 I'm looking forward to telling you a bit about the journey I've been on for the last 20 years. It's a very personal journey. It might not apply to anyone else, but it's what I've done. And it really started over 20 years ago. Originally I have a degree in physics and electronics, so I was sort of a scientist engineer and came out of Southampton University with a 2-1, much to my tutored surprise, and had no idea what I wanted to do. But that, like many journeys, so I started out not really knowing where I was going. So I decided that I would go to the library and do some research. And I like a good engineer. I made a list of the requirements that I had for a job. And so my requirements were really quite simple. I wanted to earn a lot of money, I wanted to have a lot of holiday, I wanted some travel, I wanted an exciting job. It wasn't too difficult. I looked through a book. In those days we had books. And I actually came up with about five companies that would fulfill all of those criteria. And they were all in the oil industry. And I wrote to a couple of them. One was Shlumbage, you've probably heard of. Another one was Seismograph Service, they were a seismic company. And I had a very interesting interview with Seismograph. The guy who interviewed me was clearly a very smart individual. He asked me a few questions and he said, well, if you start next week, you will get your first skiing in November. And so he obviously had me suspect. And two weeks later I found myself on a twin-engine Dota, I think it was called, a plane, flying into the Libyan Sahara desert. And I spent the next two years in this place. That was our equipment truck in the Libyan Sahara desert. In fact, for the first 18 months, this is after I was promoted to be a proper engineer, for the first 18 months I was the explosive expert. I spent my life wandering around the desert, blowing it up basically. Which, as a 21-year-old or whatever I was then, was actually amazing. We worked 10 weeks on and then had four weeks on. So brilliant. But during the 10 weeks we worked, we really worked, we worked seven days a week, 12 hours a day. But in that desert there is nothing else to do. So it wasn't a problem. And at the end of 10 weeks you were kind of starting to go a bit funny. They would say, where do you want to fly? And we'd go, I'll fly to Rome and they'd give you a ticket and off you'd go. And all you had to do was get back four weeks later. In fact, I never actually succeeded in getting back four weeks later. I was always a day late, which was a bit of a joke in my camp. But anyway, so I did that for two years. Clearly, it's not a great career. And towards the end of two years I realized that I had to kind of maybe do something a little bit more serious. I was under pressure from my parents, as you can imagine. And so I resigned, came back to Europe. Again, not really knowing what I was going to do. So I did the only possible thing that I could have done in no circumstances. And I became a ski instructor. And I worked in the French Alps for a season. And while I was there, I did some more research about how I could move my career on, should we say, because again, being a ski instructor is great fun for winter. But maybe today would be all right. But it's not long term. And I then realized I had to sort of take a new track for my career. And I applied to a great school in France in Fontainebleau called Insiad to do an MBA. And amazingly enough, thanks to my 2-1 and thanks to some fairly creative writing, and I've always been good at creative writing, they actually accepted me. And I ended up, in this place, Insiad in Fontainebleau to do an MBA. So it's sort of a complete change from being a scientist engineer to being a business person, I guess. And had a fantastic year. You cover everything from marketing, accounting, finance, organizational behavior. Really, really interesting year. And more than that, it was a year where I suddenly realized that I was quite multicultural. And in Insiad, there are like 30 or 40 different nationalities. And they force you to work together. In Insiad, they put you in groups which are designed to have sort of maximum divisive groups, if you like. So I was in a group because you actually get marked as a group. And I was in a group with another Englishman, a Lebanese, an Israeli, an American. You can imagine, I mean, the group work was incredible to get done. And you had to get it done as a group. And came out of that, and I was head-hunted out of that, finally, sort of serious career. I was head-hunted into a chemical company called Cortolds, which was a very traditional British chemical company. It had two parts to it, fibers and chemicals, and then it split up. And in the chemicals part, one major part was paint, industrial paint, really. And I ended up working in industrial paint. I started off in a commercial role and then went more into marketing roles and then ended up working in head-offers. I actually, I lasted 13 years in Cortolds. A very interesting time, because basically over those 13 years, they managed to destroy about 2 billion pounds worse of value. It was very badly run. But in many ways, I learned more from seeing them run it badly than maybe I'd learned if it had been brilliantly run. But I ended up in head-offers in business development, which is a sort of a classic MBA job, sort of advising the board, going off and doing mergers and acquisitions. And actually, I became a specialist in selling businesses because they kept having to sell businesses off in order to have money to survive, which is