The Hidden Struggles of Grassroots Sports | Alex Fitchett

For many of us, grassroots sports are where it all begins. Whether it’s football, cricket, or rugby, local clubs shape communities, teach life skills, and bring people together. But there’s a serious problem—these clubs are folding at an alarming rate.

This week on MarketPulse: Pros and Pioneers, we sit down with Alex Fitchett, co-founder of PitchIn, to uncover the financial struggles that grassroots sports clubs face—and what can be done to save them. From the hidden costs of running a youth football team to the complexities of fundraising, Alex shares insights from his own experience in cricket and football, as well as how technology is helping clubs raise money more efficiently.

🚨 If you think youth sports are affordable, think again. Clubs are struggling with rising costs, committee politics, and outdated fundraising models, leaving volunteers overwhelmed. Alex reveals how PitchIn is solving these problems—and why he built the platform in the first place.

🔑 What you’ll learn in this episode:

• Why grassroots sports clubs are shutting down
• The hidden costs that most parents don’t see
• How tech can save local teams from financial collapse
• The challenges of marketing to volunteers and committee-run organisations
• How to successfully fundraise without constantly begging for donations

⚽ If you’re involved in grassroots sports—or just care about the future of local clubs—this is an episode you can’t afford to miss.

🎥 Watch the full episode here: https://www.youtube.com/@marketpulsepodcast?sub_confirmation=1

Show Links:

Find out more about PitchIn: https://www.pitchinplatform.com
Connect with Alex Fitchett: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexfitchett/

Powered by Javelin Content: www.javelincontent.com
Find Paul on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/paul-banks007

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Transcript

Paul: 0:29

Good afternoon and welcome to this week's episode of MarketPulse Pros and Pioneers. As we've mentioned, for season two we are delving deep into the stories of our guests, understanding what makes them tick and how that transitions into their why which quite a lot of the time is why we start the business or we're involved in the businesses that we work in. So this week I am privileged to welcome Alex Fitchett to the show. Alex, hi.

Alex: 0:55

Hi thanks for having me.

Paul: 0:56

Good to have you along. Good to have you along. Alex is co founder of Pitchin Platform. He's also a Director of Delivery at Bamboo Rose he's a lifelong sports enthusiast and Alex's journey began in grassroots sports, where he saw first hand the struggles of community clubs to sustain themselves financially. And that inspired him to create PitchIn, which is a platform that simplifies fundraising and supporter engagement for grassroots organisations. He's got a background in data analytics and BI, and Alex merges technology with community driven solutions. Ensuring that local sports clubs can thrive with less administration burden and more focus on the game. I have to say, Alex when we were connected together, this couldn't have come at a better time for me, in terms of the journey that I'm going through with my son, as we were talking before the episode started. Because my son is going through the grassroots system. And we've seen firsthand some of the challenges that you created PitchIn to solve. I think it's a fantastic initiative.

Alex: 1:54

Thanks.

Paul: 1:54

First up, could you just you mentioned that you're involved in grassroots at a young age. So do you want to walk us through what you were involved in and how that may be inspired you to start PitchIn what the things that you saw? Sure.

Alex: 2:06

Yeah, sure. Yeah like I said, from a very young age, so from the age of about four, I started playing cricket through my grandparents, and my grandad's massively into cricket, he's an outstanding cricketer himself and my great grandad was, and it's a family thing, comes all the way through. And so I didn't really have much choice, to be honest, at the start. So from the age of four, I was in the garden, he was throwing cricket balls at my shins telling me to use the bat rather than learning about how much it hurt, that kind of old school way of coaching someone how to play. And then I was always into football as well, so it was football during the winter, cricket during the summer. It's quite traditional in that sense. And we're all massive Derby County fans as well, so that was something that kind of run through as well. And then, yeah, I just went through the ranks of grassroots sport, mostly cricket, started playing kind of quick cricket with the old blue plastic bats that people might remember then under 11s hardball, then you, you work your way up basically into the, eventually into the adult teams, whether you're like 12, 13, that kind of thing, then playing 13 cricket and then before you know it, you're playing first team cricket with fully blown adults that are, 30 and twice the size of you, and it probably isn't as I'm not as hard as playing rugby with people that size, but the impact is probably the same. And yeah, when I was growing up the clubs themselves were a community focal point for us. It wasn't the game, it was just the game. It was there, we were there every day, we were there every night, we were there over the weekend, we were there during the winter, the summer, and you grow up. Kind of with these people surrounding you. So like the tea lady back in the day or the scorer, the umpires, the coaches. So it wasn't just reliance on like my granddad being there, for example. It was like, you grow up with these people and you still know them today. They're very close to you. So I know how vital it was that these kind of clubs stay around. It's not just transactional. And then as I progressed through you start taking on more and more responsibility at grassroots clubs. So as you become an adult, as you become, have a career that people can lean on. So if you've got a painter and decorator, suddenly they become the guy that everyone expects to do all the painting around the club. Mine was obviously, and we'll talk about the tech career on the side, but mine was so technology focused I took on a lot of the IT stuff and then eventually fundraising because no one else picked it up. And that kind of led to there must be better ways of doing this because this is ridiculous and it's taken me ages. And I could see why the last guy didn't want to do it anymore. That's basically where I got to.

