Mark Pittaccio has spoken extensively on the psychology of money, on wellbeing and happiness and on the dangers of a failed retirement. Our chat with him explains why it's important to consider more than just the numbers when making financial decisions, both personally and professionally, by applying Behavioural Economics and financial psychology.

Be it retirement plans or M&As, 'what's the money for?' is just as important question to ask as 'how much money do you want to make?'

Mark is a Behavioural Economist and Psychologist at Quilter, a wealth management firm where he helps financial advisors give better client advice through his practice.

BWB is powered by Oury Clark

Price is only an issue in the absence of value.

So what you're saying is clients do not value us.

No.

Then not say that that's We're, we're getting, we're getting, we're getting into, we're getting into the chat.

Yeah.

Price becomes important if people don't understand what the value is and, and professional services is a really tricky area.

Are okay?

Yeah, he did say we were rolling.

Ah, okay.

Hello and welcome to Business Without Bullshit.

I am Andy Orian, alongside me as my co-host, Pippa Stutz.

Hi Andy.

And today we are joined by the marvelously named Mark Potatio.

How you doing Mark?

Very well, thank you.

Welcome to the podcast.

Thank you.

Very good.

Mark is a behavioral economist, a quilter, and a doctoral college research psychologist at the University of London.

So, um, Mark, we, we always like to answer the question, what's keeping you up at night at the moment?

Mostly my wife's snoring if I'm perfect.

Yeah.

Have you sought solutions for that?

We are, I'm seeking solutions.

I'm not sure.

I mean, one solution is another bedroom, another wife.

We've been married 35 years this year.

I mean, well, it's just started.

Is it?

Well, relatively recently actually.

You are, you're a psychologist originally.

Are you?

Is that what you originally said?

No, I.

I, I, my background is actually in, in financial services, built several businesses, a around that.

And, uh, I actually went back to university in my fifties because I've always been very interested in psychology.

I'm also involved in sports coaching as well.

And for years, whilst behavioral economics was recognized as a subject, academia couldn't actually agree on a syllabus.

What do we mean by behavioral economics?

Well, exactly, this is where.

You see, this is where the psychologist and the economist wouldn't agree.

Right?

So actually it was when, when University of London actually came out with a behavioral economics masters.

I applied for it straight away and went back and they actually created a syllabus.

You you want me to define behavioral economics for you?

Yeah.

So I'm a man of a certain age.

My life has been completely dominated by neoclassical economists and neoclassical economists believe that everything you do, you do to maximize your utility, and it's normally measured in terms of money.

It can be measured in terms of time, it can be measured in terms of status, but everything you do, you do to maximize this utility, and these people live in a world of perfect information.

Where everything's factored in, and you can draw it all on a graph.

And probably one of the best ways to test whether everything we do we do to maximize our utility is are you in a long term relationship?

No.

Are you?

He is.

Yeah.

Okay.

Or anybody.

I, I mean, I basically, let's say to any audience, right?

If you are in a long term relationship, try this.

Go home tonight.

Have sex with your partner, offer them a hundred pounds to do it better next time and see if the result you get is from someone trying to maximize their financial utility.

Yeah.

Um, whatever the answer is, you're definitely gonna gonna be drawing it on a graph.

I mean, we are just full of emotion.

Yeah.

We react, we have fight, we have flight, we have freeze and punch.

Exactly.

Exactly.

In that scenario.

Exactly.

And so whilst Neoclassical economics teaches us how we should behave, behavioral economics gives us a paradigm to better understand how we actually do behave.

And how does that then fit with financial.

And I always, the phrase financial services has always slightly bothered me as an accountant because it's like, well, I'm in financial services, but you your meaning.

Specifically, aren't you financial services in terms of pensions and investing money?

And there's a separately regulated thing called financial services.

Do you mean that or do you mean the whole, the whole world of financial services?

