I am really excited to be able to sit with James Ball and discuss how he was able to build and sell multiple companies, especially as he comes from a very technical background.

We talk about -

• Finding your idea
• Taking your idea to market and getting feedback
• Building a company and culture
• Practical tools for staying on track
• Market indicators and so much more
• Tune in for a full episode.

About James Ball (Jim):

Jim is an entrepreneur and founder from the UK. Working in the tech industry he spent the last decade building his business and preparing it for sale. Jim has worn many hats in varied roles including CEO, Sales, and Marketing but the common thread across these is a desire to build a solid business with a strong growth strategy that is a great place to work

Connecting with Manpreet:

https://linktr.ee/themanpreetbawa

Because if you do not give permission for people to fail,

then you are just stopping them and then you're not allowing them to think

outside of the box because out of the box is the unknown where you could fail.

And that's a conversation that we have.

But I have noticed that you need to.

You need to have that conversation quite frequently.

And I think that's the challenge is, you know,

and I thought this is one of the ways that we talk with

the team is if we're going to grow as an organization and that's definitely

our path now, you know, we're where we're a lot broader organization now.

But we continue to grow and we can our aspirations are bigger than we are.

So if we're following that

path, then we have to delegate responsibility.

We have to bring new people into the team and we have to grow as a team.

Part of that is we're going to get things wrong.

So we're going to bring in people and we're going to ask them

to help with things. They might get it wrong.

We might get it wrong.

We might get it wrong as a team, but we have to accept that.

So, you know, one of the things I say to my team is I'm

happy with, you know, a breakage rate of,

I think this is a temporary thing, a breakage rate of ten to 15%.

So if we make a decision, if we make ten decisions and one of them

isn't quite right, we can fix that and we'll fix that as a team.

And I am absolutely fine with that because the alternative is that we spend

much more time on all of those things and we slow the boat down.

We just we kind of grind to a halt and we don't grow.

So yes, I think

accepting I call it breakage by accepting

mistakes and

accepting mistakes and reassuring people that that is OK,

I think is a really important part of that

because like you say, it grows confidence and it lets people kind of explore

those soft side things as well.

All right.

Welcome, everyone.

one more episode, and I'm so excited

to have this gentlemen virtually sitting next to me.

I have known him for a few years and we met, you know,

at a common customer common project, and since then we have kept in touch.

The reason I'm excited about him is his background.

He comes from the very technical background as an enterprise architect,

and then he saw he wanted to do more and he shifted into

getting on his own business, building his own company.

And, you know, here we are, multiple

companies he has built and sold

and then some more, and there are some more things.

So I am really excited.

Welcome, Jim James.

And so that they're doing this.

I'm happy to be here too, and congratulations on your journey as well.

I can see, I can see where you're going and I can see the growth,

and it's incredibly impressive the pace as well.

So, yeah, super happy to be here.

Thank you.

So let's start where it started, you know?

How about you give a little bit of your background

so people understand where you come from and how you

then went from your employee to enter relationship?

Sure. Yeah.

I mean, you know, just a tiny bit of background on me.

So as you, I'm based here in the UK originally.

I'm from the north west of the company.

So the north west of the country, so up near Liverpool,

like Liverpool, Manchester, Preston, that kind of industrial north of the UK.

I'm in my mid-to-late forties now.

So as many people of my kind of era kind of like I'm

growing up in the seventies and eighties in the UK and then going to

university in the nineties, I've slowly made my way south.

We all made our way south for work.

So I'm kind of a northern guy who lives now

down in the south of England, just outside of just outside London.

And you know, as

you said in the introduction, I'm a techie, really.

I go back to computer science as kind of my profession

when I was kind of growing up and then through university

and then worked for some large I.T.

organizations, Oracle and Compaq,

as it was, then they were bought out by HP.

But yeah, techie background.

So I've been a developer, I've been a database administrator.

You mentioned enterprise architect.

So you know, that whole kind of design side of it,

that's kind of where I come from.

And I guess that was probably the first,

I guess, twelve or 13 years

of my career was, you know,

building IT systems, implementing IT systems

for big companies here in the UK.

And, you know, over that

time, I guess, you know, there was some entrepreneurship there.

You know, I was interested in how I was more

more than interested in, you know, what does it take to start a company?

What does it take to build a team and what does innovation look like?

What is entrepreneurship look like?

And I was really lucky to have an opportunity with a bunch of guys

kind of around 2011, 2012,

and there was I always named the guy,

so there was myself and Matt Smith right in that Kareem and Pete Barry .

So those four of us and we're friends, we go back, we go back a long, long way.

But we we were all working together

on a large government project

here in the UK and around us, and we we were implement in an IT system.

It was a long term projects like 18, 24 months, that kind of thing.

We had a lot of time together and at the same time, Amazon was coming up.

So Amazon Web Services, the cloud platform was coming up

and we realized that the the I.T.

world that we've been used to,

of servers and hardware

and storage and you know, these these huge vendors were being disrupted

by this e-commerce as this bookselling platform, right?

And you could

you could order a book, but you could also like run up a server as well.

And we were doing that in the evenings.

And, you know, one of my kind of

one of my kind of viewpoints is like, if you're if you're trying to figure out

what's coming next, look at what your team are doing in the evening.

So if they're, you know,

they're like today, they're going to be on blockchain,

they're going to be either can be looking at

cryptocurrencies and things like that.

But that's kind of where things are going, like,

what are they doing in the evening?

And what we were doing was we were playing around with with eight of us,

and that was the genesis of our kind of entrepreneurial journey.

We we

we developed an idea,

created a company,

spent a long time getting stuff wrong, like you do at the beginning.

