Ep 23: Dr Leo Evans: The Profound Journey of a UK Educational Entrepreneur

Dr. Leo Evans is an inspiration.

From his humble beginnings in Dorset to becoming a Forbes 30 under 30 honoree, Leo's tale is one of ambition fuelled by early financial challenges. His story unfolds from a scholarship at a prestigious UK boarding school to his innovative leap into founding "The Profs" with his brother.

We dig into what truly matters in life as Leo opens up about his massive career pivot, from the high-pressure trading floors of JP Morgan to the liberating journey of entrepreneurship. His candid reflections on the realization that wealth does not equate to happiness illuminate the deeper motivations that drive us. We uncover the wisdom of mentorship, the strength found in personal development, and the courage it takes to turn away from a lucrative career to forge a path that brings fulfillment beyond monetary gain.

Leo gives us an insider look at the inner workings of a successful startup. We delve into the transformative power of digital marketing but look at how to play nicely with the large global platforms.

Leo leaves us with profound insights into the value of calculated decision-making, the delicate balance between intuition and analysis, and how redefining success on your own terms can lead to life-changing outcomes. Don't miss this episode as Dr Leo shares his remarkable journey, offering priceless lessons for any aspiring entrepreneur or student looking to chart their own course.

You can connect with Dr Leo via LinkedIn and check out The Profs.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

If you're not in control of your own destiny, how can you have security and safety? And if you have money but are sick, have no freedom and or no one likes you, are you?

Speaker 2: 0:12

rich. Really Right, dr Leo, he is one very, very impressive individual. He's the co-founder and CEO of the Prost. He holds a PhD. He's an alumni of JP Morgan. He is a multi-award winning educationalist. Dr Leo is also a Forbes 30 under 30.

Speaker 1: 0:31

Someone once said to me boys look forward, never look sideways, and I kind of live my life by that a little bit as well. Comparing yourself to other people is a bit of a dangerous game.

Speaker 2: 0:41

You are genuinely changing people's lives, and I read that the Profs is all about helping students achieve life-changing success, and that is an incredible thing to not only be a part of but to lead. I would always, even a small business.

Speaker 1: 0:57

I have a deep respect for business owners. Whether it's the guy with the Turkish restaurant on my street corner over here, I have a deep respect for him. Hey everybody, it's Greg Sheehan. It's the guy with the.

Speaker 2: 1:04

Turkish restaurant on my street corner over here. I have a deep respect for him. Hey everybody, it's Greg Sheehan. Welcome to my podcast, where you will hear from a range of guests, including those from the startup world and those that have had incredibly interesting lives and some stories to tell. I would really appreciate it if you could hit the follow button and share this amongst your friends, but, as you know, time is limited, so let's get on with it and hear from our next guest.

Speaker 2: 1:30

My guest today is Dr Leo Evans. Now, Leo was introduced to me by a third party and I have to say, when I started doing a little bit of research on this guy, I thought how the hell did his parents keep him occupied as a child? He is one very, very impressive individual. He holds a PhD from the Imperial College Business School in London in financial economics. He's an alumni of JP Morgan. He is a multi-award winning educationalist and, most recently, is the co-founder and CEO of the Profs. Now just let me take you through a couple of awards that the Profs have won. The Profs won the Young Entrepreneur of the Year, the Tutoring Company of the Year, the Most Innovative SME at the Telegraph Awards. The Best Customer Service at the National Tutoring Awards. And finally, if it's not enough, Dr Leo is also a Forbes 30 under 30. Leo, welcome to the show. Good morning Greg.

Speaker 1: 2:26

Thank you so much for your very generous introduction. I see it through my own eyes and perhaps don't always see the wood through the tree, but thank you, it's very gracious, well received.

Speaker 2: 2:35

Well, you are certainly a very impressive individual and you're doing some really cool stuff that we will dig into. I would love to start, as I like to, with just your early origin story. So you know, how did you grow up? Were you always destined to study finance and economics and be an entrepreneur, like what were those earliest signs of who you ultimately became as an adult? I need to do some soul searching.

Speaker 1: 2:57

So, going right back, I'm from South England, from the countryside, a provincial region called Dorset, state or municipality, county as we call it called Dorset, and it's on the south coast. I'm from there originally because my grandparents were decommissioned there after World War II. There's a big army base there and my grandfather was in the Royal Signals. So they decommissioned there and it was a nice place. So they stayed and my family were from there in some sense. So they stayed and my family were from there in some sense.

Speaker 1: 3:23

I think growing up resources were a big function of my thinking financial resources. My parents were both ostensibly middle class people running small businesses. My mom had a shop, my dad had a car body repair business, but money was tight. They got caught up in the property crash of 87 in a bad way and it wiped them out effectively. So so you know, money was always quite tight.

Speaker 1: 3:48

I had a very nice upbringing. I'm very grateful to my parents. They're lovely people. Luckily they're both still with us, but I think that was a big motivator for me, and my mom in particular was very keen that she's very ambitious and very driven. She hadn't had said to be the most business success, not necessarily because of her fault but through sort of external factors with property and stuff, and that was a big motivator for me and that was the inspiration for finance. I think she was very keen. I went off and worked in the city and made money because she saw that as being route one to financial success and, I suppose, security right. Interestingly, as an entrepreneur, she didn't sort of lead me in that direction, which made it telling.

Speaker 1: 4:24

But, yeah, that's where the infrastructure finance came from. And then I went from there. So I was at school down in the Dorset. My parents made a lot of sacrifices, sent me with grandparents' support to a very prestigious boarding school in the south of England. But I got a scholarship an academic scholarship to study there, which meant that we could pay for it. I got a big discount on the fee and I was there as a boarder. So I lived at school for five years. Well, that was in my hometown and most of the kids there were either international or from London. It was a very international school in a very provincial place.

Speaker 2: 4:52

And I did that for five years.

Speaker 1: 4:58

And off the back of that I got the grades and went to Imperial to study physics, which I had been told was the softer way to get into the city. It was far less competitive on the university entrance side because it's much harder effectively than, say, economics or I don't know if we sort of had undergrads in straight finance, then we do now. But, um, you know, route one was kind of economics, the city in a london university or oxford and cambridge. No, the oxford nor cambridge wanted me. So I found a home at imperial college london which was super easy to get into.

Speaker 1: 5:21

They were starving for people to do physics, did that and you know they went on the journey into finance. Pretty much everyone who I studied with was either going into physics or finance. There's two very clear cut streams of people physicists who are, you know, have their work and people are just doing it as a stepping stone to the city. And pretty much all my mates were the same. So that's how we all got involved in banking and we supported each other and all ended up in various city jobs.

Speaker 2: 5:50

And when you talk about the city, that's a concept that we as sort of Antipodeans and as Kiwis and Aussies, et cetera, don't necessarily know what that means. When you're referencing the city, you mean in the financial markets. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1: 6:00

Yeah, exactly In the city. So the city of London is historically a one-square-mile area which is full of banks, although we have now two big financial districts. The historic one is called the City of London and yeah, so it's a short way of saying. Financial services, banking, money markets.