So basically we, we, we, our role is to help advisors or help professionals, help their clients make better financial decisions, better decisions regarding their wellbeing, better decisions regarding their health.

And so I use behavioral economics and financial psychology.

To help advisors help their clients make better financial decisions?

Yeah, so I, so to me that is financial advice about later life planning, that sort of stuff.

I'm being pedantic just because the freight to get the frame of, you know, as an accountant, I provide financial services, I provide financial advice, but mine is much more, you know, about, Companies and expanding them or whatever.

This is much more individual focused financial advice and, and I would assume, is that what we're talking about?

Yeah.

So the financial advice that you're probably referring to is talking about the, the method of investing, the numbers, things like that.

Yeah.

Our role really is to talk to people about what the money's actually for.

Yeah.

Okay.

Because as Daniel Canman, the father of behavioral economics said, no one ever made a decision.

Purely on a number.

They need a vision, they need a narrative, and they need a story.

Yeah.

And so risk then becomes the risk to that vision you have for your life rather than the number you think you are going to get.

So you, you mentioned retirement, for example.

I.

Retirement is something you can fail at.

You really can fail at it unless you understand the psychological journey you are going to go through at at retirement.

And so there's, if, if I give you an example, I mean we, we often use this phrase that, that people in their fifties actually, or are approaching retirement actually in some ways have a lot more in common with people in their twenties than people in their thirties and their forties.

Because in your twenties, if you think, if you go back.

To your twenties, you think, well, nothing, you know, you haven't really factored anything in.

It's, everything's available.

The world's your oyster.

You know, you, you, you, you're looking at your decisions and, and, and the plan for your life.

And then you get, you get a job and you, and this concept of a career plan starts, and then you meet a partner and then, you know, you, you basically, you settle down.

You probably have a family.

You sort of call it a family, but then you, you find yourself 10 years later running a sort of underfunded correctional facility, but you know, it's, it could call it a family, and then the children move away, and then you find a degree of financial independence.

And what actually happens is your mi your world opens up again.

And so actually you are faced with a similar set of choices, sometimes later in life as you were earlier in life, because you can then actually think about, well, what is it?

What, what is it that I want to do now?

And, and, and, and so.

You have two really creative periods in your life, your early in, your early twenties.

These are often the people that are the disruptors.

They see the world in a very different way, very early.

And you know, you see a lot of these guys in tech and you know, different ideas that that, that they may have.

And then people in their fifties, they, these are the who, who see that the world could have been a different place and they use their experience to start changing it and coming up with those ideas as well.

So you have these.

Quite often these two very creative periods in life, and quite often people, they retire too young and often retire at a time when they're actually at their most creative.

So one of the key things to a happy retirement is not to retire from something, it's to retire to something.

Mm-hmm.

The real mistake is where you go from binging on work to binging on leisure.

And all the, all the, the phrases.

People say, well, you know, my, my retirement's stored at the 19th hole.

I went from who's who to who's he overnight.

And actually they, you know, I was looking for something in my garage to break so that I had something to fix.

You know, I happened to have seen it a lot with, with men, but I think that's just because the age I am, the men that I've seen retiring.

Or, you know, a generation earlier where there were less women like with full-time jobs or kind of senior jobs.

But you know, it's that thing of you get to a point in your career and then for a sort of a certain number of years, nobody ever says no to you.

Like you, you are, you are the boss.

You go in, you tell people to do stuff, they do it, or you know, they just get on with it, right?

And then suddenly you retire and there's no one.

You know, there isn't anyone that does what you tell them anymore.

You know, and suddenly it's like I don't have control over anything anymore, even though I've got all this leisure and I can do whatever I like.

Actually, I haven't got that kind of first limb, which is being able to make the world do what I want it to do.

So that's very interesting.

Is the three building blocks to happiness are, are mastery, autonomy, and relatedness.

Okay.

Yeah.

So it's very hard to be happy.

