140 - The Lawyer’s Identity Trap

My guest today is none other than Liz Smith, a charismatic lady who is the Head of Talent at Bamboo Platform, which provides a centralised operational support to a group of legal businesses.

One of those is Carbon Law Partners, a consultancy law firm.

Through her work at Carbon, she helps lawyers step away from the structure they’ve always known and build something that gives them more freedom, control, and balance.

She knows that moving from a firm to self-employment is a big emotional shift, so her role is all about guidance, reassurance, and showing lawyers what’s really possible when they start to design work on their own terms.

She’s passionate about changing the narrative in law, proving that you can have both success and a life, and that you don’t have to sacrifice one for the other.

Before joining Carbon, Liz owned her own headhunting business for over 20 years. She understands both the ambition that drives lawyers and the fear that can hold them back.

What we're covering today is The Lawyer’s Identity Trap and how this often holds them back from creating a truly fulfilling career.

Here is a link to Liz on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lizziesmith/

About Dan:
Currently, Dan is seeking a London Law Firm turning over £3M or more to invest in, so if you are interested in receiving investment to grow or sell your law firm or know someone who might be, please contact Dan on: dan@danwarburton.com

Dan also provides law firm owners with skills that increase their profitability while reducing their workload. He can show you strategies that have grown his clients' revenues from 15% to over 300% while more than halving their workload in less than a year.

To find out more about Dan and his programs, click here: https://www.danwarburton.com/

Proudly edited with finesse by Mike at Making Digital Real ✨

Transcript

Welcome to the Law Firm Owners Podcast. My guest today is none other than Liz Smith, a charismatic lady who is the head of talent at Bamboo Platform, which provides a centralised operation, operational support to a group of legal businesses. One of those is Carbon Law Partners, a consultancy law firm. 

Through her work at Carbon, she helps lawyers step away from the structure they've always known and build something that gives them more freedom, control, and balance. She knows that moving from a firm to self-employment is a big emotional shift, so her role is all about guidance, reassurance, and showing lawyers what's really possible when they start to design work on their own terms. She's passionate about changing the narrative in law, providing you can have both success and a life, and that you don't have to sacrifice one for the other. 

Before joining Carbon, Liz owned her own headhunting business for over 20 years, so she understands both the ambition that drives lawyers and the fear that can hold them back. What we're covering today is the lawyer's identity trap and how this often holds them back from creating a truly fulfilling career. Liz, it's brilliant to have you here.

Oh, it's great to be here, Dan. It was just lovely to chat just before we went live to talk about the early days when we both met each other, and you reminded me how I was saying to you, Dan, I'm too scared to put a post out there. I don't know what to do, don't know what to say.

Yeah, I remember this. Yeah, yeah, you were just trying to post on LinkedIn, and you didn't know what to post, and then all of a sudden, you've started posting, and your posts just get amazing engagement because you seem to have this real deep understanding of lawyers on a psychological level. I mean, I have, but the angle that you've got and how you're able to write about it has been so moving for so many readers of your content that you've ended up becoming known as one of the real voices in the legal space in the UK through LinkedIn now, which is amazing. 

I'd love to hear from you. What is this identity trap that you've seen that lawyers sort of get stuck in? Well, it's quite a deep area. Yeah, well, we're here to go deep. 

One that often sort of isn't explored, and it's multifaceted. I suppose, really, it's easier for me to talk about what I see because I talk to lots of lawyers, and they take me on. Everybody's got their own journey about their career, what they've gone through, and the identity trap is very much when a lawyer sort of almost becomes, dare I say, institutionalised within the environment that they're in, and also, they take on the identity of the institution that they are in rather than themselves. 

Well, what does that mean that they take that on? That they very much feel like they will introduce themselves as the firm that they work for first rather than, you know, I'm Liz Smith. They work for a magic circle firm or a firm where they have very much felt it just runs deep through them, and that's what they think mostly of first rather than prioritising actually who they are. I think what's difficult about it is what I see is a human being who is highly intelligent. 