Paul: 4:21

Yeah, you get to the point where you always feel like you've got your hand out to people.

Alex: 4:24

Yeah, you're always asking for

Paul: 4:25

but,

Alex: 4:26

Yeah, exactly. You're asking the same people for the same amount of money. You might as well just ask them at the start of the year for an extra 200 quid or something rather than engaging with anything else. And it's so manual and so heavy handed that it's, as soon as someone drops it and leaves, someone picking it up again, it's almost an impossible task. So yeah that's how PitchIn started which I can talk about. And then in terms of my background in tech, it's. Traditionally, I was never really into technology, really growing up, like I said, I was quite sporty, I was actually really into history, I went and did a history degree, I moved to Budapest to do a history degree, and study Eastern European economics, and it was just technology wasn't on my radar, really And then when I came back, I was working at, as we were discussing before, I was working at Asda on the shop floor, and I was sacking shelves, and I thought there's got to be something more out there for me to do with my time, something interesting that I can engage my brain in. And I applied for jobs at various startups, really, not really understanding what it really was. Landed really on my feet at a startup called Solutions for Retail Brands in Nottingham. Working with working on supply chain software for Walmart, Asda, and things like that. Loved it, and because it was a startup, I got to try loads of different things because I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do anyway. So I got to try a bit of marketing, dabble in a bit of finance, dabble in a bit of project management, a bit of account management travel the world as well, and really landed on my feet. And then. Worked out where my strengths lie and it was really a combination of projects and engagement management and data, really. And that's where I pursued the most over the following 10 years. I met Matt along the way, he was a co founder of Pitchin Platform as well. He also worked there, that's how we met.

Paul: 6:03

That kind of serendipity in the meeting. And do you know what, I think, had you not had that moment, and I laugh at it because it mirrors my own background to a certain extent, although I didn't get directly involved in the technology side, that's the industry I ended up in. Had you not made that leap, then you wouldn't have been in the position to be able to start PitchIn and do something yourself. And I think that's where a lot of founders go, struggle a little bit because they're either product people who are very good at the product, but not so much at the business operationalization or they're business people, but have no idea how to do the the technical side of things and the programming side of things and the design side. So it sounds like between you and your core fan, you've ticked both the boxes each, right? Like you've,

Alex: 6:52

we were so lucky really that so I see these, Sites all the time that try and match the founders and if you're non technical trying to match with the technical and vice versa and I get it because you do need both. Like I think trying to, if I was trying to build it by myself and I was having to outsource the coding and the tech, it would one, cost me a lot more money. It would two, be very difficult for me to translate a lot of my ideas across, I think. So I got really lucky in the fact that Matt is a grassroots sports enthusiast as well, like he's done it himself, he knows the problem, he's run clubs himself and also interestingly, not cricket, he's played cricket, but he's run like basketball clubs and has just a slightly different experience to bring to it as well. But because he understands the problem and he's that passionate about it, being able to join forces with someone that's a front end, back end developer. And then I do the rest is I don't know how I would have done it if I was able to try and find someone to do it or pay someone to do it. I think my enthusiasm would have not initially been as much as well if I didn't have a friend that was also my co founder. If I was like, it's transactional if I was trying to find someone and kind of search for them like it was a job almost. So yeah, we got really lucky both in, Kind of purpose and skill set. People do say you you got to think about founder fit. And I do think we smashed it on that front, to be honest. By fluke really, there is just luck. It's not any formula that you can copy, but we did smash it really.

Paul: 8:11

I wonder though so there must've been a point in time where you committed to build Pitchin and get it done. What was the turning point for you where you just thought, you know what, I have to get this started and it can't wait any longer.