If everything you need to do in your day you are no good at, you know, we often use the sort of basil, faulty hotel manager scenario.

You know, he should never have been a hotel.

He was a terrible hotel manager.

But, you know, anything, say in your career or that that you know you need to do, you need to have mastery.

The second thing is autonomy.

It's having volition in your life.

It's virtually impossible to be a happy slave.

And the research that's been done on, you know, concubines that live in, live in absolute luxury, in palaces of a Arab shakes, they're not happy.

You know, they get to a point where they understand they have no autonomy at all.

And the third thing is, Is relatedness.

It's the relationships you have, the people you love, the people that love you, your colleagues at work, the people you deal with professionally, and actually being in a toxic personal relationship is, is more damaging to your health than smoking 20 cigarettes.

A day.

And so what you'll find is quite often when I'm going into businesses and I'm talking to business owners about their wellbeing and what they're trying to do with their business, if I identify dissatisfaction, it's always in one of those three boxes.

Hmm.

It's either they don't feel.

They're good enough to do what they potentially want to do next, or actually they don't feel they have the control to do it.

It's beyond their control.

Or actually quite often they could be personal issues, um, as well, um, with the relationships that they have.

And so, We break those boxes down and trying to try and repair those things.

I mean, a classic example, and it happened, it does happen more than you'd expect.

Most people call me PITS and, and go, petsy, can, can you come and talk to me because we've got the opportunity to buy another business.

I go, okay, we'll go and speak to it and then, and we'll, we'll sit down and go, well, what is it that's making you want to buy this other business so well, so we can get bigger?

And so we could, and he go, but.

But the last time we met, you were telling me you had no time at home, that you weren't seeing your kids.

I said, how is this gonna help you spend more of your time doing all the things we talked about a month ago?

Mm-hmm.

And in some instances, we've not only have they not bought the other company, they've sold half the company they're already running.

And this is where we come back to financial psychology.

What's the money for?

And just living on a hedonic treadmill of, of endless materialism mm-hmm.

Is not going to lead you to that wellbeing that everybody saves.

So when you say retire to something and taking your, your base that I need to retire to something where I have mastery, autonomy and relatedness.

I mean, in an office, yeah.

I could be.

Become quite skilled as a tax advisor, as, as some people would debate.

Uh, I have autonomy.

So that's almost, you become more senior in the business or you've got sort of, you know, ability to, you know, slightly do your own thing and not be told what to do.

And relatedness is you are connected to your colleagues and your partners and, I mean, there's, there's lots of relatedness in a partnership business cuz it's flat at the top and there's 20 of us.

So, you know, you've gotta be mates with everyone.

So mastery, autonomy, and relatedness.

Um, trying to translate that into retirement.

I mean, I can do it cuz I like you, we share a love of music and of making music and of ra and, and I love that thought because I can spend all day doing it and it actually just terrifies me how complex it is and how hard it is, you know, if I'm on it.

But, you know, I'm, I'm lucky to have something like that, that I've.

I've spent a long time.

What, how, how, how'd you develop?

Like take my old man who's, who's like work and kids.

That's it.

Work kids wine, you know?

Mm-hmm.

He, he won't ever retire.

He'll die with a pen in his hand.

He can't, you know, he's just, but if you were advising him or had someone like him, or all they had was work, how do you build this?

Exit, you know, as it were for retirement.

Well, if work is fulfilling everything that he needs, why, why?

Stop.

Okay, fine.

I mean, this is, this is what I'm saying.

It's not, it's not a binary decision.

Yeah.

And actually, for people of our generation, retirement isn't an event.

It's a series of transitions.

You see, the thing is we all retire on exactly the same in terms of money or you mean what?

168 hours a week?

What are you gonna do with it?

Yeah.

Okay.

I see what you mean.

And that, and that's the point that, so these, when we talk about the psychology of retirement, that's what I'm talking about.

So it's not about the money, it's about what is the money for?