I've always held lawyers in very high regards. They have a different level of intelligence that I have. They are, to a larger extent, very opposite to me. 

I've never been a perfectionist. I've always been sort of a salesperson. I've not really ever had much, and I've had to build on not very much and build on that. 

With lawyers, I've always held them in a huge regard because I've always thought, gosh, you've been blessed with this amazing intelligence, and then they sort of go into an industry which, to a certain extent, it values it, but it doesn't really champion it because, ultimately, the structure that they're within is far more interested in building what that image is all about rather than the image of the individual lawyer. For me, I just feel that when lawyers get into this environment, it traps them because they don't realise they're getting trapped, but it absolutely knocks away their identity as to who they are, and it holds them back in projecting who they are. When I see them, what I suppose I tend to do in the first few weeks of working with a lawyer is what they don't realise what I'm doing is I'm sort of turning the mirror onto them because I want them to see what I see. 

I see this hugely entrepreneurial individual who doesn't know that they've got an entrepreneurial gene in their body, but what they don't realise is to do their job, once you're an established lawyer in a law firm, you absolutely have to be entrepreneurial because every element of the job requires you to be. So, you have to go out and win work. You have to go out and network. 

You have to go out and present yourself. You have to build teams around you. The path to partnership requires every element of really running a small business, which is what I did for a long time. 

I didn't go on that pathway, and I didn't come from that environment. So, when I see these lawyers, I think you have baffles more experience than I did when I set up my small business, and I managed to be very successful. So, if I can just allow myself that opportunity to grab that lawyer, turn them around so they see what I see, then gradually we start to knock down the barriers. 

That's one of the identity traps I find one of the hardest to overcome because they do not have the ability to be able to put themselves first and see real value in that. And it's fascinating hearing your experience because with the work that I do, I work with law firm owners that are looking to remove themselves from their law firm so they actually can have a life. And one of their biggest traits is the thing that makes them a brilliant lawyer is also the trait that then holds them back from being able to do that effectively, and that is risk aversion. 

So, because they spend their lives calculating risk on behalf of their clients and making sure they don't fall into a situation where they lose a load of money or lose their freedom or business, life, whatever it is, through doing that work of avoiding that risk, they then look at avoiding risk through everything that they do. And then that holds them back from... Massively. From... Because as me and you know, you can only grow a business by trying things and things not going to plan before you adjust. 

So, if you avoid things forever not failing, then how do you do things in a new way to grow or learn? Well, yeah. And I suppose the difficulty is when you look at risk with lawyers, I really do think what runs very deeply through a lawyer is this constant stress of, I could just end up on the park bench. I'll just lose everything. 

There's never any sort of, well, it might be a bit tough, but I'll get through it. It's very much, no, I'm here and I could end up there. The level of risk, the pendulum as I call it, how it swings between the two, it's huge. 

It's vast. And so, I can have a conversation with a lawyer on a Monday and get them up here, where they are really, they're looking at me going, this is incredible because they can't understand what I see in front of me. So, I presented them incredibly clearly with a lot of detail as to what I see. 

I leave them shy as a kite because they're like, this is amazing. I'm amazing. This is wonderful. 

This is amazing. And then by Friday, this pendulum swung back, terror. I can never win a client. 

It doesn't matter that I've been winning clients 20 years. I definitely won't be able to win a client ever again if I go self-employed. I definitely won't be able to make relationships. 

And all those clients that I've worked with for the last 20 years, well, they won't know who I am. They won't hold me in high regard. They'll forget about me.

I will never be able to win clients ever again. And it's hugely frustrating because all I see is the trap. Yeah. 

And as you say this, the other identity trap that I see with the law firm owners is that they need to be seen as valuable to the rest of the partners and owners by doing loads of billable work. And they have this real struggle. Well, if I delegate my workload away, well, I'm not going to be needed around here. 