That's kind of this kind of couple of years is very trial and error.

But then you find a niche.

People get to know what you're doing

and then you know, you keep going on that you kind of keep going on that journey.

You keep making a few mistakes, correcting things, trying to do things a little bit

better and eventually, hopefully fingers crossed you get to a good place.

Yeah, which is kind of where we are now.

Amazing.

You know, when I started my journey, I was still learning programing.

one of the things I remember is one of the session

this there was some I would say they're from.

IBM came and he was saying, OK, if you're a programmer

for more than a year, there's something wrong.

You should be becoming a leader.

And I've been done to set up like, I love programing.

And I did stick with programing for like ten years.

I just didn't want it because it was

something I was so comfortable I enjoyed doing and leading

or managing seemed like a lot more work.

You know, seeing in Black Box in my box was so much easier.

Yeah.

In terms of the idea, you know, so many people

as they're transitioning, as they are looking, especially technical people,

we all are full of ideas like when we're seeing it.

But not many people

are able to go beyond the idea to the execution or,

you know, finding and like you rightly said, that, you know,

first few ideas are

not exactly what is your niche or something that makes you successful.

It's just maybe a pivotal point.

Or it is. Yeah,

it's a stepping stone in a way.

So from your experience,

what would you tell somebody who's had an idea

but thinking, OK, let me figure out everything before I do this?

We did exactly that.

So we were actually, no, we didn't do that.

We did the bit that we thought was important.

So we we concentrated on the technology

and and and got to know that technology really well.

We we did.

We were proven things.

So we were able to, you know, like demo things to our customers.

We were able to show our ideas technically,

but we probably spent too much time and money on that as well

and not huge amounts of money because, you know,

you can kind of do these things quite cheaply.

But it's more about the effort and kind of where you spend your time.

And I think, you know, in retrospect, I would say you have to develop

enough of the idea so that you can show it so that you can demonstrate it.

And I guess it gets to we talk about like minimum viable product,

but who's whose book that comes from,

you know, just enough to show the idea, but it doesn't need

all of the kind of framework around it and the bells and whistles

and then go to market because ultimately.

If no one cares, then the market would just tell you,

no, and that's really hard to take

if you spent two years building something and then the market says no.

So yeah, so I think, you know, you need enough to be able to show

and then you just go out, go out and tell the world what you're doing

and take that feedback on board.

And and it's the scariest bit, right?

Because it's yeah, it's the bit where people go.

Why I don't understand or like, why are you doing that?

Or, you know, like, do people like you really do that?

You know, it's a really hard one, you know?

But I think I think you're getting out there and

and showing the world your work is is really valuable.

So when you know, as you were building this MVP

and when you took it out, and if you know, I'm assuming

some people said no and some would say yes ,

eventually when you heard the No.

Or, you know, or it didn't make sense to the people that you were talking to,

what were some of the things that you did as you

look back that made it possible to get to the yes.

Well, I think there's two things.

I think this one is like, how do you carry on?

And two is, how do you get to? Yes.

So for us and this deserves a little bit of context.

So we were we were basically trying to get

established companies or

established customers like mid-market UK customers.

They could be manufacturing, they could be service based,

but kind of big companies to rather than use their own I.T.

like data centers and their own kind of computers and stuff like that.

We're trying to get them to use Amazon's.

We're trying to get them to use the cloud.

And Amazon have been around since 2006, and we were trying

to have this conversation in 2011 2012

and people didn't want to have it, but they weren't ready.

You know, there was the concerns were, is it secure?

Is it reliable?

And these guys sell books.

You know, all this kind of stuff.

It was just too early to have that conversation. So,

so number one, we had to find a way to, but we kind of knew it was the future.

So it was like, OK, so how do we expand the gap between

how do we expand the gap between?

Our idea and finding an early adopter,

that was kind of our first challenge.

And I remember we had conversations around this one that kind of sticks out to me.

It was on a street in London, like outside a customer

that had said no and we kind of like came downstairs

and we were on this noisy street and it was cold and we were like.

What are we going to do if people keep saying

no, because we couldn't understand that it was obvious to us?

What are we going to do if we say no?

And we went and we sat down, we drank some coffee.

And what we figured out was

how can we keep going long enough, how can we create a runway?

That's long enough?

It wasn't even that it's like, how can we create a runway that's forever,

you know,

so that we can literally keep doing this until the penny drops

for the rest of the world because it's going to drop

and we just figured out what that was going to be.

So we're like, Well, how much is that going to cost?

Are you going to do it and how are we going to manage

our day jobs against doing that as well?

We figured that out.

And then it was a case of go and execute.

So then there's just the kind of the grittiness of actually doing that.

And then in terms of finding that first customer

and kind of convincing that first customer,

I think we just we had a phrase like, sometimes

you just have to let the world turn underneath people for a while.

And that was what we did.

We just persisted and kept going until

until the world was ready, until until our customer base was ready.

And then you find one, find one customer,

one friendly person that's willing to take the the jump

with you and with the technology, and then you've got a story to tell.

So then you go and tell that story, and that's a proof

point, and it's kind of some social proof that someone else is doing it.

Then at the end of the next person isn't the risk taker.

And then you find the second one and then the ball is rolling, right?

You you just need to keep pushing it down the hill.

So amazing.

I mean, I love the analogy of, you know,

using the runway building end of runways or that.

Eventually, it comes to a yes, and then,

you know, believing in your idea, like if you knew

just because you believe it's going to happen, you know,

you had to give it to time and you wait for the perfect timing to come.

So that's amazing.

So when you were, you know, a lot of times

would I have seen and personally with myself also like in the technical

background, people are a little bit more introverted, shy.

