions because it's so easy for the other side just to take advantage of it as a sudden dip. Okay, so we then go on to a couple more. You went on to Drift, which you founded just before the pandemic.

Oliver Crofton:

Yes, Drift, still love Drift. So my wife is from Scotland, and we bought a car, not a nice car, a two-year-old car. And her father said to me, "If you're driving up to Scotland, have you got breakdown cover?" And so I looked into breakdown cover, and I saw these offers. There was 99 pounds or 150 quid for the first year. And then they all shot up in price for the second year. And I thought to myself, "Well, I'm getting breakdown cover because my father-in-law is telling me, "Do I have breakdown cover?" Yet, the chances of my car breaking down, it's two years old, it's so slim. But if I don't have it, I don't want to be stuck at the side of the road with his daughter in the pouring rain. So I thought, "Well..." I reluctantly paid it, and then I got peppered with all the ads and stuff about being a member of a particular breakdown service. And I just thought, "There's a better way."

And I looked into it and actually, some of the operators use independent recovery operators, recovery family-owned businesses, to top up their network of vans. And the country is peppered with these brilliant breakdown providers or recovery providers. They're family-owned businesses that don't have any technology. They operate on a phone basis, or a very simple email basis to book a job in. And they'll work with some of the big operators, but they also work with a local community. And I thought, "Well, how do we centralize that into an app?" And, again, coming back to the Uber of examples, it was quite an obvious fix to be able to have a breakdown service that you have an app for, and you only pay when you break down. So you only pay 99 pounds for a tow home. So it was no frills, but only as you need. So people could save hundreds of pounds a year if they didn't actually break down. And even if it did break down, it would be cheaper than an annual renewal on one of the big boys. So that's how the idea came about.

Mark Greaves:

Obviously, the pandemic had a slight impact when no one was driving at all.

Oliver Crofton:

Yes. Well, take a step back before then. So we actually launched in the October, November before the pandemic. And in the February, March of the following year, we actually had the CEO of a similar business in the US over, looking to acquire us. And we went through a week-long due diligence process with them, working through a term sheet, which would've been multi-millions for what was a fairly, well, very early stage business. But we had a working network, where we were doing recovery, and they wanted to expand into Europe. And we had an app and we had clients signing up. So it was a quick fix for them to expand. And they're a big American business, dropping five million wouldn't have been a problem for them. And we thought, "This is fantastic. What a turnaround. This is, within six months, selling this company, fantastic."

But the CEO flew back to the US, and the following week, got on a call with him, and he said that there was a board meeting to discuss what COVID meant for them in the US, and whether they can go through with any expansion plans. And, sadly, an email the following week to say, "We're putting everything on hold." And then the UK goes into lockdown, nobody drives, it just killed the idea. And then, out the back of that, transport picked up, people started driving again. But, at which point, what we were spending 40 pounds to a recovery operator, suddenly became more money than we were charging our customers. And the economics just fell away and didn't work anymore.

Mark Greaves:

Timing in life is everything. I think there's always that luck and timing. You've got to keep on coming back. And you can't let it get you down. You've just got to acknowledge it sometimes. I come back to your mind, and I didn't know about your psychology degree, you obviously have a different way of looking at things. Because a couple of things you've said about wandering round Winter Wonderland, or conversations with your father-in-law and taking a look at the recovery industry. Do you have a mind that is trying always to analyze the operations of stuff?

Oliver Crofton:

That's a good question. I wouldn't classify myself as a particularly good operator. And I don't know whether I'm doing myself a disservice there. But, for me, a good operator is following a process, and working through a systematic approach to something. Whereas, I would classify myself more as ideas, and looking for the opportunities, and looking for the fixes. So, yeah, I guess I can't switch my mind off. And the businesses we're talking about today are probably 1% of the crazy ridiculous ideas that I have on a weekly basis. So I am always looking for solutions and where the problems might lie.

Mark Greaves:

It's that kind of solution, it's looking at operations, or whatever word you want to use in there. And just going, "Well, wait a minute, that could be done differently." Or there's an application of technology. I imagine lying awake at night occasionally, just letting the thought processes run. Okay, you went through another business, which comes back to the cyber side of things, but I want to come up to date with Meysey, which you co-founded after your exit from your previous one, late last year. Could you give us a layman's description of what Meysey does?

