First question to do kind of relatively briefly, but how did you get into the seat that you're in now? Oh, my guest, Roger, that goes back quite a long way really. So I got involved with the mobility industry, which is a general term for our industry, which covers anything from a mobility scooter to a fully fledged powerchef, some of you just can't walk at all. Stairless, and clearly now, homeless, which is where I'm now at still. So I've been involved in the industry since 1993, starting a company called Sunrise Medical, just down the road from where I'm sitting, just outside Dudley today. And I evolved from that, bought a stairlift business from them, and doing a management buyout, which was, that was year 2000, I think, 2001 maybe, and we've ran that for 10 years, sold that, and then went on a mad investing spree, invested about 10 or 12 businesses, not all of which turned out terribly well. Some of them did, and still, so it was one of the ones that did, and that's how it happened to be here today. So that's a very, very story in a nutshell. No, no, no, I'm a good success. So I'm going to immediately pick up on that, because I know it's something that a lot of people I get involved in in terms of considering acquisitions, bringing businesses in and those kind of things. Everybody recognizes the excitement and the challenge, but also potentially the risk. So what's your big learning out of acquiring businesses into another business and putting it together? Is there, is there anything that comes to mind, mind? Yeah, I guess, I guess there's several things. So, I think I've always been more successful in doing that with businesses where I've had the time to get intimately involved with. So when I originally did this back in year 2000, 2001, when we invested in MinuteBait, I was a management buyer out. It was one of my boss at the time, so he was the MDN, I was a sales director, and it had some money left over from a divorce I'd just been through, and that all went into the business, and then we'd just throw ourselves right into it. So I think that whole commitment to doing it is definitely a path forward. When I went through my investment spree, having sold the MinuteBait a business at the end of the beginning of 2010, I think my learning from that was I'm about to achieve exactly now I'm a chairman and I have the title of both today, but that's because I think mainly because we invested a lot of businesses that time just didn't have the time to fix the problems in order to come up when you're dealing with what are either turnaround startups or build stories. So that's, don't leave yourself too thinly spread on the ground because if you do that, then you're going to come unstuck. So never doing an acquisition of one business from another business, although just in a couple on a business and chairman of recently, and that's starting to work, but that's the chief executive who's doing that rather than me. So it's making sure you've got the bandwidth to deal with it. Okay, I get that because there's always more behind it than you actually can't imagine, I guess, so that's the point. Yeah, exactly. No, no, that's interesting. And just following on that theme, and again, because I know a lot of people are interested in this, in terms of when you make those acquisitions and look into them, how important are the kind of people piece, and again, what's your thoughts and ideas in terms of how you address the kind of people aspects when you're making those kind of acquisitions emerging? Yeah, so I describe what I do as investing rather than acquiring, actually, and I think that probably plays straight into the question you're asking me. So for me, in businesses, there's three pillars you need to build a business. Number one is a product, number two is the processes, which glue the product to the third pillar, which is the people. So you definitely need a product which the market likes, right? So there's no point starting if you don't have that. The next thing you need is people who understand their market and who want to help drive that business. So you've got to have people who've got a passion, they've got the drive, they've got the determination when things get a bit tougher, they don't just give up and walk away. So the products and other people are two important ones. The process is, so long as you know what you're doing with processes, you can stick those around the other two. So Stilts is a great example of when I got involved with Stilts, there was four founders and they had a great product and they were very ambitious and very keen to make it work. And all we had to do then was help run a business around them and allow it to grow as far as they were capable as individuals have taken it. And then over time, some of them have left and one of the four founders still remains as he's been able to grow with the business. Right. No, okay. No, I like that in terms of, and you're right, I mean, product is product. And I guess things like the markets that you're in, you know, that that's probably a growing market, I guess, given the demography and some of the poor. And people's an obvious, but I like alter, you've got, I asked about people, but you put process in there too. And I think that's actually again, a lot of people struggle with that. They don't have the consistency in discipline of process that then ensures that they do what they do. And so I like those three. That's that's excellent. Just deliver the customer, the customer experiences delivered by the process, as well as the people and the products, but you have to get the process right and making the products as well as or delivering a service, as well as then the customer experience around that of my processes. Sure. No, I get that. I get that. No, excellent, excellent advice. And just one thing and again, because again, I'm going to say in theme, because I know when you make acquisitions and you're building companies and obviously the change that you being through, you go through ups and downs. I mean, there's some really great days out there, and there's some really kind of more difficult days. So I'm just going to ask about resilience, Mike, I suspect, to the conversation, if I don't already, you're