And I've seen you and you're not really outspoken like you have your resolve.

You, you are friendly, but you still have that

reservation or shyness to it.

How is that transition from somebody who is technical who's

maybe sitting behind the computer most of the times working

to this new world, where now you have to not only talk about the idea, you have to

convince people that it is going to happen because it was not there yet.

It is a great question.

And you're right, you've got me on. Kind of

I don't really like introvert and extrovert.

I read something recently about.

I can't remember the guy's name, but

the guy who started Gymshark and he was on a podcast

and he was talking about, you know, are you introvert and are you extrovert?

And you know,

I think when people think about that, they're like, Well,

you know, just this person might jump up and down

in front of the room, and that's what makes them an extrovert.

And unlike

and he described it as it's more about how do you recharge your batteries?

Unlike, introverts tend to recharge the batteries by

kind of being on their own a little bit and being quiet, whereas extroverts

like to recharge the batteries being in the group.

And I think, you know, that's how I reflect on it.

So I'm perfectly happy like,

you know, standing up in front of the room and, you know,

I kind of making a bit of a fool of myself and getting things wrong.

And, you know, I do get embarrassed.

I blush and go read and and I kind of groan, like, that's just me.

That's just how it's going to be.

And I'm kind of happy with it as long as I get time to kind of

go back and just kind of recharge those memories a little bit afterwards.

But it just, I think it just takes practice.

I think you're right.

You know, if you're if you're a coder

and you know, you're you're technical.

And I think that's changed now, actually, I think that's a career

you can have like the whole, whole way through now.

I think being a a creative technical person

is something you can do all the way through your career.

I don't think there should be this pressure to, like, be a team leader.

I mean, I think you can do that.

But I think equally, you know, technical creator, engineer, coder,

whatever you call it, I think I think that's a valid all the way through.

I think if you do want to change and if that's come the way you want to go.

I think it's practice.

Yeah, it's putting yourself out there, making yourself uncomfortable

and just.

And the other thing is that nobody really cares anyway.

I mean, it's like you, you, you go, you know, when you're younger,

maybe you kind of go through the world

thinking that everybody's picking up on you, your flaws.

And, you know, like when you say the word wrong

or when you kind of like, speak to no one really cares.

Everybody's kind of thinking about themselves that anyway.

So I think use that knowledge, get up in front of people and just practice.

And yeah, I enjoy it now.

It's my it's my favorite part of things at work

is working with people and kind of being creative with the group.

And it's the it's the thing I've most missed

during the pandemic as well is not having that get in a room together

and, you know, meet people and and do stuff together at the end.

Yeah, yeah, and I agree with you, like

even with the like morphs into a more shy people,

you still enjoy the company of others, like it's not like shy people.

They may not talk.

They may have a little bit

harder time to express and do.

But they still enjoy it.

Like this is this is from my own experience.

So when you were,

you know, as you were building this idea and trying to get your first?

Yes, were you still doing your jobs?

Like, was it the period that you were doing this

part time and then transition from time to time?

How was the journey? Yeah, that's exactly.

So we figured out a way of.

We figured out a way of carrying on doing the roles that we had

because we were we were all freelance at the time,

so we'd all kind of like taking that tiny little micro step

into kind of entrepreneurship and and so on. But.

So that gave

us an element of control, an element of freedom, so we could say,

OK, well, you know, what can I do this as a as a side gig, I guess?

And until it takes off.

And then around and.

So there's one of our team, Matt Smith, right?

He took the first leap, so he he was kind of the first person

to go and work in the company full time.

And I think that was around Christmas 2011.

So kind of heading into 2012, I might be wrong there.

And then as we grew, as we grew our customer base and kind of got a bit

more traction, got a more business, then we slowly we all came into the business

and then we had that kind of.

And we create a framework for that as well.

So we've had the conversations about like,

how much is only going to get paid, like what's up,

how are we going to manage the finances and all that kind of thing.

So we've had those conversations.

So then it was just a kind of a business

process of like, when can the business support us all?

And then we had a period of.

Probably a year or so of.

Is this going to right, we've managed to make this leap, but can we sustain it?

And, you know, and they probably took it, as I say, a year

or so for us to kind of get to the point where we're like, Okay, yeah, this is

I always think about it

as this is very likely to be the thing I'm doing in twelve months time.

Therefore, I should look at how we grow now,

and we kind of got to that point, and that's when we started

to grow the team and bring some, some some of the folks in as well.

So when you were looking ahead, like twelve months ahead

and thinking about what should we be doing now to prepare

for that twelve months,

it's almost like you're putting your region on like this

is what's going to happen and determining

what you can do to prepare that.

Did you guys have,

you know, in the personal development,

those vision board there as goals and planning

and things like, did you collectively do something where you decided, Okay,

this is where the company is going?

We did. Yeah, and we were.

It's one of the things I'm really proud of that we did.

And it's one of the things that I don't

I don't see as much of in other organizations. We

I can't remember exactly the timing,

but it was probably like 20, 15, something like that.

We stumbled on a couple of things.

And it's always ideas from outside, right?

So there was and there's there's two books that kind of influence

the way we built things from sort of to 2015 to 2019.

The first one was, I can't remember that guy's name, but he's he's a rower.

He was a rower in the 2012 Olympics,

and he wrote a book called Does It Make the Boat Go Faster?

Which is a fantastic book.

It's it's it's half

the story of the Olympics and it's half a

a coaching book or

a business slash self-improvement book.

And the stories that they tell around

the the the experience of rowing and winning in the Olympics

is then reflected back in kind of what we can all learn from it.

And it's a fantastic book and we really took that on board

and it focused us in on that.