Oliver Crofton:

Sure. So throughout my career I have had either direct, or invested in, or been a non-exec director of cybersecurity and digital forensic businesses. And time and time again, I've been involved in investigations, where a small or mid-sized business has been done by digital fraud. So where somebody has faked an invoice, or fabricated reconciliation reports, or has embezzled money in some way from a company, and it's had devastating effects on that business. And, generally speaking, SMEs don't think about fraud until it's too late because they've got so many other things on their plate. So we developed Meysey on the basis that, within cloud accounting technology now, so within the likes of Xero, QuickBooks, and Sage, there's so much data there that can be analyzed that can give you the telltale signs of whether something is not right. And so we developed the software to analyze that data and identify anomalies where there could be potential instances of wrongdoing.

Mark Greaves:

And is that systematic fraud or one-off fraud? How does the system cope?

Oliver Crofton:

So it's both. So it can be where there's a request for payment from someone who's sent in a fake invoice, or a copycat invoice, as a one-off. Or there's an ongoing fraud that's happening in someone within the accounts team that's continuing to take money out of the business. Rarely does a fraud happen with an organisation that's been successful, rarely does it only ever happen once. Even by external fraudsters, they'll tend to want to dip back into the pot to get more money out, if they've been successful the first time. And fraud all comes down to how fast you find it. So even if you've been defrauded once, the vital part of the investigation, or any fraud protection, is to find it as quickly as possible, limit how expensive it's going to be in the long term.

Mark Greaves:

But you mentioned about AI earlier within this, is this potentially almost a race with AI trying to spot it, and then the opposite, AI trying to do stuff, which that AI wouldn't spot, and then it evolving? Isn't it a bit of an arms race between them?

Oliver Crofton:

It is, yeah. The toolkit now of a fraudster or a hacker is so much more advanced than it was five, 10 years ago. There's FraudGPT, for example, which is the fraudsters' version of ChatGPT. And that is a similar interface to ChatGPT, which enables fraudsters to actually just ask for a phishing email. And it'll give you a printout, or give you a statement on a phishing email that you copy and paste. And it gives you the shortcuts, in terms of how to dupe somebody into paying an invoice by actually creating that fake invoice for the fraudster. So just the tools around AI that fraudsters are using are so much more advanced. Gone are the days where you get an email with a spelling mistake and it looks completely dodgy. Today, the fraudsters are so advanced that creating a copycat business website will look as good, if not better, than your real suppliers. So, actually, finding fraud has never been harder.

Mark Greaves:

It's one of those where there's never been more need for cyber defense and spotting fakes. And we talk about deep fake technology, creating videos and all that type of stuff, but there's also the need for actually recovery after the event if you are breached. Then, actually, how do you recover from it? How do you make sure that it doesn't take the business down? How do you make sure the employees that have been successfully phished are coped with at that stage? And I think that's almost the next stage, in that you've got the arms race, but you've also got the, and what happens if we are breached at that stage? How do you cope in those circumstances?

Oliver Crofton:

So I've seen the aftermath of fraud. Invariably, it is devastating. It does take down businesses. I've had CEOs crying on my shoulder. Sadly, I've even been involved in a fraud where someone took their own life because of it. And it wasn't the victim, it was actually the perpetrator that was in the business, the finance director. So it has huge implications. And if you are a victim, or even if you are committing fraud, how strange for me to say this, but people commit fraud for all different reasons. It is an incredibly damaging thing to go through. And there is not enough thought given to what you need to do to build yourself back up again, and how to get yourself back on your feet.

Mark Greaves:

That is one of the big things I do see starting to happen is just so much focus on preventing it. Yes, that is excellent. But if someone is going to commit a fraud and bring all the resources to your SME, they're going to get through somehow. Therefore, you've got to give thought to the other side of that. You've raised finance, I think early this year, from QVentures, which is a slightly different way of funding things. How did you find that process? Because that's more business angel type stuff, formalized.