Speaker 2: 6:18

And a big driver for you was being able to do something, I guess, with its seeds in your upbringing, with your mum and dad, and losing everything, and therefore was that a big driver for you to go into the city, to get into the markets, to make a lot of money, to be a successful guy.

Speaker 1: 6:37

Yeah, just money, right, I suppose my mum had instilled in me that money equaled maybe not happiness security, right, and there was definitely a lack of financial security as a you know, in some sense growing up. Right, I didn't want, for, you know, we didn't, we didn't starve and we certainly didn't lack for anything. You know, my parents provided extremely well for me, but through a lot of personal sacrifice, right, and I think they were keen that I avoid that, perhaps. So it was just purely a monetary decision and, as I came to to learn with time, a very naive framework for thinking, right, I'm sure we'll get onto that in a minute, but yeah, that was the pure motivation to make some money quickly.

Speaker 2: 7:12

Exactly, and so you then sort of start doing, whether it was while you were studying or even after you had completed your PhD. You're doing some lecturing and you're learning about being an educator, and was that then a logical bridge into you, starting into the entrepreneurial world and starting your own businesses?

Speaker 1: 7:30

No, not at all. There's nothing logical in my backstory. I go from physics undergrad to latterly. I then did an internship in Bank of America. I then ended up doing a PhD in finance and working at JP and then becoming a lecturer and dropping out of all of that and starting the business. So to work through that or to pick through that so serendipity, I think, is how I ended up. You know, in one word, is how I ended up where I am right.

Speaker 1: 7:54

This was not a linear, not necessarily logical career path. In some sense maybe it certainly wasn't preordained, right? Someone once said to me to me, we never a friend of my business partners, good friend and most confident, he said to me you know, we never really know what we want to do, but by process of elimination we work out what we don't right, and I think I hold that very dear in some sense. I thought I wanted to work in the city and I thought I would make money quickly and I thought that would be optimal. In some very narrow sense I realized that that was completely suboptimal along a number of dimensions. So the PhD was a function of. I think I suffer broadly from a lack of discipline. Right, that might sound odd, but I do and perhaps I don't betray that to people who aren't extremely close to me. I know me personally, but I think there's a bit of a theme of that in my life and you know, as part of that, whilst all my friends were, we turned up on this physics degree, which was the hardest thing.

Speaker 1: 8:53

I've ever done and the thing I'm most proud of by a mile was getting my undergraduate degree, not the master's, not the PhD, not the 5,000 to one banking application job success right and application job success right that's how many people are applying for jobs. You know it wasn't all the awards, necessarily, and all the rest Like I'm extremely proud of a lot of these things, but the single hardest thing I ever did was undergrad and when I turned up at 18, I was determined to have fun right, and I turned up in a very adult, very serious place surrounded by basically London educated schoolchildren who were a very different breed from Southern English educated school children. We lived in the countryside in a big manor house and had a lot of fun in our teenage years. That was the focus of what we were, whereas they were driven, determined, had very professional parents, had been taught from a young age a more militant approach to academia and career success. So it turned out, it was quite determined to have fun and no one else was really in that mood. They were working extremely hard and past all the couple of years, whilst they were all getting internships and getting into banking and this was just before the financial crisis. So it was a very different economic reality for graduates back then. There was a huge amount of financial districts of London. The banks just hoovered up graduates left, right and centre to work in. The banks are expanding massively. You remember, obviously. So you know, the early 2000s into 2007, 2008.

Speaker 1: 10:10

And whilst all my friends are sort of being disciplined and getting jobs and doing all the right stuff and ticking all the boxes and getting work experience I was talking about. So it came to a head where, you know, I was so far behind in my degree and my grades were so poor I didn't stand a chance of any of that. Far behind in my degree and my grades were so poor I didn't stand a chance of any of that. So I had to sort of put all of that on hold, whilst I then spent a year correcting my degree, you know, working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to get the grades, to be able to even think about getting into the city. And during all of that I met a lovely lady in the business school through an optional course I was doing in finance and she took a shine to me, became my, became my PhD supervisor and said hey look, we got some funding. What are you doing next year? And I said, well, my grades suck, so I'm not going to get a job in the city. And she said, well, we got some funding. Why? Don't?

Speaker 1: 10:53

Sounds funny with the benefit of hindsight, but the Labour government at the time had decided that there weren't enough British investment bankers, so they had put funding into business schools to train British people to be investment bankers. This is a true story. Through these research studentships was the guys. So Gordon Brown's government, who was the Chancellor of Tony Blair's ostensibly centralist party government in the early 2000s decided to put some money into British graduates to become investment bankers.

Speaker 1: 11:18

So she offered me this funding, if I got the grades, to do a four-year studentship at the business school, which meant they would pay for my master's and then pay me to do a PhD, which was just bonkers, right, I mean, the master's alone was like 30, 40 grand and then they were paying me that to do a PhD. So I bit her hand off, obviously, and that delayed the whole thing. So then that gave me a new four-year runway to really think about my career, which was a safe, and I needed that kind of safe environment, I think, to grow up and to mature. I was, I think, also I suffered from a lack of maturity for lean like lotus, but who doesn't.

Speaker 2: 11:51

At that age, though, you know like who yeah.

Speaker 1: 11:54

But well, my friends, sadly they were like these were just people who were, you know, 18, 19, 20, were on it. They knew what they wanted. They were very, very successful people now in their domain and invested it right, but had that sort of determination, grit and just focus that I just didn't and I still don't to some extent have right, which is why they became successful investment bankers that you exactly need that skill and fast forward, obviously I then I got through the phd and that was tough for different reasons, but I got through it and I met some, met some people at JP Morgan who took me onto their desk. I worked for them for a couple of years and that's when it came to a head, when I realized that I just didn't have it in me to be, the way I put it, like an economic soldier, right. These people are extremely, a lot of very, very bright people in the city of London.

Speaker 1: 12:40

I have a huge amount of respect for many of my friends, but there is a degree of militantism. There's a degree of needing to be militant right to really survive in that environment and in some sense, to thrive in it. Right, just very, very disciplined, very focused, very sort of robotic in how you live your day-to-day life in and outside of the bank, and I just didn't have that in me, so I kind of crashed out after two years. I did well. I mean, I made vice president at JP in like a year, which was pretty good going, I think, by most standards. My team certainly thought so I could hack it.

Speaker 1: 13:13

I think certainly intellectually, and I could track it in terms of, you know, the people around me liked me and supported me, but it wasn't to me and it came to a head, ultimately, and I crashed out in 2013. This was by this point. I thought what am I going to do with my life? Right, and it's like I'd lined myself up for this whole thing since childhood, as you said. You know, I was going into banking and I'd got there. I'd done it much slower than other people through the path I took, in some sense, through my own deficiencies, but ultimately I caught up with them all. By the time I was 26, I was like 26. Yeah, by the time I was 26, I was actually in parliament everyone again, right, I'd done it a different way. They'd all gone in at 21 and they'd worked for five years and gritted their way through it.

