In this Top Floor interview, host Asari St Hill sits down with Mitchell Kaye to discuss his inspiring journey from aspiring journalist to successful entrepreneur. Mitchell shares how his early exposure to business through his parents and his drive to work in media led him to join Sky TV, eventually launching his first agency in 2006, which he later sold.
Mitchell also opens up about his daily routines and the importance of discipline in achieving success, with tips like rising early, prepping early, and keeping daily lists. His goal? To help his team build a strong foundation for success in both their personal and professional lives.
Tune in to learn more about Mitchell's entrepreneurial insights and leadership style.
Connect with Mitchell on Linkedin:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mitchell-kaye-7503243/
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From
The Top Floor Team
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Welcome Mitch. It's lovely to have you here for being willing to do an interview with me. I'm sure we're going to have a bit of fun going through this. So it's Mitch Kay, you'll introduce yourself anyway from the Academy. As I said, it's lovely to have you here. We'll just go for a series and questions. Let's see and explore where it goes. I'm sure you'll have some lovely nuggets for people listening to this podcast and this recording. So welcome Mitch. My best. I'm sure you'll be fine. So just tell us a little bit about who you are. Just tell us a bit, you know, who you are, what you do. Sure. Well, first of all, thank you for having me. My name is Mitch. I am the CEO and the co-founder of a PR agency called the Academy. Brilliant. And so tell us a bit about the business. What do you do? Sure. Well, we have a series of clients who we help. We operate in the space of consumer PR. So brands like Amazon, Disney, Morrison's, Mastercard, Burger King, Tinder. I'm getting into trouble now because I'm going to forget somebody and offend somebody. But big, big consumer brands, and we look after their media relations, their influencer relations. We help them launch things, talk about the things that they want to talk about. Sometimes we help them avoid a problem. Sometimes we help them define what they're trying to achieve. And we are their retain partner, their creative comms partner to help them win every day. Yeah. That's a very impressive list. I was looking at the website, some impressive list of clients there, for sure. So in terms of yourself, who's the first person that comes to mind when you think of success? Well, I'm going to give you two, and it might be a bit clichéd, but I'm going to definitely say my mum and dad. They would be the first one. Oh, wow. That's pretty cool. And why is that? Well, my earliest memories are growing up in a house in Bournemouth, where they ran a family business and both worked together, obviously. And they were my early introduction to working life from afar. So mum was a brilliant salesperson and was brilliant at just getting a deal done. Dad was a brilliant people manager and a brilliant administrator of a business. And I learned so much from both of them. They were so complimentary in terms of how they worked and what their strengths were. But I learned so much from both of them that I think they set the bar for me very early on, like long before I'd even gone to university or thought about a career, the bar was set really high from then. Yeah, it's lovely to hear that. I mean, I love working with family businesses. It's interesting because a lot of people are self-made and they've had no family business experience, but you do get that interest in where family have had a business. It does have an impact on people, which is fantastic. So tell us about how your path to becoming a CEO, because lots of people are businesses don't necessarily CEO. Most businesses are what we call micro businesses, employing less than 10 people. In fact, most businesses don't employ one person. So to be a CEO of a company is interesting. So how did you become the CEO? It's a good question. I'm not sure it was the plan on day one. I always wanted to be a journalist. When I was at university, that was my dream. And the dream kind of came to a shuttering halt when I was at university. And I did lots of work experience at national newspapers and magazines and realized very quickly that that environment wasn't going to be for me. It didn't feel entrepreneurial enough. It just felt very exciting, but it felt very negative in some respects from an environment point of view. I didn't enjoy being in a newsroom, didn't really enjoy being in that kind of dynamic. And then my big break came when I did some work experience at Sky Television. That was the last work experience placement of a very long summer of work experiences. And it was a game changer for the minute I walked into their building. And there was something about the building, the environment, the energy, the ambition, the people. They just won the Premier League television rights, and they were launching digital television. This is in the late 90s. And it was an amazing, amazing place to be in the perfect era to be there. And that was my start point. And I worked for some amazing people there, some really talented people. And then I left there a couple of years later. And I joined a really small agency called Shine. I think I was there eighth or ninth higher in 1999. And I met Rachel Bell. And Rachel Bell was the founder and the CEO of Shine. And she was, I would say alongside my mum and dad, she's probably the biggest other influence on my whole career, really. And that was a meeting 25 years ago. And