Oliver Crofton:

Yes, yes. So previous companies, I've either, well, funded myself, had friends and family. And in one instance, with Flexy, actually, one of our first customers invested in us as well to help us grow. But with Meysey, it was a case of we would do half the round with previous investors and friends. But, actually, we wanted to get a more institutional investor or a syndicate involved that was able to help us with the governance and scaling the business. And I think having QVentures as a partner, rather than just money, we benefit from having somebody on the board. There's two of us that have started the business. So having that third person just gives another perspective. Not that we need it necessarily, but it's there if we come to a deadlock, for whatever reason. So that's the thinking why we took on that type of investment.

Mark Greaves:

Having the third person in the room. We've talked about non-exec directors for quite a few of our previous podcast guests, and if you can find the right non-executive director. They're not there really to referee or that type of stuff. It is the ability to ask the stupid question. It's the ability just to bring a little bit of different perspective, as you said. We talked about AI generally. You've obviously seen AI upfront, and close and personal, shall we say. There's a lot of talk about it. How do you see AI really making a difference to businesses over the next... I'll say three years rather than five years, because no one can see five years ahead at the moment.

Oliver Crofton:

Well, no, they can't. I think we tend to, and the old adage goes with tech, we tend to overestimate the adoption within 12 months, and underestimate the adoption in 10 years. And I think that is where we will go with AI. I think being a... The ChatGPT example is the most common way people think about AI because it's something that they can use and mess around with. But short of creating homework, or checking the spelling of an email, or whatever, it's got limited functionality.

But where AI does come into its own, and we use it within our platform, is a digestion of large volumes of data. And it's being able to augment the software development process of a team to be able to streamline and speed up deployment of software, being able to run analytics on certain data sets at scale, and pick out trends and anomalies that you just wouldn't be able to do as a human. And I think that scale has a massive advantage, being able to find answers for things that would take the human mind, or a team of people, years and years, can be done and distilled into a simple program.

Mark Greaves:

You work with accountants at the moment, in terms of the accounting software, we mentioned Xero and that type of stuff. The thing you're just describing there, however, perhaps AI is coming to revolutionize the auditing side of things. If you're looking for trends, you're processing mass data, that, to me, describes an audit.

Oliver Crofton:

Absolutely, yes, it does. And I think the benefits around using it for specific tasks, like auditing or analyzing information at scale, is where we'll see the benefit. I think content creation and generative AI, whilst fun to mess around with, I think it has its limitations because it's being taught on stuff that's already been written down. It's not necessarily creating it. So you think you write a letter to somebody, you're probably crafting the words 100, 200 times in your mind before you actually put your fingers on a keyboard. But the software can only analyze what you put on the keyboard. You can't go on the journey that was in your head yet. I don't know, who knows what Sam Altman's going to do?

Mark Greaves:

Well, I thought the best phrase I heard, given the way certainly large language models have been trained, is that the output is the average of the internet. Because it takes all of that, it trains it, and you're getting the average back. And anyone who's done any sort of trawling through the internet would know that that average is perhaps somewhat skewed occasionally, shall we say, at that moment.

Well, thank you for your time. Coming to the end of it, end of the podcast at the moment, one thing I'd just end on is you also have a smallholding. Now, I have no idea, where on earth do you get the time to either run or enjoy a smallholding, given your life?

Oliver Crofton:

Yeah, that's a very good question. If you look at my veg garden right now, you'd think I don't. And probably the answer is, I don't. But a few years ago, we had our first child in London, and I wanted to move out and get some space. And my wife found somewhere in the Cotswolds, typical, it couldn't be more cliche, Mark. And she found somewhere and just said, "This is great." And I had to go along with it. But just coming back to your point earlier, I was looking at the angles on how could this property actually make money? And so we ended up, we've got a holiday let in one of the, well, two of the outbuildings. We converted a Dutch barn on site. Now, my parents moved in, so they scuppered my plan for making money out of that. And then used the fields for local farmers to keep cows on. We've just signed up to get some pigs for the wood. And so I think, working the angle to make it a commercially viable property, was the way I thought about it. But it's a lovely place to live as well.

Mark Greaves:

I like the phrase working the angles at that stage. I think that's a really good summary, potentially, of your career, in that you've looked at stuff. You've seen it slightly differently, and worked the angles to go, "Actually, there might be something we could make some money out of there." That's a really good way of looking at stuff sometimes.

So thank you so much for your time today, Oliver. Been really enjoyable seeing about your career, seeing about the highlights, seeing about discussing some of the lowlights as well within there. 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.