And so if you come to a lot of the advisory businesses that I work with, they'll go, right, you know, I just wanna start a pension.

We'll go.

Well, what I'm hearing is that you want an income when you don't wanna work as hard.

Yes.

Well, a pension's one way of doing it, but let's have a look at, you know, planning and what does this retirement look like?

And the really good advisors, they won't engage clients unless they've had that conversation about what retirement actually looks like for them.

And the interesting thing is the amount of people, the amount of clients that will come back and go.

Do you know what, thank you so much for doing this cuz it's the first time me and my partner have actually sat down and really thought about it and really talked about it.

I think what we're talking about is the advice you would give business people about, you know, getting your head around what is.

This thing called retirement.

You know, I, I was reading this thing the other day that we all eat breakfast, but actually it's not a natural meal and you're sort of roped into it.

It's a bit like that, you know, sort of life, isn't it?

It's sort of like, oh, well this is kind of how it works, and then you do this and then you do that.

You know, it's sort of like, you know, have a family then retire.

And it's like, well, you are kind of saying, well, what is that?

Yes.

I, and I think, I think be a lifelong learner is, is a real mantra.

Um, for me, I mean I, I've, I've changed my role significantly a number of times in my career, and it's taking yourself out of your comfort zone and doing something different.

It's always the question, what would you do if you weren't scared?

What would you really do if you didn't feel there was a consequence in making you did it quite 50, I consider quite late.

You mentioned you did a career change, you know, so I mean, I, you know, when someone's considering a career change, I'm just like, absolutely.

But.

There's kind of eventually a time limit.

I feel that there's a moment that it's like, okay, it's quite late in your career now I the fifties.

Okay.

But it's like much further past that you're starting to be like, well, we, we deal with things.

There's a limit, you know, like professional sports people.

And the issue they have is they have a, a really quite, quite a hard stop.

It's a, it's a very interesting.

Thing, um, psychological journey.

And it's one that's quite difficult to manage.

Cuz if you think about it, they spend their sporting life purely in mastery.

I am going to be as, as good a sports person as I can possibly be.

So let's take football as an example.

I'm just gonna be the best footballer I can possibly be.

I'll dedicate my whole life to being that footballer.

Surely relatability too.

They're in a team or No, that's it.

Um, well actually they have no autonomy because they don't.

They don't select themselves on a Saturday.

Yeah.

So if you think about it, you've got mastery, you've got auto relatedness is another thing, which is very interesting in in the dynamic of, of a changing course.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But if you just take the mastery in autonomy, so while they're playing it's maximum mastery, very little autonomy.

The day they retire, that coin flips on its head.

Yeah.

So suddenly the thing that they have spent their whole life being really good at, they're no longer doing, but actually they can do anything they want.

And that's a period of time where actually they start getting bad advice.

Um, they start getting persuaded to make investments and they're nearly always.

Burger bars and restaurants and things and, and things like that quite often at that period of time where they can get into some trouble as well themselves, because the purpose has disappeared.

Mm-hmm.

They had 50,000 people singing songs about them the week before.

Let's just end that thought.

I mean, okay, so the financials advice industry is, It's confusing to say the least, but people should go get financial advice.

Do you have any opinion about how they should approach that problem?

Should they be using an app or what, what should they be doing?

No, I, I think you should en you should engage with professional advisors.

It really depends what your, your needs are.

But if you want proper financial planning, I, I think the way I would, the way, the way I would, Judge, the advisors that I'm talking to is if, if the first question is right, how much money have you got and where is it run for the hills, it's about, well, what's your, what's the money for what, what's this narrow?

What, what's the vision of life?

What's the plan?

Your life?

What's the, what is it you're trying to do?

What is it you're trying to achieve?

And it's only really then that you can understand the kind of plan that you would put in place to maximize the probability of that vision and that narrative actually occurring.

That's the key thing.

Otherwise, you're just f flogging products.