I saw the way she managed on day one. I saw the way she handled situations and spoke to people and handled clients and handled the recruitment. And I loved what she did. And I loved the way she did it. So if you take my dad, who is the ultimate manager of people, and then you take Rachel Bell, who I think is just a phenomenally talented, intuitive, kind, emotional, intelligent leader, and you put the two together, they were my inspiration. And I guess, try to learn from every single person I've worked for along the way. And really, my big break came at the end of 2005. I'd left Rachel, gone off to work in other places, and then come back to Shine. She'd hired me back. And we'd worked for two years together. And then it was Rachel who suggested that she should back me to set my first agency up. And that was a life changing moment. She obviously saw something in me that was incredible for her to give me that opportunity. So in 2006, I launched my first agency backed by Rachel. And that was probably the pathway to becoming a CEO, first of all, managing director, and then ultimately a CEO. And that was the pathway, really, but the inspiration from those people when Rachel's backing made that possible. Brilliant, absolutely phenomenal. That's such a lovely story. And it's interesting. We have something called the entrepreneur, we call it an entrepreneur ladder. And we say that you can start on that ladder. A lot of people think you can start on the ladder when you get up in your first business. But what we say to people who are not in business is that actually you can start learning as a trainee or a first employee. And it's interesting that you said that the environment you find yourself in, you might not be an entrepreneur at that time, but you can watch and learn and see lots of things are going on. And that can be a major learning spot on your journey that a lot people tend to not think that there's an opportunity. So a really good point. And it's something I talked a lot about to my team now, especially the team who are in their first or second jobs. And I almost say to them, I call it something slightly different, but it's exactly the same concept. I almost talk about keeping a leadership log. And sometimes I do it because if someone is struggling with the line manager they have or the head of the team that they're working into, you can learn so much from the way people maybe shouldn't do things. And if I look back at my career, I've been, I've been really blessed with working for some unbelievable people. But maybe some of the people that have managed me at times maybe haven't been quite as remarkable or maybe not has been quite as remarkable for me. But I've learned probably even more from those people. And I think you get to a point, I certainly got to a point long before I set my first company up, where I would see someone walk into a room and inspire people. And I picked myself, okay, if I ever manage my own business, if I'm going to do that. And sometimes I'd watch someone get it really badly wrong. There's a couple of times, definitely not going to name any names, but there's a couple of times it's been to mind where someone lost the room really badly or lost the company really badly by saying something or not saying something. And I remember thinking at time, if ever I do their job, I'm sure it's way harder than it looks. But if ever I do their job, I will never do that. It's almost like a mental log. I think you get to a point in your career where if you've logged enough good things and you've logged enough bad things, you kind of need to stop judging other people's work and have a go for yourself and put your own name to it and see if it's your difficulty it seems. And I guess that's what I did. I was going to ask you some of your learnings as a CEO, but it's interesting. You told me some of your reflections in terms of your journey. But as a CEO, what sort of things do you think you've learned good lessons that you maybe share with another CEO? I mean, how long have you got? So many. Tronky bits of three, only because we'll be talking all day, learn a million things and normally by making mistakes or missing something and then realizing and trying to make them a second. Anyway, I think over promising just to avoid over promising. Sometimes people over promise because they're dishonest. It was never my way. I would over promise because I was overly optimistic. And what I've learned many, many times over the years is to never make a promise that you can't guarantee you can keep. So if you make a promise to somebody with good intentions coming from a good place, but it's not in your gift or not in your control to be able to guarantee that you can deliver that promise, don't make the promise. Because people hang off your every word and they remember. And rightly so, if you make a promise to someone, they should remember it. But if you can't deliver that promise, you break their trust. And if you break their trust, it's really hard to get it back again. So to get it back. That's an obvious one, but a really important one. So the second one, I guess, goes from over promising to under celebrating. So it's in my nature. And it's in my business partners nature. I'm sure we'll talk about it a bit later. But my business partner, Dan and I are cut from the same cloth. We are both the kind of people who never want to get complacent, never want to stop and pat ourselves on the back, never want to believe our own hype. So when something great happens, it could be a pitch win, it could be with one in a ward, it could be a great piece of work that's been delivered. It's in our nature to enjoy a very brief fleeting moment