What am I going to do? And it's because their identity is in them being seen as sweating and exhausted and billing loads. And they just don't get the value they can bring by leading and managing a team of 10 to all hit their billing targets instead of them. Well, I think it's the voyage of discovery, isn't it? The joy of delegation is to enable you to be free to have thinking time. 

So give me any good CEO or senior leader. What they really want is time, don't they? It's so precious to them because they know that when they've got time, they can think about strategy. They can think about how they can develop themselves personally. 

So let's take me as an example. I'm here to be head of talent. So ultimately, my number one goal is to grow this business. 

What if we just had a real purple patch and we grew and we got lots of people in and everybody around me because I then make everybody around me busy is going, oh my goodness, Liz, you got onboarding here and we've got to do all this work with these other lawyers. What if I had the ability to say, okay, well, let's just put the brakes on for a second because actually what I really want to do is now do more one-to-one coaching with some of our lawyers, or I want to actually go on more podcasts, or I want to raise the awareness of our business, or I'm going to go and work with Matt in BD in marketing because actually I love going to speak with clients. So one has to see themselves as a multi-talented, multifaceted individual, lawyers of which are only very poor at doing that.

But that's, again, one of the barriers. It's about identifying where we have a wealth of skills, a wealth of transferable skills that we can tap into. But sometimes you get so locked in into the environment that you're in that you become so closed. 

The blinkers are on very tight and the individual doesn't really get the opportunity to just breathe and think, well, what can I do? What skills have I got? I mean, I have a lot of incredible potential in me in the last five months that I didn't know I had. But it's when you put yourself in a different environment and you work with different people and they see different things in you that you just think, gosh, I can do so much more and actually not worry and be bogged down by the risk. What if it goes wrong? What if it goes right? What if you thrive? What if you unlock this huge potential, which I'm sure some of the people that you work with, Dan, that are leading these law firms. 

I mean, for me, they're my ideal target market because sometimes a managing or a senior partner steps down, they can feel so incredibly lost and lonely because they sort of feel like, well, where do I fit in now? I was the big honcho for a long time and now I've sort of disappeared. Obviously, the next person that's come into their shoes, everybody's all over them now. They are the most important person in the organisation and where that individual can feel really lost. 

That's a brilliant individual for me to get my hands on because then we can just have so much fun and they can reinvent themselves and they can unlock a lot of the potential that perhaps they never really had the opportunity to unlock in that job because they had a job to do. It was very time consuming and they had a lot of eyes and expectations on them. Ultimately, it was all about profit, largely. 

They were driven by that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, me and you know there's something so rewarding to being able to give somebody one-on-one time and to see them as a byproduct of that one-on-one time start to achieve a deeper level of or gain a deeper level of clarity and then be able to start taking those actions that then has them fulfil that thing that lights them up. 

There's nothing more rewarding and that's what's available to all these people in these high-level positions. Everything that they've done, everything they've studied, every mistake they've made, you know, and every skill they've gained can absolutely be taught and delegated to anybody who's eager enough around them. So you can move from a position of being overwhelmed, having to hit targets, to leading others through those pressures of having to hit their own targets and then seeing them all flourish and go places. 

That's incredibly rewarding, you know. It is and of course, you know, a lot of people that when they reach senior positions, they get on the hamster wheel, you know, so it's going fast and they are really, you know, the joy is gone, you know, the fulfilment is gone. When they come off, they either come off burnt out or they come off because of ill health or they just, you know, simply are forced out, unfortunately. 

The difficulty then is you've got somebody pretty broken, which is so, so sad. Whereas actually, if you could take them out a little bit earlier when they've still got some muscle strength, then you can actually do something really creative with that individual. And that creativity fuels legacy. 