Yeah, and that's not what good financial advisors do.

Business Without Bullshit is brought to you by Ari Clark.

Straight Talking financial and legal advice since 1935.

You can find us sad.

Ari clark.com.

Do you think anything is bullshit in business?

I mean, there's particular things that I find quite amusing.

I mean, some company mission statements are just fine.

Hysterical.

Yeah.

Missions, mission statements are just going, basically what you've written there is a, is an unusually long sentence, which just seems to illustrate to me your complete lack of, oh, I've got the wrong one.

Mission statements is the purpose of the company as opposed to your values, which is the, just a random set of words that all the same.

Is a mission statement quite long, often, is it?

Well, quite, quite often.

You can tell it's.

Been written by a committee.

So this is, this is Starbucks mission stand.

Oh yeah, me.

What our mission to this is my wifi, inspire and nurture the human spirit.

I'm gonna throw up in my mouth a little bit.

One person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time.

Fuck off.

But what does that mean?

Inspire the human spirit.

Our, our mission is to sell you mediocre coffee wherever.

Damn.

You can, you know, I mean, some mission statements are really good, but there are, it's, it's quite often mi, you know, mid-size companies, they're quite funny and, and quite often the mission statements aren't a mission statement.

They're a, they're a goal from the owner.

You know, we are gonna be that biggest.

X, y, Z in the northwest of England or something, and he'd go, well, what's the mission?

The biggest health club in Talka.

Yeah.

That's not a mission.

Well, I, I find, I, I find all that stuff quite strange too, because at some, at some point in your business, usually a later life cycle, cause the mission seem pretty.

Uh, uh, obvious when you started, I, you know, uh, not be broken, do X or whatever, but you then sort of all sit down and someone takes you through that.

Yeah.

Well, what are your values and what's that?

And you've gotta sort of construct this thing.

I mean, we must have found it.

A load of bullshit must be really, I mean, I'm sure it's very valuable to people, but the mission statement was particularly difficult.

It's like we, I think we ended up coming up with.

To give the best possible professional advice.

You know, it's like, I mean, we're a fucking accountants and law firm.

What do you think we are doing here?

You know, it's like, be a good doctor.

You know?

Don't kill people.

Don't kill people and be a good doctor.

That's my mission.

You know, it's when companies write these mission statements and then you ask employees what the mission statement means, cuz they are, the whole idea of a mission statement is that it's.

The, it, it embodies the culture of, and it's when the employees go, I really don't know.

So what's your mission statement?

We'll make it to the weekend.

Find another, given me a great idea.

We've done these camp intuitive recruitment videos cuz we were like, oh, so and so you need some videos about life at Clark.

And then like, oh my god, I'm not doing like loads of people going, yeah, it's really nice here.

It's all about the people.

So we did some silly ones, but uh, you've just given me a new one, which is, To do the, do the whole sort of interview ask, come up with a very posh thing of what the values are and the mission statement.

Then you interview the employees and ask them, because the values would be brilliant.

What do you think the values of this business are?

You know, I mean, they'd just be the opposite.

So what's the point of them really?

I mean, it's interesting what you're talking about.

Recruitment change subjects slightly, cuz I do a lot of interviewing for, for businesses they'd normally ask me to, you know, could you just.

You know, and my questions are nothing to do with the, with the package or the, it's all to do with motivations, but then I always ask for PE people for their CV of failure.

Because I go, right, your cv, you know, you've probably, you've sent your CV and it's full of your, everything you've ever achieved and everything you've ever done.

And when you actually get people to talk about the things that have gone wrong, I mean, as a, as a, as a coach, as as a rugby coach, I, you learn far more from your defeats than you ever will from your, from your wins.

Oh, isn't that one of the irony?

I mean, it's an irony of professional advice, an iron of anything when you're, it's that you learn, you learn from other clients, but yeah, you love from your failures.