and then move on very quickly. The problem with that is that the team around you need to enjoy that moment and deserve to enjoy that moment. And if they don't enjoy that moment and there aren't those moments, the job becomes very transactional and very relentless and very difficult. So we both had to try very, very hard over the years to pause and give ourselves permission and therefore everybody else to enjoy the moment to celebrate success and to make sure that that's part of our culture. And actually, if we're not naturally the best at doing that, then what's really important is that other people around us, we've got brilliant people around us help us do that. So that's definitely and I think the final one is probably the antidote of the second one, which is just not to believe your own height. So I think what I've learned is that you need to stay very level in this job. So when you're winning, really big and you've won two or three pitches in a month and people are saying great things about you or you've won an award or you're getting accolades, you're never quite as good as the person that people are describing and when you're struggling and a client resigned you or people are leaving or the numbers don't quite look right or something's wobbling, you're never quite as bad as you may feel in that moment and actually to stay quite centered and be able to not have the extreme reactions that I think wobble people around you, easier said than done, much easier to give us a tip than to practice day to day but that's definitely a learning as well. Great stuff. Yeah, so great. Don't over promise celebrate your successes because it's interesting you say that the team need to be felt feel good for that period of time, even if you're in depression you want to go, you've got to give them that moment, I love that one and then the last one is don't believe your own height. It's never as bad as it might seem and it's not always as good as it might seem either. It's both a good cautions because people can get big carried away and then when the bad times come it can be a big big blow and the same thing you get criticized and you just focus on the criticism. For sure but by the way if you believe you're as bad as you are in a bad moment but you don't allow yourself to believe you're as good as you are in a good moment that's a very difficult path to sustain so you've either got to do both extremes and let them balance each other out or you've got to stay very level if you can and not indulge either but the only thing you can't do is go to the go to the depths but not the highs because that's not sustainable. Yeah yeah the highs and lows of the life of a CEO isn't it? You don't want to have to any of them. Bit level is a bit more fun. So what does a typical day look like to you as a CEO? Oh sure there's such a- If there is a typical day- And that's what it is. There's definitely routines. I am a creature of habit and there's routines that I think work for me. There's definitely not a typical day. If there was I think the job would be much easier in a way but maybe much less interesting. So I'm an early riser and I like getting going early. I like getting head of things. If I could be at my desk at 7 a.m. I would because I do some of my best work early on. It's quiet. I feel like psychologically I'm ahead of something. So I try and do my reading and my thinking and my planning for the day early on. I try and make myself a list every single day. I've got a to-do list which is never-ending and has some long-term objectives and some short-term stuff and I make myself a daily to-do list from my master to-do list and I try and take what I have to achieve in that day, write it down on the separate list and then I race to get ahead of that list as early as I can. If I can get that whole list done by 10 a.m. I'm winning because no doubt in that day something else will come up. So I try and beat the clock and beat myself and I'm endlessly making lists which probably makes me sound slightly mad but it works for me and if you give yourself an early start you have the luxury of time and if you have the luxury of time and you're not up against it you can think and you need to think in this job because if you're just doing and never thinking you missed stuff absolutely in action coach we have big fans of lists by the way there's something that Brad instilled in us from day one action daily we actually have something called action daily lists and we encourage people to maybe at first daily can be a bit of a challenge but we said at least at the beginning of the week or end of the week some people prefer to plan on a Sunday night or something like that but we said at least at the beginning of every week at least have a list of what the key things you need to do to hit your goals so we encourage that but it's interesting we say the level up from that is to do it every day and you'd be surprised how people struggle with just right what you're going to do today not everything you need to do just today and we call it the eat the frog sheet is the short word for it we call it the eat the frog from the book from Brian Tracy that talks about eating the frog doing those big things first but I love that coming early get things done by 10 o'clock it's a massive psychological hit as well when you come in so early brilliant so we talk about aspirations and for a company because most business owners want to grow in some sense or the other so what's your aspirations for the company in the next say five years or so um I tend to look at impact rather than growth so in other words we're currently 60 people I don't ever think what would I need to do to get to 