In this candid episode, Andrew Hulbert, Founder and Vice Chair of Pareto Facilities Management Ltd, shares lessons from building, exiting, and redefining purpose post-sale. If you struggle with post-exit identity voids and legacy planning, you won't want to miss it.

You will discover:

- Why aligning business with personal purpose sustains fulfillment beyond exits

- How to structure companies for independence and multi-generational impact

- What mindset shifts empower everyday people to launch successfully

This episode is ideal for for Founders, Owners, and CEOs in stage 6 of The Founder's Evolution. Not sure which stage you're in? Find out for free in less than 10 minutes at https://www.scalearchitects.com/founders/quiz

Andrew Hulbert is a founder and entrepreneur who built Pareto FM from scratch into a £50M company with 500 staff, culminating in a nine-figure private equity exit. Raised on a council estate, he created his own path through grit and a people-first business culture. His story is one of real trade-offs—financial freedom, early retirement for his father, but also missed moments. With over 40 awards, two books, and a track record in leadership, diversity, and mentoring, Andrew now speaks candidly about entrepreneurship, legacy, and men’s wellness. His conversations are honest, unfiltered, and grounded in lived experience.

Want to learn more about Andrew Hulbert's work at Pareto Facilities Management Ltd? Check out his website at https://www.paretofm.com/

Mentioned in this episode:

Take the Founder's Evolution Quiz Today

If you’re a Founder, business owner, or CEO who feels overworked by the business you lead and underwhelmed by the results, you’re doing it wrong. Succeeding as a founder all comes down to doing the right one or two things right now. Take the quiz today at foundersquiz.com, and in just ten questions, you can figure out what stage you are in, so you can focus on what is going to work and say goodbye to everything else.

Founder's Quiz

Take the Founder's Evolution Quiz Today

If you’re a Founder, business owner, or CEO who feels overworked by the business you lead and underwhelmed by the results, you’re doing it wrong. Succeeding as a founder all comes down to doing the right one or two things right now. Take the quiz today at foundersquiz.com, and in just ten questions, you can figure out what stage you are in, so you can focus on what is going to work and say goodbye to everything else.

Founder's Quiz

Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again

to the start, scale and succeed. Podcast, the only podcast that

grows with you through all seven stages of your journey. As a

founder, I'm your host, Scott Ritzheimer, and I want to talk

to the founders out there who are building toward an exit, but

in a moment of honesty, realize they have no idea what actually

comes after that exit. You've got a vision for your company.

You've got a growth plan. You may even know the multiple that

you're targeting. But the question that I have for you

today is, have you thought about what happens to you when you're

no longer the one in charge? What does life actually look

like when the business that consumed all your time, energy,

and maybe even your identity for a decade or more, suddenly

doesn't need you anymore. And here's what's tricky about this

phase, because just about everyone talks about building

the company and how to sell it, but almost nobody talks honestly

about navigating life after the company. What are the trade offs

that you didn't see coming. What do you do with the drive that

got you there? And how do you think about legacy while you're

still young enough to build something else entirely? Well, I

have no real hope of dealing with all of that alone, so I've

got with me here today Andrew Hulbert, who is a founder and

entrepreneur himself who built Pareto FM from scratch into a

$50 million company with 500 staff, culminating in a nine

figure private equity exit raised on a council estate. He

created his own path through grit and people, first business

culture, and his story is one of real trade offs. There's

financial freedom or early retirement for his father, but

also missed moments with over 40 Awards, two books and track

record in leadership, diversity and mentoring, Andrew now speaks

candidly about entrepreneurship, legacy and men's wellness. His

conversations are honest, unfiltered and grounded in lived

experience, and he's here with us today. Andrew, welcome to the

show. Glad to have you on joining us from the other side

of the pond and and you know, here to keep everyone

interested, there was a podcast, and folks who listen to the show

will know, podcast changed my life, mostly because the

gentleman who was speaking on the podcast as a guest had an

Irish accent. And so anytime we get a wonderful accent from

anywhere else really, I think it's just a bonus opportunity to

keep people on to hear something great. So I know you've got a

lot more than wonderful.

Oh yeah, I tell you, the Irish accent. I did a

lot of work in Dublin, so I was going to like Ireland every

three weeks or so. And when you get two Irish people together

who talk in English, but in like a Dublin accent. It's very

difficult to keep hold of them, especially when they're drinking

in it at the same time, it sends it in a completely different

path. But yeah, my really nice.

