Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hello and welcome to the How to Acceit Podcasts, where
we introduce you to a world of small to medium
business acquisitions and mergers. We interview business owners, industry leaders, authors, mentors,
and other influencers with the sole intent to share with
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(00:57):
acquisition entrepreneurs wherever they are in the journey. And I
want you to visit acquisition Afficionado dot com today. Hello
and welcome to the Hot podcast Today. I'm here with
Peter Graves and he is the CEO or interim CEO
of the company he just bought, which is a motorcycle,
a dealership and e commerce site. We're going to get
(01:18):
into that, but man, you have an incredible background so
thank you for being here today, and we're going to
start there, I think, talk about kind of your background,
how you ended up through racing to where you're at now,
and anything else you want to share, but just kind
of let's make let's make the audience know who you
are so we get connected with you.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Hey, thanks Rob, and thanks so much for inviting me on.
It's a really pleasure to be on here.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
So I've got to start with that.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Yeah, we've known each other for a while now. We've
been on the same zooms and stuff, and you've been
involved with some of the cool things that you know,
we did together as a team and some of the
projects and stuff I put on. So you and I
have known each other for what a couple of years now.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
So yeah, I haven't yet visited you in California, but
visited you with digitally.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Yep mill in the office for your zoom many a times. Right, So,
but thank you for being here, and let's just start
with your origin side of it.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
Yes, yes, so, actually my path to becoming an acquisition
entrepreneurs is probably a odd one, but then we all
have odd parts. I was I was just talking with Ron,
and I was born into a cult family in London,
and my father was in a cult called the School
of Economic Science, and it was from the before I
was born until the day he died, which a couple
of years ago. So that was a very strange upbringing.
(02:33):
And we were sort of them. We were vegetarian, and
we played in Sanskrit, and the women all had to
be servient to their men and all those other things
that cults do. They then opened up their own schools
to which I was sent, and they decided to beat
the boys a lot to break us into subission. And
the girls they didn't beat, because of course they were
female and you couldn't do that to a woman. But
(02:54):
they just put them into arranged marriages with their teachers.
All the cult stuff went on. I was very grateful
to escape around the age of twelve.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
Oh wow, so that's a tough tough start, right, So
twelve year escape? Would you go to live with a relative?
Do you go where did you? Where did you go
into to finish school? And do end u where you
are now?
Speaker 2 (03:14):
I went to normal school and my mother actually she
kind of had enough. I think she got into she
got married not really knowing what she was getting into,
and eventually and they got divorced, and we were running
away from school every single day. And of course my
father's people were telling the judges that we loved it
there and we were happy there, but the judge could
see that we just left every single day. So we
(03:34):
were able to give evidence in our own way, and
we got out.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
So I went to normal schooling. Oh we still of
course had you know, normal family.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
We had, you know, still we weren't didn't lose touch
with uncle's aunts and grandparents and neighbors, so there was
a semblance of normality in our life as well, so
we knew what that.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
Was awesome, that's cool, And there's somewhere along ride you
found a motorcycle.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
Right, Yes, So I kind of went through my teens,
did school, but I'd seen motorcycle kling and at this
point probably thought that's as far away as possible from
what I was brought up into in those early days,
and I fixated on it, and that's exactly what I
wanted to do. So when I hit eighteen, I got
myself a dodgy old four hundred pound race bike and
(04:17):
started racing very badly to begin with, and went on
to fifteen years and ended up winning quite a lot
of stuff. I won somebodies championship races. I'd raced in
World Endurance, going around to famous circuit called Spa in
Belgium if anyone follows it. We made it on the
POSI in there, and I did a year in Grand
Prix as a private rider.
Speaker 3 (04:37):
So it's a bit of a bit of a hard
act as a private rider.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
But one some good races and aged about thirty three,
I thought that's enough time to do something else now,
so I stopped.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
I used to ride dirt bikes and race those a
little bit amateur, never good, never never had any real sponsors,
are they. We're run in the you know, the local
races and stuff and play around. Never got great at it,
and tried to do some motocross those a lot of
those ur and duro type of things or flat track
type of things when I was younger. Tried to get
into the motocross scene and kept hurting myself. So around
(05:11):
my thirties I was like, yeah, I've broken it up bones.
I think I broke my ribs in my right arm
twice in a single year in three different wrecks. And
after that I was like I probably had to quit
doing this.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
It sounds like being a racer. And of course where
you your area is brilliant for that, isn't it. You
remember the film with Steve McQueen and Kenny Roberts on
any Sunday they're just riding across the desert, just fantastic.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
Yeah, all right, let's see here. So after that, you
you know you've got kind of getting out of that.
Where did you go next?
Speaker 2 (05:37):
Well, I've been doing to pay for that. I'd been
doing a lot of it work. I was contracting in London,
so I got quite the skilled in that. But I
a year after racing, I thought, well, I'm not going
to be a commuter in London for the rest of
my life, and so I went off to visit some
people in New Zealand ended up saying for five years.
And while I was there, I met my wife and
we got a boat and we sailed around a lot,
(05:58):
and we got a child, own a house. So life
definitely took a different turn there. But five years later
some was growing up not knowing his grandparents, and my
dad had some strokes, so we.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
Thought we'd come back.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
So we're back in London five years later and then
begun yet another chapter. So on that chapter in fact
out and my wife is from Cornwall. So we built
up a web business there, took the digital skills, but
moved more towards web in e commerce and got good
at all that digital marketing and search engine optimization and
build the e commerce websites, build a great little business.
(06:32):
Had a team of people there and we ran that
four ten years and that grew very nicely. So there
was another business grounding in a slightly different field.
Speaker 3 (06:39):
But it all builds up, doesn't it all. There's different
things you.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
Do, think marketing in SEO and online online business stuff.
That's cool, and then what did you guys do with that?
Business is still around or you sew it?
Speaker 3 (06:50):
Well, my wife still runs it, but we took us.
Cornwall was a very small town.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
I don't know, it's like it's like living on probably
a very far plead through a Newfoundland or something like that.
For me as a London we had the opportunity then
to get a boat and go sailing. So we spent
four years sailing across the Atlantic, came to the Caribbean.
We had our son on the boat and we scored
him as well, which was what fun for us, maybe
not so much for him. And we went from Trinidad
(07:15):
up to New York and back down to the Caribbean
and had had a very jolly time before years doing that.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
Did you have a captain on the border you actually
did you sell the boat yourself? No?
Speaker 2 (07:24):
We did all we'd learned that really in New Zealand,
and we got qualified and we built up some miles.
We sailed from New Zealand to Tongua and did some
fastnet races in Britain.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
So we were reasonably experienced when we got the boat.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
But I have to say when you when you leave
the Canary Islands to cross the Atlantic out into the
out into the blue yonder, and you know it's a
one way trip because everything's going that way, the wind's
going that way, and you're not coming back when you leave.
So it was still a big moment, quite intimidating.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
Let's go into the let's get back on the topic.
Let's go to so you sell the world? You came back,
You didn't doing this I stuff? What had you start
looking around to think you, you know, wanted to buy
a company? Because I probably met you around the time
or if we went through the well.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
I actually had one more phase, which is when we
came back from there, we we the business wasn't only
much money and has put. The father was in poor health,
and our son just wanted to go to school. You
had enough of being schooled by us, and I actually
wanted to get back to London. So when it meant,
I had to go and get a job. And so
I spent a few years in two corporate roles and
I ended up as vice president of e commerce. So
(08:28):
I did the full on corporate thing for six years,
and you know, that got us back into society. We
got back back on the ladder. And then after that
thought right, we need to go back to doing our
own thing. And I knew the guys that were, you know,
buying and selling the businesses, and I'd been sort of
in this very office bound it jobs for a while,
and I thought this is this will suit me better
(08:48):
and I'll be out and about again, I'll be more
ENTREPRENEURIALLL do my own thing.
Speaker 3 (08:51):
So I launched into it.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
And that was just over a year ago, and I thought, right,
I'm going to admit myself to doing this and see
how we can make a go of the whole end
in a space and started that late early last.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
Year, okay, and then you did your search. You participated
in some of the stuff I did, like the Hundreday
Challenge where we try to break that the nostalgia that
you know, getting deal flow going for everybody. The whole
purpose of thee hundred day Challenge was to do our
best in one hundred days to talk to one hundred
business owners. Nobody made it. Some people made it in
the seventies. I think one guy made it up into
(09:22):
the eighties, but that wasn't The goal wasn't like you
have to hit one hundred. The goal was to have
a pipeline where if you continued on, there would be
you know, you could if you continue doing what we
were doing, now that you had momentum, every hundred days
you'd be talking to one hundred business owners like sometimes
two or three days. Some days you have days off,
but you know that the whole point was to build
(09:42):
the momentum.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
And some you can just walk into a corner shop,
can't you, and find the person that owns it and
talk about that business, How did you get into it?