70 people or 80 people or 100 people we're currently a seven million revenue business I might think sometimes how do we get to become a 10 million pound revenue business there's growth there but actually what I think Dan and I are more likely to do is look at the type of work we're doing and look at the impact we're having for our clients and challenge ourselves to have a bigger impact how can we make the work bigger how can we get it seen by more people how can we make the work more relevant how can we cut through so when we measure that work the client is happier with the outcome and I think if you focus on those things and you run a good business then growth looks after itself because what happens is you grow your clients organically that's where you keep your clients you retain them and you grow them organically because the work is working and it's having a bigger impact then what happens as a result of that is that your reputation grows and then what happens as a result of that is that you end up on more pitch lists and you end up winning more pitches because there's really good momentum around you and there's good hype around you so you end up growing but you grow because you've earned the right to grow because you focus not on growth in your own in terms of your own metrics but you focus on the growth of the product and the and the impact that's what we do so how can we make our work bigger is our daily obsession how can we how can how can it play out across more channels how can it have a yeah if we make our clients win then we'll win too yeah I like that yeah we certainly like it because we certainly talk to clients about value add value if you create enough value for people who willing to pay as you said growth will come yeah if you focus on growth they can be a risk that you start forgetting about actually why you're in business in the first place isn't it so it's a big risk so I like that yeah impact and impacting why the society is great as well so we talked about learnings but what about as an employer because this is one of the things that you know we often say to clients you know what's your biggest challenge time team or money but team once you get larger and be a challenge can be a good thing too what sort of challenges do you have when it comes to sort of employers employees yeah I totally agree with that I think the bigger you get the harder it gets there's more people which means there's more different types of personalities there's more people challenges that the bigger you get that that's that's obvious I think I work on a try and work on a very simple premise that work for me growing up working for other people so when that was me either my first job at Skye or working for Rachel or other agencies and kind of making my way through my career the worst thing I used to find is that if I didn't know if I if I didn't really know where I stood or I had to try and read between the lines and work out what someone was telling me I used to find that really exhausting and really stressful and really demotivating I like to know where I stand I like to know when it's good and I like to know when it isn't very good Rachel was very good at telling me what a brilliant job I'd done and she was equally adept at telling me when I hadn't really done such a great job and explaining why and I think so that's that's a that's a philosophy very simple philosophy and I think we try and be very very straight and direct and honest with people on on on the basis that most people like to know where they stand so that's not just about annual performance reviews that day to day when something's great we tell them it's great when it's not so good we tell them it's not so good and we're very clear on that we have everyone at the academy has a scorecard with relative to their level so twice a year when they're having a check-in or a review they will fill in a scorecard against every single element of their job description and the person managing them will do the same thing and where there's discrepancies that becomes a big part of the review but checking in with ourselves being honest about what we can and can't do there's so many different ways that people can have a successful career if I look at our competitor set and I look at the people running those businesses now they're all very different people some people are allowed some people are quiet some people are naturally very confident some people are introvert some people are brilliant speakers and communicators some people aren't some people are strategic minds some people are creatives some people are just very good business people there's so many different ways you couldn't you couldn't you can win in this industry it doesn't really matter what you're good at and what you're not good at as long as you a recognize that b you mitigate it with what you have around you but it comes down to a place of honesty and and honesty and people know what they stand is really important so I think that's the biggest single thing we have as an employer um I think kindness you know we we have a thing where we won't hire anybody who we don't think is kind and they can be extremely talented but if they're not kind with it it doesn't tend to last very long and that's a very important principle that we have in our business and in every business that we've ever run you have to be kind you have to be a team player you have to put other people ahead of yourself and if it if you don't have those qualities at the academy then you don't tend to last too long that's really interesting it what's what's fascinating is that there's a book called the one-minute manager and in the one-minute manager we