Yeah, that's awesome. My first time in

London, we were at my my wife and I were at a hotel or

something, and some guy comes in and he's talking, and I don't

understand a word he's saying, like, not a word. And I look at

my wife, who's from Norway, and I'm like, what language was that

she goes English?

Yeah, I've been to Norway many times as well.

One very quick story. I went to Norway just before Christmas,

and my car got stuck in the snow, and a Norwegian farmer

very kindly came and pulled me out. And luckily he spoke

English, because my Norwegian is awful. So yeah, I was saved by a

Norwegian farmer only about six, seven weeks ago. So yeah, thank

you to the Norwegians for that.

Yeah, there you go. And a Norwegian farmer

is a great group the consoles, and surprisingly, a lot of them

speak English, which is wonderful as well. But all

right, well, but All right, we're not here to talk about

Norwegian farmers. We are here to talk about what happens for

founders who achieve everything that they want and find out that

it might not have been everything that they wanted.

Tell us a little bit what happens after the sale.

It's a really good question, and the first

thing I would say is, if you don't know what happens after

the sale? You're already behind. You need to be planning for what

happens after the sale, if I just briefly explain our exit.

So about nine months in advance of the sale, we knew we wanted

to go to exit. We hired corporate advisors. They go to

the sector, and they find investors that are interested in

your business. So we went through a nine month process,

but the actual due diligence process of exit was about four

or five weeks. It's very, very quick and intense when we were

going through that. So it all happened really, really quick.

And I started to work with a business psychologist, a guy

called Stuart, before I exited, and he was helping me prepare

for what it might be like after the exit. And I can share the

advice that he gave to me, he said, entrepreneurs who get

their exit one day are a little bit like gold medalists in the

Olympics, who actually win the gold medal that they've been

training for for four years and the day after, if you're not

careful, depression is a real risk for you, because you have

all this adrenaline, all of a sudden you've achieved

everything, and it drops so. He likened that to swimming towards

an island. And what he said was you can see the island in the

distance, and as you get bigger and as you get more profitable,

the island is getting closer and closer, and eventually someone

makes you an offer for the business, and you swim as hard

as you can, and you get there. But what are you going to do

when you reach that island? So we worked on lots of techniques

around what was important to me as Andrew the human, as opposed

to Andrew the entrepreneur, and that's really where it started.

We started to list those things down and actually create some

new goals shortly after the deal was done. So that's the very

beginning of the journey that we have.

Yeah, I love that, that picture, and I think

you bring a really important distinction is that there's a

difference between Andrew the entrepreneur and Andrew the

human. And I think where folks get get blindside is they don't

start to handle that ahead of time. What did that? What does

that mean? It's one thing to say it. It's another thing like,

what did that mean for you? What do you see? What do you see that

as in in other entrepreneurs,

something that really worked for me, which I

came to understand was really a defense mechanism, was I almost

thought about Andrew the entrepreneur as a external

character. It was like a different person that I played.

Because we all know when we're at home with our family, wife,

kids, whatever, we're a certain type of person. When you're in

the middle of a sales pitch, or you're running a board meeting,

or you're meeting investors, you're a different person.

You're sort of the personification of all of the

business bits about you that you're trying to hit certain

expectations and standards and your profitability goals and all

that sort of stuff. So for me, I felt like I ran my business for

nearly 10 years. I exited nine years after starting. I felt for

those nine years I had created a business persona for myself,

Andrew the entrepreneur, that I would put him into various

situations. And the good news was, if people hated him, it

didn't matter, because that wasn't me. And if people loved

him, that was great, because we made more money. But actually

there was this distinction that when I went home, I wasn't

Andrew the entrepreneur any longer. But there's only so long

you for me that I could live that sort of facade of a two

life person. And really, when I knew that I was going to be

coming out and I was going to be retiring, and I was 37 when I

stepped back, I knew that there was going to be this period

where my Andrew at home was 95% of me and Andrew, the

businessman, was only 5% so I made a real distinction between

those two people, and that really helped me with

insecurities around taking bad feedback and going into a pitch

and sort of really bigging myself up for it, and dealing

with the challenges that come with all entrepreneurs, as we

all know, around the difficult part of growing a Business.

Yeah, one of the things that can happen in in

a life of an entrepreneur, especially a successful one, is

that we can actually flip those identities where we start to

believe we're Andrew the entrepreneur and not Andrew the

human. What would you say to someone who feels like they're

succeeding more at work than they are in these other areas of

life.

I would say that hopefully life is a lot longer

than work. So actually, work for me was always a definite cut off

at some point that I wouldn't be working any longer. And that's

how I really sort of compartmentalized my work life.