How are you ever going to get out of it?
And you can end up with these fantastic conversations. So
I find that incredibly incredibly rewarding.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
It does, and that that becomes part of your actual
conversation now with business owners. I mean I do it
constantly whenever I'm at a coffee shop or you know,
or anything. Right, I'm like, okay, what got you into
this space? I'm going to retreat down in Mexico on
vacation and the guy starts telling me about all you know,
like you know that he's semi retired. Now, I was like, cool,
(10:18):
how did you retire? Turns out he's sold his business
and I might try to get him on the show.
I won't say his name or anything, but so an
incredible business him and his brother's built, and now he
owns a couple of you know, the body into and
own a couple of little other little things going on.
But uh, you know, it's just natural party conversation now.
And you do that because of the muscle you built
up of tried and going out and doing one hundred conversations.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
So because of course, when you start approaching businesses, don't
you say I'll be interested in buying you. You really
don't know what to say. You can say I'd be
interested in buying you, and they give whatever response they're
gonna give, and you don't really know what to say next.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
Right, So that's that's.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
Why those conversations are say useful because it comes a
natural thing to talk about.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
As like you, if you try that approach a lot
of times people don't get well, I'm not for sales,
like okay, if you just like if you go in
the natural approach, And what we did in the Hundreday
challenge was just to go, now, tell me all about
your business. How did you build it? Why did you
build it? You know, what were your challenges? You know,
I bet this was difficult, I bet that was easy
or whatever. And you're having a natural conversation and somewhere
along the work along the line, leek, what's next? Right?
(11:21):
What are you gonna do when this is done? Right?
And that's naturally part of the conversation as opposed to
just going, hey, I buy businesses? Are you for sale?
So it just it doesn't land right because nobody's for
selling unless they're like something's wrong, unless they've already reached
out to a broker. Right, most businesses you want to
actually won't you want not necessarily for sell.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
Normally, by the time they think it's for sale, it's
actually far too late to get it into any conditions.
The vast majority, I think never will. You know, the
famous statistics says that the vast majority never sell, and
those that did, they they decide to sell and then
they've got, you know, another three or four years to
get it into shape.
Speaker 3 (11:56):
Even if they know how, they.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
Could easily have been preparing earlier, doing the right things
so that when they finally want to step away, everything's
in place.
Speaker 3 (12:04):
But the majority don't do that.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
We interviewed another Graves that should come out any day now.
But he went from the corporate world of buying a
yog He went from being working at Deloitte as a
contractor consultant to buy a franchise yoga studio. And I
was like, well, did you do yoga a lot? He's like, no,
you went from which was that was a little you know,
I say, well, that must have been difficult adapting to
(12:27):
not being a yogi and owning a yoga studio, right,
you know. They had people come in and do the
exercises and stuff, and I'm sure he participated, but there's
something about being in your natural element and being known
for something related to your business. I think what you
did in getting a large motorcycle dealership, and we'll talk
about that next. Your background in motorcycles gives you some
(12:48):
credibility when people go, oh, yeah, this guy used to race,
he want this and that and stuff like that. It
gives you a lot of almost instant rapport with people
that you want to work with, business owners and employees,
customers that walk in the door, right. You know, it's
not the first time you've ever seen a motorcycle. You're
trying to sell one.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
And some people getting into businesses prefer, don't they not
to be in something they've done before, because it if
they've done it before, often they dragged into the operational
side of things and it's hard to resist.
Speaker 3 (13:20):
But of course, you know, I have done this before.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
I've done the sport, though not necessarily the trade, which
are quite different. But yeah, we all share the love,
don't we of motorcycling. If you've done it, you know
there's the whole sensation thing, the freedom thing.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
Wherever you come from, you.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
Share that with other people and it gives you a
real strong bond with the people you're working with.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
You ended up doing an acquisition of a large motorcycle dealership.
How did that deal come about? What was the let's
talk about like, what was what led up to it? What?
How did you find the how did you find that one?
Speaker 2 (13:53):
When you get into m and A, of course you
look in for the kind of businesses that you're going
to source, and there's some good advice which says you
focus on a.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
Niche and get well known in their niche.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
And there's some other good advice which says, you know,
do something you actually know, and you'll have some hopefully
some respect from those business owners and something to talk about,
because if they're intrusting their their life's work and their
pride and joy to someone, it's likely they're going to
want to trust it to someone you know, with a
trap record where with success or the very least with
the strong interest and knowledge of the area. So somewhere
(14:23):
you've got to find what's your angle and get to
know that owner. Motorcycling hasn't been in growth for the
last few years. It's kind of, you know, an older population,
so you look at it and you think it's not
the sort of thing I'm going to buy into. Everyoneants
to buy into tech. We will want to buy AI,
e commerce, SaaS. But that's it's a very different space,
isn't it, Because of course everyone's investing in that, and
(14:44):
you'll get bench capitalists going in there, putting in millions
of pounds into businesses, nine of ten of which fail,
and it's the massive gamble says that one of these
is going to become Facebook. So that's not a practical
approach for someone like me or most of us, is it.
You want to find a viable business that you can
get involved in and make a living from while you're
growing it, So that space becomes very hard. So I
(15:09):
looked around for e commerce and looked at some other
sectors and started actually working on building up a marketing
group of marketing agencies with with some other people. And
that's that's beginning to go, though I haven't I haven't
got my own one yet, but I'm collaborating quite closely
with them and that's starting to come together. But it
made sense to me to talk to motorcycling businesses and
I spoke to some owners and and of course middle
(15:29):
of last year I was speaking to an owner. I've
dropped him a little message and the message. You know, I've
got like a one liner back saying yes, I would
like to sell my business. So we got talking and
and you know, so the story began the long journey
of discussions and negotiations until that finally came to pass.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
So is this something you're in the deity? I know
you're at the interim CEO's position right now. Is your
immediate goal the finery replacement or you want to wait
until you get it back to a certain level before
you do that, or.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
It needs to have reached a certain point.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
Because of my e commerce experience, particular thing that I
can do is I can take any business that hasn't
fully digitalized and make that part work. And often that's
the biggest opportunity. And with these guys, they had a
really decent e commerce operation going and it's the most
profitable part of the business. The manufacturers tend to own you.
On the bike sales part of the business, it's very
(16:24):
hard to make any profit because the manufacturers sort of
arrange things so that you know, most of it goes
to them. So you can make a small profit and
you can be a viable business that you.
Speaker 3 (16:32):
Can't expect much more than that from a dealership.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
But the e commerce can care as much as you like.
It's only down to your vision and your capability of
setting up the tech, doing the marketing and scaling the thing.
But the e commerce they had was quite manually done.
It was still using quite old fashioned processes and a
lot of it was outsourced out of the business, so
there was a really big opportunity for that to improve.
So it means that my mission therefore is to get
(16:56):
into the business, stabilize it, make sure that all the
things that should be working, a base working, and the
by part of the business is viable, and then set
up the e commerce to grow and the partnerships with
other businesses so they can grow.
Speaker 3 (17:08):
And that's the area where I can add the most value,
I believe.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
Yeah, I was looking at the I downloaded and got
a request for information for the Harley dealerships, right doesn't
to buy a Harley dealership and a couple other ones.
And I was just curious so whether we took like
and it looked like they totally expected you to make
most of your money off of parts and servicing. Right,
you do, you do sales, and you know you make
(17:32):
a little bit off each by but the majority of
you looked at like most of these companies out there,
and I've looked at a couple that were for sale.
I you know, reached out to the broker, hab send
and stuff. The majority of their money comes from parts
and service, right selling gloves and you know, fuel filters
and oil filters and oil changes and so many mile maintenances.
Speaker 3 (17:51):
All that we all know.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
Hardly don't mean what a great brand it is, how
long they've been going, and that whole lifestyle thing they've
built around it. But you know, they've had trouble here,
and I think that half their dealers have closed over
the last two or three years. And in fact, it
was one of the ones that I stopped doing. I've
closed that off because I couldn't see a way of
making their viable. And so the whole rationalization of process
of making sure bottom line is you need to work
(18:14):
with motorcycle manufacturers that will not send you bust.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
So I've had to be quite hard nosed about that.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
And we've got some were starting with some new ones
which will be coming on soon, but we had to
stop with some that weren't going to work for us.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
Yeah, it's just you know, it's a business, you have
to run it like a business. And unfortunately, right now
the current CEO of that is not doing right by
people's He's gonna get labeled as the CEO they destroyed Harley, Right,
So that's it. I'll write other stuff. I've had one before,
(18:48):
I'd be I'd be interested in own another one. Their
high maintenance still these you know, they've always been high meetings, Fike.