not a great way to run a business. And finally ended up buying a business in Germany, a wonderful German family business, Mittelstand business. And as I was, well, there were actually two of us in head-offers who spoke German. There was myself and there was a chairman. So guess who was challenging to go out and help run the business, not the chairman. So I went out to Germany and ran or helped to run a big paint company in Germany for a couple of years. Quite a very interesting time. You know, living as an expatriate, we had three young children, but expatriate life has its advantages and we had a really great time. A few mishaps. So we managed to have an explosion in those two years. In the two years I was in Germany, we got over that. And then finally got to a point where my eldest child was just coming up to school age. And we decided that we didn't really want them to go through the German school system. It just didn't quite fit our philosophy, I won't go into detail. And we were thinking of coming back to London. And at that point, it was one of those moments in your life that sort of something happens and you think, wow, you know, do you go right or do you go left? And so that's a phone, telephone, I guess, probably quite a few people in this audience who recognise that. Because a lot of audiences I talk to have no idea what that is. And a friend of mine from Ensead, one of, he's actually American, who had been working as a venture capitalist for 13 years, we had been talking for a long time about coffee and why there was no coffee in the UK. So I was partly brought up in Germany, in France, in Austria and I had seen the coffee culture, if you like, of those countries, which in the case of Austria has been going for hundreds of years, very, very strong coffee culture, wonderful coffee houses that we used to hang around in. And he was American and he had seen the Starbucks phenomena in America, which just came out of nowhere and even 20 years ago, they already had a few thousand Starbucks, I guess, by then. But we could never understand why there were no coffee bars in the UK. And we've been talking about this and finally, at this point in time, he had found five small coffee bars which were for sale. They were all in London and they were called Caffe Nero. They went very good, they had good coffee but the rest of it was a bit iffy. And he decided it was a bunch of friends, we would buy these five coffee bars. And that's what we did. In 1997, we bought five small coffee bars in London. And I think there were 35 employees and it was branded, it had a name Caffe Nero, it wasn't really branded, you can imagine, it was a very small company. So he rang me up and said, could I help build this coffee bar, which would be the dream we'd been talking about, to which I replied, but you can't pay me, can you? And he said, no, of course not, it's a tiny, tiny company. But we could find a little bit, maybe, come over. And I think he asked me in the end to do 12 weeks, because I said I have to get a serious job, I've got three kids, we're going to get a mortgage, I can't do it. But anyway, in the end I agreed to spend, I think, 12 weeks helping to do a turnaround on this sort of business, which had been pretty badly run for many years. And we came over in 1998. And in fact, just before we came over, I managed to find another job as a chief executive of a chemical company in the UK. But I told them that I couldn't join immediately, so we needed a few months to help a friend to turn his coffee bar around. So we came back to the UK and I started working in these little coffee bars, having a lot of fun. And then one day a week I would actually then work as a consultant in the chemical company, where I was due to go in as CEO. And this actually went on for about, I think about four months before the owner of the chemical company said, Paul, you've got to join now. You've got a contract, we need a chief executive, you're going to have to come and join. So on the 2nd of January, 1999, I left Caffe Nero and he picked me up in his Aston Martin, this was the owner of the company. And he drove me to the company for my first day in the office. And we had a kind of classic first day, I was taken around, I met all the managers, I met the shop floor with all the workers, we looked at the numbers, we looked at the order books, we went through a whole thing, I had a great day. And at the end of the day, he said, well, I was standing in his office and he said, what do you think? And I said, well, I think you're in real trouble, actually. You're going to go bust if you don't do something pretty drastic. Because it was obvious, they were doing really badly. And he said, wow, really? I go, yeah, absolutely, you're going to have to make, look at the numbers, you're going to have to make a certain of your workforce redundant. The order books were pretty empty, they just had far too many people. And he said, wow, I guess, yeah, you're right, I have to do that. And then I said, and I'm one of them. So I made myself redundant on the first day in my job. It was obvious he couldn't afford to pay me a big salary. But he accepted it, in fact, afterwards he thanked me for having been direct about it. So I went home that night and my wife said, did you have a good day in the office? First day in the office. I said, well, it was quite interesting, actually. I had to make a third of the workforce redundant. And she said, well, that's terrible. What a terrible way to start your new job. And I said, well, that's not the worst of it. And she said, what do you