If we want to grow this company, you need to look at what we're doing every day

and we used that phrase.

We said, Does it make the boat go faster?

Like, does it grow the company?

Are we doing things better or is it just kind of.

Administration trivia let distraction.

So that was the one thing

we kind of focused in on, you know, exactly what should we be doing?

And then the second thing the second book,

we and I literally saw someone reading it on the tube.

And it's called the twelve week year.

And and I just looked at it and I thought, I wonder what that's about.

And that's kind of what I was looking at this guy reading on the tube

and I saw the outside cover and I saw a little bit of the inside

and I could see a diagram of things like that. And I went straight.

I was on my way to work.

I went straight into work and ordered it.

And it was it.

It's a very simple idea, but it's a it's a great challenge

and it's a great framework for building things.

So the idea is that you look at what you would normally do in

in a year, in twelve months, and then you challenge yourself

to think about why you can't do that in twelve weeks.

And we use this as a framework

to to start kind of planning and building out the company.

And and as I say, it's one of the things I'm most proud that we did

because we would we would get together on a weekly basis.

So obviously, this divides the year into four chunks or quarters.

But you have you have twelve weeks and then you have week 13,

which is your planning week.

So you basically plan

four times a year and then you go away for for the individual

at the in-between twelve weeks and you execute on those plans

and then you come back in week 13,

you see how you did and then you improve on things.

And that's how we structured

our kind of approach to building the company.

So we did.

So to answer your question in a really long roundabout way,

we didn't have like vision boards or statements

or anything like that, but we did know where we wanted to take the company.

We knew we knew that small is temporary.

We knew that you need to get to a scale to be sustainable.

So we knew we had to build.

We knew what that looked like on a kind of a three year timeframe,

and we had a way of breaking that down into chunks

so that we knew what was in front of us for the next twelve weeks.

And that was how we did it.

We we just kind of had that repetition.

We had that to use a kind of up to date phrase.

We had that cadence within the kind of planning cycle of the business.

And I think it's a large part of what made us successful.

Amazing.

There's so much

wisdom in here, I like the phrase, does it make, you know, bored, go on board,

go faster because we can get ourselves distracted by a lot of many things.

And I mean, as I'm building this podcast and doing these things, I'm

not necessarily

asking this question, but I'm asking this like,

what is it I'm doing like is the best use of my time?

Can I sort of give it away

and let somebody do it better than me?

So that's amazing.

You mentioned so many books and yeah.

You know, and this is where we connect.

Like, I love that you are also a reader.

And for me, when I was still doing programing and I was reading books

like somebody handed me and I was so early on my personal realm and learning,

I know that people around me used to

laugh like, OK, what is it that book is going to do?

But you know, as I look back now, 15 years later, it has helped me immensely.

Those ideas, it was all towards those mentors.

And and like you said, a lot of companies

do not use it and are like bigger companies, Amazon and Google.

They're more to build a culture.

But in terms of building yourself first and investing,

I mean, one of the easiest ways to find a coaches book, right?

Picking up a book.

So along your journey, did you have, you know,

other than the books like direct mentors or role models that you followed

that helped you maybe get better in your craft?

I yes, we did.

Yeah, and I was thinking about this when we were,

you know, kind of preparing to talk today.

And I think.

I think there's been so many people, and

it's hard to mention a few, because then you miss out others and

and that's not not fair, but I think what I learned was that you

you need to be open to other people's ideas. And

there's two things need to be open to other people's ideas,

and you need to ask enough questions

that you really, really understand kind of where they're coming from.

And I think back to.

So I'll tell one story kind of from when we were getting started, we

we were getting started with Amazon

or with eight of us

, but we didn't have any contact with them.

We hadn't spoken to them as a company.

We just kind of like this big, anonymous organization for us,

and we were using their tools and we really understood their tools

and we were probably being more creative than a lot of people.

But they had no idea and we didn't know that.

We didn't know that that was what we were doing.

But we went

to they had a conference in London and it was free to go.

You could just like go along with a pass, register online and get.

So we did that

and there was a guy.

There's a guy I'd met through and through a project.

He was working on a project that we were working on.

His name is James Brown.

He was working for a company called Logic at the time.

He's moved on now.

But I was he was saying to you saying to

me, Well, are you partnering with Amazon?

And I was like, Well, yeah,

because we're kind of using this stuff and he's like, No, no, no.

Are you like in their partner framework?

And he was like, No, I didn't even know.

Like, is it even the thing, right?

And he said, OK, I need to introduce you to this person.

So introduce me to a guy called Alistair McAlpine,

who at the time was

running the partner organization for Amazon.

And I explained what we were doing, and he said it kind of said to me, Well,

you should really be a partner.

And I was like, OK, what does that mean?

And he's like, Well, we have a partner network.

And I was like, Well, what is that for?

And he's like, OK, we need to meet and you need to understand what all this is.

But I think it is that, you know,

rather than I don't think I've ever had or we've ever had.

Like a set of, you know, mentors

that kind of that kind of help you all the way through.

But I think there are people that you come across and I think you kind of

if you kind of recognize these people and you think, Oh, yeah, you know,

this little bit like ten times better than I know it

. And then if you've got the

if they've got the patience and they can see something and you know

you just and generous with their time, then you can just ask

enough questions to get good enough to take that next step.

And you know, and that

that was like two or two conversations, maybe three conversations.

And then that took us on a path with Amazon as a partner, which just like,

really, you know, put fuel under the business

and got us a load of attention that we just wouldn't.

We didn't even know existed.

So, yeah, I think it's people you meet along the way.

Amazing.

I remember one of the things two years back, I think it's a year back sometime

when I talk to you that I was thinking to get on that independent journey

and we were talking about ideas I knew you gave me, just tap.