Speaker 1: 13:53

I kind of pissed around to some extent. Obviously, that's. That's strong. But you know, I was doing a PhD, which was a much safer environment. I had much more freedom. I probably worked less certainly worked less hours but then ended up leapfrogging all of the kind of bullshit stage of being a junior in an investment bank, right, and because I'm easy eye to eye with my peers again.

Speaker 1: 14:11

But then, you know, I realized that perhaps all that phase and development I'd missed inside the bank was lacking right. I just didn't have it, I think. The way I put it to myself is I think I'm too creative and not disciplined enough for that lifestyle, fundamentally. And so then, what do you do with that right? What do you do? Say it's in the knowledge that you have ambition, you have a certain amount of determination, you're capable of hard work when you want to right, but you're not capable of it. Necessarily.

Speaker 1: 14:39

24, 7 or actually want that, or actually does money make you happy, was another big realization. You know it wasn't, in the grand scheme of things, wild numbers, but sure, for you know, your average joe, at 25, 26, I was earning significant sums of money, right, not the hyperbolic sums that people have in their heads. You know, I was an analyst. I wasn't kind of a wildly successful trader, so I was attached to a research function. I was attached to the bonds trading division, so I was still, you know, as a vice president in JP Morgan investment bank. You don't need good money, right, but that in itself, the way I looked at it would, every day being quite miserable in the bank was okay. I'm swapping life, and to some extent my sanity, for money. But that just strikes me as a really bad trade because I can't talk, I can't buy it back, right. So it didn't make sense to me. Beyond certain point I was like I don't, you know, I'm not even necessarily spending this money.

Speaker 1: 15:32

I'm learning and this is not what I want. I want my own thing. I want to have ownership. I don't want a boss was a big factor. I like my boss a lot. I have a deep amount of respect for him. I would love if he watched this.

Speaker 1: 15:44

I suspect a lot of what I'm saying will ring true in his ears. But I had a fantastic boss at jay from morgan. I have a deep amount of respect for him to this day, a mentor as well. A lot of what he said and a lot of the sort of casual advice and tips he gave me really stuck with me, like I live a lot of my life by some things he said actually. But you know, in discussions I had with him, I just wasn't happy, right, and I was looking for something else, and he sort of tried even to facilitate that. But when it all came to a head, I had to have a you know, a sort of frank conversation myself that this is just not for me.

Speaker 1: 16:13

I'm on the wrong path, right. I don't know what that path is, but I know I'm not just optimizing over money anymore or as I used to be. Right now I'm actually optimizing over liberty, health, who I am and how I perceive myself and the boss is the wrong word because I liked my boss and good bosses are great I didn't like the authoritarian infrastructure placed around me, right living, and with a degree of uncertainty and fear that I could be axed at any minute. How can you go and get you know if you're not in control of your own destiny? How can you have security and safety? And I think security and safety are quite important to me.

Speaker 1: 16:48

Actually, it's something else I optimize over, right, and that's weird when you think entrepreneurship. Really, if you're successful in entrepreneurship in the way I did it, you can actually free yourself of those constraints. Right, I think we'll probably talk about vc and investment and money in a little bit. Right, but I bootstrap my companies. We started with a small overdraft and a couple of desks in our bedroom right, and went from there.

Speaker 2: 17:07

So when I realized what I was optimizing over you know people say I want to be rich.

Speaker 1: 17:11

Fine, so did I. But wealth in its true form has multiple dimensions. It's not just money, right. There's health, liberty, the quality of the people around you. And you know, if you have money but are sick, have no freedom and or no one likes you, are you rich really right? Have you got money and are poor in a holistic sense? Right, and that's kind of how I came to frame these things.

Speaker 2: 17:38

And so, you know, looking at it and thinking about it, the only thing left for me to do was try my hand at business, I think here we are, and so when that decision came about and you were at a point where it's time to leave banking, was it quite a slow burn for you. That process of rethinking your whole reason for being is coming to no, you know, or was it a bit of a blow-up moment, and it was no, it was a blow-up moment.

Speaker 1: 18:06

It was a you know, a moment that you know that, one of those points in life where it just yeah, it all came to a head along a number of dimensions, but it was clear to me that that was not viable anymore. That path was a dead end. From this point on, I crashed out of banking, in not necessarily the best way and through not necessarily the best behaviors. But why are you behaving in this way? Right, because you're deeply unhappy. And so, yeah, when it all came to a head, what am I to do now? Right, it's not finance, or what is it, and I think you know, just being a bit of soul searching for a month or two. Am I going to go back and trying it back at times? Do I do finance in a different way? Maybe not a bank, maybe a smaller firm? You know, it's like working through my options. I was like now I want to do my own thing. Right, and how can I go about doing my own thing again? Complete serendipity, but whilst I've been at JP, my old supervisor, two very important mentors in my life.

Speaker 1: 19:01

One One was my PhD supervisor. She was, and I needed that at that age as kind of, in some sense, a young dumb man, I think, and I've always been quite precocious, right. So I needed kind of a I like the better word a more maternal figure to kind of help and guide me. She was obviously someone I respected, very intelligent, but I thought, for instance, when I got onto my PhD, I had like a superstar professor, right, you know, sort of big character, whatever.

Speaker 1: 19:30

I blew up with him as well, right, like it started off well, and then I realized I didn't like him and you know, he, I don't know, started trying to exert some weird sort of pressures on me and I told him to do one. Ultimately, I, you know, I just was like I don't need to take it from you, I didn't, you know, you're not my boss, sorry. So no, I'm not doing a bidding for you and no, I don't really care what you say. So I sought out who became my PhD supervisor, again along a completely different set of realizations and completely different optimization. It was like I thought that wanted big, bright, shiny name, big personality, could carry me. But when I realized that narcissists are all about themselves and they sell you that they're going to help you and don't, well, again that realization came really quickly.

Speaker 2: 20:11

It's like I'm not stupid, like actually I don't need that, or you what I need is this I need someone to help me develop, someone who listens to me, someone who helps me find out who I am not someone who tries to make me what they need right or to do to do that bidding.

Speaker 1: 20:22

So that again just working out pretty quick. And when you come to those realizations I think you have to move quite quick right. There's no point dwelling on it and umming and ahhing. When you get to a point where you're 95% certain of something, you've got to act right and in that sense, like these two people. So she was very kind of given to my development of who I am. And then lastly, shortly after, my boss at JP but again I was optimizing over, say, older people, more mature people. You know, although my PhD supervisor was sort of not an old lady, my boss at JP Morgan was a lot older and again that kind of age, wisdom, experience, someone I could look up to.