mean? I said, well, I'm afraid I'm one of them. At that point, she went mad because she realized, I just love working in a coffee bar. I have two hobbies I should point out at this stage. One is food, which is why my friend from NCI had rung me up because I was the only MBA he knew who knew anything about food. That's really how I got the job. And the other hobby I have as a passionate is music, which you'll hear about a bit later. Those are the two things I do. So the next day, I was back in Cafe Nero, and I'm still there. So that's how it started. And we then started to build more coffee bars. Number six, I think, we built towards the end of 1998. And we just kept going. I mean, it wasn't simple. There it is. Now, this is not what it looked like in the early days. This was about number, I would say that's about number 15. But in the early days, it had no brand. We came up with the logo. We came up with the colors. We did everything. I mean, and it was great fun. There were four of us who were running it really. There was one guy, there was my friend who was sort of chairman and strategy and that part of it. I looked after all the food, beverage, buying and distribution. Another guy was finance director, he also did property. And the fourth guy, in fact, the fourth guy is the only guy who really knew what he was doing. He had been running the five coffee bars. So we made him operations director, because he's the only guy who really knew what he was doing. And he ran the day-to-day operations. But we had a fantastic time. It was really exciting. Not easy. Even in those days, we had competition. In fact, there was a force competitor. Anyone remember who that was? There was a company called Coffee Republic, who were quite powerful. I mean, when we started, they were a lot bigger than us. But they got it wrong. They made some very bad decisions in terms of acquiring sites and they overextended themselves. They were publicly listed. And in the end, we took them out effectively. We bought 11% of them. And then when they were desperate, we swapped that 11% for some of their best sites, which is not a great strategy for a coffee bar. And that really was the end of them. But very, very strong competition. In fact, when we started with our five coffee bars, Starbucks didn't exist. And I think by the mid-99, we'd built about three or four more. And we woke up one day to read, Starbucks had bought Seattle coffee, who were actually the biggest in London. They had 50 stores in London. So overnight, we suddenly had this giant competitor breezing down our necks, which was quite worrying, as you can imagine. But actually, it actually helped us because they came in, massive publicity machine, huge PR machine. I actually gate-crashed their first opening and met their PR company. They ended up working for us. So we were the small players. We were ducking, weaving and diving. We had no money. We kept running out of money. So what happens in retail game is that, fortunately, you have to pay your rent every quarter, every three months. You have to pay your rent, which is why, at the moment, and for the next few weeks, you're going to be hearing about more retailers, not just Maplin, not just Toys R Us. There's going to be quite a few more, I'm afraid, in the next few weeks. They're going to declare themselves out of business because they have to pay their rent at the end of March. And many of them, quite a few, will not be able to. And we went through the same thing. We got to the end of the quarter. We had no money. We would sit around the board table and go, what do we do? And I would be ringing up friends and saying, can you invest 100,000 pounds in Caffe Nero on Monday? And one or two of them did. I mean, that was the amazing thing. I mean, we kept kind of peering over the edge of the cliff. And then suddenly a friend would come along and go, yeah, I'll do that. I think this is great. And they've actually done really well out of it. But it was touch and go for two or three years. Everyone said we were mad. You can imagine. Everyone said it's a fad. It's a fashion. You know, you wait another year. It'll be done. It'll be finished. You know, people will be on to the next big thing. And we didn't believe it. I mean, we thought that this was a culture. This was actually going to be a shift in the culture of this country. And that's exactly what happened. And this was all around the time that people, obviously, were traveling a lot more. People suddenly discovering what good coffee was. And there was this enormous cultural shift, not just in the way people, people's expectations of coffee and coffee houses, but in the way people worked and were working in Caffe Nero's. No one would have believed that 20 years ago. You know, people, all these people doing their work inside a coffee bar. But, you know, the internet, obviously, Wi-Fi, everything has allowed coffee bars to develop in the way that they have now become a, you know, no one, I don't think, would question whether we're going to survive or not. You know, coffee is here forever now in this country, which is great. If you look at our numbers, pretty phenomenal growth. I mean, this is up to 2011, where we were turning over about 165 million from zero in 1998, pretty well. Phenomenal growth. And what happened is that in 2001, when we had about 58 shops, we were fed up of ringing our friends and family for money and begging. And we decided we had to get serious about it, and we floated on the London stock market. We raised £9 million, all of which then went into building new shops. And