I was like, I'm going to go and grow a business, hopefully for

10 years and exit if I can. That was always the goal to try and

sort of cut it off, whereas you hope that life will be 7080, 90

years depending on each individual so I saw work to some

degree, as a means to an end to be able to earn enough money to

go back and live the life that I wanted to and look ultimately,

for me, being a multi millionaire is not about buying

Lots of bright yellow fast cars. It's about having choices on a

day to day basis about what you do. So for me, I'm a father. My

kids now are four and six. They were two and four when I

finished two years ago. And actually my whole life has just

been around children and spending time and recouping

being a dad and reconnecting with my wife and my friends and

all of those things. So that is way more important to me than

all of the money and the success and the business side. So I

would just say it's easy to flip, and we should take

wellbeing out of the characters we create as entrepreneurs.

That's good because we've created that, but it's not us.

And ultimately, when someone buys the organization and you're

asked to take a step back, or you move to the side or you

leave, you can't have too much of yourself in that person,

because you can't forget who you are. And I worked really hard on

that as I was coming towards the exit, and I started to plan

things that I do, and I can give you some examples, if you like,

of actually what I did because so I really mean it. I grew up

in a working class family where community was really important

to me. So every Sunday, about 30 members of my family would all

go to my grandma's house and eat together. It was non negotiable.

Every Sunday, 6pm we had to be there. So for me, it was like I

wanted to do this thing where our family is now so big that on

Christmas Day We can't all go to the same place, because there's

no how. Big enough to have all 75 of us, or whatever. So I

hired an entire hotel on Christmas day, literally every

room, paid for every meal, every drink, everything, and brought

75 people together on that day in the summer, I ended up buying

a farm where I live. Now, very English. I live on a farm and

plant trees and eat berries and all that sort of stuff these

days. So on this farm, I hosted a massive party, 150 people. We

had a hog roast, we had a pizza van. We had a burger van.

Everybody came for like this Jambo Lee sort of thing, where

they came to our house and celebrated what we'd done. I

also I gave my dad quarter of a million dollars so he could go

and retire five years early from the factory that he'd worked in.

I bought my two sisters their house. I bought my mum and dad

another house so they could move closer to where we were, and I

financially secured all the people I cared about. I also

bought my children a couple of houses each too, so that they

had future investment properties for themselves as they got

bigger. So just in case everything went wrong and I died

the day after I'd done all those things to secure my family and

support the family unit, and that was a massively, massively

important thing for me, and that's really what drove me to

be very satisfied after I'd finished work. It wasn't about

going and buying the sports car. It was about going to my dad and

saying, hey, you've been in the same factory for 46 years.

Here's $250,000 in cash so that you can leave the factory this

month. And that's actually what happened. And it was an amazing

feeling. And I promise you cannot buy that feeling. Doesn't

matter how much money you have. Like, being able to give that

back was really quite special.

Yeah, I think in some settings, Andrew the

entrepreneur has an advantage over Andrew the human, in that

there's a lot more work being done in the organizational space

around vision and purpose and direction. And I think one of

the things that happens when we shift to 95% Andrew the human,

is that we haven't quite invested in the same degree of

clarity on what our vision is for that phase of our life. And

I think that is a big part of the depression that you talked

about earlier. I think it's a big part of the health issues

that come up staggering amount of health concern in the first

nine to 12 months after after exit. And I think it's also why

some people will, rationally get back into business deals almost

immediately after trying to check that box again. What did

you do to have such a clear vision of what was next?

I tell you the very first thing I did, I we

between London and the north of Scotland. We have something

called the Caledonian sleeper train, and you get on it at

eight o'clock at night, and you sleep on it, and then you end up

in Scotland in the morning the next day, the day after the

money hit my account, I got on that train on my own and just

went for a two day trip. And just went all the way to

Scotland. I hired a car and drove to the very tip of the

Isle of Skye in the rain, and then I took some photos, turned

round and came back again. And that was a two day trip. I just

looked out the window, no social media, no sort of planning what

I was going to do. I just started the decompression that I

needed to because I'd been so highly strung for like, nine

years or so. So that's how it started for me. But also working

with that psychologist, I started to write down some

things that were important. So buying the farm where I am now,

being a dad, doing the school run, doing the homework, doing

the swimming, all those things I knew were important to me, plus,

and this was a big one. In the last five years or so of running

the business, I totally neglected my friends. So I was a

32 to 37 year old man at that stage, and my friends, I lost

touch with them because they got busy because they had families.