But uh, you know, as I get older and stuff,
I was like, can I get on something and just
ride and not have to work on it or do
anything to it? A lot? You know, So then looking
at other stuff you mentioned in your notes is to
turn around. So is it not just not as profitable
(19:10):
as it can be? Was it losing money? Where was
it when you when you first seen it?
Speaker 2 (19:14):
They went When I spoke to them, they'd lost some
money and the owner had been not involved for a
while and he'd had someone running it, and they clearly
communications hadn't.
Speaker 3 (19:23):
Been quite right. He'd had some personal problems.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
I think his mazar had died, and when he got
back involved, there was some quite big losses and there
was a falling out with Heson that been running it,
and technology had obviously moved on was leaving them behind
a bit, so he was in a difficult place, and hence,
you know, he was highly motivated to find a way out.
So it was hard for us because one of the
things they'd had was big problems with systems. So you
(19:45):
start asking for what's in numbers, and it was really
hard for them to tell.
Speaker 3 (19:49):
Us in any reliable way.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
For a couple of years, they've been running two or
three different finance systems alongside and not trusting any of them,
and they'd all been costing money. So one of the
things he'd done has gone down to one system, but
that wasn't great, and just getting good financial information was
one of the challenges of many I should say.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
Yeah, so you know that I've seen a lot of
stuff recently on different other podcasts and stuff like that
talking about how pro ball players and some other people
are getting in and making millions, if not billionaires out
of them by buying car dealerships up and I'm wondering,
why is the car dealership seemingly and I haven't dobed
into any of them, so I don't know the true numbers,
(20:27):
but it seems like they seem to be more way
more profitable than what I've seen the motorcycle dealerships being.
Is that because the manufacturers and the way they do
it or what do you think is causing that?
Speaker 2 (20:40):
I think it's just much more of a mass market,
isn't it. You know, motorcycling's not not been that well
a marketed, I would say the last few years. You
know that most like the audience, as we said, is
getting a bit older. But the car audience, okay, it's
you know, likely to decline with all the you know,
global changes that are going on and green movements, but
it's still huge, isn't it. So you can be in
(21:01):
a car dealership and just turning over tens of thousands
of vehicles, so and the value of.
Speaker 3 (21:06):
Each is high.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
So I think people put a lot of disposable income
into their cars, don't they. And you know, some people
put disposable income into the bikes, but it's a smaller market.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
So we want to see your bike's your secondary mode
of transportation to like for a while there, all I
had was my bike, but for you know, most of
the time, you know, I ended up having to sell
my bile moved to Hawaii and it has storms there
were little rain so art you can't see your hand
in front of your face, and then I couldn't get
anywhere because you can't ride a bike in that, like
you know, it's really dangerous to ride a bike is
(21:37):
super heavy rain anyway, just because the hydroplaning is not
in a car. A hydroplane you slide a little bit
and ooh, that's fun. And a bike you do that,
you're able to be ding on pavement for a while,
so you don't want to do that often. And the
roads there were grooved to let the rain off the road,
so you're even when you're riding a long casual and
it's not raining, it's kind of miserable because it's like
(21:57):
you're on this vibrating thing all the time. Your car
is pretty to absorbit it. That hardly wasn't. It's like
everywhere I went on the other roads that crowd across
the island, it was just like riding on on just
vibrating just the whole time, and it wasn't It wasn't
tough fun. I got three or four tickets too, for
the traffic was so horrible there. I was cutting traffic
and that's not allowed there, or riding in the the
(22:18):
mopeds could ride in the bicycle line. They'd let them
get away with that. So I'd be riding on the
motorcycle line with my motorcycle right down the bicycle lane,
and they didn't like that much. So, but if you bumper,
the bumper take you. You know, the island is only
twenty six miles or thirty miles, you know, route diameter,
but it might take you three hours to get somewhere
because it's bumper to bumper, right.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
It should be a quick well again on your buke it.
You should be quicker, right, you should be able to
get around. But if they're not, if you're not allowed
to pass the cars, you know, split.
Speaker 3 (22:45):
Lanes, then then it ruins the fund, rather does not
on the road.
Speaker 1 (22:48):
I tell you, I was in Mexico and it's scary
down there. I was in Mexico for four days and
I had to I was on the retreat most of
the four days. But on their way to the retreat
was forty five miles or so forty five minute drive
from the airport, and I didn't have to drive it
because we had private security pick us up and stuff.
It was a pretty luxury thing, and the driving along
(23:09):
watching the motorcycles there. They'd have grandma on the back
or something, and they'd be riding three people deep this
on a motorcycle and they're splitting lanes coming across us
while we're going forty miles an hour fifty miles an
hour on the highway. I don't know what seventy kilometers is,
but it didn't fill like sixty or seventy here, So
whatever seventy miles kilometers an hour was, that's what we
were driving on these roads. But yet to get I
(23:32):
think they're not wearing helmets. You know. Some of these
motorcycles look can made homemade. It was impressive to see.
And then we got into these little villages and people
were riding dirt bikes and four wheelers and golf carts
around like as not just like just to get around,
like as means of transportation. Right, you could tell that's
what they were driving to work.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
There's plenty of parts of the world on there where
you can see people riding on a motorcycle, as you say,
with a family of three or four, maybe with a
pot of strawbales on the back.
Speaker 3 (23:59):
And if you're lucky, then my even have a goat
strapped on the back.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
I haven't seen that down there, but it was feel
pretty impressive to see how well they use the motorcycles
and stuff. And uh, yeah, there's one guy. He come
flying by on a wheelie, right, and I thought, oh,
he's gonna ticket because we just passed a cop. I
seen him fly past a cop on that wheel and
they didn't know. The thing didn't bother right, And the
cops down there are serious. They have ars, right, they're
wearing They're wearing fully automatic or semi automatic rifles, you know,
(24:23):
in military uniforms down there. It wasn't like our local
cop has a little pistol on his side and it
says stop, you know, give you a ticket. I don't
think you'd want to tick one of those guys off.
But they didn't blink an eye. They just kind of
looked up and like, you know, whatever, right, you gonna
hurt himself, you know, like it wasn't hurting me. There
was nobody else on the road at that time in
the day. It was just heeling going down the road.
So let's go back to uh, what is the what
(24:43):
does you think the timeline is? Like, you you've got
this got some turnaround to do you think this is
something you're gonna own your whole life. Is this something
you're gonna grow and and add on to and kind
of do the roll up strategy where you bolt on
things to it. What's your what's your what's your current
I know it changes over time, but what do you
think your current plan is.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
We're definitely starting from the point of view of being
an acquisition entrepreneur rather than the lifelong motorcycle dealer. So
it's all about you know, building it and and you know,
being able to exit it later on.
Speaker 3 (25:13):
I should.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
I didn't talk about this much yet, but while I
was on the journey, you know, towards this, I ended
up partnering up with Rob Richmond and his Synergy Groups,
which means that we've got a whole structure here now
for building groups of companies and some really really good
people involved. So when I started talking to this company,
I needed to bring different people in, and I needed
to understand the potential deal better, and I brought in
(25:34):
role and the financials needed to be picked apart. I
brought in Steve Rumsey's and another you know, a great CFO,
and I brought the systems all had all sorts of problems,
and I brought in Rick Wilson, who's another one of
the teams. And finally we needed you know, we needed
to buy a property, and we brought in a property
guy that was able to unlock a part of the dealer,
and so I ended up building.
Speaker 3 (25:55):
A team of five.
Speaker 2 (25:56):
So now, between that and the Synergy Group's concept, we
have a really strong platform that we can build things
on so we can acquire other companies, and we have
we have one that's just about to be announced that
that's been worked on in a in a very closely
related space. And we we have opportunities in the whole
of not just motorcycling, but anything around e commerce or related.
Speaker 3 (26:18):
Engineering disciplines and or.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
Yeah, and sorry, let me say that around automotive and
motorcycling and related engineering disciplines, or entirely separately around e
commerce and logistics, because you know, that's half of our business.
So we have opportunities to synergistically acquire companies in both directions.
So so we're looking at both at the moment.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
Yeah, there's all kinds of other stuff you can do too,
I mean in the same realm of you know, street bikes,
there's dirt bikes, there's four wheelers, there's you know other
type of alterraated vehicles. There's you know, water watercraft. I mean,
if you ever got it, wanted to get into the
jet skill what you have there. And in Europe you
have lakes and stuff you goes take jet skis on and.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
That always yes, and those sort of businesses can be
very synogistic.