Speaker 1: 21:00

Whereas I found in my young career, particularly with kind of I was in my mid-20s, when I was dealing with men in, let's say, late 30s, early 40s, weird power dynamics came into play, right. It's something I'm keen to avoid now when I interact with my youngest staff, but, you know, people who weren't competing with me in some way right and was more optimal for my personal development, and so these mentors really helped shape me in that thinking ultimately and kind of working out who I wanted to be. But in very frank discussions with them, you know, say, well, I'm not, I can't do this, I'm not good at this right, and let's be honest about that. And getting that just honest and critical feedback from people in a in a in a constructive but caring way, right, no, look, you're not actually cut out for this right. You know I'm not. Yes, you're perfectly capable of doing it and we love having you around. But is this for you really right? And again, I could see in my own behavior, particularly in the bank, the way I was feeling, the way I was acting was completely suboptimal. I was, I was angry, I was not happy, I was taking it out to some extent on some of my family members and friends. I was that sort of passive aggressive. I hate passive aggressiveness. It's a bit of a trauma for me and you probably know what I'm talking about. Right, that sort of say what you mean and mean what you think right, and I can live with those terms. If people are kind of clear and direct and open and honest, that's fine.

Speaker 1: 22:19

But that sort of corporatism that I really can't deal with was really bringing out weird stuff in me, right, and was making me develop in a strange direction. You kind of bottle stuff up and you're not at liberty to say what you think. You can't be who you are. You're not given those kind of freedoms, right, and I couldn't be how I behave and who I am today inside a bank. It's not possible. I couldn't say what I say, and I'm not talking about outrageous stuff, but you're not welcome to have an opinion or a personality, right. In some extent you're not. Being individual is not welcomed in that kind of environment. Particular. You need to be more as part of the herd, right. You need to fall into line and do what you're told and if you like that and that you thrive in that environment, it's a fantastic way to go and it can be very lucrative. But for me it was just all wrong.

Speaker 2: 23:05

Thank you for sharing that because I think there will be a bunch of people listening who can relate to that directly, and maybe people who are much later in their career than when you discovered it. So hopefully it will give people some confidence to be honest with themselves, to be able to look at what it is they really want to do with their lives and what what brings them joy and gives them purpose and meaning. So you come out of the bank and do you immediately have have an idea for jumping in and doing a startup? What's the origin of that? So I think, knowing your weaknesses, is really important business.

Speaker 1: 23:37

That would be a message right. But I think being very clear on what you're good at and what's not is really helpful. But I think in terms of you know I was making this point right. So whilst I'd been doing this job in JP, my former supervisor who remains very close had invited me back to be a lecturer at the business school. I'd done a lot of teaching to pay my way through my PhD.

Speaker 1: 23:58

It was very lucrative actually, like I make quite a lot of money teaching ultimately in business school as a teacher assistant, as I well it was. It was good money. It was like I could either work in a bar or earn 10x working as a assistant teacher right like so and I had worked in a bar during my undergrad to pay for all of that extensively. So I went from bar to teaching assistant. As part of that. I did quite well and built up quite a lot of rapport with the I had on various courses and they take a note of that. And when I positioned him up, they offered me this visiting lectureship in the business class teaching master's students derivatives, basically credit and equity derivatives and obviously I had the name of JP Morgan and they liked that and I was an alumni and they knew me.

Speaker 1: 24:36

So they invited me back to this lecturing course, which I did for one year, and I loved, loved. I was moonlighting as a lecturer in evenings out of JP Morgan, which was a very busy time in my life, but you know, just put it in context.

Speaker 1: 24:46

Yeah, and that was wild. I was starting in the bank at seven, finishing at seven and giving evening lectures from seven to ten in a business school on the other side of London, right, and that was going on for about three or four months, literally just before it all came to head in the bank. And so I've been doing this lecturing gig. I'm really enjoying it and it was also very lucrative. I was earning as much doing that as I was, at least in terms of my salary at jp morgan, right like it was. It was good money lecturing in a business school, paid master's course in finance, so there was something in that as well. And when the banking job came to a head, they offered to extend my, my lectureship, but for a whole different set of reasons.

Speaker 1: 25:24

I moved to brazil. I was brazilian and, yeah, my wife was brazilian and she'd been a banker. And you know, at the same time as my banking career came to a head, hers came to a head. We were both bankers. None of us were happy, both not liking it, and so we decided to go 360 and said look at the time brazil was kind of booming and she'd been educated here because of me and spent years going through university and jobs in London with me. So I wanted to go back home and spend some time with the family, so I opted to go with them. So we went to live in Brazil and again, serendipity is part of that Quite quickly money started to get quite tight.

Speaker 1: 26:04

Six months a year in I was thinking, was thinking okay, we were thinking about doing something entrepreneurial or maybe like venture capital in brazil and kind of. But it takes a long time to get anything off the ground right and in the meantime you've got cash flow issues. So I started. My brother calls me up one day and he says to me I'm thinking about starting a business I was like, oh cool, you know, I'm kind of in the same place as myself.

Speaker 1: 26:21

And he was fresh out of college. Actually He'd been at the London School of Economics and he had been doing some side hustle gig, as they call it now. Back then they just called it a part-time job as a tutor and he sort of said, hey, I think there's something in this and I think I want to create a tutoring business. And I said sounds tutoring business? And I said so I was like good idea, let's talk it through, just as a brother and as a mentor, I suppose in the very early day. So we were kind of talking through it and he came around to me after a few discussions, said, can you do some tutoring for me? And I was like, okay, I'm in brazil. I was like he said, well, this guy, try that maybe. Hey, who is this guy? It's a future member of the royal family of one of the emirates. I was like, okay, how did you meet him? He said, oh well, I met him through another agency I was working with, but you know he's not very happy with them. He just wants to work with me and but I can't teach him the stuff he wants to learn in finance. You know it's university level finance, can you? And I'd never considered this as something to do at all. I was like to help him. Honestly, originally I was like, all right, I'll give it a go, why not? So through that interaction, so I realized there was something in this right that you could teach a distance online, that the realization that maybe the person you need to help you is actually a long way away. They might not be physically close to you and that might be optimal in some way.

Speaker 1: 27:39

And at the time, voip technology was kind of still in its infancy. Right, you didn't have WhatsApp back then. You didn't know if you did. It was very new. And you didn't have Zoom didn't exist back then right, we're going back this 2013 or certainly weren't commercially well known, right. I think Zoom was founded in 13 or 14, so you know, I started to sort of play with it and then realized you needed some more tools somewhere were available and started to think about digital writing, tablets and quality of intake. It made me laugh, actually, when you sent me the brief for this school. You sent all the things you need to do. You have no idea how many times we've sent that exact same document to people online. Two things, same things, right. Good audio video, light room, quiet environment, good headphones, not listening to the humming of your laptop plan on the audio, right.