often teach to pick to as you said to business owners to we call it they call it the daily praise but to find somebody in the organization to praise that's one of the principles that they look at find somebody you can say you did a good job well done whatever but also we call it there's all thing called a one-minute reprimand reprimand is a bit of a big word but it's an american so maybe reprimand we wouldn't use the term reprimand in the uk unless it was something fairly serious but we get the principle which is as you said point out when something's not right and one of as you said one of the things we do find is that a lot of complaints from staff is i don't know what my manager thinks and usually we call it the power of you know the law of vacuum if if you don't know what your manager thinks you make something up and usually it's pretty negative because people think if he's not talking to me does he not like me as and people start getting a bit negative they don't necessarily presume everything's okay they think that a one-to-one then not getting any feedback or the danger is what you said at the beginning of the business which is you're deluded about how good you are because nobody said you're not good so you must be doing well so you just carry on doing what you're doing until somebody says well that's not right and you think i've been there's a year nobody's ever said anything so yeah or you have it or you have your review and it's a bombshell review where you learned something that you hadn't realized what knows happened and that nothing disconnects people from a business quicker than when they walk into a review and there's some kind of bombshell shock and they just hadn't seen it coming either you're not ready or it's not really working and if people learn something i always think of something people learn something for the first time in their annual performance review the system's broken because i'm just not right and it's probably there's a lack of honesty in that culture they're not asking the right questions or being self-aware enough the person managing them isn't being honest enough or they're not in control and on top of what that person's doing there's so many ills in that and or so many red flags that show the machine isn't working but there should be no surprises review should be absolutely they're not always easy but they should be predictable yeah and i like that i watched a video with Simon Sinek on leadership i try and get clips if i'm doing training stuff and one of them was when he was one of the top marines or top military people in the u.s and he was asking them about how they make a decision in employment and you said kindness if they're not kind and they say something he says something like can i trust you so have you got my back and you imagine somebody's in a military if you can't trust this person then there's an issue right but it's interesting they said a high performance but bad attitude they don't want them so they'd rather have not so high performance but great attitude you can train performance so it's just interesting that you said that isn't it somebody's not kind but they're really good performer but they could cause a havoc in company 100% and actually i've often thought over the years because you recruit somebody there's no point asking them if they're kind because no one in the history of job interviews has ever sat there and said i'm absolutely not kind you need to know i'm not a kind person but sometimes you misjudge it and sometimes you think they're kind and then they show their true selves as time goes on i always think the sign of a good culture is when the one or two people in the business who aren't quite aligned with the values of the group stick out like a sore thumb yeah what it means is 98% of the group share the same values now if if unkind people don't stand out and are in stark contrast to the rest of the group well then you've got a problem on a much bigger scale so i quite like the fact actually that often it's the group who police the group and the values and the culture it isn't me or Dan or Chris who's our brilliant MD or the excellent directors we've got at the academy actually the group work out the group and that's i think always the way it should be brilliant i love that is there any any particular books audios or whatever because there's so many different medians now people have youtube videos all sorts of things any any would you recommend to people any you particularly like well i can see the irony of this answer because i've probably got 300 books on the shelf behind me but if you look really closely if you if you were to zoom in you'd see most of them about football or football management so i'm definitely a football manager in the body of a PR agency CEO truth be told i'm not a massive reader unlike my business partner who will read a book a week normally on advertising i'm not a massive reader i listen to lots of podcasts every single day i'm listening to a different podcast i learn a huge amount from those it's probably my lack of attention span that means that's my preferred um media but i do love Dave trot it's one name i've heard you uh who Dan introduced me to many many years ago Dave trot is a advertising copywriting legend and writes has for many many years written an absolutely brilliant blog which i think is as relevant to people working in PR as as it is advertising and actually i think this is relevant to people in life as it is in work and it's just beautifully written as you would expect from Dave trot and every single blog that i read from him um i learned something and it gets me thinking and it definitely gives me something