Speaker 3 (27:04):
Can't they.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
One of one of the things we'll be doing with
this will be we'll be moving property for the main business.
There's a there's a rented building over in Cardiff, which
is the capital city of Wales, but we're based in Swansea,
which is kind of the second city.
Speaker 3 (27:16):
Of Wales, and we'll be moving buildings.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
We're looking at something even larger and more interesting than
what we have and build this out as a destination
with multiple retailers in their different sorts of businesses, and
that would be the place you could bring in the marine,
you bring activity centers definitely, cafes, make it a destination
that the whole city wants to Counting.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
Yeah, I've seen some of these kind of where they
have the motorsport you know, just called the Motorsports Center
and you walk in and you know they've got motorcycles
and four wheelers and street bikes and different two or
three different brands of each you know they might have
here in the United States they have Yamaha and Suzuki
and Honda and maybe even Dakadi. You know, Harley's are
(27:55):
never usually in them because those are so unique here
that I mean that you kind of have to I
don't know, hardly in the United States allows themselves to
be and other stuff. And then now I've seen a
lot of these places they have at least one that's
some form of electric have you have you looked at
have you seen that already? Do have electric bikes on electric.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
We have some smaller electric bikes, but in our part
of the country there's not much enthusiasm for them yet.
So I think if we were near the city and
there were lots of you know, bus lanes and bike
lanes and you know, more traffic jams, they would be
a great demand for it. But where we are in Wales,
we're near some of the biggest hills in the UK,
miles of forest with off roads and just open roads
and beautiful roads. So we're kind of in a part
(28:34):
of the country where I don't think people feel the
needs to go electric yet despite.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
Maybe they should.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
But if they're you know, like us, a die hard biker,
they currently still like an engine.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
Yeah, and there's something about are of an engine, right,
But uh, like some of these things are doing good.
They've gotten you know, I'd say that there's there's short
trip ones right because there they remind me of the
Sports where it's a small tank on it. They've got
eighty to one hundred mile ranges most of the time, right.
So that's the reason when I when I had my Sports,
So the first thing I did is found someplace that
it did. He did custom work and he built a
(29:06):
tank that was like a full sized tank on there.
Because I knew I was going to take this drive
and the original sports a tank all he could go
about eighty miles, Like I didn't want to pull over
looking for gas station. There's some spots along the way.
There's no gas station for about eighty miles. Right you
go through the Arizona Desert, you'll see signs of you know,
nest gas stations one hundred and twenty miles away. Well,
if I had the little Sports, I would have been
stock i'd have to be like hauling gas tanks on
(29:28):
the side of the IK or something. If I didn't
have you know, if I didn't hadn't put a bigger
tank on there.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
So the arrange can be an issue, gun't it. And
you know whether you got a small tank or a
small battery. But you know, with the electric that's going
to improve, isn't it. And I think, although you know,
we might be dinosaurs, I might be a dinosaur. We
all love an engine, but it's probably not the future.
Most European countries have got some legislation moving towards the
end of the internal combustion engine, and so that you
know we will be doing you know, I think maybe
(29:55):
electric vehicles and a long term thing. It should be
hydrogen at some point. But the movement is on right,
and it's going somewhere, and eventually we won't all be
guzzling gas, I suppose.
Speaker 1 (30:07):
And I tell you the electric motors just have so
much more torque it's insane. I have a contact he
has the Tesla plaid and I got to be the
passenger in it, and he put it ludicrous mode. We
went out to a long road and nobody was and
he just let it go, and it's like being in
a rocket. It just throws you back. I've been in
race cars before, you know, I grew up in a
(30:28):
redneck boy. You know, I've been in drag race cars.
It felt like he's been back in a drag race car.
The launch on that thing was amazing. And imagine putting
that in a bike. You know, as long as you
keep the front wheel down, you know, and the tires
you know, you know, but with the computers and stuff
and these things, I bet you could bet that he
can do that where they he just has amazing launch.
But you know, he knows traction control, that knows what
(30:49):
it's losing interaction, knows when the wheel's coming off the ground,
and it just tunes it because that that that tesla,
the computer in it keeps the tires from spinning, right.
It just maximizes every little thing.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Yeah, and there certainly when I was doing it, getting
the front wheel up in the air, you know, when
you know a maximum acceleration was a big issue. But
now the electronics stopped that happening. And it's odd story.
I took some of the guys in the business to
a race recently and I hadn't been to one for
a while, and it turned out turned out unfortunate with
that with quite a bad accident. But when we got there,
(31:21):
I said, we have to go to this place on
the circuit. I mean it was actually the place where
I had my last racing crash, so I knew the
circuit really well.
Speaker 3 (31:26):
It was a beautiful circuit in England.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
In fact, the Americans used to come over and do
the Transatlantic Trophy on it every east so it was
great racing. But they would go over this hill called
Clay Hill pulling massive wheelies on those screaming race bikes
in the seventies. I said, we've got to go and.
Speaker 3 (31:39):
Look at that.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
We got to the hills, not a single wheelie was
being pulled. They all had that front wheel flat on
the grounds, absolutely ruined it. The spectacle has gone.
Speaker 1 (31:47):
So you're you're going to buy other stuff. You're gonna
acquire things. You're gonna make this, you know, kind of
a roll up or something with the intent at some
point to to build it as if you know, to
exit and build it to where it's can be sold.
That's when wealth generation really happens in this space. You
make a living, You can you make yourself be able
(32:10):
to pay your bills and eat when you run it,
you make generational wealth when you sell it, and you
do that MUL on multiple occasions. It's the horizon you
see here. You think this is going to be two years,
three years, five.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
Years, certainly in that range, yes, you know, and with
work going on in the marketing group as well, and
there's there's a group also are v RP companies coming
together nicely now and some in kind of solar. So
there's some really interesting groups of companies coming out of
our group, and all of which will have you know
the way it works, obviously, but it's worth telling people,
(32:43):
isn't it. Once If you look at any one of
these companies and you try and sell it when you
want to retire, if you're lucky, you may get two,
three or maybe even four times.
Speaker 3 (32:52):
It's it's a bit as it's sale price.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
When you can get that group to a certain level
of ebit, which with enough companies in there, and you
get past the combined profit, say five or ten million,
the whole thing changes completely. A new valuation can be
sort of six to ten times to anyone what's sector
you're in, So that really the play is, even if
each of the businesses doesn't expand, you bring them together
and their value increases. But if you bring together good
(33:16):
businesses and help them work together synergistically, they will expand
as well. So each owner can come into this group
and they can take they can get their business to
the point where it's actually an attractive sale of value,
which they normally won't on their own, is the truth
of the matter. But this allows them to get to
that point and then to exit with a whole exit
process set up and in a collaborative journey with the
(33:39):
arther owners, so everyone.
Speaker 3 (33:41):
Gets the exit they want. So that's the long play.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
I think we actually have a window here right now
that is going to just take anything else. I think
here in the United States especially probably will bleed over
to where you're in the other side of the on
the other side of the big old pond. The you
selled across the pe here is causing a problem, and
(34:05):
it's just now getting some attention. And that private equity,
which is one of the one of one of your
exits would either be private equity or a strategic purchaser.
So basically they're another big dealership will buy you at
the end of this journey, or you're going to sell
their private equity. I honestly think here in the United States,
maybe in a year, maybe in three or four years,
(34:25):
but fairly soon in the next four to five years,
are going to become heavily regulated. And it's because the
same corporate raiders that actually took advantage of the real
estate boom and basically cause the real estate financial crisis
in two thousand and seven two thousand and eight are
playing the same game in private equity right now. They're
(34:48):
buying companies. They're buying companies, over ledveraging them with bank loans,
stripping the real estate and all the assets out of them,
forcing them to pay usual leases on, sell lease backs
and stuff like that for those real estate and then
turn around and they can't afford anymore and they're going
to bankrupt. So here, in the last five to ten years,
(35:08):
we've lost things like Hooters, which is a restaurant, adult
theme restaurant. We've lost Joints Fabric, which was one of
my wife's favorite stores. It's an arts and craft store
and you know TGA fridays about it. I don't know
think that was pe based, but a good dozen great companies.
We just got to email this morning and my wife's like,
I gotta email the right it's going to be. I
(35:29):
think it's going away, And I said, but it's a
pe play. I haven't looked it up yet. But you
can't continue to do this without starting to get you know,
more rules and more laws put in place in it.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
So I wonder if he'll be tweeted the same though.