And for me, I'm all about, you know, especially when I work with a lot of older partners, is about, you know, what do you want to leave? What's your mark on this industry? That's one of the great things about working with Michael Byrne, our CEO, you know, he's all about legacies, all about ensuring that he leaves this industry, you know, in a better shape than he found it. And that we absolutely care for the lawyers in the industry, which everybody knows I'm hugely passionate about. So to be able to be in an environment where actually that just runs through the veins of our business, you know, it's a really special place because then we can go out to partners, you know, at the latter stages of their career, perhaps their final fling, you know, and again, going back to the senior partners that you perhaps deal with, it's capturing them to say, right, come on, you probably thought you had three years in you. 

Let's make that seven. Let's have an absolute blast. What do you want to do? What do you want to build around you? You know, you might be 62, you might be 63. 

Do you really want to go and retire right now? What's the plan? What's the big dream? Because most of them don't have a big plan or a big dream, and they haven't got the yacht. The reality is they've probably got three kids they've put through private school and now want to give them a half decent leg up on the housing ladder, or they've got elderly parents that need care fees covered. So actually, you know, they might not be as well off as they perhaps thought. 

They're not ready for retirement. If they're male, they're probably going through the andropause, which is a whole different chapter that I'd love to talk about another day, which is basically the male menopause. So there's a lot hitting them. 

And actually, what I can do is unlock this huge potential with that individual and say, okay, let's give an example. Let's talk about your legacy. Let's talk about you coming to somewhere like Carbon, which is a brilliant opportunity for you. 

You come in with your black book of contacts. Let's not worry too much about what that business plan looks like. Let's not worry too much about, you know, how much business you can move across, because you've been doing this a long time, and you know, a lot of people. 

So what you go to the market with is you say, I'm free, I'm available to talk to you in a consultative fashion. So I'm about to come to you with my wealth of experience to not only the clients, which are going to just absolutely lap it up. But also, you can have an entourage of people behind you that could be your successors.

So let's say we want to engage with that fantastic superstar, five-year qualified associate that you trained, you know, five years ago, all the way through. But you know, they haven't really got a client base because they've been in a big structure. And they wouldn't know how to put business plan together. 

But you know that they've got huge potential. And if you had the environment where you could spend a lot of time with that individual, or maybe three, on a one-to-one basis, and you mentor them, and you coach them, and you develop them to how to get out there and win business, and build value, and build their profile so that, you know, they actually are the go-to person for, pick a discipline, Dan, first legal discipline that comes to mind. Corporate law.

Corporate law, right. So you've got a five-year qualified corporate lawyer who's now running their own self-employed business, working alongside a mentor who's their successor, who's 62, 63. How's that senior partner going to be enjoying the next five years? Yeah, yeah, brilliant. 

Yeah, it's a completely new avenue. Yeah. And they're not in the structure of the big firm. 

They're not, you know, they're not looking at that senior associate thinking, well, I can't favour them because there's another 20 that are in that cohort, or, you know, that we're not having to play the politics. We're not having to drag that person through the partnership hoops. It's probably going to take them another five years. 

And then actually when they get there, you know, Fred, who's been mentoring that senior associate, who's the ex, Fred being the ex-senior partner, you say, I'm so sorry, didn't get it. You know, it's like, yeah, I can't really give you any really good feedback either. You know, it's just, yeah, it's difficult, isn't it? And the senior associate that has gone through the last five years trying to get that partnership is there thinking, what's just happened? I'm now 10 years qualified. 

I didn't get partnership. And nobody tells that senior associates because their fate didn't fit because somebody higher up doesn't like them, doesn't rate them. Yeah.

Put the spanner in the works. Yeah. Yeah. 

Wow. Yeah. A lot of what you're saying is a new angle to something that, you know, I've been working with and it's interesting to experience it more from those aspiring partners that never quite make partner, you know, and how distraught they would be to have committed their lives to working such hours and doing so much billable work to then not be given the opportunity. 