Alex: 8:24

Yeah. There's two key moments really for that. One is so when we first started building Pitchin, it wasn't intentionally a business. It wasn't a, There was no idea of a co founder, really. It was like, I was struggling to do the 100 Club myself at my cricket club, and struggling to do sponsorship, and basically got in touch with Matt, who I played cricket with, and I know, really well, and I was like, can you must be able to build me something that makes my life easier. And that was what it was. He, we built this really rubbish I've got screenshots of it now, just in case they're quite interested to to look back on and it made my life a lot easier, allow people to buy a hundred club numbers and go through the transaction and only buy numbers that are available and save me hours. But as we were advertising it for my club, just on social media saying, does anyone want to buy a Hundred Club number? I was getting messages from other clubs saying, what's pitch in? We've not seen it. It looks really helpful. Can you put me in touch with them? And only really after a while did we think, oh, maybe it is useful to other people. There is actually a pain here that isn't being solved elsewhere. And so I gave it to those clubs for free. Like I just again, I was I don't know if I want it to be a business, like it's not really What I saw happening so the games were free, and they had it for free until two months ago, to be honest, those blobs. They were like the pilots, we had 10 pilots that I still lean on today to, every time we release a new feature, I go to them first and I give them first chance of feeding back and using it. And then the second key point was When we started taking it a bit more seriously, I then started talking to other people about it a lot more, including James Butcher, who's now in the business, is chair of Pitchin. And at that point we were like, okay, we're going to actually start taking this seriously as a business. We're going to formalize a lot of the stuff that we were already talking about, both legally but also financially, all this kind of stuff. And we basically stopped onboarding clubs and said since we're doing that, let's stop onboarding. I'm going to give Matt a few months to basically build a platform that is self service. It's scalable. Clubs can go on and do whatever they need. It isn't reliant on me copy pasting stuff like the other ones were. And that was the key turning point to where we basically decided. We're going to pursue it as an actual kind of venture, essentially. And then we launched in January to a waitlist, waitlist over the next four months. Launched in January to nearly 100 clubs. And that's really when it started taking off as a, yeah, this is what we want to do. This is actually helping, and it's a really purpose driven business.

Paul: 10:50

Yeah, building a waitlist. Daniel Priestley would be so proud. I can tell.

Alex: 10:54

Yeah,

Paul: 10:55

so for those, Who are watching along at home, who don't have kids involved in grassroots football or grassroots cricket or whatever sport. And I like, first of all, I have to say, I like the idea that you've built the platform to be sport agnostic. It's not for cricket kids. It's not for football kids. It's for sports clubs, whatever that might be.

Alex: 11:16

Yeah. It's interesting you say that because we've got a lot of rugby clubs, football clubs, small charities, scouts, we've got sea cadets on there. So anyone that relies on volunteers to do fundraising, basically. But it does make messaging difficult, which we'll probably move on to when it comes to marketing.

Paul: 11:31

So my son started in a club in June, July, and I just wanna bring it to life to people a little bit as to how much money actually these clubs need. And we signed him up to, to play regularly with a league team. And you'd pay subs of about 25 a month to cover referee fees, league games training time, all that sort of thing. It's not for profit, it just covers the costs of running the team. And so you've got about seven kids in a five a side team at that age, paying that 25 a month. But then they did a fundraising drive. And I was I'm I've got quite a big network, I'm quite a big fan of helping not for profits. I was like how much do we actually need? You're asking us to raise money, but what's the target? And they were like, as much as we can get. I was like because what are we going to buy with this? Cause I just thought, he needs a football shirt, which he's already got. He needs shorts, which he's already got. He needs a pair of socks, which we've bought him. What else does he need? We're like we need like a training top for when it starts to get chilly, so you have a long sleeve training top on okay, then you need a waterproof jacket for when it's raining and then you need tracksuit bottoms for the winter, and probably some waterproof trousers, you can buy those yourself okay, and then we need a winter coat, because it's gonna get really cold and you need something to get to the Games Inn before you strip off and you start training, okay? And we need probably some hats and maybe some like neck gaiters or something like that. And I was like this is, and this is all on top of buying football boots, shin pads, goalkeeper gloves, goalkeeper I'm like, I had no idea it was going to be this expensive per child. And there's hundreds of children just in that one club. There's probably four or five hundred registered youth at that club. And there are hundreds of these clubs across the UK, right?