fairly resilient, kind of gargle away in the beginning. Do you have thoughts about how do you keep resilience through kind of difficult periods of time? Yeah, I'm not sure whether it's something that can be taught. I think it comes from having challenges, having managed to work through those and realising that there's usually a solution if you look hard enough. And there's not always, I've had business that have gone into administration as well as it succeeded. So sometimes you have to know when to give up, but you have to have tried hard enough and kicked every barrier down that you possibly can along the way. And sometimes the business just ain't ever going to work. But you know, that resilience piece, I think, I think if you look at the one consistent thing across people who've been successful is that resilience piece, because as you say, you have some great days, but you have some really horrible days when you have to deal with people issues, you don't really want to nobody wants to go into the conflicts of a meeting where things aren't working with an employee and have to deal with that. And so some bad days like that, some bad days when you deal with banks as well, they're not always straightforward and easy to do, so you have to have to be resilient in that and not lose your place with people like that because it doesn't help, it doesn't get you any further forwards. Right, and great advice, I love that in that regard. And then the idea, I mean, you started by saying not necessarily you can't teach resilience, I think probably right, it comes with experience, doesn't it? You go through those kind of situations you talk about. I think also some people are just born with it, some people just take knocks as part of how they go through life or because of their background upbringing or something in that as taught them to take those knocks. So it might be something you develop in childhood, might be something you develop in adulthood, who knows, but you definitely need it in order to be able to run a business. It's very rare you get a business that you're just plain sailing all the way through. No, absolutely, I get that, I get that. And you're right, we talk about this a lot in terms of going back to childhood and there are things there that actually shape as who we are and that hopefully helps do things like resilience, so I get that. So I'm going to be playing, I'm going to psychologist there. Where's my psychology qualifications table here? Oh, there you go, where you are. One kind of follow-on question that I just wondered if there was anything that you learned from the whole COVID experience. I mean, again, that was a really difficult period of time, wasn't it? But anything that comes to mind in terms of what you kind of learned from that, in terms of... I think with it all is sometimes you just need to take a deep breath and not go into panic mode, just because everybody else around you is going into panic mode. And think back to the businesses involved with joining COVID. I think what we were really good at is just saying, okay, we can only affect what we can affect deep breath, how do we work ourselves through it and just come up with a plan and just think through something logically, rather than going off the deep end and panicking. So it's just trying to stay calm, just trying to think through the issues and think about how you can manage and what you can do to make a difference. I like you said, you create a plan, you stop and hold it, because everything's changed, the variables have all changed. So what's the new plan? And it's interesting that actually, in some instances, I don't know if it's happening yours, but actually, it's amazing how people can have stepped up knowing that they had to pivot to something quite different because the world had changed. And actually, people found that quite stimulating and rallied around and it became energising almost in a way. I did that happen within your businesses. Yeah, I think it probably does, because we were already growing very quickly coming into COVID. And so you don't tend to pay attention to the things that are problems as much as you do when things aren't going quite so well. So all of a sudden, when you're walking one morning and your ordering takes halved and your production in China is shut down because you can't get into the factory and you just have to go, right, what we're going to do about this then? And so you just try to develop a plan, do what you can change what you can. And it's a little bit every day, a little bit every day, just try and move it forwards. And guess what? That one's going to change as well, because somebody that introduces some new rules associated with it and then surprisingly, then remove all the rules. And it's like, oh my goodness, how do we catch up now? Sure, sure, no, I guess. And I noticed actually, I think it was 2020 that you won the Queen's award for international trade. Yeah, yeah, one of our proud amounts. We're quite a lot of awards over a period of time. That's probably the one that's a feather in our cap. And that was just because we'd grown export so much. We now probably a two thirds of our business is international, rather than UK. So it's a big number for us now. And it was, it was on that track at the time. Yeah, sure. So I guess that came shortly after Brexit, then in that case, we were Brexit and then COVID and so on and so forth. I guess that if you've got amount of international business, that was a challenge as well, I guess. So it's a Brexit. Now, I think if you went and talked to my staff who had to deal with the detail of customs and getting stuff around the world, they were probably over a different perspective. But Brexit really didn't slow us down at all. And what you had to do is just play by the new rules of getting something from the UK to Europe. Yeah, it was a bit more difficult. There was a few more customs forms. There was battle officers in different countries demanding that your dealers now pay the VAT rather than you paying the VAT for them and claiming the VAT back. So all of that stuff got a little bit more complicated, complicated, convoluted, and added a bit of extra administration. But once you'd learned how to do