Speaker 1: 28:26

So in that process we started to come quite close to talking about this and sort of formulating the idea of how this would work right. And then it went from there really, and it just went from strength to strength. As we sort of discussed, as we developed, as we brought on more people, we went from me and him tutoring, you know, a couple of his past clients into hiring a couple of my PhD mates who are floating around to work with some other people that they introduced Fast forward. Now I think we have 1,500 monthly active tutors on our books and we work with at last count, maybe I think we actually had through our system 13,000 students in the last 12 months. So there's now an infrastructure behind that and there's a lot of people involved.

Speaker 1: 29:04

But yeah, it all began of a call like this and based on the fact that I was living abroad and he needed some help with one of his clients to teach. So, yeah, I had to answer your question. I had not envisaged this lifestyle. It's not what I set out to do. I had never in my. You know, I liked the idea of business. I like the idea of having a tech enabled startup. All the cool kids are doing tech companies back then still are so, but you know, it was like the natural thing. But then when you're thinking about that I was like.

Speaker 1: 29:30

Well, I'd take ed tech makes as much sense as anything and if you think about it, you know I have quite a lot of educational baggage between us that might help down the line when people introduce you on podcasts, for instance. And so yeah, we, it was complete serendipity and there was no preordained plan and never set out to do it.

Speaker 1: 29:48

But I think that's how in my experience at least, I think like 90 plus percent of successful businesses, certainly unfunded businesses, start in that way right and so did the two of you decide okay, well, you know I'm going to do this and then you do that.

Speaker 2: 30:03

Do you want to be the ceo? I mean, did you have titles? Did you, did you?

Speaker 1: 30:07

get your bootstrap.

Speaker 2: 30:08

You know what was. What was that earliest kind of experience of setting up the company and getting going?

Speaker 1: 30:13

yeah, we only got the answer to that question about six months ago. It's an interesting power balance between brothers and, you know, going into business right. Naturally, and it's been a bit of a theme of our learning as brothers, we're extremely close, we love it, we love each other deeply. I'll premise it with that. But yeah, we've had our moments in business for sure, because obviously you bring family, basically we are with with family first, right, it's a very different relationship that you have with business partners that are all family, right. So yeah, I think, well, it wasn't like, say, we even thought about it like that. We didn't. We never really had a macro plan or some like top-down level. We're thinking we're now exactly doing that. We're going through that process.

Speaker 1: 30:49

Over the last 10, 16 months to a year of really starting to think top-down, we were just pure bottom-up, right. Well, how do we do this? How do we go from here to tomorrow? What are we doing the next day? A series of local optimizations without much of a global plan. If I'm brutally honest, it's only now that we're trying to superimpose onto that a global plan to try and present to the outside world. You know kind of how we've done it and the way we're doing it. But there wasn't any of that process, it was just entirely organic, you know, working through it.

Speaker 1: 31:15

In terms of the specialisms, we just naturally fell along our strengths. To some extent I enjoyed more the tech and taking responsibility for the growth and performance side of the business, whereas he was more into the people and the organization building and over time that naturally made sense that he'd be ceo and I'd be ceo in some sense. Right, and I still don't think and he might not think I'm a natural ceo. My talent, my background, perhaps just I'm more of a cfo, but my actual favorite part of the business by and large is products. I really enjoy building products and creating products, but until we get big enough where we can hire in external CEOs and CFOs and CMOs and stuff to take those reins. In reality, richard and I have done every single job at the company without fail. The only job I've never done is I've never taken directly phone call with clients and to some extent he's never directed the tech team. But apart, from that.

Speaker 1: 32:10

We've both done each and every single job in the company, I think on any given day lawyer, bank, you know, finance law, marketing, hr, sales done it with every single function and because one of the things that is widely talked about is that founding teams need to be like in terms of being the most backable founding teams.

Speaker 2: 32:25

they need to be really tight and obviously brothers, you know, siblings in general have probably got that, but you know so that you can avoid being stabbed in the back at Christmas when you're cutting. You know the Christmas turkey. How do you avoid conflict and not have business issues creep into the family?

Speaker 1: 32:45

yeah, I'd love to imagine that again we've achieved that successfully right. We haven't, like they have and they do and perhaps they will, we've got much better. It took, you know, there was a period of, I think, soul searching where we had to, you know, honestly and openly had to look at our relationship and look at some of the dysfunctions of it and a lot had built up over the years and some of the resentments and some of the you know, and it did come to a bit of a crescendo moment right where we just like look, are we gonna, is this right, are we going to continue on this path? And that set off a process of talking, communication, and it's a process of a healing process of partners, right and again I'm making it sound dramatic and also dramatic in real time.

Speaker 1: 33:25

But yeah, we've definitely had our moments and we've definitely had to work through this, but we are and we're capable of that and again, that, at the end of the day, is actually where the brother bit comes in, because you have to. There's something bigger at play, perhaps than the business or selfish interests, or even perhaps money or titles. You know, at the end of the day, you're family and you can't actually get out of that relationship. Partners can quit, you know, people can be fired, shareholders can be bought out. What do you do with a brother? Right, you're stuck with them.

Speaker 1: 33:54

And that's it, and I think that wins, the brother relationship at the end of the day wins and that's why, probably, we are, that's why we are still together, probably in some sense right, I don't know if, if but equally, if we hadn't been brothers, perhaps we wouldn't have had so much emotional binding to some of our business decisions, right, but at the end of the day we've we're in the best place we've ever been in, both of us over sort of the last six months a year in particular, and the business thrives under those conditions. Right, when we have strategic, it comes down to strategic disagreements. Right where someone thinks x and someone else thinks y, and particularly in a two founder business. We have other business and business interests between us, but particularly in our core principal business that we founded together, the brass, there was again, there wasn't a natural democracy in some sense and that's something else I think that is important for founding team is that there's a natural democracy.

Speaker 1: 34:45

Three people's a very good number to start a business, maybe even five, I don't know. All might work, but I think as long as you can have some natural democracy process and if that's straight up votes in terms of having an uneven number of founders, that's probably not a bad starting point, right?

Speaker 2: 35:00

so what did you do if you had the two of you, if the two of you, if it was just you and your brother and you didn't reach consensus on some issues, what did you do? You just fight. We got stuck.

Speaker 1: 35:11

We got stuck at that, but a bit like a marriage, right. I mean, it's the same in any relationship, any personal relationship, and you just you get to an injunction and you don't move forward. You just get stuck at that point and you keep banging your heads against that same point and then you know you get disinterested and or you start thinking about other things and you know you avoid conflict, say, rather than actually dealing with the matter. So you know it just gets out to what happened. We had to sit down around a table and pick through all of the you, of the things that we were or weren't happy about, and you have to try and get rid of historical injustice. You can't write the past If everyone just keeps going back on this thing. You said you can't move forward. So you have to also learn. And then I think it's good for your own personal and professional development to learn to just say that thing happened, I am sorry for the perceived or real injustice. So are you, but how do we move forward? Right, and one of the questions or one of the things you sent me in your sort of introduction pack, was it really just when thinking through some of those myself, I think the hardest thing I've ever done in business by a mile is that it's the conflict and resolution process with founders, and not just my brother's one.