And yet what frustrates me is then there's the owner of the firm who's exhausted, tired, burnt out with too much to do, who just never took the time to get clear on what they wanted and to engage with me or you or somebody that's experiencing guiding somebody to create a new future that works better for everybody, you know? And it's, and again, it's that, it's that identity trap. Get trapped in it. It's like, you know, the identity trap for me fundamentally is anybody can have it, which is the world of, I know what I know and I know what I don't know. 

And then that's the trap. Most people live in that. They think that is the world, but actually that's not the world. 

The world is, I don't know what it is that I don't know. And I don't even know that I don't know it. Right? That's it. 

And it's a whole nother realm that's outside of us. And we, we, we all have made the mistake of living too much in the world of, I know what I know and I know what I don't know. And we think we assume that's the world, but it's not. 

Having conversations with others that have walked a different path, that have been flies on the walls of so many other conversations that you will never have had the opportunity to hear. Just one conversation with them and being open to the fact that there could be something that we don't know. And being in that place of listening in ancient Buddhism terms, they call it beginner's mind can bring about, you know, extraordinary new insights and opportunities going forward.

And I think that's the biggest problem with an identity trap is it keeps us closed in this world of, well, this is it. I know what it is. I know how it goes. 

There's no point. I've just got to work harder. That's all it is, you know? Yeah. 

Yeah. And I think for me, the biggest frustration I have with lawyers is that they don't necessarily know the options that are available to them. Um, I mean, we, we both can remember the financial trash of 07, 08. 

It was a pretty dire time and the industry really had a tough, had it tough. Um, and those such as me as supply into the industry had it tough. Um, but at that time, um, lawyers were really struggling to reinvent themselves. 

There was very little, there were very few role models. The legal press would diabolical in actually showcasing, uh, what was available for lawyers. So actually they were coming out, being made redundant in droves and they were awfully lost and the industry lost them, you know, whereas now, um, there are an abundance of lawyers that are, um, you know, multifaceted, they have multi-skilled, um, we've got loads of really big profile individuals on LinkedIn who are lawyers and also podcasters, videographers, um, coaches, you know, all, all sorts of individuals. 

So it's wonderful to be able to see that actually, you know, yes, law is a fantastic profession, but it doesn't have to be the be all and end all of that individual. It can be an element of them. And I, and I think that's, what's been really, um, a massive eye opener for certainly a lot of the younger generation that are coming through the industry, because they're embracing that and just thinking, yeah, you know, I'll go into law. 

It sounds like an interesting opportunity for me. I'm naturally gifted to be able to, to, to learn this and probably learn it at a much faster pace with AI coming in. Um, but they will probably be more interested in thinking, well, how can I utilise this? How can I have that as a sort of a, um, you know, a springboard or my grounding for where my career is going to go in the future? Um, because it's well reported that, you know, the average lawyer moves now every sort of two to three years, no matter what, how amazing the law firm is, um, or not. 

Um, so you, you add that into the mix where you've got, um, you know, a young mind that's coming through the industry thinking, well, um, not only do I want to move every few years, but I actually want to really upskill as well. And not that that's not necessarily just purely in law. It's upskilling my, um, you know, wider skillset to be able to, uh, enable myself to be very marketable. 

And if they start that journey from thinking about themselves, who they are, how they project themselves, and that the, they themselves can first, rather than I'm a lawyer at, you know, it's a very different mindset. And to a certain extent, that's what law funds should be embracing rather than being, you know, being challenged by or, or being concerned about. So it's, it's about unlocking that potential.

And, you know, as, as a consultancy firm, you know, typically, uh, each consultancy is different. We all have our own culture and culture fix. So, you know, I am very much a supporter of the consultancy, uh, movement as a collective, you know, so whenever anybody comes to me and they say, you know, what are the other consultancies like? I say, you've got to go out there and do your own due diligence. 

You've got to go out and find your fit. Um, we are one. Um, and as, and as a collective, we're pushing the industry for change, which I think is brilliant.