Alex: 13:16

yeah, and to be honest, football is expensive, but it's probably one of the cheaper sports as well, because if you think whatever you spend on football, think about how much you spend on cricket, like a cricket bat nowadays is astronomical for a kid that's growing as well, but they're going to need one, supposedly every year, every two years. You're paying hundreds of pounds for just the bat, never mind the pads, the gloves, the kit. Then also the club kit that you were speaking about, which is similar for cricket. And then for clubs, to be honest, and that's for families and we, the PitchIn, the way we've built it for families does allow us that they can spread costs of subscriptions and all sorts over months because of that reason. Having also grown up thinking, subscriptions are a lot, not being able to buy new kit trying to help families. Play cricket or play whatever sport they're trying to do. But for clubs themselves for cricket as well, and this is where it overlaps a little bit with rugby because they tend to have a bigger home than football do, like the facilities management in cricket costs tens of thousands a year for clubs, whether it's nets or, and if you don't have nets then juniors won't join and any club will die that way, or or it's like lawnmowers or, cause the maintenance of the pitch is to a standard that football isn't.

Paul: 14:26

Yep.

Alex: 14:27

Sorry. is something that, yeah, no other sport really has to contend with, is that there's 40 hours a week of a groundsman putting effort into the pitch, using five different lawnmowers for different heights, and then they outfield, and then the boundary rope, if you've got a rope, costs loads of money. Or if you're like we've spent 30, 40 grand on a massive net on one side of the ground because they've built new houses on the other side. And it's apparently our responsibility to make sure they don't get hit by a ball even though the ground was there for 120 years before they were built. Like that kind of thing. It just becomes, and you can see why clubs fold, because it just becomes ridiculous when you're getting like 50, 000 to run a three or four person cricket club. let alone, yeah, rugby, football, it just gets crazy.

Paul: 15:12

This is why I like talking to owners of purpose driven businesses, right? So I, what I hear from you is that PitchIn, yes, it is built now as a business rather than a not for profit, but the purpose of the business is not to make profit, it's to drive. It's to survive, right? It's

Alex: 15:29

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Paul: 15:31

so it can be a business for good for all of those small clubs.

Alex: 15:37

Yeah, exactly. We were never trying to make money out of clubs necessarily. We take like a small transaction fee to keep the infrastructure going. But really our business model has always been reduce the amount for clubs and I'll get money elsewhere. Like whether it's utilizing the audience for some advertising or, and even then I don't want to put Google ads or affiliate marketing necessarily. It's more. I want to go to specific brands and say you are a cricket brand, you could offer discounts to this massive audience of kids and parents. Why not just sponsor the sites, the network that we've got? And that's where we want to get to, because you're right, we are purpose driven. We're not there to make money out of clubs, like a lot of the other team management apps can be.

Paul: 16:19

Did you feel it was Something that you guys had to build. I don't know, it was, you were struggling with the management side of things yourself. But like, why do you think it is that you decided that you needed to do something about it? Why specifically you? Cause everybody else just mourns about it and gets on with it. So what's the difference between the next person and you?

Alex: 16:39

Yeah, I guess it was fortuitous that the stars aligned with me and Matt and it would work well. I think the Having worked at a startup in the past. I knew that you can just build things, like it's not, it's not impossible, it's not beyond the realms of possibility to use technology to your advantage, that I think a lot of people see as a blocker. And I think I've, personally I've always had a bit more of a drive to build things, I'm a bit more of a builder, I like solutionizing things, like it is a problem sometimes when people don't want solutions, I'm trying to like think of solutions. And I've got loads of ideas about how I can help people out like day to day, using, whether it's technology, whether it's services, whatever it is. And so my mind naturally just went to, why am I doing all this manual work? When I'm emailing 200 people about 100 club numbers, and then 4 are sending back, can I have number 16? And then I'm like only one of you can have it. And then I go to the treasurer and see if who's paid. And one of them's paid 250 quid, because he also includes annual subs. I'm like, This is ridiculous. There must technology can solve all of this problem. And then I go searching for a solution and there isn't one, and I'm like yeah, I'm just not afraid to build it myself then, or get someone else that I know close to help me build it. I think it's just that. That, and also that I'm a naturally lazy person when it comes to that kind of thing. When it comes to admin, I'm always like, there must be. an easier solution to this. There's no reason why this is going to take me hours a week to run, when all someone's doing is buying a number. That's all they're doing. People buy lottery tickets. It doesn't take the national lottery hours to let people buy lottery tickets. Yeah, I don't know if that answers the question, but yeah, that's how I came about it, really.