then what happened is over the next few years, we ended up regretting being a public company because there are enormous constraints upon you as a public company. You obviously have to tell the city about what you're doing. You have to justify ever saying, you know, you're constantly talking to investors. And we wanted to become an international company quite quickly. And the city didn't really want us to become an international company. They were putting constraints upon us. And by 2007, the chairman, Jerry, my friend, were so fed up of being a public company that we decided to buy it back, which is what we did. We did a sort of leverage buyout. We borrowed a couple of hundred million pounds, and we borrowed it back. So it's now back in private ownership, in fact. There's probably, I don't know, how many shareholders there are now, about 20, 30. And in fact, this curve, amazing curve, carried on, and this year will probably turn over about 350 million. And we're very successful. Now, before anyone says, well, why don't you pay tax? Because that's always the criticism that is thrown at us. Though when you go out and borrow a couple of hundred million pounds, unfortunately you have to pay interest and you pay a huge amount of interest. So our profits over the last few years have really all gone into paying off that interest. But we control the business, and we now have far more freedom in what we can do with it. And unfortunately, in the next few years, we are going to start paying quite a lot of tax, but that's just part of being successful. And then, yes, so in 2007, we bought it back, which is what they call a liquidity event. And by that time, you know, I've been there nearly 10 years. I was pretty burnt out. And I decided that I'd really had enough. I never wanted to look at another panini in my life. That's the truth. And I went to my chairman and I said, I'm out of here. You know, I've done my bit. We've built the business up, but now, you know, I can sell my shares. My options are all vesting. And it's time for me to go off and do something else. And he said, no, you can't leave. Which is an interesting response. He said, what do you want to do? So I said, well, I will do international development, because that's kind of fun. And we had just done our first joint venture in Turkey. And that's like building a new cafe nearer all over again. Every country is very exciting. So I said, I'd do that. And he was very happy about that. And then I said I would carry on building the music program. As I mentioned earlier, music's my big thing. And I had developed quite a big music program where we not only play music in all the stores, but a lot of music we play is from unsigned artists. People I've got to know, musicians I've got to know. And we not only played a music in store, but we put on live gigs. This year we'll probably put on about 500 live gigs around the country in Cafe Nero. And we'll sponsor music festivals. And we run music competitions. So I have a lot of fun. And I was already building that up then. So I said I would carry that on, of course. And he was very happy about that. And then I said to him, and I'm going to work two days a week. And he wasn't so happy about that, funny enough. But in the end, he realized that I would have gone. If he'd have said no, I would have gone. So he said, yeah, that's fine. So since then, that's what I've been doing. In fact, I've now given up most of my international work, which has left me with music, which is fantastic. That's a picture of me looking happy after we bought it back. And one of the things that we did, one of the things I was working on then was the notion that coffee bars are really community gathering spaces. I mean, they're places, in a way, we don't sell coffee. What we do is we rent a bit of space for someone to come in and relax or to work or do whatever they want to do. And at the same time, they happen to buy a coffee. But really, it's about the space and about the community and that sort of gathering. And in fact, in a lot of towns around the country, we're a really important part of the local community, an absolutely essential part. And I was kind of working on this idea of maybe you've got this sort of real world community. Maybe the internet could be used to create virtual communities. I was starting to work on that idea. And I created a company, because I had time on my hands because I was only working two days a week, called MeetMeForAcoffee.com, which was the idea which you would join your local coffee bar and then you could see who else was in your local coffee bar. Great idea, completely disastrous. We got it so wrong. We went through three iterations of the website. None of them worked properly. We really didn't know what we were doing. I was doing it with one other guy, a journalist. We had a lot of fun trying to do it. And then while I was doing that, I met a team who were doing exactly the same thing but did know what they were doing. And we joined forces. That was called Street Life. And I spent the next few years building up Street Life as sort of a community. Does anyone remember Street Life? A couple here, OK. We ended up with one and a half million users, which is not bad. And it was all about talking to your neighbours about you would join and you'd put your postcode on and then you could find out what was going on in your neighbourhood. And people would talk about, do you know a good plumber? I've lost my cat. A million of one's things that people talk about as it were to the neighbours. And it was really, really active, very