you know food for thought to apply to my to my my job and my life he's written some brilliant books too there's a book called creative mischief that he wrote also mischief being the name of the first company i launched but that's a coincidence but creative mischief is just a brilliant collection of lessons um predatory thinking was another book he wrote which is about how to win how to win against your your opposition it's kind of you know a very strategic very creative way of winning doesn't matter what fields you're in so i think he would probably be my go-to um but you should probably interview Dan if you want proper book recommendations hmm he's the book person is he very much the book person yeah yeah well it doesn't matter what book because you know growth is growth if you if you're getting something from it and learning from it and it stimulating your open to ideas that's the point because what's the point of reading loads of books and then somebody asks you something you can't remember any of them and don't apply any of it it's really entertainment isn't it but so we do expect our business owners to sort of learn and act otherwise we say it's just it's just enjoyment where there's nothing wrong with enjoyment as well yeah i mean actually on that i do think there's there's a lot of virtue in learning from outside of your sector so yes you've got to know your sector of course you do yes you've got to know about your competitors what's happening in your industry the future of it the direction that travel of course those things are a given but actually i think you can learn a huge amount from outside of your sector so for me understanding how people manage footballers at a football club for example how how players are recruited for example it's not that i'm paying transfer fees fortunately for PR employees but the way you sell a football club to a player is the way you sell a PR agency to a potential hire the way you motivate footballers and the way you motivate people in your agency are surprisingly similar so i think you can i think you can take inspiration outside of your core area and then bring it back in and sometimes i think that's something that maybe not enough CEOs do because they're very very focused understanding on their own sector yeah something we encourage to i definitely encourage that because i use a lot of sporting allergies but if you're sporting person it's easier but even people are not sporting you know there is a lot you can transfer from high performance sport to the business world because as you said it's about how do you get the best out of people that are around you and at the end of the day high performance sport is the same how do you get the best out of somebody who may be a genius but difficult to cope with or manage so fantastic brilliant um what about mistakes it's interesting you talk about the successes mistakes you've learned from anything you would share from us the biggest mistake or the state you would share what you learned from it again hello have you got um so many so many i mean i make very quick decisions Dan and i work at a massive pace every day now there's a virtue to pace i think pace is a is a competitive advantage i think when you're an entrepreneurial business i think if you're not quick and you don't have pace i think you have to be quicker than your clients and if they're waiting for you all the time it doesn't it doesn't play well i think when you're working at that pace you make mistakes every day um i think the trick is to not make the same mistake twice or to make sure your mistakes are not existential but but you know relatively small mistakes you could make up for so mistakes i've made certainly some hires over the years uh we've hired a lot of people you can't always get that right if if if you're hiring if your recruitment is ninety percent brilliant then that's ten percent you've probably got wrong and if you've hired a thousand people that's a hundred bad hires so that has the potential to cause some challenges so i think probably those um sometimes i've been too honest with people or maybe delivered something in a way that was not uh the right tone or the right moment only coming from a good place but maybe delivered in the wrong way um they're definitely mistakes we've definitely made mistakes with clients over the years again impossible not to um but if i'm honest i think we definitely have a culture of learning from mistakes i encourage everyone to make mistakes uh because if you're if your objective every day is to try and avoid a mistake then i think you go very cautious in terms of how you do your job and i think you you end up being nowhere really that you need to be so i think mistakes are part of growing um and in honesty i think we wouldn't be where we are now if it wasn't for the mistakes that we've made so if i could go back and change that would there be a moment i could go back and change probably not because if i changed it then somehow it wouldn't lead us to where we are now and i think some of the biggest mistakes we've made are probably the things that we've learned from the most hmm no i love that it's one of the things we see in so many successful people is mistakes you know and uh fear of failure is one of the biggest reasons not to act isn't it so we we realize successful people we see the success or when i say we the role we when people see successful people they think are amazing they're superheroes and all the rest of it yeah and you often don't see the amount of mistakes they made to do it because you had to uh but the the difference is how do you recover from them rather than just let it defeat you so it's really nice