Paul: 18:06

I think that's interesting though, because there's something about the skillset mix there that just made it where other people would see an obstacle there, you saw an opportunity. And I think that's the basis of a lot of businesses, whether they admit it or not, like that's the basis for a lot of businesses. It's about being in the right place at the right time with the right skillset and the right

Alex: 18:25

think so, yeah. There's a lot more look involved, I think, than people give it credit for. I think, obviously, this is hard work, there's skills you have to be the right person, but I think, The problem existing and me taking over fundraising at my club happened at the perfect time for me and the perfect time for Matt and everything aligned. And I have enough kind of contact in, it's almost like I've spent a lifetime building up contacts in cricket to help me build at least the initial versions and get the business off the ground. In a way that if I was just randomly, I'm going to, I'm going to start something, a business, and then I'm just, then I'm going to think about. Yeah. What problem is it solving? How am I going to get contacts? All this kind of stuff. Just, I just didn't come at it like that. It was just lucky that I didn't need to worry about that. There is a pain because it's my pain. I've got the contacts because I've spent, 30 years playing cricket across six different counties. And it just felt, yeah, like I'd spent my life building up to that, building that which, might sound stupid, but it just, that's what it just felt like for me.

Paul: 19:58

Yep. So then, you mentioned earlier on that you found that there was a struggle around messaging when there was multiple fundraisers in a small organisation. Do you want to walk us through that?

Alex: 20:10

Yeah. So one challenge, we have had some challenges with marketing, I think, fundamentally comes down to probably the fact that we're not marketing, understanding whether we're B2B or B2C, and we're actually neither, we're like B2Volunteer, and marketing to volunteers, a range of sports, a range of ages, has been really tough for a few different reasons, really. Educating people that have done the same thing for decades, that there is actually a potential solution out there. But people that aren't necessarily looking for the solution because they're quite technophobic, like they're not actively looking for the technical solution. So like getting them on board, making them understand that it's, it makes their life easier and that we're different to the other management apps that come at them and say we can manage your fixtures and availability and that we're only solely focused on raising the money and actually hitting the the revenue. The other thing that has always been a problem has been that unlike business, so if you're targeting businesses, you find a decision maker, either they have budget or their boss has budget, you can get a meeting and you get a decision because you know who's making the decision. These places they wait for committee meetings and committee meetings could be anywhere between, next month and three months time. They, everything's done by committee. Nothing, there's no, everything's there's no everything's centralized around the volunteers and everyone making a democratic decision. It's very rare. And we do get some clubs like this, I mean my club was like this, which is why I built it really where they basically give the reins to someone to go and fundraise however they see fit. A lot of the time it's now we're going to get committed and we're going to decide. And yeah, the messaging specifically was difficult for a couple of reasons. One is that, like you said, we're quite agnostic, which makes us, it sounds great, but when you're trying to build something at least vertically at the start, so that you can Built on a big product led, too agnostic. Like I said, it can help anyone that uses volunteers for fundraising. So we do get Sea Cadets and we do get scouts and we do get all these things where I'm like, we can help you and we do help you. But remember, it's built first and foremost for grassroots sport and specifically cricket, rugby and bubble, to be honest, initially. And that's difficult from a messaging point of view on the website and marketing. It's also difficult from a. Product point of view. So like Matt's very good at keeping us in check for is that really our kind of current focus when I'm coming back with like feedback from sea cadets? Is that really going to help the hundreds of creative clubs that we're getting on board? And the other one as well, actually finding the contacts is, Harder, I think, cause having worked in kind of businesses in the past where you can go on LinkedIn and search for a role, no one puts their volunteer roles on their LinkedIn. Not, I can't search for who's the fundraising manager at cricket clubs because people have put it on the LinkedIn. Some people do, but most people don't. I don't have it on mine, for example. So I'm at fault as well. So like finding those contacts is so hard to then market to. Luckily for like cricket, we've got playcricket, which is like a free site that every club pretty much uses. They've got 6, 000 clubs on there, but that doesn't mean they keep it up to date. It doesn't mean that they have the people on there with their email addresses and all that kind of stuff. And it's very manual. I have to go on and paste the email address and I'm not going to do that for 6, 000 clubs. So yeah, there's quite a few kind of stumbling blocks that we didn't really realize at the start that we learned as we went around marketing generally and messaging and our messaging on our website changes quite regularly based on feedback. Got it.