engaged audience. And we built it up to about a million and a half people. But in the end, well, actually, that's me with one of my music festivals. We had a lot of fun. Great band. So, yeah, we took it from in 2013, 100,000 users up to 1.1 million users. And, yeah, a really great network. But we made one big mistake, is that our cash burn got bigger and bigger as we got bigger and bigger. And we were what was called pre-revenue. We never had any income at all, which is quite normal in social networking. And it's fine if you've got backers with really deep pockets, but we didn't have backers with really deep pockets. And unfortunately, we got to a point, we actually got up to about 1.5 million users where we made the cardinal mistake, the sin we made was we effectively ran out of money. And we were forced to sell it, which were luckily, very, very luckily, we sold it early last year to the Americans came charging over the hill with a reasonable amount of money and they bought it from us. So, you know, that had been taking up about two days in my week. So I've been two days at Cafe Nero, two days doing street life and building that up. And then suddenly overnight, I had nothing to do, you know, which was a bit of a shock and it was a shame because we actually believed we were going to be the next Facebook. I was already thinking about spending the money we were going to make. Sadly, you know, we sold it, which was in itself remarkable, but it wasn't a great... I'm not going to pretend it was a massive success for the investors, but we got something back, which was good. And so then what do you do? I was left with still doing Cafe Nero, obviously by then we'd grown and grown and grown, but I was doing mainly music. And I'd started doing a bit of tech investing as an angel investor and I sat on a few tech boards, which was very interesting, but didn't kind of keep me out of trouble, really. And I was looking for something else to do and about that time I thought, well, maybe quite fun to do something in the music industry. And a number of amazing coincidences happened, which I'll talk about. So my third career, yeah. So I've now been... Actually, it's kind of... Street life was hardly a career. It was sort of an interlude, I guess, but what happened is I... In fact, at a Cafe Nero event, I met a guy, this is his crazy guy up there, called Ray Jones, who was running Time Out and he was running all the live events for Time Out. And we got chatting. He also supported a lot of unsigned artists through the Time Out events. And he loved doing very passionate about music, very passionate about supporting music. And we got chatting and we were kind of talking about the way that the music industry in this country has really not moved on a lot over the last 20 years. And we really needed to do something different. At the same time, a friend of mine, can't remember how I met her, a great network, she introduced me to the guy at Top Right. His name is Mervyn Davis. In fact, to give him his full title is Lord Mervyn Davis. And he came to my office to talk in Cafe Nero to talk about just being... doing business, doing... It was just a kind of a general chat, but we got on really well and it transpired that he also loved music. And he then went away and he invited me to a party a few weeks later. He was a minister of trade in the Labour Government and he was the chairman of Standard Chart at Bank. And he sits on many boards. He's what they call a heavy hitter. And he invited me to a fundraising party at the Royal Academy. He's actually chairman of the fundraising at the Royal Academy, which is really degrading the good of this country. Very, very wealthy people. So he invited me to a party. It was actually a fundraising party at the Royal Academy. I worked out at this party that I was the poorest guy there by a factor of 100. And I'm not that poor, but absolutely extraordinary party. And he had invited as the... There were musicians everywhere, playing on every corner there was music playing. The main musician playing was this guy here who recognises him. Jamie Cullum. Yeah, Jamie Cullum. Brilliant musician, great artist. And Jamie was invited to entertain 400 of us at this private party. And Jamie was on stage playing piano halfway through the evening. We'd all had a few drinks, I have to admit. And he said, right, who's going to get up on stage and play with me? And I stuck my hand up. I'll do that. So I ended up on stage with Jamie Cullum. He said I could play three notes, right? And he gave me three notes to play. I said, yeah, that's fine. And then he started to play kind of left-hand jazz bass. What he didn't know is that I am actually a jazz musician. Not a great jazz, but not a bad jazz musician. And so I played those three notes. He said, that's fine, you know, carry on. And then I started going into improvisation. We ended up on stage together playing for 10 minutes during his party, which Mervin had organized. So Mervin completely lost control of the party at that point, which doesn't happen often. He stays in control of most things. I came off stage after about 10 minutes and he just turned to me and he said, Paul, you and I, we're going to start a business together. Right, that was it. It's sort of billionaire. Just said we're going to start a business together. Come and see me in my office next week. And the next week I was in his office with Ray and he said, have you got a business plan? And we'd spent about two hours putting a business plan together on the back of a fag packet. And we went through the business