it, you could do it, right? And it just, you know, three, six months later and just having a new process and you procedure for doing it, right? And you just maybe a little bit more work than it used to be, but you can do it. I guess that comes back to that process, please. If you've got, if you understand what the new process is and then you apply it and then you make it work. Yeah. Yeah. Well, if you understand the old process, you've got better chance of working over the new processes, right? No, okay, okay. So here's a tough one. Then in terms of just what about, what about, what do you see the challenges for the future in terms of kind of going forward, either in general or in your markets? Or what's, what's, what do you think about when you think about the future? So I guess as we now come into a calmer, more settled business world, certainly, I think inflation back under control interest rates seeming like they've reached a peak. I'm still very sadly, what was going on around the place, but I thought a new norm in terms of the impacts that they've had. Then you turn yourself back to your standard business to don't you? Where's my next customer coming from? Where's my next set of orders coming from? Where's, where's the future for the product range? Where's the design going? What do I need to do extra for my customers that I don't do now? Is our customer service good enough? Are we delivering for the customers that we've got? How do we improve that? It's just a general business, you know, cheaper, better, faster if you like in old terms. We're not allowed to say that sort of stuff anymore because it makes sense. It sounds like the quality is not important, which clearly it is. No, okay. You're right. We have a lot of turbulence recently, but it hopefully is kind of stabilizing a bit, but you're right. Issues like geopolitical issues and so on and so forth are kind of interesting. We're going to keep an eye on it, especially for things like supply chain, you mentioned about Chinese supply, etc. I guess it's always an eye to what's happening that might affect supply chains, those kind of things. Sure. Yeah. One of the things for us when Donald Trump came in is he importing to the US from China, import tariffs. They were 15%, and he went to 7.5, and he's threatening 60% of he gets into office again. You just start to think about, well, what could you do differently in order to move the needle back the other way if those sort of things do come in? We've got time to think about it because he's been saying it for a while now, so you have time to think about it, have time to plan for it and work out what you might do if that hit up. No, absolutely. Again, it's always about thinking ahead in terms of what options could be. One kind of final question, Mike, and again, thanks for your time. What about inspiration for you? Where have you got inspiration from through all this kind of journey that you've been on? Have you got recommendations in terms of books or podcasts or those kind of things? Yeah. In terms of where inspiration came from, I think I'm just a competitive person, so in my younger days, I used a lot of canoe slalom, and that teaches the discipline of competing at a reasonably high level, and the training that's involved with that, making sure that you are planning for the next three months of competition, not just for the next competition, so all of that stuff, I think, probably bred in me something which is just, I just want to win it whatever I do, so I want to do better every day than I did yesterday, never quite satisfied with last month's result, always want to do better this month, so I guess that came from being introduced to a sport, being coached in that sport, and a teacher who took me under his wing and helped me with that at school, so that's where that competitive nature comes from. My dad was in business, got some great advice from him when I was just finishing you, which is go get some production experience some, which I went and got some production experience like I was told, and again, that taught me all the process stuff and how to do that, and then I made a promise to myself when I finished my degree, I'd never set another exam ever again, and I haven't, except for my pilot's license actually, but which was my one exception, so from that point of view, I made myself that promise, but that doesn't mean I can't keep myself educated, so if I was to listen to any podcast, go back to the early free economics podcast, they're really, really good at giving you a perspective on the world and how the world operates, so that's good stuff. Just a love listening to statistics podcasts more or less, BBC podcasts fantastic, because it's just interesting stuff about the world, and reading economics articles at my times reader, so I read the economics articles in the times, and you just learn something as you go every day about how that all works and kind of stitch together how it might affect you, and just a general overall curiosity about the world, I guess, keeping yourself informed of it today. Absolutely, and I love that, I think keeping curious and never stop learning is just one of the greatest things we can do, because again, because the world changes around us so much, actually we do need to keep on top of what's happening, so yeah, I love that, keep curious and keep learning, now that's great, and interesting you go back to your dad, I've done a few of these, and actually that's a really kind of common theme in terms of parents influencing people, and giving that one kind of bit of advice that really can be useful for the rest of your lives, so I think all our parents' influences, right, it's just a question about how good or how badly they do it, right? Yeah, exactly, and that we hope that we do the same for our kids, and I guess we'll... We'll find out in time, but yeah. Mike, thanks so much indeed, really enjoyed the conversation, again, congratulations on the business and making the growth that you've got, and the awards that you've won, so on and so forth, and keep on doing it, but really excellent, so yeah. Good to talk with you, thanks very much indeed, thank you, thank you for taking the time to talk to me. No problem, no problem.