And when you fuck up, I mean, When, when you're in a business where you really, people don't want you to fail, but yeah, it's how El how else do you learn?

I mean, books a bit.

Yeah.

And that's maybe why it's such a problem when people can't recognize when they have fucked up.

You know?

There is, and that as an issue is a, that is what winds me up in business probably more than anything else, that most businesses are complex and error prone because they have to be, cuz they're complex organizations.

So the idea then that you can't have a forum or a culture in which people can admit.

Where things have gone wrong, it's really damaging to that business.

And, you know, we've seen this, I think one of the positive things in management that I've seen coming out of the pandemic is, is actually people are leading with vulnerability now.

They're saying, look, you know, a leader of business, go, I don't have all the answers.

Anybody's view in an organization can be mission critical at any particular point in time.

So it's actually creating that environment.

Um, Amy Emon, she's got a really good book.

Um, um, And she talks about, she talks about psychological safety and how actually silence should never be the default setting.

Yes.

Psychological safety's a bit in a meeting.

Do you feel comfortable saying, do you feel threatened or that you are gonna get into trouble or whatever?

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

And actually, um, you know, in, in good organizations the, you know, this, this doesn't mean that everything you say is gonna be applauded and, you know, lauded.

It's just create an environment in which people can say, look, we are doing this wrong.

Yeah.

You know, and I think we could be better.

Or even now you take elite organizations.

So I was involved coaching at Sara's and also I've met the guys that, um, who flew the Red Arrows, for example.

It's very interesting an organization like the Red Arrows.

When they finish doing one of their displays, they will have a debrief about every DC that went wrong.

Uh, yeah.

And, and it starts with red leader.

Red leader's.

The boss, the first person to get up and, and say what they did wrong or what could have been better is the guy who's leading I.

Can I just say one other thing as well, because in sport there's something that I, I found that really, really works.

So I was, if I was coaching junior teams, quite often at the end of a, a match or at the end of a, a training session, you'd give out an award for, for player of the week.

I.

And then that player had to pass it on to the teammate that he felt enabled him to play so well.

And actually what happened is you got so much more inclusivity and understanding from everyone.

From everybody about each other's roles and and, and how they affected each other.

This is where we're gonna ask you some questions.

Yeah.

Okay.

Five to 10.

Put fire five to 10 seconds per question.

We're not gonna, interrupts gonna put the music on and, uh, we're gonna begin.

What was your first job?

Technically it was my, my dog was in the printing industry and, um, he.

Started his own company and uh, he created color cards.

And when I was about 10 years old, I had to glue these laminate pieces onto bits of paper.

And thinking about it, I probably could assume for industrial injury from the effect of the glue.

And I don't think he ever paid me.

So whether that's actually counts or not, I don't know.

Perfect.

Somehow that would feel really satisfying.

My, I think basically I was exploited, wasn't I?

Yeah.

What a good parent is for, um, this might be the.

What was your worst job?

Uh, banana farming in Australia.

Ooh.

Yeah, I mean the snakes, the spiders, the, the spinal weed that came up through the mud.

And you obviously had to work in bare feet cuz it was so wet on the ground.

Plus the, I mean, my mate in front of me.

Hundred and 20 pound Banana Bunch.

We have, we've got our t-shirts over the back of our head so stuff doesn't crawl in.

And a snake uncoiled itself from inside the banana bunch went down his back.

He goes, what was that I just got?

But they do, they bite you?

They don't bite.

They tend not to, they tend to bugger off.

Well, the, the, I mean, sorry, this isn't a ten second answer.

We're breaking the rules.

Yeah.

But.

Actually, when we got back with, uh, we had to load these things onto a trailer, we want, we got back to the, uh, to the shed and we had to haul these things up onto an over a, a, onto a, a conveyor belt.

And as we were hauling these up, this snake comes out of all these banana bunches on the trailer, right?

And I, I basically managed to leap, leap off the side of the trailer, but it blocked my mate's, my mate's exit and he was gonna, Fuck it.