The reason why I ask is obviously if you know
the way it went with the banking crisis, a lot
of it were based around personal savings, wasn't it, and
people's mortgages, their houses, and it was what was the
It's like Freddie mcka and Fanny Mail or something, the
American one and Layman brother.
Speaker 3 (36:00):
And when they will win.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
It affected millions of people potentially losing their house. Isn't
it really affects the massive the mass of the population,
doesn't it? But I think when a business goes bust,
it affects the employees of the business and the owners
of the business, but actually other businesses just come in
to fill its place, and so that there's a kind
of a case to be made. Isn't it that it's
all right? For a business to go bust, because then
(36:22):
a better one will come in and fill that gap,
unless it's so large that it starts causing sort of
a knock on effect through the population.
Speaker 3 (36:29):
I don't know the answer. I'm just speculating now.
Speaker 1 (36:31):
These guys are taking one hundred million, two billion dollar
companies though and overburning them with strapping them down with
all kinds of debt, forcing them in the bankruptcy and
leaving the banks holding the bill. Right, And those banks
are the ones that you know are also paying They've
they've got their own lobbyist, right, They've got their own uh,
(36:52):
and it's causing there's there's a it's a dual effect
right now. One of the biggest money making things that's
happened in the United States is what's called private bank.
It's basically when you when you've become so high risk
as a business that the banks will no longer lend
you money. These PE firms are starting to lind it
out at higher risk loans and they're killing it doing it.
So that's the kind of life cycle of you know,
(37:13):
one of these things failing is they sell at overpriced
overvaluation to a PE firm and they're sitting on, say
multiple locations of real estate, and real estate is valuable
here right now. So the PE firms is like, hey,
let's sell that real estate over. I'll even give you
more money if you sell the real estate to me.
I'll place it in my real estate investment trust and
I'll give you you know, this one in the real estate.
(37:35):
Now you've got a lease, right, And this whole thing
cascades up to where they have a lease. They are
paying another paying for extra lease, extra debt, extra you know,
warehousing and stuff because they used to own their warehouses.
All that stuff adds up and then the economy shifts
a little bit and they can't afford all these payments
and are like, well, I guess you have to go bankrupt.
But all this the PE firms safe because they've stripped
(37:57):
all the equity and all the all these other valuations,
all their other little entities have all this stuff, and
if the company itself goes bankrupt, they're fine. You know,
the bank's the one holding the bill because they only
have twenty percent of their money in the bank finance
seventy percent of it seventy five.
Speaker 2 (38:12):
I guess it's kind of fraud on the bank eventually,
isn't it. And the banks have enough cloud to get
laws changed.
Speaker 3 (38:16):
So I'll take your side.
Speaker 2 (38:18):
If banks are losing out heavily, then eventually the laws
will probably come in.
Speaker 1 (38:23):
So that's what that you know, what you know basically
you can you know, I used to tell all the
time that in the real estate world, you know, these
real estate investors, they come up with a new way
to make money. I said, yeah, And some of the
times I own the RIA for a while, they would
come to me. It's like I'm going to do X,
Y and Z. I said, yeah, if that ever catches
on that that that'll work. Until this first time that
that happens to some senator's son or some you know whatever,
(38:45):
and you get a little cloud about it, and then
there's gonna be a law passed. You can't do it anymore, right,
And like you can't go around being predatory and not
have problems caused. And that's what's going on right now.
This is it's a very predatory thing happening here.
Speaker 3 (39:00):
And maybe the pe world.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
Right.
Speaker 2 (39:01):
But you don't have to go that way, do you
As there's multiple ways of exiting a business, and you know,
there's there's other really creative and and and interesting ways
that hero. Obviously, management buyout has always been an effective thing,
and of course it means you end up business has
a natural management team.
Speaker 3 (39:17):
Probably ownership trusts are really popular over here and really
good to attacks. But then with a couple of our groups,
so right now working on on listings and you know,
secondary market listings. It doesn't need to be as big
and complex as an IPO, but it's a brilliant way
of helping a business to grow. So so all of
these present really good options to business owners for the
(39:38):
for their future.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
And now it's solve the private equity program. Right. If
you get to the point where we just nobody wants
to sell the private equity because they're playing dirty tricks
and there's other alternatives, then you know, all of a sudden,
either have to change their ways or they're not gonna
they're not gonna get these these things sold. They're not
there's not gonna be a they're not going to be
a market to where they could purchase things.
Speaker 2 (39:58):
Right, there's always it's it's a if I think for
a business owner is the particularly small business owners think
they're going to sell it like this old their house,
and you know they're just going to decide to sell
it one day, give it to an agent. Someone's going
to give them what are you know, a million dollars
and they're going to go off and spend the rest
of the rest of the days or a boat. Of course,
in reality, that doesn't happen, does it. A business sale
is more complex because a business can so easily fail
(40:20):
having been sold, so people will very rarely give you
the money up front. You get into complex deals, you know,
you get into deferred payments, you get into all sorts
of interesting arrangements which can give the owner of the
value they want in the long term, but not exposed
the buyer to risk.
Speaker 3 (40:37):
But what happens is that the.
Speaker 2 (40:40):
Business owner's not really interest in that, So I just
want my money, don't do all this fancy stuff. So
if pe comes along and says, hey, we'll just give
you the money, They're going to jump at it, aren't they.
And you know, the future be damned, however, that business
is going to get milked and destroyed.
Speaker 3 (40:52):
Is no longer my problem because I've got my million
and I'm on the boat.
Speaker 1 (40:56):
There will be some people like that. There's always those people,
and I've seen more often not here, I've seen smaller,
especially as small the medium businesses. The legacy and the
legitim you know, basically a safe parent hands for the
business often becomes probably you know, two or three times,
you know, fifty sixty seventy percent of the time is
more interesting and more important to that owner than the
(41:16):
actual monetary values. After I interviewing three hundred people, I've
actually asked many times, who was the highest bidder, the
one that got the got the company, And there's like not,
you know, not normally it's the one that the owner
felt safest. Usually the bids are pretty close, they would say,
you know, within a few hundred thousand or within one
hundred thousand or two hundred thousand dollars of each other.
But it wasn't the highest and best they got the offer.
(41:38):
It was the ones that the owner trusted the most,
the one that the owner believed that would take care
of the best care of their customers and employees. You know,
they would trade that over a few hundred gard Not everybody.
There's some I think their lines drawn, especially in the
United States and maybe there too is when you have
more than two to three owners you start to have
to have a cap table. Then it's all about the money,
(41:58):
because you got to appease for people, and somebody's going
to be a holdout, right. But if you're a single
operator's mom and pop, a lot of times it's just
who's going to be the safest person? Right? You know
that that motorcycle dealership, he's seen you as a safe
pair of hands. You really because you've been in the space.
You know, the space I would imagine, you know, you know,
(42:19):
if somebody offered him just a few more dollars than
what you could come up with, he would say, and
they you know, they came from engineering or something else.
He's like, no, I'm gonna this thing's in danger. I'm
gonna give it to the motorcycle guy.
Speaker 3 (42:29):
It can be a bit of self interest as well.
Speaker 2 (42:31):
I think if it's in a safe pair of hands,
presumably of yes, your your local reputation has a better
chance of staying intact.
Speaker 3 (42:37):
If you've got deferred payments, you feel you've got a
better chance of receiving them.
Speaker 2 (42:41):
So I think, yeah, you can see why just the
biggest cash offer may not necessarily be the one you jump.
Speaker 1 (42:46):
For, right. And I know Rob and Rod Richman, and
I know what he's doing in this Synergy group a
little bit. But are you participating in some of the
other are the marketing thing? Are you going to be
a part owner some of the marketing things if you
go through that route, or yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
You're going to have my own digital marketing agency. It
makes makes sense for me to do that, right, And
you know the way thing is, isn't it. We have
a business which is you know, fifty percent e commerce.
It's almost a marketing company. So sometimes you wonder which
which side of the fence it should go. Should it
be a marketing company, should it be an automotive company?
So there's there's it's an interesting space because you know,
there's a lot of technology in both areas, and some
(43:24):
of it is integrated between the marketing and the automotive side.
Speaker 1 (43:27):
You know, almost all businesses should be a marketing and
sales company. And the product is in your case as
a motorcycle. The product in another case might be, you know,
I'm writing the software app and proper products are there.
I should be a marketing in and sales agency. The
product is an app, right, you know, it could be
almost any business that they're really focused on how do
(43:48):
I run the business? Is the business the product? You know,
whether it's cars or motorcycles or widgets, you know, that's
definitely a part of it. But you know, you can
make the best widget in the world, and if you
can't market it and sell it, you can't drive numbers.
Nobody's going to know and nobody's gonna you're not going
(44:09):
to pay your next year. You're not going to keep
the lights on.