You mentioned that, you know, one should not be afraid of sharing their own ideas.

I remember that if you

can talk about that because I thought that was a profound wisdom in it,

because a lot of times we just hold on to ideas thinking somebody would steal.

Yeah, yeah,

yeah, it's I thought you were going to go somewhere else, but you're right.

It's all right.

I think when when we have an idea and I don't know where this comes from,

I think it's cultural.

I don't know whether it's UK cultural or whether it's whether it's broader.

But there's like if you have an idea or if you're an inventor

and you make something or you've got you think you could make something, then

you should keep it close to your chest because like someone else will steal it.

And you know, you won't have a you won't have a copyright

or you won't have a trademark or you won't have a pattern,

you have nothing to protect you and all that kind of thing. Yeah.

And and

I remember looking at all, and I think that's how we were when we started

is like, Oh, we need that the secret sauce here, we need to protect that

and make sure nobody knows about it.

But then

I think I think I started listening to people

like Gary Vaynerchuk and people like that.

And yeah, it is one of the things that he always says is like,

if you've got an idea, you can tell 100 people and 99 of

them are going to do nothing about it, like just nothing like it.

They're not even going to realize.

And there might be one person who realizes the opportunity there,

but then there's probably a one in 100

chance that that person will actually go and copy what you're doing.

Because like we said earlier on, most people aren't paying,

you know, most people are kind of like wrapped up with their own stuff.

So that kind of taught me that actually, you know?

You can share your secret sauce.

And actually, that's that's where the that's where the real value is

and that's where the real influence and kind of energy for your business

is going to come from.

So I just think the more that you can share about what you do

and how you do it, the more valuable it is for the rest of the world .

And actually, it's just a

it's an accelerant to your business more than anything can be.

And I think that's why thing you do.

You've kind of

you put yourself out there and,

you know, you kind of your ideas, your you're expressing.

And I've,

you know, we've had these conversations and I've seen that change over time.

And yeah, I think I've only seen it change because we've had those conversations

and I can kind of see it.

But you know, it's just I think it's so important to share.

Yeah.

Yeah, and it's

and it gives you a feedback loop also like if you're doing our talk,

if you hold yourself so closely that I'm going to just talk it

to the right person, then you miss the opportunity.

And one of the first things I learned from the mentor was that,

you know, surveying the market, talking to people like,

I may think you need this, but people actually did something different,

which is why I did everything because I'm just getting aligned with

what is market asking to deliver rather than what I think I need to do 100%.

And actually what we found was

what we thought the market wanted.

But the market was actually a lot simpler than we thought.

You know, it's kind of, you know, we've taken you sort of four or five steps

into how to enterprises use public cloud, you know, how to businesses use Amazon.

We'd taken four or five steps on that journey.

But actually our customers, they were just wanting to look at step number one.

So, you know, we were kind of we almost had to simplify the message.

But unless you're kind of sharing what these steps are, it's just confusing.

So I think you just oversharing and really simplifying things

so that people understand this is so valuable.

And like you say, you get the feedback as well.

You know, if if you're.

But if you if you're not sharing enough detail

and the person doesn't understand, you're not going to get the right feedback.

Yeah, so I think it's important to go to

the amazing.

So coming to your own mindset right here.

I believe somebody who is building or going somewhere

has to protect yourself like your mental

psych psychology or not get affected by a lot of things

and knows whether it's a normal or whether it's, you know,

you get somebody saying something wrong or a customer not liking you.

We all have those situations.

So what do you do from day to day?

Like to make sure that you're aligned and you're not distracted by the noises

that may not mean anything from Adobe or,

you know, years point of your and your long term vision.

There certain things that you do to keep yourself sane.

Yeah. And

I think I think maturity comes into it.

I think I used to get ten years ago I would get a lot more upset

and a lot more worried about the,

you know, kind of one person's comment or feedback

or, you know, where was all this going and that kind of thing.

And so I think maturity helps

maturity slash experience.

I guess I I know about maturity, I probably know less about experience.

But I think that to the two things that I do day to day are

and going back to something we said already like

what is this likely to look like in twelve months time?

And is that is what I'm doing now important for that?

You know, so I kind of try and take that, take that view.

And if if somebody is being critical, it's like, Well, is that

is that going to affect us in twelve months time?

Probably not. So I'm going to put it away.

Or if somebody is being constructive, it's like, actually, OK,

do we need to change things?

Because actually the market's

going to be in a different place or we're all going to be

in a different place in twelve months time, I think,

you know, try and take that longer perspective that helps me.

And then day to day, I'm just very practical.

So, you know, if we have a if we have a challenge and whether that's

kind of a hard business challenge or a soft people challenge, you know,

I try and just think about it very practically.

And if it's a business challenge, what are the what the activities,

what are the tasks that we need to to do or try to overcome the business challenge?

And if it's if it's softer, if it's about people,

if it's about relationships, then how do we need to have the conversation?

Like how do we get people talking and communicating better?

And and it helps me rather than it helps me because it gives me

something practical to do, and I think I'm very progress driven.

So, yeah, I'd say those two things

in terms of building the company

culture is one of the biggest things that impacts the growth

of the company and

meeting the people, knowing the people that work

in your company like yourselves, dorm feed.

I saw one thing.

The common thing I saw was working with you

guys was, you know, there is a sense of energy

that and never felt threatened like it was always welcoming energy.

And you know, if it was just you, I could say, OK, it's just personality.

But you know, you have very different personalities, but

the energy that comes across or the vibe that come across the scene.

So was there something intentionally you guys built or like?