I wonder.

It's a snake now.

The guy I was working with was this huge bloke called Marty, who actually just ran the local Hell's Angels chapter, and I'm not joking.

He leap onto the back of this trailer and took this thing's head off with one blow of the machete.

Oh.

And the snake was still trying to bite my mate with no head.

I mean, honestly, these was these.

Wow.

Yeah.

I don't, you know, health and safety I allow.

Used to go past the 10 seconds.

That was a good story.

Favorite subjects at school?

Uh, probably, um, when I was doing A Levels, it was, it was, uh, politics, global politics.

What's your special skill?

I was once described as the eddie, the eagle of cycling talent, talentless, but determined.

So, so basically I have no thought, Eddie, I have no stop button is very, I think that's probably what my, what my friends would say.

What did you wanna be when you grew up?

Oh, a, a, a rockstar.

And, you know, we would've.

Been, um, that we had one drawback, which was a complete and utter lack of any recognizable talent.

Uh, what did your parents want you to be?

They were parents who just wanted us to be happy.

Yeah, I think that's, that's probably, there was no, I don't ever remember them.

You know, saying, well, we want you to be this or that, or the other.

I think they wanted us very much to find our own way.

What's your go-to karaoke song?

Oh, this had come from my mate's wedding years ago where there was actually a live band and the, and the singer had a bit of a problem and the next song up was Mustang Sally.

And so I ended up singing that live and it's been a karaoke, it's been a karaoke song ever since.

Office Dogs Business or Bullshit?

I suppose it depends on the temperament of the dog.

I mean, I've got two dogs.

I love that moment.

Yeah.

Excellent.

No, I'd be, I'd say yes.

Definitely a good thing.

Have you ever been fired?

Oh God, yes.

More than once.

Coming back to it.

You wants to me today?

Oh no, you've lost it.

You've lost, okay.

Yes.

To fired.

We will obviously come back to that.

Okay.

Uh, what's your vice?

Do you know?

I used to have a lot.

Um, I think now it's you.

Yeah.

It's prob you can always buy another bike.

Another bike.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Materialism.

That's very niche.

Well, it's, it the amount of bicycles you own is m plus one N being the amount of bikes you currently own.

Yeah.

Plus another one.

Yeah.

Um, so there you have it.

That sec.

Congratulations.

You got 12 points.

Thank you very much.

And what did you get fired for?

Well, so when, when we were teenagers and we were playing in bands, a lot of us had, um, jobs, uh, as waiters and, you know, and doing various jobs and, and, um, I, I did work in quite a posh restaurant in quite a, quite a ni nice hotel.

And, um, there were always two of us on the, on the station serving a number of tables.

And I was working with this, with this girl.

I think we, we must have only been about.

17 years old, 16, 17 years old.

And there was this guy on the on, on this table who was just the most arrogant us.

I mean, he really was.

And, and he was, he was so rude to my colleague and I, you know, I sort of, Yeah, making sure she was okay.

And then I went to take the sweet order and I just basically said to this guy, would you like some manners with your suite?

Nice.

And, and basically he reported it straight to the maitre d and I remember technically I wasn't fired.

I was about to bed and I just went, you don't need to say anything.

I'm leaving this.

Um, so this is gonna give you 30 seconds to pitch your company podcast, book, whatever you like.

Off you go.

All I would say is you mentioned about advice, and it's a shout out really to all the fantastic financial advisors that I do work with.

A lot of 'em are quilter.

And, um, you know, these, these really are very, very professional people who were, who had huge amounts of value and reassurance to their, to their clients every day.

And if, if people want to find you, where do they go?

Oh, find me on LinkedIn.

That's, that's the easiest way to do it.

Yes.

So there you have it.

That was this week's episode of Business Without Bullshit.

Thank you very much.

Mark Pippa d our producer.

We'll be back on Thursday.