Speaker 2 (44:11):
One of the things we're doing wrong is in terms
of our operational strategy. We really needed to sort it
out of the back end systems and make sure that
you know, our financials worked properly and that you know,
the operational side runds smoothly. We really needed to renew
the e commerce and get that working.
Speaker 3 (44:25):
There's a whole piece for.
Speaker 2 (44:26):
Us about building out building out more e commerce products
so that we can list more products faster from different
manufacturers and different suppliers, and we're building out an AI
based workflow for that which we help What we'll have
is actually a template of the integration between between all
those elements which would be able to drop into certainly
any similar businesses, any similar business and also maybe dissimilar
(44:50):
businesses with the back end and the front end and
the AI workflow is working together. So a big part
of our play should be to again to acquire similar
businesses that need that digitization and then drop the template
in and reapply it to them. And that is I
think where we could probably add the most value for
the owners of those businesses.
Speaker 1 (45:08):
Yeah, I've spent the last four weeks writing code. Again,
I haven't wrote code in twenty years, and use an
AI and use an AI tools to help me write code.
I'm in four weeks, five weeks, I've written over eighteen
thousand lines of code. So I don't know, if you've
ever been in the IT world, you know that that's
not on a one man's shop. That's a little bit
of code, and it's all because of what the possibilities
are with the stuff. Now. I think there's a possibility
(45:31):
in the near future to where you can have AI
out there. Not just I'm playing with all these different tools,
but as a marketing datacy, I could create a product.
I can give my AI now a picture of a
product and say write a product description of it, and
then I can say, here's my five competitors, go dig
through their reviews and tell me what are the customers
(45:53):
missing on that? And then if I have it fixed
in mind, highlight that as part of my product description. Right,
centiate myself by being the positive of what everybody else
is having a problem with. And AI can almost track
that in real time making. You need to have a
tool that crawls and watches those customer reviews, watches the
different things, and watch the markets. What are people talking about,
(46:14):
what do they want, how are they using the product?
All the stuff that takes a lot of man hours
to do things. I'm a marketing nerd. I have an
MBA in marketing. Right that said, all the stuff that
takes many of people and man hours to do. When
I was doing this fifteen twenty years ago, click tracking
on the e commerce site, what's the path they took
through a website. I actually helped build some software a
long time ago, back in PHP that I could actually
(46:36):
see somebody where they entered the website, what was the
path they got to the product and when they sold it?
How many clicks did it take to get that? And
then I would track all the products on our sites
because I had a few ecmarmerce sites. How can I
get the key products that are the highest sold in
front of people, and less clicks because you know, they
shouldn't take it nine clicks to get something if it's
my number two product on the site. Right, So you
(46:57):
know we could track this stuff. All that could be
done in real time now where it took us a
long time to write code and we'd have to always
review these your statistics and webb Ana Ladys and all
this other stuff. Not only could it do that in
real time, you could do a b test between descriptions.
Once it got there, it's insane. What's capable now? And
then basically it's like, how do you manage it all?
(47:19):
How do you put it to something that get something
out there that's working using AI? Because AI is changing
so fast by the time you get it done, you're like, oh,
I'm going to add this to it too, now that
I can have this other thing going.
Speaker 2 (47:31):
Yeah, now you're talking about my bread and butter on
and it's fantastic, isn't it. Whether you're using the same
sentiment analysis tooled on your social media and you know,
creating alerts for the business when they need to act,
or whether you're tracking user behavior and then using that
to personalize that. Once we've got the basic platform in place.
Speaker 3 (47:47):
Which is what we're working on now. We'll be launching
that in July.
Speaker 2 (47:50):
But then you know, you got I'm gonna be able
to say on I know what bike you look you
brought from us, I know what things you looked at
last time. I'll then be serving you up products I
think the most likely to take your fancy, So it
won't even be our best seller products when it'll be
the products that I believe are the best suited to
you based upon the the your your desires you've expressed exactly.
Speaker 1 (48:11):
And think about me, right, if I live on the
specific coast up north to San Francisco, if I were
to ride a bike, I would constantly be encountering fog,
mist and damp roads. So when I come to your website,
you could position the products that are best for that,
the tires that are best for that, the you know,
the helmets that have you know, you know rip off
(48:32):
codings in case that you know, or whatever it takes, right,
you know that if I'm riding in this area because
of this, you know you can see my social media.
You know, your AI and your tools can see where
I live where I what I'm doing. You know, I'm
you know, anybody these days if you go for a ride,
I post pictures from the coast all the time, even
though I'll have a motorcycle, like okay, the guy who
drives of the coast, you know twice a week. You know,
(48:54):
anybody with these tools these days, you'd be able to
customize that experience. When I got there, it's like this
guy knows exactly what I need. Right.
Speaker 2 (49:01):
And if you've been to the site and you've you know,
you've told us what sort of bike you have. We
know what hardly you have because you search for parts
for it. Well, we can when we get in some
new office, some special new part for that. We can
either have that going to you personally on email. We
can have it even you know, dropping into your Facebook
feeds saying, you know, whatever the new part is for
your for your sports stuff, and it's here in the shop.
So the tech is fantastic, isn't it. You need enough
(49:24):
time and skilled people to do it. We're in the
early stages of that with this business. But you know,
the potential is fantastic when we get it all in place.
Speaker 1 (49:31):
Yeah, and then that that applies to anything. You could
drop anything in there now you just need to you know,
whether it's water sports or helmets and loves or whatever
or whatever it happens to be. If you end up
with any of the you know, any of the auxiliary
products that go into that, the software you build is
you know, going to be able to plug into that.
(49:51):
You know it's going to make and it's gonna make
it a lot more valuable when you go to sell
to somebody will want your IP. You know, not only
do you just do you have a brand you can
sell Harley, you can sell your Dacatis or whatever you know,
BMW's there motorcycles. You also have this unique marketing system
and a unique intellectual property based you know, intelligent tool
(50:13):
that physicians yourself competitively or above the rest of the market.
And there's where you get your premiums. That's why you
get between you know, if even if you have the
ebit of you know, and that's where you get there
your what you call strategic acquisitions. Uh, the company that
will value at you know, fifteen twenty x because they
want your tech then you know, as opposed to pay
(50:33):
in seven or ten x because you know, you're you
have a market space they want to be in, and did.
Speaker 3 (50:39):
You know my plan? I don't believe it. I've been rumbled,
you troubled me wrong.
Speaker 1 (50:44):
It's that you know, I've been around for a little while.
I've got I've got the uh my blonde beard to
prove it. So the white so I think it's great,
and I was like, no, I just went blonde. That said,
good bid, I'll come grow a bit. It's all just
stop doesn't welcome me. So I'm very impressed. Enough beard
for most of us. So I did a funny thing
(51:04):
with the group. I'm helping a group here do acquisitions
and stuff. Yeah, a little bit like the Synergy group,
a little bit different, but for fun. One day, I
took the AI and I took my picture of me,
and I gave everybody on the board, including the women, beard,
So I wanted to make you guys all cool like me.
So AI is superimposed my beard on the whole crew,
and they thought it was amusing and told me to
(51:25):
cut it out. So, but no, I love what you're doing.
I love what you're working on. I really want to
see you win. Man. What can we do to help
you out? What is there if the audience is out
there and they're listening to this. Is there anything they
can do to help you out? Point you in the
right way of something good for sale or something. What
can we do to help you out?
Speaker 2 (51:44):
I mean, I guess you know, if anyone anyone over
this side of the pond mods a motorcycle, we could
definitely help. But people in the m and a community, Now,
if you've got some skill, you've got a business that
would match beautifully. Because the whole group thing is it's
very open. Someone's got a business they want and see
that it would work in the group, then you can
use that and participate in the group. So there's no
(52:05):
real barrier to people wanting to be a part of this.
And you know, we're looking people that can help us
to build out the AI faster. I've got people we're
working with that can help us with elements of the outreach.
Of course, you know, doing outreach to our trade customers
is really important. So there's no end of good people
(52:25):
we'd like to get involved. So if you think there's
a synergy, just please come and talk to me. I
think Rom's got all my contact details. It'll all be
on the podcast somewhere, won't it. So people that saying
they've got a business that would suit I'd really like
to hear from them.
Speaker 1 (52:38):
Well, Peter, thank you, hang up for a few seconds afterwards,
and we'll call that a show man.
Speaker 3 (52:42):
Thank you all, thank you everyone,
Hello and welcome to the How to Acceit Podcasts, where
we introduce you to a world of small to medium
business acquisitions and mergers. We interview business owners, industry leaders, authors, mentors,
and other influencers with the sole intent to share with
you what it looks like to buy or sell a business.