How do you build that culture to ensure

this is welcoming or it stands correct toward your vision and brand is about?

It's it's hard, isn't it?

I mean, I think we we definitely worked hard on culture early on

and the guys that you mentioned, you've got a founder in there

and you've got a very early employee in there as well.

And, you know, still with the organization, which is fantastic.

And yeah, I think very early on,

we thought we kind of tried to have a

a type company culture and just make sure that we were all just

communicating really well and frequently

and having fun together as well as working together.

And I think I think the environment we were in helped.

So, you know, around the time that we were starting up

and that we were building, there was a big

kind of technology focus in East London.

So in between

Old Street roundabout in the city of London,

there's kind of some older kind of industrial areas that were being

kind of gentrified and redeveloped

as co-working spaces like live workspaces and things like that.

And there was there was a real strong vibe of like creating.

Tivity and, you know, entrepreneurship and technology within that space.

So we just put ourselves right in the middle of it, and I think

that attracted attracted people to come and work at the company,

be part of that kind of community.

And it also meant that there was always things going on.

So, you know, we were always able to

go and eat in cool places together, go out for drinks and smart places.

There was always kind of events going on and things like that. So

I think that really helped us early on.

And aside from the environment, I think we what we tried to do

is just have a even when we were a team of like maybe up to about ten,

we would all stay in the same room.

So everything happened in the same room

and we communicate daily.

We had a thing called daily stand up and we had the biggest whiteboard

that money can buy and it had everything we were doing on it

and everybody knew what was going on in the organization.

And I think that was the culture that we put in place.

And somehow, and I don't know how these things work.

Not my fields of expertize, but somehow that closeness

and that kind of practicality that we built into

that early team has spread out as we've grown, which has been fantastic.

And then I think the last thing you can't ignore

is the people you hire, the people that you bring in along the way.

And then again, you know, some of the guys that, you know,

will be early hires in a really strong team members.

So I think if you get the right people,

you put them in the right environment and you put them together as a team.

I think you can have something really great, which is

which is hopefully what you see.

Yeah, yeah.

And as you share this, one thing that comes to my mind is it's

also the environment people, but it's also

just because you are the person leading them like the, you know,

one thing that immediately comes across when somebody meets you is like,

how humble you are an ambassador welcoming energy

like there's a balance between your humility and your vision

and your practicality, you know, and

and and that's what attracted me to,

quite frankly, to you like we became

even though we were different partners working different companies.

But I think we became good friends because that energy

is that vibe that, you know, not threatening our helpful nature.

It just was amazing.

It's kind of easy to say so.

Going back to Gary,

since you mentioned, Gary, one of the things in terms of the

company culture.

He talks about is a higher fast and fire posture,

as is the philosophy he was, though, that he finds the right people files

like he mentioned that, you know, in interviews,

cannot do the justice with reference checks, cannot do the justice

to actually work that person could be doing.

And I can relate to it and then firing and firing

people, I think there is a wrong connotation to it.

But I think in a way, when you are in the wrong position,

you're not growing yourself, you're not helping grow the company.

It's better to get ahead and find something that

motivates you.

Is there something?

Is there a philosophy you hiring people for your company?

I think.

I understand how a fast fire fast.

It's not something we ever did, and it's I'm

not sure it's kind of the way that I'm put together.

But that's just me.

So I think we probably hired slowly but very considerately.

And I think when it wasn't a good fit for people,

I think that was a kind of a conversation that happened over a period of time.

And maybe, you know, like you say,

if someone isn't growing in a role and that they don't quite fit in the team,

then it'll be obvious to you or be obvious to them.

And at some point you have the conversation, and sometimes it's

sometimes it's easier.

And they're like, Yeah, actually, I'm going to go and look at something else,

and sometimes it's a bit harder.

But I

don't think that was a philosophy we we adopted.

And having said that, when you know, when we look at hiring people

and I was thinking about this this morning, I think this is kind of.

When I look at hiring a person, I think you look at the skill

you look at there,

you look at the skill level, of course, that kind of hard skills.

You look at the cultural fit and that kind of, you know, how

how they're going to work in the team.

And then I think the third piece is is and I wrote

this down are labeled as ambition, but I think it's like, you know, their future.

And I think you need ideally you need some of all three,

but you can get away with two.

So, you know, we've hired people who've got

they've got skill and they've got great cultural fit.

Maybe they don't have, you know,

massive ambition, things like that, but they're a great team member.

Equally, we've hired people who are a great cultural fit,

have a, you know, total newcomers to the industry.

So like low skill level, but they've got massive ambition

and they just want to take off and then just feel for the team.

If it's the right person with the right ambition,

it's just fuel for the team and that can work really well.

And I think the only one that doesn't work so well is if you've got

if you've got somebody with skill and somebody with ambition,

but they're not a team fit, they should probably be doing their own thing .

You know, and I think that's that's where those people end up.

There's an entrepreneurship and a drive that

but yeah, I kind of look at those three things.

And, you know, I think when I'm talking to somebody

about bringing them into the team now, it's like if.

If they've got some of the skill and they're a good team fit

and I always have the conversation about, you know, where do you like it

if this job or this role is two years or three years,

where do you want to be in five years?

And as long as we fit on that line, then I think I think we're good and

and it's amazing when you ask that question like what

what people will come out with and what they'll say.

And and and the reason I ask it is I want to make sure that what we do

in a role together

now or over the next two or three years or however long we're together

is is putting you on a path

for your five or ten year kind of ambitions

because otherwise, like, you know, I think

we're just going to end up disappointed and you know, it's just going to be a job.

It's not going to be part of a career and things like that.

So that's kind of the way I look at it now is more of a

think about the person as well as the job.