You know, as a collective, we are some of the fastest growing, um, businesses in law. So that is very telling. So when I do come across lawyers that go, well, you know, there's hundreds of thousands of lawyers, and there's only a tiny percentage of consultancy. 

You can't be, you know, the answer. I'm not, we're not looking to be the answer. We're looking to be an option, a really credible option. 

Um, you know, and I, and I want more and more lawyers to realise that, you know, I, I lose patience now when I speak with a lawyer that comes to me, whinging about their environments, you know, the, the toxicity that, that runs through their law firm, the lack of progression, the lack of structure, the framework and all that. I think, well, you know, you've got options now and I, I can't spend too much time with a lawyer that just wants to complain about that and not fuel themselves up to be able to get themselves ready to fly in a different area. Especially when I, again, going back to the start of the conversation where what I see in that individual is, is a money making machine really for themselves, you know, because they are. 

Um, yeah. I think you're right. You know, and the whole, a lot of the legal sector promotes the identity of being a lawyer, and then it just becomes this thing that, you know, the truth is, if you lacking confidence, then being able to say, I am a lawyer, I am a partner becomes your identity. 

Then you hold on for that thinking that that's, what's given you the opportunity that you have to open doors, makes you loved, makes you wanted, appreciated. It would be really frightening to let go of that identity and create something new. And yet, you know, I'm looking at this completely back to front. 

I'm not even a qualified lawyer. Yeah. I've now worked with over 40 law firm owners. 

Many of them have gone on to, you know, greatly increase their profits while reducing their workload and often free themselves completely of all billable work to the point now where people are putting into my mind, the idea that I could own a law firm because my track record. And so now I'm going to become a law firm owner at some point. And I'm not even qualified in law. 

You know, it's just business. That's right. So it really shows what is possible once you understand all the skills that are beyond the law. 

But even more inspiring is when you are a qualified lawyer and you practise all the aspects of business that are not law. When you bring those all together, you're looking at a very, very exciting future because not many are doing that, right? Yeah. Yeah. 

But there's no reason why they couldn't. Well, yeah, of course. I mean, you see that, you know.

Yeah. I mean, it's funny when I work with lawyers that can come into carbon, they almost sort of become a carbon copy of what I was doing for 20 years, you know, running a small business. But I often say, and I publicly put this in comments quite regularly on LinkedIn, you know, when I started my small headhunting business, if I could have been in a platform environment where I had a whole range of other headhunters covering every business discipline, you know, so if I could be self-employed but, you know, pay an amount so that I could have access to this beautiful, strong network of collaborative headhunters. 

So if I went to, you know, a client that was a traditional law firm, national law firm, and in conversation they said, oh, we're really struggling to find a head of HR or, you know, a finance director, and I could just come back and say, don't worry, I've got it sorted for you. I will go and, you know, you will have somebody really good being introduced to you this afternoon. Well, that's how our carbon consultants work, you know, and I could feed that back, or I could go to a centralised point where I could go back to our BD marketing team and say, right, I haven't got time to contact whoever because I'm just about to rush out to the meeting. 

Can you make sure that this referral goes to Claire or, you know, Natalie or Bob or Tom or whatever? And then, you know, they're doing the same for me. I mean, I would have grown a team around me because I just would have been out there constantly, you know, harvesting opportunity and work and then, you know, passing it out. And so, for me, I just think it's a golden opportunity for lawyers who are just sat there today looking around and thinking, I'm no longer aligned with this environment. 

I feel trapped. I feel penned in, and I've got so many ideas because that's the common theme when I speak to lawyers. It's that I've got so many ideas, but I don't know what to do with them. 

The classic example is, I really want to refer my clients to real estate or to employment, but we're just disjointed. We're not connected. You know, our marketing team says that we do cross-marketing, but actually the reality is when you're in these four walls, it doesn't really happen. 