Let's get rolling and now a moment for our sponsors,
(00:33):
I want to highly recommend you get Acquisition Officionado magazine.
Every month, Acquisition Officiona Audo Magazine brings you tactics for
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(00:57):
acquisition entrepreneurs wherever they are in the journey. And I
want you to visit acquisition Afficionado dot com today. Hello
and welcome to the Hot podcast Today. I'm here with
Peter Graves and he is the CEO or interim CEO
of the company he just bought, which is a motorcycle,
a dealership and e commerce site. We're going to get
(01:18):
into that, but man, you have an incredible background so
thank you for being here today, and we're going to
start there, I think, talk about kind of your background,
how you ended up through racing to where you're at now,
and anything else you want to share, but just kind
of let's make let's make the audience know who you
are so we get connected with you.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Hey, thanks Rob, and thanks so much for inviting me on.
It's a really pleasure to be on here.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
So I've got to start with that.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Yeah, we've known each other for a while now. We've
been on the same zooms and stuff, and you've been
involved with some of the cool things that you know,
we did together as a team and some of the
projects and stuff I put on. So you and I
have known each other for what a couple of years now.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
So yeah, I haven't yet visited you in California, but
visited you with digitally.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Yep mill in the office for your zoom many a times. Right, So,
but thank you for being here, and let's just start
with your origin side of it.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
Yes, yes, so, actually my path to becoming an acquisition
entrepreneurs is probably a odd one, but then we all
have odd parts. I was I was just talking with Ron,
and I was born into a cult family in London,
and my father was in a cult called the School
of Economic Science, and it was from the before I
was born until the day he died, which a couple
of years ago. So that was a very strange upbringing.
(02:33):
And we were sort of them. We were vegetarian, and
we played in Sanskrit, and the women all had to
be servient to their men and all those other things
that cults do. They then opened up their own schools
to which I was sent, and they decided to beat
the boys a lot to break us into subission. And
the girls they didn't beat, because of course they were
female and you couldn't do that to a woman. But
(02:54):
they just put them into arranged marriages with their teachers.
All the cult stuff went on. I was very grateful
to escape around the age of twelve.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
Oh wow, so that's a tough tough start, right, So
twelve year escape? Would you go to live with a relative?
Do you go where did you? Where did you go
into to finish school? And do end u where you
are now?
Speaker 2 (03:14):
I went to normal school and my mother actually she
kind of had enough. I think she got into she
got married not really knowing what she was getting into,
and eventually and they got divorced, and we were running
away from school every single day. And of course my
father's people were telling the judges that we loved it
there and we were happy there, but the judge could
see that we just left every single day. So we
(03:34):
were able to give evidence in our own way, and
we got out.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
So I went to normal schooling. Oh we still of
course had you know, normal family.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
We had, you know, still we weren't didn't lose touch
with uncle's aunts and grandparents and neighbors, so there was
a semblance of normality in our life as well, so
we knew what that.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
Was awesome, that's cool, And there's somewhere along ride you
found a motorcycle.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
Right, Yes, So I kind of went through my teens,
did school, but I'd seen motorcycle kling and at this
point probably thought that's as far away as possible from
what I was brought up into in those early days,
and I fixated on it, and that's exactly what I
wanted to do. So when I hit eighteen, I got
myself a dodgy old four hundred pound race bike and
(04:17):
started racing very badly to begin with, and went on
to fifteen years and ended up winning quite a lot
of stuff. I won somebodies championship races. I'd raced in
World Endurance, going around to famous circuit called Spa in
Belgium if anyone follows it. We made it on the
POSI in there, and I did a year in Grand
Prix as a private rider.
Speaker 3 (04:37):
So it's a bit of a bit of a hard
act as a private rider.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
But one some good races and aged about thirty three,
I thought that's enough time to do something else now,
so I stopped.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
I used to ride dirt bikes and race those a
little bit amateur, never good, never never had any real sponsors,
are they. We're run in the you know, the local
races and stuff and play around. Never got great at it,
and tried to do some motocross those a lot of
those ur and duro type of things or flat track
type of things when I was younger. Tried to get
into the motocross scene and kept hurting myself. So around
(05:11):
my thirties I was like, yeah, I've broken it up bones.
I think I broke my ribs in my right arm
twice in a single year in three different wrecks. And
after that I was like I probably had to quit
doing this.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
It sounds like being a racer. And of course where
you your area is brilliant for that, isn't it. You
remember the film with Steve McQueen and Kenny Roberts on
any Sunday they're just riding across the desert, just fantastic.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
Yeah, all right, let's see here. So after that, you
you know you've got kind of getting out of that.
Where did you go next?
Speaker 2 (05:37):
Well, I've been doing to pay for that. I'd been
doing a lot of it work. I was contracting in London,
so I got quite the skilled in that. But I
a year after racing, I thought, well, I'm not going
to be a commuter in London for the rest of
my life, and so I went off to visit some
people in New Zealand ended up saying for five years.
And while I was there, I met my wife and
we got a boat and we sailed around a lot,
(05:58):
and we got a child, own a house. So life
definitely took a different turn there. But five years later
some was growing up not knowing his grandparents, and my
dad had some strokes, so we.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
Thought we'd come back.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
So we're back in London five years later and then
begun yet another chapter. So on that chapter in fact
out and my wife is from Cornwall. So we built
up a web business there, took the digital skills, but
moved more towards web in e commerce and got good
at all that digital marketing and search engine optimization and
build the e commerce websites, build a great little business.
(06:32):
Had a team of people there and we ran that
four ten years and that grew very nicely. So there
was another business grounding in a slightly different field.
Speaker 3 (06:39):
But it all builds up, doesn't it all. There's different
things you.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
Do, think marketing in SEO and online online business stuff.
That's cool, and then what did you guys do with that?
Business is still around or you sew it?
Speaker 3 (06:50):
Well, my wife still runs it, but we took us.
Cornwall was a very small town.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
I don't know, it's like it's like living on probably
a very far plead through a Newfoundland or something like that.
For me as a London we had the opportunity then
to get a boat and go sailing. So we spent
four years sailing across the Atlantic, came to the Caribbean.
We had our son on the boat and we scored
him as well, which was what fun for us, maybe
not so much for him. And we went from Trinidad
(07:15):
up to New York and back down to the Caribbean
and had had a very jolly time before years doing that.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
Did you have a captain on the border you actually
did you sell the boat yourself? No?
Speaker 2 (07:24):
We did all we'd learned that really in New Zealand,
and we got qualified and we built up some miles.
We sailed from New Zealand to Tongua and did some
fastnet races in Britain.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
So we were reasonably experienced when we got the boat.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
But I have to say when you when you leave
the Canary Islands to cross the Atlantic out into the
out into the blue yonder, and you know it's a
one way trip because everything's going that way, the wind's
going that way, and you're not coming back when you leave.
So it was still a big moment, quite intimidating.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
Let's go into the let's get back on the topic.
Let's go to so you sell the world? You came back,
You didn't doing this I stuff? What had you start
looking around to think you, you know, wanted to buy
a company? Because I probably met you around the time
or if we went through the well.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
I actually had one more phase, which is when we
came back from there, we we the business wasn't only
much money and has put. The father was in poor health,
and our son just wanted to go to school. You
had enough of being schooled by us, and I actually
wanted to get back to London. So when it meant,
I had to go and get a job. And so
I spent a few years in two corporate roles and
I ended up as vice president of e commerce. So
(08:28):
I did the full on corporate thing for six years,
and you know, that got us back into society. We
got back back on the ladder. And then after that
thought right, we need to go back to doing our
own thing. And I knew the guys that were, you know,
buying and selling the businesses, and I'd been sort of
in this very office bound it jobs for a while,
and I thought this is this will suit me better
(08:48):
and I'll be out and about again, I'll be more
ENTREPRENEURIALLL do my own thing.
Speaker 3 (08:51):
So I launched into it.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
And that was just over a year ago, and I thought, right,
I'm going to admit myself to doing this and see
how we can make a go of the whole end
in a space and started that late early last.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
Year, okay, and then you did your search. You participated
in some of the stuff I did, like the Hundreday
Challenge where we try to break that the nostalgia that
you know, getting deal flow going for everybody. The whole
purpose of thee hundred day Challenge was to do our
best in one hundred days to talk to one hundred
business owners. Nobody made it. Some people made it in
the seventies. I think one guy made it up into
(09:22):
the eighties, but that wasn't The goal wasn't like you
have to hit one hundred. The goal was to have
a pipeline where if you continued on, there would be
you know, you could if you continue doing what we
were doing, now that you had momentum, every hundred days
you'd be talking to one hundred business owners like sometimes
two or three days. Some days you have days off,
but you know that the whole point was to build
(09:42):
the momentum.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
And some you can just walk into a corner shop,
can't you, and find the person that owns it and
talk about that business, How did you get into it?