to hear that yeah and actually i think it's easy the easy bit is to say um we have a culture of people being brave and and and trying different things and people are encouraged to make mistakes that's the easy bit that that's the bit that you read out of a book and anyone can say that i think actually the much harder bit is that when someone does that and makes a really big mistake how do you react as a business so if you if you end up if your initial reaction is panic or fear or anger or frustration or aggression then that culture dies with your initial very quickly so actually the real test isn't to say to people try different things to be brave anyone can do that the real test is when they do that and it goes horribly wrong do you lead from the front and they stand behind you and you front it up with them or do you you know do the opposite so i think they're the moments at the final culture we try very hard to back our people we've got brilliant staff like we're really proud of our team and you've got to be proud of your team when they make a mistake as well as when they win an award you have to do that yeah brilliant love it so um just comes to the time got a few just a few more questions before we finish you did um you saw the business before previously sold a business uh would you sell this one yeah um well i'd probably i could never sit here and say absolutely not because i think that would be disingenuous um we are an entrepreneurial business we don't think about selling our business and and what i mean by that is a bit like the answer i gave you 10 minutes ago about growth we don't think how do we get from 60 people to 70 people or 80 people we think about the impact we have so we don't wake up every morning and think what could we sell our business for how much money would we make what we do is we try and build the best business in the country in our space that's our objective build the best business we can build and build a business so good that one day someone might want to buy it now that doesn't mean we might want to sell it um Dan and I have sold on business it was called mischief and we sold it to a group called engine and we had two very good years of engine wholesale and that business still today is doing really well it's got a great leadership team and they're absolutely flying they're a brilliant agency so we know what it means and what it takes to sell a business we also know what it takes to lose our independence because you end up working for somebody else and you lose that entrepreneurial control that we we have now again i think you give that up at your peril because actually we're probably at our best when we're free to make those quick decisions under our own steam so the the job isn't to sell the job is to do something so good that someone might want to buy it one day because what it means is you're hitting high standards every day you're running a great business you're growing and developing a brilliant leadership team you're doing fantastic work your client list is amazing your numbers support that there's an excitement and a momentum around your business so they're the things we want now if they lead to someone knocking on the door one day great that's a that's that's good news um but if someone knocks on the door and wants to talk about buying your business it's a massive compliment for everyone in that business and on that note i would say that unless that deal works for everyone in that business it's a bad deal so when you're weighing up any interest that you have you're going yes of course are the numbers right would it be would it be the right deal but also would it be exciting for my management team would it be motivating for the people that only joined in the last six to twelve months that joined what they thought was a certain type of business how would they feel having gone through that process once i think we understand a lot more now about the journey that everyone would need to go on for that to be a good deal so lots of things in there um but hopefully i haven't properly answered your question no it's absolutely fine uh it's a great great great answer and you mentioned your business partner does it make life easier more difficult um well that depends on what day you asked me it definitely makes life easier he is he is my closest friend in the world and i think the word i've said this many many times um i think the word genius is used too often but he is a genius um he is the cleverest person i've ever worked with um and he is difficult and he would probably tell you that i'm difficult and i think we're difficult with each other every single day and what that really means is we demand a lot for ourselves we demand a lot from each other we keep each other honest we are each other's biggest critics but also biggest supporters um and it is a brilliant partnership it's also a 19-year-old partnership and i don't think there are too many double acts in our industry that have managed to go 19 years without falling out luckily we fall down at least once a week so we don't have to worry about that but we're a really good team and to run a business with your best mate is a real privilege because you know you've got each other's backs and it's definitely definitely easier it sounds fantastic so my penultimate question is if i gave you a hundred million pounds to positively change or build a company that dominated your industry what would you do with it oh it's a lot of money 100 million pounds it's a lot of money uh what would i do with it okay so i would i'd first of all look at people and i would assemble the greatest team of people that i could possibly assemble that money could