plan. He said, that's interesting. How much do you need? And we kind of said, half a million. He goes, yep, that's fine. What else do you need? And we went through a whole list of things that we needed. He goes, yeah, that's fine. Do it. Come back in a couple of weeks when you've set it up. That was back in October In January, we launched with a party for 600 people. We are now Talent Bank with a queue at the end, B-A-N-Q. We've already put on about 30 or 40 gigs. We're about to sign our first artist. We're a production company. We put on events for other people, but we also put on events for ourselves that we promote. And we're about to start signing some of our artists. We have a roster of about 50 amazing artists. So we had a gig last night with four of them. And it's going great guns. So that's me. That's my third career. Very early stage, almost pre-revenue. We've actually started earning money, which is great. But that's probably what I'll be doing mainly for the next few years. I'm still at Cafe Nero, two days a week, mainly music. But probably seven days a week at Talent Bank, having a lot of fun. And that was our opening party. 600 people watching this incredible band called Coffee Pop Drive, having a big party. So that's where I am today. Everything kind of happened almost by accident, but it happened. I'm having a lot of fun. I've just managed to get my show. I'm very proud of this, actually. Look at that. I don't pay for transport anymore. Brilliant. And on that note, I will open it up to any questions about anything whatsoever. We've lost the microphone, sorry. You can have to put your hand up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We can hear. Thank you for the excellent presentation. One question about the street life. You said you had a million users? About 1.5 million users. About 1.2 million what we'd call active users. How does it happen then that having all these users, you run out of money? What could you have done to prevent that? Wow. How long have you gone? Well, obviously all of this is under what they call Chatham House rules. We're not going to talk about this later. But we had a chief executive who was a brilliant founder and got the business going, got everything going, but he was completely uncommercial. And we should have brought in a commercial CEO much earlier. He actually resigned a year before we sold the business because he realized he couldn't do the job we wanted him to do. By then it was too late. We actually recruited a new CEO who was completely commercial. And if he had had maybe six months more time, he could have started to turn dial-up revenues because there are ways you can make money, of course, when you've got that number of users. But we just didn't have time to do it. And maybe we couldn't have done it. So next door who bought us, they're very big in the States. They've got millions and millions of users in the States. And they are still pre-revenue as well, which is incredible. I mean, basically, if you're going to go into social networking, you need to have incredibly deep pockets. And unless you get to a massive scale, you're probably never, ever going to make money. That's the reality of it. So, you know, our users loved us. They thought we were the best thing. A lot of them used us every day. They thought it was amazing. So, great. We couldn't survive. It's also changing adults in the time who spied with another small revenue on the Internet of the people. Or the assessment is more... No, well, advertising, I mean, the kind of... The old original banner advertising went completely, really. I mean, you cannot earn money from that type of advertising. You know, it all has to be very cleverly now built into the streams of information that the customers are using. And the idea was, I mean, the idea was that we would become the ultimate sort of local yellow pages. And local businesses would pay us to be in our directory, which we actually had set up, and then would pay to be number one in the directory, if you like. Because plumbers found us an amazing way of finding customers. So there's got to be money there. But the problem is that a lot of those businesses they don't understand marketing. And I talked to a lot of plumbers about would they spend money on street life and being part of the directory? And a lot of them kind of go, oh, I don't know, really. Or they'd say, oh, my wife does that. It's very, very hard to monetize that type of a business. I think we might have got there in the end, but we needed much, much deeper pockets. Yeah. Go back in there. Yeah. Very interesting to hear your journey there. Thank you. And I've done a very similar thing to the sort of concept of street life. And in a similar kind of way. Yeah. First. And then now on TV, these things, like JetStreet.com and things like that, what do you think they did differently to do so? Yeah. I mean, you know, checker trade is exactly what we were going to try and do, but obviously all online. You know, they had a big advantage because they were offline and they were a first mover pretty well. They were two or three, but I think they're probably the biggest now. And they had a very clear value proposition for the, you know, whoever, the local tradespeople. And, you know, they could persuade, it was much easier for them to persuade those tradespeople to spend money than we did. And I think that's partly, maybe we were five years ahead of our time. You know, my guess is that in five or ten years time, if we tried to do what we were doing a couple of years ago, it would be much easier