If anything, what does happen is competition. You know, we're far too bothered about, you know, what department's doing the best, who's in love with the top board and who's not. Who's not feeling the love from the top board? You know, are we becoming more corporate? Oh, private client are feeling a little bit unloved now, so private client go a little bit quiet, and then they're thinking, right, we've got to pull our finger out and, you know, bill more, but they're not actually thinking we could bill more if we spent more time talking to, you know, real estate or corporate where there's a load of referrals that come in for private client work, you know, and it's when you see it happen, most people know that it makes sense. 

It makes perfect sense, and it's pretty, you know, standard practise, but in my experience in talking to lawyers, it just doesn't happen. It gets complicated, and it's not running through the culture of the business, and a lot of the time that comes down to billing targets, chargeable hours, all of that, but that's just, you know, that's for another day, and for a better guest, but for me, I just, what I pick up is the damage that that environment does to the lawyer, because for all their frustration and for all them sitting there day in day out going, I just don't feel aligned, they're trapped. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. 

So, yeah, you've got to step out, take a new action, and get into conversation. This is the only way. As long as you sit there doing the same thing over and over and over, nothing's ever going to change.

It's not, you know, and as I say to many a lawyer, right now, you think you're sitting on the edge of a cliff, and they're really sitting on the edge of a puddle, if they trust me and allow me to guide them, and spend more time talking to lawyers that I've worked with successfully, and watch them and see what they're up to. You know, the reality is that they're just doing what they've always done, you know, but they're doing it in a better way. That's all, you know, we haven't reinvented anything here. 

All we're doing is saying to lawyers, look, just crack on, do what you do best, but you haven't got all of this mess going on around you, which is highly complicated, and full of politics, and structures, and things that have been overthought. Whereas, actually, if you just get out there, spend time with your clients, you know, give time away for free. Do that as a lawyer, and clients will always remember it. 

You know, go and sit at a place that's convenient for them, show them that you care, get under the skin of their business, be the consultative lawyer that you are, and then you just fly. You know, it really is the most amazing time of my career to be able to see lawyers doing what they're doing in this environment. That's not to say it's the right environment, you know. 

I want to stress that there are many amazing traditional law firms that, you know, is the right place for a lot of lawyers, but for many, it's the wrong place, and it's quite damaging to them, and they actually live with a lot of trauma, Dan. I absolutely agree. I see this, yeah, I see this a lot, I see this a lot, and I find it all starts with the owners, and the owners' relationship between each other all needs repairing first, and everyone getting clear, and getting honest, and that, again, all starts with a conversation with somebody outside. 

Liz, me and you could talk forever, I know. It's been brilliant to have you on the show. I look forward to staying in touch with you, and seeing your post on LinkedIn, and yeah, I'm sure we'll meet when the time is right.

Likewise, Dan. I'm so looking forward to seeing you find your firm, and watching that journey. I told my friends for 20 years that I was going to move to Devon. 

It took me 20 years. Felt like such a fraud. So, you're going to have to do it, Dan, because you have said this now, that you want to buy out a firm. 

Well, the funny thing is, I thought that coming up with the money was going to be the difficult part, but it's not. I've got two major banks willing to lend, you know, millions. I've now got five investors willing to put in the first 20 percent that will enable the millions to be lent to me, and actually, the hardest part now is finding the right deal.

This is what I've discovered. So, I never realised that was going to be the hardest part, but hey, I'm learning. Well, yeah, there's a lot of characters out there with their head in the sand, and when something comes along, and a great opportunity comes along, it's getting them to lift their head out of the sand, realise that this is a great opportunity for them, and really, they could potentially stay in the business and have a great time for the next five years. 

That's exactly it. The idea is to design a sale or an acquisition that works for everybody, and that gives everybody what they're looking for. That wouldn't be available without them doing this. 

Yeah. No, exactly, and they could have a really, really amazing time in the latter part of their career and leave a great legacy. Yeah, absolutely. 

Liz, great. Good luck with that. Great to chat with you, too. 

All the best. Liz, bye. Thank you.