Speaker 1: 36:22

I have several founders in a couple of companies now but you know, with all of the sort of founding and or board members of the companies that is, that is a really difficult thing. Right that when conflict arises and it will on a long enough time scale, and it will as the business gets bigger and scales and there's just more responsibility and more problems Like dealing with those, with people you kind of care about deeply and are an extension of your family, I consider my business partners. They are a form of family as far as I'm concerned. The nature of your interactions puts you again. I can't speak for all founders and many founders might think very differently from me and maybe I'm completely naive and got it all wrong. It's all possible.

Speaker 1: 37:00

But in my reality, in my business, in my world, free of external influence, I don't have to answer really to a master power. Some set of funds or VCs that kind of, you know, pull the strings. We don't have that. We have us. We do have shareholders and we are accountable to them. But when, like, 75% of your cap table is you and your close friends and your brother. You like, 75% of your cap table is you and your close friends and your brother. You are the ultimate responsibility and you answer to yourselves and, most importantly, you answer to each other. Right and when that gets difficult and heated, I think that is the hardest thing in business for me. I don't like conflict. I certainly don't like conflict with people. I like a lot and trust and respect, right, but it does occur and when it occurs it's not pleasant and respect right, but it does occur and when it occurs it's not pleasant.

Speaker 2: 37:44

That sense of control, of running your own business, a big driver in not taking venture capital.

Speaker 1: 37:50

Yeah again, push and miss, yes, definitely Equally. Vcs just I don't know, but we might not be very good at that game. My wife is a very successful fundraiser. She's got a fintech company out in Brazil, a very successful one. She.

Speaker 1: 38:05

I've watched her sat where I am right physically now go through that process over a number of years and aside from reaffirming a lot of my before the fact suspicions and beliefs about that, it's not something. A I was particularly interested in. B I don't know if we're we're more in education in in our world and perhaps in the way our revenues work, I think we're more aligned kind of strategic eye out some private equity and this kind of stuff. I just the horizons of ec money, the expectations of ec money and perhaps the nature of our business didn't obviously align for me right. And equally, when we talked to vcs, it would was always kind of going to be, on my terms, a little bit right, like yeah, and and perhaps the combination of that and we flirted with some we perhaps never had like a really concerted go at it, but equally we didn't need to. So when you're up against the wall and you don't have a gun to the back of your head and you're not running out of money. You can dabble, you can talk to people, and it's sensible for any founder to do so.

Speaker 1: 39:07

I spend a lot of time talking to interested or potentially interested financial parties and or education companies, whatever, right, you have to be thinking towards the long term existential future of the company, right, whether that's in your hands or someone else's, what would be optimal?

Speaker 1: 39:27

Obviously, if someone comes along and says I'll give you infinite money for zero strings attached, well, you'd be mad not to take it right. But equally, if it's marginal and or you can't make the math out in your head, so particularly expectations versus what you think you can or can't or are willing to deliver, well then you know it's not for you, right. And so, just in that process and talking to those people, nothing ever came up that was just obviously made sense, right, and all the while, all the while, we were just kind of working with what we had in the background and things were growing at a nice, a nice enough clip and we were progressing, a nice enough clip that we were fine with that ultimately. But yeah, no, we of course have got one eye on sort of you know, yes, I guess exit is the word in chandler land. Right, of course right, but when, why and on what terms?

Speaker 2: 40:08

well, all of that has to make sense, not just for us, for the business as well yeah, and so, to date, what would you say would be the toughest experience in building the profs? What's been the hardest moment for you?

Speaker 1: 40:20

it's definitely been a conflict. In a word, right. That for me, has been the lowest times, I think, and I think my founders might agree with that. I want to speak on their behalf. In terms of outside of that, we've had a couple of one.

Speaker 1: 40:36

That really stands out was our business is quite heavily in the extension of google, and this is probably the case of a lot of successful companies, which is that, yeah, I read somewhere I can't remember the exact number, so don't quote me but I think something like 70 of all dc money ends up back at google and facebook right, and that is through, of course, exactly that's back through google ads and facebook ads and what have you? So back through acquisition Ads and Facebook Ads and what have you? So back to acquisition right, and we, like every other business, sweat over CAC and LTV and addressable market, all this good stuff, and we can talk about that if you want to. But in the sense that we are an extension of Google and spending, you know, our entire company has been built up around basically getting people who go from typing a computer into doing exactly what we want, how we want, in an economic sense, which is consuming our product, meeting the downstream conversion funnel. But it all begins with people hitting the keyboard and that is their first interaction with our company. In most cases we're not big enough to have a brand and yet be a household name. I want to get there. But certainly in the early days we were just providing a service and that's how we found the need. In fact, the process almost ended before it got started.

Speaker 1: 41:48

After about a month of having these sort of cursory discussions with my brother, he said to me I'm going to pack it in, I'm not working. I've walked around London, I've flyered, I've called up all my contacts, I just can't get acquisition. I can't get enough people through the door to make this make sense. I can't see how to do it. I said, all right, well, listen. And this was the beginning of my involvement, actually not as a tutor, which was my first interaction, but actually in thinking about running the company with him. I said, well, you know, how should we think about that? You know, digital marketing, I suppose, makes sense, right? And he said, well, someone mentioned this thing called adwords to me. We could give it a go. I said, why not? So he. So he initially for you know, a weekend sat down. I sort of helped him build a website landing page and he sat down and built some ad campaigns and Monday morning I'm on the phone and called him. I'm Brazil, he's in London, he's got his office phone on his Ikea desk and he goes all campaign for accounting tutors.

Speaker 1: 42:40

So we sat at the Idleman and whilst he's sitting there, screen sharing by the way, I think the best invention of the 21st century is probably screen sharing. I think it's the most underrated invention of the 21st century. It is absolutely a game changer for business. So we're sitting there on screen share and Dan's at Arnhem and we're sitting there talking about this and I'm not what, and he's like hello. The process is like oh, look for an accounting tutor. Well, he just looks at me into the camera. You can see my expression. Of course, the people listening can't, if they are still listening at this point, but you know it was just like he was in absolute awe and disbelief. Right, puts the phone down and he's got a job to do. Right, we got a job to do. 17 minutes later, ring, ring, right, okay, there's something in this.

Speaker 1: 43:21

And we then spent the next five years just basically mining Google and other digital marketing channels to scale this business and that is how we did it. But as a function of that to answer your original point with that came the knowledge and awareness of our structural dependency on this thing, which has, in many senses, more power than a government act. I have, over the last few years, built up a wonderful relationship with Google. If you're listening, guys, thanks for all your help. But back then I didn't have it and through some unfortunate sequence of events largely outside of anyone's control, tell you, we had a WordPress website and a plugin was dodgy that some third-party agency developer had installed on the website innocently, no doubt, turns out this plugin was flawed in some way, been violated, and it was apparently redirecting our traffic onto some very dodgy websites. We had no idea and no way of even seeing this. So one day we just got blocked All of our councils. We were cancelled by Google is the right word and that five or six weeks was terrifying.