Yeah.

No, that's brilliant, and a lot of companies, I mean,

I can tell you from my career, a lot of companies are not focused

on the career of the person coming, and that probably is a mess.

Like if you focus there,

then you give a reason for person to come on board and work

and to their capability and put in efforts to get where they want to be.

And it's also easier to hold them accountable. OK?

You said you wanted to go there.

You know, every year is a change something.

And I think that's a brilliant way to hire people.

I wish somebody did that.

one of the things I wished when I was growing

as I was getting more exposed to

other great leaders and great organizations

I always wanted like, I wish I had somebody

who would have

that kind of interest in my growth.

And, you know, hold me accountable.

Or, you know, it's more almost like a teacher,

somebody holding you accountable for your words that you said.

And hey, I didn't get that there,

but I had to actually hire people to do that to me.

But but that leads me to this question how do you see the

you know, there's the

importance of higher skills,

obviously, for Adobe a role, you need to have those skills.

But in my experience, or what I believe is that you,

you also need to have social skills to grow yourself, invest in yourself.

And almost like companies should be

giving away or making sure that people are being

that they are not always focused on the hard way.

Do you see the balance in your experience between hard and soft skills?

It's I mean, it's a great question, and it's really poignant in our industry.

You know, we're a service provider.

We provide people with skills

as a service to companies.

And so it's natural that you focus there, you know, it's kind of natural.

That's the salable commodity that we have.

But you're 100% right.

You need to kind of you need to build those.

And when I think about

soft skills, I think about generally communication and yeah, kind of building,

building a team relationships, building personal relationships,

developing rapport with people and it just kind of human skills.

And yeah, I mean, we in our in the company now, we have a culture of mentorship.

So we have a mentoring program,

which means that people can learn from one another and that has a real slant

on personal progression, career progression.

And it's a very safe and open way to ask questions

about kind of what's going on and how to grow.

So I think

the balance

is really hard, isn't it, because everybody's different?

But I think.

I think one of the best ways to do it is to lead by example.

So, you know, I always try and put myself out.

There is the one that will

talk about what soft skills are.

I'll be willing to be vulnerable and kind of the one who's wrong as well,

because I think, you know,

that kind of culture of everybody's got to be right all the time is

it kind of breeds the wrong kind of soft skills.

So so I'll always make sure that I try or try and make sure that I lead by example.

I'm open to making a fool of myself.

I'm open to being wrong.

I'll always be the one that asks the question that needs to be asked.

If I, if I don't understand, or if I think is a win win, not understanding.

So yeah,

I think I think it's those things that we can do as leaders

of an organization to kind of help people along.

I, I don't see enough of and I think this is where you

where you're going and the kind of community that you're in

in that you're building is, you know, how do we structure that?

You know, how do we

and how do we make sure that we're repeating that on a regular basis?

So, you know, it's one thing Jim saying, you know, like, Oh,

we need to we need to be more open in our communication.

We need to be

happy with failing from time to time,

and that's acceptable and it's OK.

But I think there's another thing of how do we

how do we make sure that people understand that on a regular basis

and kind of build that into a person's training plan or career progression?

And I think as an industry, we don't do that as well as we could.

Yeah.

And I mean, this is what surprises me like an especially in service industry

where you know you if you're selling services,

you're selling commodity and the commodities, your people and

if people are not communicating.

Then you're almost sabotaging your success

like you can get into the occult or of,

you know, a program with the customer, but it's so hard to

spread yourself because you're just in that container and one that you got in.

And all of the times companies do not invest.

And it's not just about the money, it's about providing them

tools and encouraging them people to do it.

And like you said, being the example of

somebody who invest openly, communicates

openly, tells them it's okay to fail and not necessary.

I mean, one thing that I and it's industry wide leg

across everywhere is almost like culture.

The culture of fighting, which is why it has a strong connotation is you fire

because somebody feel that something right, as though you know, that to me is

stopping the growth.

Because if you do not give permission for people to fail,

then you are just stopping them, then you're not allowing them to think

outside of the box because out of the box, that is done, not where you could fail.

Yeah, and that's a conversation that we have.

But I have noticed that you need to you need to have that conversation

quite frequently.

And I think that's the challenge is, you know.

And I thought this is one of the ways that we talk with

the team is if we're going to grow as an organization and that's definitely

our path now, you know, we're where we're a lot broader organization now.

But we continue to grow

and we can our aspirations are bigger than we are.

So if we're following that path, then

we have to delegate responsibility.

We have to bring new people into the team and we have to grow as a team.

Part of that is we're going to get things wrong.

So we're going to bring people in.

We're going to ask them to help with things.

They might get it wrong. We might get it wrong.

We may get it wrong as a team, but we have to accept that.

So, you know, one of the things I say to my team is I'm happy with,

you know, a breakage rate of,

I think this is a 1010 first thing, a breakage rate of ten to 15%.

So if we make a decision, if we make ten decisions and one of them

isn't quite right, we can fix that and we'll fix that as a team.

And I am absolutely fine with that because the alternative is that we spend

much more time on all of those things and we slow the boat down, right?

We just we we kind of grind to a halt and we don't grow.

And so yes, I think

accepting I call it breakage

by accepting mistakes and.

Exactly mistakes and reassuring people that that is OK,

I think is a really important part of that

because like you say, it grows confidence and it lets people

kind of explore those soft side things as well.

Amazing.

OK, so two more questions

and then be done and before I ask this question.

I just want to make sure I thank you for this time.

It's brilliant, ominous for me personally.

It's a masterclass in learning and to friendship and some of the things

one should be thinking about when you're building company, the culture,

the hiring , the people and just having the conversations with.