I got busy because I had a family and I was running the

business. So one of the things I really worked on was going back

to organize little trips for us, organize us being together, even

just getting the train somewhere and having a beer together, you

know, just spending a bit of time back with each other.

Because that was the easiest no when my friend said, Hey, I live

in Oxford, come to London and have a beer with us on Friday.

That's an easy no, because I'm not seeing my wife. I've got

work to do. I can't be hungover. So those things really played

into my mind, and I've really made an effort with my kids, my

wife, my family, my friends, to integrate myself back into those

circles, if I may, just add a bit about health as well,

because this is a really important point. So in the seven

months in the lead up to the sale that I just mentioned

earlier on, I woke up one day and I decided I was going to

lose some weight, and I went on a 500 calorie a day diet for

seven months straight, and I lost 130 pounds in seven months.

So like, Absolutely, like, down to the bone. I got down to my

healthy weight for the first time in my whole life. Wow, I'll

tell you. I got down there. And on the on deal day, we had lots

of photos taken. You can see how thin and skinny I am, and gaunt

and gray, because I pushed myself right to the limit to get

this deal done. And about the week after us, my wife said,

because we've been together for 20 years, my wife. Said, I don't

like skinny guys, right? I don't find it attractive when you're

at this weight. That's all I needed to hear. So donuts and

pizza, here I came, no and I put about 25 pounds back on

something like that. So I got back up to looking a little bit

healthier again, but I managed to maintain my weight after

that. But do you know that is how intense I was for those

seven months to make sure that I was going to do it. I ate once a

day, and I ate 500 calories, no caffeine, no alcohol, nothing

like that. Just focus, focus, focus. And now that's the

unbalanced person that I am. But nothing was going to stop me

from getting to that. I would also just say no Manjaro or

pills or surgery or anything that was just mindset. I

wouldn't recommend it. It it gives you lots of bowel issues

in the future when you start eating more than 500 calories

again. But it worked for me, and actually I think it was a form

of control, because I when you have, like, we had nearly 1000

questions in the due diligence of sale, so then, when you had

all these questions and these numbers and this pressure, the

one thing I could do daily was control how much I was eating

and then weigh myself and see that I'd lost weight at the end

of the day. So health really plays an important part, as you

just suggested as well.

Yeah, yeah, Andrew, there's this question

before I let you go, that I want to ask. I asked one of my

guests. I'm interested to see what you have to say, especially

at this stage in your career. But what would you say is the

biggest secret you wish wasn't the secret at all? What's that

one thing you wish everybody watching or listening today

knew?

I think that I don't believe everyone can start

a business. I don't think everybody has them, has it in

them. I think those with the right mindset can start a

business, and they can try and make it a success. In the UK,

80% of new businesses still fail within the first two years. So

running a business is hard, but with the right mindset and with

the right sort of focus on what you're trying to achieve in life

and what's going to be important for you, I think more people can

start businesses than believe that they can. It's actually not

that hard. And the sector I look towards is charities. I see lots

of amazing leaders, often women who run these charities, they

started it themselves, and now they've grown it, and it's been

a success. The skill you need to run a charity and the skill you

need to run a successful, profitable business are the

same. And actually, a lot of people put their heart and soul

into doing something that's right and never get a financial

rewards. So actually, if you're just a mum out there that

happens to run the school association, or you do something

with the church, or you do something over here. I actually

think you have the skills to be an entrepreneur, but you just

need the mindset and the support and the confidence to be able to

do it. So not everybody can do it, but more people can do it

than they think is probably possible.

That's so good. Andrew, so good. I love

the example as well. So Andrew, there's some folks listening.

They're thinking about their exit, or they're right in the

middle of it. They just want to know more about the work you're

doing now. Where can they find out more? Where can they connect

with you?

So for my businessy stuff, they can go to

LinkedIn, and if you search Andrew Holbert, you'll find me

on there or on Instagram. I share much more insight. So it's

underscore Andrew Holbert on Instagram, but look, I have

nothing to sell. I'm just trying to tell the story. I'm in an

incredibly fortunate position as a 39 year old now with more

money than I'll ever need in my life. And I'm just trying to

share the story and let people know it's not always the big

secret that people claim that it is, and actually it's probably a

bit easier than you think.

It's fantastic. Andrew, thanks so

much for being on thanks for sharing your story and your

success with us. It was a real privilege, and honor having you

here with us today. For those of you watching and listening, you

know that your time and attention mean the world to us,

I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I

did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.