Speaker 1: 44:31

We suddenly like our client acquisition dropped 85% overnight and we had no idea why and they wouldn't tell us. And we were met with in trying to even speak to them, we were met with such hostility from their support staff, which I can understand from their point of view, because what the signals they were saying was that we were like really, really dodgy In the end. Through, again, personal network, I knew a person, knew a person who got me in contact with a girl, got me in contact with a guy and got me in contact indirectly with the Vice President of People Europe to have a look at this. And within a day or two they looked at it, they realized that it wasn't something you know unfortunate and they helped us work through it and we got out of it. But even he said I can count on one hand, how many people have ever got out of a situation like that?

Speaker 1: 45:20

Cloaking was what they called it. This is like the most severe violation of Google Ads policy. So, anyway, in that five or six weeks of running around morning, night and day working out while company was dying, it was bleeding to death, right, and it wasn't as light bleed, it was a heavy bleed, right, but it was bleeding out and sitting there having conversation, my brother, like in what order do we let people go right for a small business? We'd spend, by this point, three years just got out of that stage of, like, you know, we were surviving, we got out of the original survival stage and we're now looking like a small business, right? Uh, yeah, it was about three years into the journey. Just some things are sort of starting to make sense and so, yeah, I think that was the hardest moment and so in that I became clear to me how much you need to develop relationships with third-party suppliers and providers, right, and I think one thing I've learned from running a consumer-facing business is how to be a good client.

Speaker 1: 46:14

Most people think that, and most people are awful clients is the reality. Some are very good. But being a good customer is just as important in business as being a good purchaser right, being a good seller right. Sure, you can be happy and have a nice sales focused business and have good customer service, but being a good customer is really important and when you have big structural relationships on companies and their services, treat them well, be nice to them, make friends with them, have a point of contact, and so we spend a lot of time actually on that. Right, if you have a structure depends on google or facebook or stripe is another one. A lot of these companies not very willingly particularly at the size of most entrepreneurs, not very willingly give you a lot of customer support. But even if you've got a slightly unpleasant customer sales rep who's just trying to push some newest crap teacher on you, treat them well, be nice, because you never know when you might actually need them to come in and save your company right. And having been staff-rosist, I can tell you quite honestly.

Speaker 2: 47:13

You are helping a bunch of founders avoid the potential to bleed out through potentially no fault of their own. That's excellent advice. And what about from a really positive standpoint? Is there something and I appreciate your Britishness might get in the way of? From a really positive standpoint, is there something and I and I appreciate your britishness might get in the way of you talking well of yourself? But what's this? What's the thing that would be a real superpower of yours that you think has made a, you know, quite a palpable difference to the success of the business, whether that's you or your brother. What would that be?

Speaker 1: 47:39

it's definitely not humility, go for it. So I think, in the same way, you have to be aware of what you're not so good at and be true to that and let people know that. I think you also do, as you say, have to know what you are potentially distributionally very good at right. So there's absolute and there's relatives. I think good decision making and I think that's at the core of all business, I think I have quite a long track record. I like to think I have a long track record now of just weighing up options and not always getting it right, but never, you know, come from a statistics background.

Speaker 1: 48:21

We say ex post and ex ante. Ante, before the fact, there's a distribution of future outcomes. You don't know which is right ex post, but you can make good decisions ex ante. So you can always be right before the fact and often be wrong after the fact, and that's fine and that's a really important way of thinking right. Give you an example right, you can play the lottery. Is there good and bad numbers?

Speaker 1: 48:44

Take before the fact, because, because it's random, right, there's 14 million combinations. 49 million combinations yes, there is. There's much better numbers than others to pick before the fact. What are those. The sequence say you pick six numbers in the UK one, two, three, four, five, six is a perfect ex-ante decision. Everyone goes you're crazy why that will never come up. Well, number one it's just as likely to come up as any other combination of six numbers. Number two because everyone thinks that that will never come up, no one picks it. So if you win, you don't split the pot. That is an example of brilliant anti-decision making. Which X post is going to be wrong in 13,999,999 cases out of 14. But before the fact, you made a great decision right, and so I take that framework with me into life.

Speaker 1: 49:31

And I think if you make consistently good decisions, that scales well. There's always two factors to a decision. There's the probability of outcome and expected benefit or loss. Right the payoff right. And I come from a world of statistics and kind of derivatives, right, bond pricing, and I use that. I use a huge amount of statistics, I use a huge amount of finance theory in my day-to-day life, particularly thinking about probabilistic outcomes, thinking about distributions and that's what you're, anyone who?

Speaker 1: 50:00

works for me, that's embedded in the dna of our company is a very rigorous analytical approach to thinking. Why is that important? If you don't have good frameworks for thinking, you don't have a way of analyzing whether you were right or wrong before or after the fact. You always know after the fact whether you're right or wrong. Well, you, you typically have a better idea after the fact of whether you're right or wrong. Yes, you don't always have counterfactuals in life.

Speaker 1: 50:26

I know it's not always observable, but if you don't have a framework for rational decision making, then you can never have a way of working out why you are right or wrong. I don't care. Quite often and I say this to myself I don't care whether you are right or wrong. Ultimately, in a lot of cases, it's, of course, better to be right or wrong. Ultimately, in a lot of cases, it's, of course, better to be right than wrong. But I care that you've thought about it in a good way, because that's a far more powerful framework for building a way of making good decisions right, and then analyzing where you got it wrong and so I think it's repeatable.

Speaker 1: 50:59

It's nice, exactly, that's exactly it. Right, it's observable, it's repeatable. So a bit of scientific approach to your thinking and a lot of people yes, guts is the marginal decider on a decision. If you have to go left or right and you've analyzed it there's a 50 50 probability that the right door is on the left or the right and it's a equal. You know you win 100 if you go get it right and you lose 100 if you get it wrong.

Speaker 1: 51:27

Right, okay, well, you've analyzed it. You said it doesn't actually matter which one I pick, I'm just going to be right 50% of the time. Fine, great, just walk through it. And then if you say, all right, but my gut's telling me it's left, go for it right. Gut's a great marginal decider, but great marginal decider but is not a good framework for consistent decision making. You can't, just before you've done that analysis or really thought about it, you can't just say my gut tells me, therefore, it is, that's just. Also, hubris is a very bad and I think a lot of founders fall into that trap. Hubris is a very bad framework for decision making.

Speaker 2: 52:00

Yeah, I can see why that is such a superpower of yours, and I think it's Google that have the phrase in God we trust and everybody else brings data needs to bring data. I love that.

Speaker 1: 52:14

Yeah, and as I told the Google guys in the meeting at their office last week, we have a phrase at our company how do we please the gods at Google? Right, they are in some sense, our gods.

Speaker 2: 52:29

Startups are tough, right, right, they're super, super tough. How do you get inspired? Do you listen to? You know music? Do you? Do you have a podcast sort of you know collection you listen to? Do you read books you know? How do you get energy for going and doing what it is that you do?