buy um and truthfully i kind of think i've already got that team but if you give me 100 million pounds then i would spend more on even better people to join the people i've got to complement them that could be highest it could be acquisitions so i know the areas i want to grow into i would potentially buy the best most exciting most academy like-minded brands out there who see the world we do in those respective areas that's the first thing i would do the second thing i would do is we've just spent time money and energy on a massive refurbishment of our office and we all move back in two weeks ago so i'm currently feeling very very excited and very happy about the environment that we're working in every day which i think is really important but i guess if you had a hundred million pounds you'd probably buy your own office be your own landlord and that would be an opportunity the third thing i'd probably do probably sounds a bit left field but and i don't know how this would work and i haven't looked into it because i don't have a hundred million pounds to spend but something along the lines of helping anyone in my team get on the property ladder in london for the first time and i don't have a plan around what that looks like if you gave me 100 million pounds i'd find one i would love to help people do what i did many many years ago when it was much easier than it is now and get on the property ladder in london i think it would it would change the way people see their relationship with their work it would change how they feel it would change how they view their future trajectories and i think it would be an amazing thing if a company could aid their employers to get on the property ladder and i what it what it shouldn't do is trap an employer to never be able to leave that company to like can't be bad but it could just be some way that you could you could help and i think that would be that i think that would be the ultimate um now how much of that hundred million you'd have left i'm not sure but i think even a small contribution would probably help a lot people yeah i think so if you could do something in those three areas i think it would be a brilliant use of money what i would say is we already have a brilliant team we already have a brilliant office we haven't quite cracked the mortgage offer thing but the thing about our industry is you actually don't need a hundred million pounds you need some brilliant people you need a great space to work in you need energy you need a laptop you need a mobile phone um and actually if you bring those things together it's amazing how far you can get without the hundred million pounds although i wouldn't say no if you're off you've only added it i like that i love it i'm one of those softies that when i watch something like under cover boss i get all emotional when that end bit where he it's usually he where he goes and helps certain people he says you know you you had a problem with your property or something like that here's 50 000 pound for a deposit or here's a new car i get really motion at that point i think that is a phenomenal thing to watch that you can say thank you to an employee who's gone beyond and just say here's a gift that will change your life i find that i just get very emotional every time i watch it i think why am i getting emotional i don't know these people but i think it's fantastic so final question for those listening listening to the recording what couple of tips would you give them somebody in business today um there's the obvious ones that i'm going to rattle off but they're pretty cliched i think work ethic i think the people earning the most amount of money should work hardest um i'll give you one which i haven't always followed but i have done in more recent years which is the exercise to stay well um it is a difficult job it's not the hardest job in the world by the way i think many many other people do much harder jobs than we do but it is it's a it's a high pressure job i think you have to stay well however you do that for some people it will be going to the gym every day for some people mindfulness for some people it will be um you know escaping or hobby but you have to you have to keep yourself well and manage yourself through whatever you're doing there the obvious ones i think other things would be uh to maybe not lose sight of why you're doing what you're doing sometimes you can get so wrapped up in the job and the objectives and the the drive behind success maybe you lose sight of why you're doing that and i think you need reminders in your life it could be the people around you could be family friends it might be that you get to enjoy the fruits of your labor and that could play out in lots of different ways but you need reminders of why you're doing what you're doing and i think if you do that it's a brilliant job and it's a sustainable job and if you don't maybe at some point you're hit or all and there'll be some kind of crisis of identity so to make sure that you keep yourself well and keep yourself balanced um and i think maybe i would return to the first point i made on your first question which is to try and stay level you're never as good as the headline suggests when you're winning but you're one thousand percent never as bad as you might feel in the moment where you have a difficult a difficult day so to stay level and to keep some kind of perspective too brilliant absolutely brilliant mitch it's been a pleasure absolute pleasure thank you very much for spending a bit of time with me and sharing these lovely nuggets with uh with others um i wish you all the success thank you for having me really enjoyed it thank you very much