because, you know, bluntly, it's much younger group of people who are completely at ease in spending money on online marketing. But a lot of the people we talked to just wouldn't spend money. So, you know, I think that's part of it. So when you were a skinny instructor, why did you turn around and do an MBA? And why specifically that school was very interesting? Well, because, I mean, I, you know, I'm a reasonably sensible person. And, you know, as a skinny instructor, it's an amazing job and you meet brilliant people. But it is very seasonal. You know, or you have to go to Australia in the summer. And I know people who have done it. But, you know, it's one of those jobs where you see people kind of hanging around year after year after year and it all gets a bit sad after a while. You know, and I ended up, I didn't talk about it. I did a season before university as well. Two seasons, I think, is the maximum you should do because then you kind of get locked into that life. And, actually, it's not a very healthy life after a while. And I see it very, very simply because I'm not English at all. I sound English. But my background is completely not my father was German. My mother was Austrian. My wife is French. I was brought up in this kind of massively multicultural society. We're not Brexit people in my family. And I went to a very English school, actually. But later on, as I was growing up, realized that I was kind of a bit different from some people who were, you know, very English-English. And it was when I kind of looked at this school and I realized that it had this incredible multiculturalism about it. Because, you know, people there from all over the world, it was just an environment that really suited me because of my background. And actually, you know, as I walked into that school, in a way, for the first time in my life, I felt completely at home within that type of environment. Thanks very much. I'm particularly interested in the scale-up phase. There seems to be an awful lot out in the marketplace about startups, entrepreneurship. I know this community very well. And I guess the digital agencies, generally, you're looking at a lot of companies between about 10 and 20 people. That's about as far as you can go by yourself. So you've bought into this coffee chain at five shops around 35 to 40 people with you for joining as the management team. I'd be interested to hear from you maybe your top sort of two to five pinnacle moments as you went from that size, getting your foundations right and putting in the door up to, say, that first 100, 500 people. Are there any standout moments for you where you thought that was kind of we've really broken a glass ceiling here and we're getting into the next phase? I mean, as the obvious sort of financial fulcrum, you go over when you become self-funding. And that's, you know, a hugely important part of a business where you're not reliant on outside funding but you want to grow. And the interesting thing about that is that when we started we thought we would be at that point when we had about 15 and when we got to 15 we thought it was maybe 25 and when we got to 25 we thought, well, maybe 40 because the problem is is that when you're building a business when you're scaling a business you actually have to invest a lot in the centre in really good management. So that was, you know, when we did get to that point, and I can't even remember I think it was probably about 60 or 70 in the end. I mean, that was a very, very important point. Physically what happens is that when you have five shops you can actually be almost everywhere within a couple of days and what we realised when we got to about 15 is that you have to delegate. And that was quite a big point of when we really started bringing people that we could trust and delegate to. And that was a big learning for us. I mean, a lot of the things I did was all about systemising everything and having processes in place and, you know, just getting something that you can scale up. Scaling up is the hardest thing and the real challenge for us was not losing our culture as we grew. And Jerry, the chairman, that's his mantra it's always been, you know, we're kind of a family business. And the reason people enjoy coming to Caffe Nero is because as you walk in, you know, we are different, you know, we're not cost, everyone tells me that and I know, you know, I would say that, wouldn't I? But a lot of people realise that we are, you know, our teams and our staff and maintaining that sort of family culture is really, really difficult and, you know, we've had to kind of invest huge amounts of time and money into doing that because, you know, the only way to do it is actually to bring people together quite a lot. That costs a huge amount. You know, when we had 20 shops, you know, we would, you know, our annual conference would be this big. And you know, now we have to, it's getting hard to find places that are big enough to take, you know, we're now, you know, you think we've got 650 shops, 650 managers, you know, we're over 1,000 people now when all the, you know, the kind of the managers and the head office come together, we're well over 1,000 people. And those are the kind of points that, you know, I don't think there's one point really, I said, you know, you kind of say, well, there's that. It doesn't go like, but there are definite massive changes as you're scaling up. And certainly when I meet entrepreneurs and I talk to a lot of small businesses and I look at a lot of small business plans, people looking for investment, the thing