Speaker 1: 52:44

yeah, the answer to all of that is no, I don't read books. There's a load in front. My wife has every single book about business in front of me, literally I'm staring at me right now. You can imagine I mean, I've got Peter, I've got zero to one. Right next to me I've got Steve Jobs. So no, none, none of that.

Speaker 1: 53:01

I don't read books. I read, I consume a huge amount of content. I'm very into current affairs. I often find myself going down Wikipedia rabbit holes. I watch a lot of documentary content. I'm very into sort of science and broadly I love astrophysics, for instance, as a side interest of mine. I like watch, consume a lot of content about.

Speaker 1: 53:21

I have a very deep interest in war and war history. You know I have a very nerdy side to me as well. I read a lot of finance literature, but I'm not interested in business books. I'm just not really interested in business people as a concept. I'm interested in business success stories. I find Google fascinating as a company, as an entity, and I have a deep respect for how they own information right.

Speaker 1: 53:44

I don't really care about the founders, if I'm honest. It's just not my framework for thinking. It's not other people's success. Perhaps I'm wrong in there and I fully accept that. It's just it doesn't. It's not how I get energy to do things by looking at other people's success. Someone said to me always look forward, never look sideways. Right, and I kind of live my life by that a little bit as well. Right, comparing yourself to other people, it's a bit of a dangerous game. Sure, the people with the formula to success you should listen to, but until I see it written down in a mathematical format, I'm skeptical because it's not repeatable and it's not empirical, right? So, yes, you can impart pearls of wisdom and that's very valuable, and I appreciate the irony of being on a podcast when I don't listen to a lot of podcasts. Right, I get it and, yes, I think there's a huge amount that we can gain from that, but I get a lot of that through osmosis, naturally, right, a lot of stuff gets sent to me a lot of babes, quotes. We learn a lot in the media about what people say, so I'm always interested in people. I've said and actually I having that.

Speaker 1: 54:44

I think people who are successful in business are some of the and probably are. That's why they're so wealthy, but it's one of the most impressive things. I would always even a small business. I have a deep respect for business owners. Whether it's the guy with the Turkish restaurant on my street corner over here, I have a deep respect for him really clever guy, really like him or whether it Elon Musk. But you know, at the end of the day, I always respect people in business and always respect people having a go, and I always give my time to people who ask me, who are trying to do all of that, because I have a deep respect for them.

Speaker 1: 55:16

Like fundamentally, in terms of like how I motivate myself. It's it's through the shared successes of my team generally, right, like it has its trials and tribulations, but when we do cool stuff, when we get good, yeah, so one that motivates my company quite a lot our trust pilot reviews. We've got a slack channel which is our trust pilot reviews coming in in real time. Right, there's a lot of very happy people. There are quite a lot of life-changing results there and taking pride, I think, in the fact that they don't know we exist. They have no idea am.

Speaker 1: 55:44

We've never made it a cult of self and perhaps, again, I've learned some of the things. Maybe we did wrong, but we never made the business an extension of our egos. We made a business and we've never been sort of big PR front men. I can see a lot of benefits of that, don't get me wrong, and I respect people who do it that way, but for us we're not necessarily, as you said, maybe our Britishness, we're not natural personality of cult front men, right, that's a bit more of an Americanism in my mind than a Britishism. Perhaps you know being massively stereotypical, but I think that we were quite conscious to not make the business an extension of our egos because, yeah, you know, business then lives or dies on your reputation, right, as opposed to its own brand and its own feet. So I like to see the businesses bigger than ourselves and within that, I like to see the businesses having its own successes and having helped all these people who have no idea who we are and will never know. But quietly, in these there was a couple of people, a team of people, who did some stuff that changed their life through a series of interactions that are chaotic but nonetheless occurred, right. So I mean, I literally I woke up this morning and just because warm, fuzzy, right. But what motivates me this? This is from emma I worked with keely, who's a fantastic tutor at the process, throughout the process of applying to master's programs, and it was a fantastic experience.

Speaker 1: 57:13

I highly recommend keely to anyone preparing to apply to any educational program or in need of tutoring. She's an expert at what she does. With her guidance, I was accepted into master's programs at both ucl and goldsmith, despite having an unconventional background compared to most applicants. I credit this to Keely's ability to generate insights in the academic counseling process. In her kind, sincere, friendly way, she guided me to clarify exactly what I wanted to study and why, and helped me to express this in a personal statement in a clear and heartfelt way, reframing years of seemingly unrelated work experience, education and life into a convincing case of why I should be admitted to these top programs.

Speaker 1: 57:47

It goes on and on and on. I mean that's less than a third of the review, right, but at the end of the day, well done, keely. But our hand is in that process. That person took the time out and that's an essay, the time out to write that because she's so happy and this is obviously a big. She's had that moment of like. I hope it works out great for her, but she's obviously had that moment of like. Shit, my stars have just changed right, and she will never know that our hand guided that, but it did and we do that thousands of times and that that motivates us, right? Yeah, we don't necessarily again see the wood through the trees all day, every day, and we don't.

Speaker 1: 58:20

You know, sometimes it takes conversations like this and talking to people who look at it externally, and happens quite often when people look and go, people often say and I don't see myself in this light, doesn't say, wow, you're so successful and I don't consider myself and I don't see it that way. But you know, sometimes you stick it back to say, okay, yes, on observable metrics we've had some successes, right, and that's what gets me up and keeps me going. Right, I want to do bigger things and I want something. You know, I'm not even nearly happy with what we've done and Richard, my brother, is not nearly happy with what we've done. You know, you're an entrepreneur. We want a 10x from here. But we do have to take stop every so often. And I say this Tim, if you'd gone back 10 years ago to that initial Skype conversation and said this is where you'll be, then we would have bitten your arm off for it, right? But now we're here. We are mildly dissatisfied.

Speaker 2: 59:11

It's super interesting to reflect on you in 50 years when you are breathing your last breath. I get a very strong sense that you're going to be able to kind of lift your arms in the air, if that's possible, with a huge yes. You know you are, without sounding too cheesy, you're changing. You are genuinely changing people's lives, and I read somewhere in preparing for this that the profs is all about helping students achieve life-changing success, and that is an incredible thing to not only be a part of but to lead. So I just want to take my hat off to you and your brother for what you've built.

Speaker 2: 59:52

I want to thank you for your time today, Leo. Like you have shared really openly, and you've also shared some insights and real wisdom for people to listen or that are listening, to learn from. I'll ensure that there are ways people can connect with both you and the profs in the show notes. I'll ensure that there are ways people can connect with both you and the profs in the show notes. But honestly, that was a real masterclass in so many different aspects of following your passion, doing things that make a genuine difference, not being afraid to make some tough choices in your career, to be doing what you should be doing, not what you think others think you should be doing. So I really want to thank you for your time today. Thank you, Greg, Absolute pleasure.