Thank you for this. Well, thank you. Thank you for having me.

The question where do you see

the technology or what changes do you see coming now post-COVID

with all that has been done that it has accelerated a lot of things.

So how do you see the market changing

or some things that you see are coming our way?

Don't ask a bigger question.

I think I think

what we've seen over the last two years

and I think what we've seen last year specifically through

COVID is an acceleration of some trends that were there already.

So the really obvious ones e-commerce, remote working,

you know, aspects like aspects of life like that that that

where we rely on it,

those things are just accelerated.

I think.

We're going to we're going to see a continued acceleration of that.

I think it will be more commonplace and I think it will be

just better integrated into day to day life.

I think we'll get used to it

and we'll get used to having a blend of, you know, distance

work in like this and face to face and all that kind of thing.

So I think we'll accelerate the trend and we'll get more used to it.

And I think both of those things are really good.

I think what we're seeing in our business

and and more broadly as an industry trend is

modernization of it

and data and data driven business decisions as well.

And to kind of simplify that a little bit, I'll take some of the industries

speak out of it.

It has become incredibly complex

over the last sort of 20 to 30 years.

And we're at a point

now where some of that complexity is a real anchor on businesses.

So just removing that complexity, modernizing those I.T.

systems is going to be a priority.

And then I think the really exciting thing

is around business data and what businesses can do with

with the data that they've got locked away in systems at the moment.

And if we look at

what's happening in the world with kind of a

data driven business, decisions around A.I.

platforms and things like that, it's really exciting, but it's super expensive.

It's very hard to do. It's hard to train.

So there's only a few companies that are really doing it

well and properly and that the much larger ones.

So I think what's really exciting is over kind of a two, three, five year period,

how that technology matures and how the how

and how those options

will become available to smaller businesses

and they'll be able to kind of take advantage of those technologies.

I think because I think when they do, they'll be able to innovate around them

and we'll see some really exciting movement in the space.

Yeah, I think that answers your question.

Yeah, it does. So,

you know, in terms of your current

would never say it would use the next war, you know, James, never say,

where are you heading and how do people connect with you?

You know, if they wanted to know a little bit more about your work and all?

Yeah, sure.

So I actually noticed I'm wearing an old shirt today.

So this is the old clockwork logo, which is the company we started a while

back with and.

We went through an acquisition process, we never say, I'm going to show you this.

So this is what I should be wearing as the new branding.

So work is now part of never say as of a couple of years ago.

So we're part of a much broader organization now,

which has been a great transition for as we're kind of 33 years into that.

We're still building.

So we have a fantastic leadership team.

We're still building out basically

what we consider to be a full service organization.

So as well as you know, the the the Adobe

space, the Amazon piece that we always did the work,

there's a much broader set of services and we think we can

we can build an organization which is kind of a one stop shop

for lots of kind of mid-market and enterprise organizations.

We think there's a gap in the market to kind of do that in a really agile

and thoughtful way,

really understanding customers you understand in their industry,

understanding their industry challenges and really bringing technology to bear.

We think there's a gap in the market for someone that does that really well.

So we continue on that

building journey, and I'm super happy to be part of it.

Oh, and just for where people can find me, obviously

navigate dot com is where you find us.

If you search for James

Gimble on LinkedIn, that's where you'll find me.

But yeah, I'm sure people can track me down through the.

Yes, and I will have these links there.

Any parting wisdom for somebody

who is newer, either new in their journey from whatever

their high skill technology nine to five area is to our ship

or somebody who is already has a company and looking to,

I think the two different questions, but allows you to

get acquired or in acquisition

just like, you know, because we have been through that cycle

multiple times to different people and to different cultures.

So. So

the first one was the person who is.

Individually, it's just transitioning, who wants to move from nine

to five into enterprise? Show you work.

That's another that we should put a link to.

There's a book called Show Your Work, which is which is amazing,

and it goes back to some of the conversations we've had,

but make enough make believe enough

that people understand it, but then go and show it to lots and lots of people.

And I think that's the way things are done,

that they're done in community, they're not done in dark rooms.

So show your work would be to that one person.

And then I think building an organization and going through an acquisition journey.

I mean, we could do a whole other podcast on acquisition journeys,

but I don't think it's a I don't think it's a dissimilar answer.

I think the way that we

the way that

we built a community around the eight of us work that we did

was by showing it to those people was by,

you know, to quote one of the guys that we worked with at Amazon,

a guy called Damian Thomson.

He's now at Google, he said.

Choose what you want to be famous for.

And we did that.

We chose one thing. We thought it was really narrow.

It was more than enough to build a business against,

but we just went and went and did that very well

and told a lot of people about it.

And I think you're right.

Our the IT industry is there's a lot of consolidation going

on, the rise of opportunities for mergers and acquisitions of things like that.

But being known for

doing one or two things really, really well

is is a real superpower.

So I'd encourage people to find a niche and get really good at it.

Awesome, awesome.

Thank you so much.

And I will

I will definitely take on for the next show

where we talk about acquisition whenever we would, but it can, you know, I

can, I can easily go and hours and hours, there's so many things we can go.

Yeah, but thank you for this one hour. It was well spent.

I know people listening will enjoy it and got a lot of good nuggets with it.

They're transitioning their career or whether they're building their own.

Now, thank you, and

I'm pretty proud of you for the journey you're on, and thanks for having me.

All right.

I hope you enjoy the show as much as I did and got some valuable nuggets out of it.

If you liked it, there are other shows you can watch.

They are exactly what you need and I ask you to like, comment.

Subscribe.

Let me know what you thought of the show.

Really, I want to hear from you firsthand

what you found, what you liked, what you didn't like.