that they don't get is how much time, effort and money it takes to really scale up. Particularly in tech because they all believe it's going to be viral. And it's not. It's never viral. It's not. We'll go over there first. I find it fascinating that a lot of the stuff you've done over time has been very much community focused. It's all about community. That's right. I'm very passionate about my local music community as well. I do a lot of open mic stuff and supporting local unsigned artists. But as you know, the way that music is consumed now is very much throwing. It's different for different people, but on mass if you're going to generalise it. So how differentiated itself from what's currently happening and what are the goals you're looking to work towards now? Great question. First of all, our whole business philosophy is built around live. And you can make money from live music. Live music is now one of the few places where it's quite clear there is a lot of money being made and will continue to be made. And what we're seeing in the market at the moment is live is actually growing again. And so we're already organising gigs in the jazz café where we're selling 500 tickets at £10 a piece. It's not millions, but it's money and the musicians are getting paid properly. So we believe if we build up that, that can certainly pay the rent. And then I think the point about music it's a bit like so many businesses now because it's all gone online and a number of things have happened is that the barriers to entry are much, much lower than they used to be. Anyone can make a brilliant EP, CD in their bedroom and they can sell it online and they can do all that for nothing. So a whole record company model where they would give the artist an advance of £20,000 and then they'd spend £20,000 making an LP and market. All of that is kind of finished. But at the same time, so that has happened and that is having a big impact on the business. So that's great for the musicians, of course. And it also means that the marketing channels or the monetisation channels now are much, much more accessible because you can go and sell your music to advertising, synchronisation. A lot of that's done online now and you just have to sign up. The difficulty is still a bit about royalties and the way that that's built. And I've spent the last few weeks sitting in lawyer's offices and PRS who are the main licensing body trying to understand where the money comes in from licensing and the answer is very complex and I think they keep it complex because the more complex it is, the harder it is to understand. And the more money that the record labels take because they do get it they really do get it. And a bit of it now is about breaking that down and for musicians to understand how they can money stop this. Merchandise, you can sell online now everything can be done online. There are so many different ways now of earning money and the reality is what we're doing, so we're doing live and by doing live what it means is that the artists in our roster are automatically going to be seen and heard by a lot more people which is amazing because seeing the artist find unsigned artists is getting good gigs and really difficult and then the other thing we're doing is we're advising them on how to build their careers and we're telling them, you've got to do that you've got to do that, you've got to do that and so that's going to help them and then finally what we're doing we're actually going to use the word record label we will sign up some of the artists to do it fast and we will help to accelerate their career but we're doing it in such a way that we're not we've got rid of all the old record company contracts and we're doing it at joint venture so we're setting up joint venture with each artist and it's 50-50, completely transparent and the record company will probably shoot me if they knew what we were doing so it's changing all the time but that's still a long way to go mate I think we're going to be part of that I like being disruptive I think we've got time for one more one final question one more question making a good one I'll hang around afterwards a bit, you know Hi, we spoke a lot about scaling up about being first to market having the market presence to make money going back early part of your speech they had the scale they had the products they had the market what went wrong with them wow I mean a combination of a lot of their markets on the fiber side what's happened to the manufacturing of clothing in the world all moved to Asia pretty well and they were they just didn't respond to that I mean if they were really smart they would have gone and built fiber companies all around Asia they kept going in Europe it was never going to work so structurally they had some big issues where the market was moving and then they had some appalling really, really appalling they made so many huge mistakes they thought they could typically buy their way out of problems they acquired a lot of companies one of my jobs was analysing the acquisitions that they had made in one year and out of 20 acquisitions 15 of them completely disastered and they had a chief executive who while we were losing huge amounts of money or certainly making far less than we had been he was still spending millions of pounds on his hobby which was Formula One racing and he would move around the world seeing all the Formula One races and we were putting a million pounds sponsoring one of the teams because that's how that's what we're doing right well thank you very much thank you so much