Paul: 23:22

It's certainly not a filter on LinkedIn, is it? Let's be honest. There are some, there's some great filters on LinkedIn. There's some terrible ones, but volunteer work is, and as you said, even if you are doing it, like I've got, so I used to be a volunteer police officer and I've got that proudly displayed on mine cause it does add a dimension to my experience. But were I running a football club? First of all, it's not for me. But No, I probably wouldn't put it on there. And I do know people that are involved in that. who don't have it on their

Alex: 23:49

especially the roles as well, because I'm not searching for anyone that's a volunteer at a Cricket Club either. I'm searching for someone that's either a treasurer or a fundraiser, or there's no point in me getting in touch with the second team captain a lot, because I am reliant on them passing it over to someone that's more relevant, and everything gets lost in translation at that point.

Paul: 24:09

It on your behalf, yeah,

Alex: 24:10

And selling. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So I, so we do a lot of and to mitigate that, I do a lot of phone calls and demos. I go on site to clubs a lot. So I do a lot of miles driving to clubs and joining committee meetings and trying to get firstly on board them clearly. But secondly, like I do a lot of note taking on what words are actually using as well, which helps the messaging, which we were talking about. So like the current message on the website is word by word. Basically got, when I went to a few clubs and said you describe to me what PitchIn Platform does for you. And then I just regurgitated their words, cause I'm like, that's What every other club is going to be looking for then. Because originally our words were, it sounds great, but raise more funds, spend less time doing it, was our original headline. And that's lovely, I think it rolls off the tongue great, but Dave at the Cricket Club isn't going to read it and go, that answers my question that they automate 100 clubs. It just doesn't. Whereas when I asked him what it does, he's it takes out the grunt work of the admin of this. And I'm like, it doesn't sound as exciting, but it clearly spells out what we do. So I do a lot of that, basically. It's backwards and forwards with clubs and talking to them a lot until we've really nailed it.

Paul: 25:10

I think that's fantastic cause you've applied the community spirit of grassroots sport to how you go about your business development and your marketing. I think that's I actually, I've spoke for a long time about the importance of marketing, Team members in SaaS businesses being at least either invited along to sales calls or watching playbacks of sales calls for the same reason. Like you need to know how the prospects and the leads and the customers themselves talk about your product. Because you can have all the

Alex: 25:44

Down to the words Yeah, like what words are they actually using when they describe you? You can't even rely on Google search for it, like what's, what they're searching, like what are they actually verbally saying? Or writing, like in an email, what are they actually using as the words? Cause no one searches Google for grunt work, takes the grunt work out, but that's just how they talk, like it, yeah. And I think, One thing that's always motivated us to do that kind of thing, and for me to get on so many calls, because I'm not necessarily in the previous businesses, I'll actively avoid a lot of meetings and stuff, because I'm not a big meeting person, but these ones are different, because these are volunteers, and if they can give up their time to grab a club, I'm sure I can give up 15 minutes of my time to show them a platform that's going to help them and help onboard them as well. I do a lot more hand holding of If we were truly trying to just make it a product led business from the beginning, Purely cause it, Yeah, selfishly, it makes us feel good as well. When we see a new club on there, they raise money just make us feel good,

Paul: 26:38

alex, I've really enjoyed the conversation this morning. When James first introduced us, I wasn't quite sure where the conversation was going to go, but we have so many shared experiences and ideas. I've really enjoyed our chat together. If the audience are listening along at home, they want to find out more about PitchIn, or they want to chat with you, maybe they know somebody who's the right person they can introduce you to, how can they get in touch?

Alex: 27:03

So we've got a website, PitchInplatform. com is the website. You can get in touch with me via there. You can find me at alexatPitchInplatform. com, which is quite nice and simple. You can find me on LinkedIn. There's not many Alex Fitchits on LinkedIn as well. It's quite nice to have a unique name in that sense. And yeah, you can contact me in any way. I think my mobile number's also on the website if they want to WhatsApp me as well. But that's the level I'm at the minute where I'm more than happy for clubs to ring me, WhatsApp me, email me, LinkedIn message me, whatever, and answer any questions they've got really. Yeah.

Paul: 27:34

Thank you very much for your time today, Alex. It's been a genuine pleasure.

Alex: 27:37

No, thank you. Thanks for having me on. Been great.

Paul: 27:40

And thank you for watching along at home or listening along if you're listening on the podcast. Please do, if you've enjoyed the start of season two, we've got lots of plans for some fascinating guests across the next year or so, please do review the podcast and leave us some stars, leave us some comments back. It means the world to us when you do but thank you very much for taking your time to, to listen to our episodes also. podcast, that's why we do it. Thank you very much and I'll see you again next week. Bye bye.