How are you ever going to get out of it?
And you can end up with these fantastic conversations. So
I find that incredibly incredibly rewarding.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
It does, and that that becomes part of your actual
conversation now with business owners. I mean I do it
constantly whenever I'm at a coffee shop or you know,
or anything. Right, I'm like, okay, what got you into
this space? I'm going to retreat down in Mexico on
vacation and the guy starts telling me about all you know,
like you know that he's semi retired. Now, I was like, cool,
(10:18):
how did you retire? Turns out he's sold his business
and I might try to get him on the show.
I won't say his name or anything, but so an
incredible business him and his brother's built, and now he
owns a couple of you know, the body into and
own a couple of little other little things going on.
But uh, you know, it's just natural party conversation now.
And you do that because of the muscle you built
up of tried and going out and doing one hundred conversations.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
So because of course, when you start approaching businesses, don't
you say I'll be interested in buying you. You really
don't know what to say. You can say I'd be
interested in buying you, and they give whatever response they're
gonna give, and you don't really know what to say next.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
Right, So that's that's.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
Why those conversations are say useful because it comes a
natural thing to talk about.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
As like you, if you try that approach a lot
of times people don't get well, I'm not for sales,
like okay, if you just like if you go in
the natural approach, And what we did in the Hundreday
challenge was just to go, now, tell me all about
your business. How did you build it? Why did you
build it? You know, what were your challenges? You know,
I bet this was difficult, I bet that was easy
or whatever. And you're having a natural conversation and somewhere
along the work along the line, leek, what's next? Right?
(11:21):
What are you gonna do when this is done? Right?
And that's naturally part of the conversation as opposed to
just going, hey, I buy businesses? Are you for sale?
So it just it doesn't land right because nobody's for
selling unless they're like something's wrong, unless they've already reached
out to a broker. Right, most businesses you want to
actually won't you want not necessarily for sell.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
Normally, by the time they think it's for sale, it's
actually far too late to get it into any conditions.
The vast majority, I think never will. You know, the
famous statistics says that the vast majority never sell, and
those that did, they they decide to sell and then
they've got, you know, another three or four years to
get it into shape.
Speaker 3 (11:56):
Even if they know how, they.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
Could easily have been preparing earlier, doing the right things
so that when they finally want to step away, everything's
in place.
Speaker 3 (12:04):
But the majority don't do that.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
We interviewed another Graves that should come out any day now.
But he went from the corporate world of buying a
yog He went from being working at Deloitte as a
contractor consultant to buy a franchise yoga studio. And I
was like, well, did you do yoga a lot? He's like, no,
you went from which was that was a little you know,
I say, well, that must have been difficult adapting to
(12:27):
not being a yogi and owning a yoga studio, right,
you know. They had people come in and do the
exercises and stuff, and I'm sure he participated, but there's
something about being in your natural element and being known
for something related to your business. I think what you
did in getting a large motorcycle dealership, and we'll talk
about that next. Your background in motorcycles gives you some
(12:48):
credibility when people go, oh, yeah, this guy used to race,
he want this and that and stuff like that. It
gives you a lot of almost instant rapport with people
that you want to work with, business owners and employees,
customers that walk in the door, right. You know, it's
not the first time you've ever seen a motorcycle. You're
trying to sell one.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
And some people getting into businesses prefer, don't they not
to be in something they've done before, because it if
they've done it before, often they dragged into the operational
side of things and it's hard to resist.
Speaker 3 (13:20):
But of course, you know, I have done this before.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
I've done the sport, though not necessarily the trade, which
are quite different. But yeah, we all share the love,
don't we of motorcycling. If you've done it, you know
there's the whole sensation thing, the freedom thing.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
Wherever you come from, you.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
Share that with other people and it gives you a
real strong bond with the people you're working with.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
You ended up doing an acquisition of a large motorcycle dealership.
How did that deal come about? What was the let's
talk about like, what was what led up to it? What?
How did you find the how did you find that one?
Speaker 2 (13:53):
When you get into m and A, of course you
look in for the kind of businesses that you're going
to source, and there's some good advice which says you
focus on a.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
Niche and get well known in their niche.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
And there's some other good advice which says, you know,
do something you actually know, and you'll have some hopefully
some respect from those business owners and something to talk about,
because if they're intrusting their their life's work and their
pride and joy to someone, it's likely they're going to
want to trust it to someone you know, with a
trap record where with success or the very least with
the strong interest and knowledge of the area. So somewhere
(14:23):
you've got to find what's your angle and get to
know that owner. Motorcycling hasn't been in growth for the
last few years. It's kind of, you know, an older population,
so you look at it and you think it's not
the sort of thing I'm going to buy into. Everyoneants
to buy into tech. We will want to buy AI,
e commerce, SaaS. But that's it's a very different space,
isn't it, Because of course everyone's investing in that, and
(14:44):
you'll get bench capitalists going in there, putting in millions
of pounds into businesses, nine of ten of which fail,
and it's the massive gamble says that one of these
is going to become Facebook. So that's not a practical
approach for someone like me or most of us, is it.
You want to find a viable business that you can
get involved in and make a living from while you're
growing it, So that space becomes very hard. So I
(15:09):
looked around for e commerce and looked at some other
sectors and started actually working on building up a marketing
group of marketing agencies with with some other people. And
that's that's beginning to go, though I haven't I haven't
got my own one yet, but I'm collaborating quite closely
with them and that's starting to come together. But it
made sense to me to talk to motorcycling businesses and
I spoke to some owners and and of course middle
(15:29):
of last year I was speaking to an owner. I've
dropped him a little message and the message. You know, I've
got like a one liner back saying yes, I would
like to sell my business. So we got talking and
and you know, so the story began the long journey
of discussions and negotiations until that finally came to pass.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
So is this something you're in the deity? I know
you're at the interim CEO's position right now. Is your
immediate goal the finery replacement or you want to wait
until you get it back to a certain level before
you do that, or.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
It needs to have reached a certain point.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
Because of my e commerce experience, particular thing that I
can do is I can take any business that hasn't
fully digitalized and make that part work. And often that's
the biggest opportunity. And with these guys, they had a
really decent e commerce operation going and it's the most
profitable part of the business. The manufacturers tend to own you.
On the bike sales part of the business, it's very
(16:24):
hard to make any profit because the manufacturers sort of
arrange things so that you know, most of it goes
to them. So you can make a small profit and
you can be a viable business that you.
Speaker 3 (16:32):
Can't expect much more than that from a dealership.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
But the e commerce can care as much as you like.
It's only down to your vision and your capability of
setting up the tech, doing the marketing and scaling the thing.
But the e commerce they had was quite manually done.
It was still using quite old fashioned processes and a
lot of it was outsourced out of the business, so
there was a really big opportunity for that to improve.
So it means that my mission therefore is to get
(16:56):
into the business, stabilize it, make sure that all the
things that should be working, a base working, and the
by part of the business is viable, and then set
up the e commerce to grow and the partnerships with
other businesses so they can grow.
Speaker 3 (17:08):
And that's the area where I can add the most value,
I believe.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
Yeah, I was looking at the I downloaded and got
a request for information for the Harley dealerships, right doesn't
to buy a Harley dealership and a couple other ones.
And I was just curious so whether we took like
and it looked like they totally expected you to make
most of your money off of parts and servicing. Right,
you do, you do sales, and you know you make
(17:32):
a little bit off each by but the majority of
you looked at like most of these companies out there,
and I've looked at a couple that were for sale.
I you know, reached out to the broker, hab send
and stuff. The majority of their money comes from parts
and service, right selling gloves and you know, fuel filters
and oil filters and oil changes and so many mile maintenances.
Speaker 3 (17:51):
All that we all know.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
Hardly don't mean what a great brand it is, how
long they've been going, and that whole lifestyle thing they've
built around it. But you know, they've had trouble here,
and I think that half their dealers have closed over
the last two or three years. And in fact, it
was one of the ones that I stopped doing. I've
closed that off because I couldn't see a way of
making their viable. And so the whole rationalization of process
of making sure bottom line is you need to work
(18:14):
with motorcycle manufacturers that will not send you bust.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
So I've had to be quite hard nosed about that.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
And we've got some were starting with some new ones
which will be coming on soon, but we had to
stop with some that weren't going to work for us.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
Yeah, it's just you know, it's a business, you have
to run it like a business. And unfortunately, right now
the current CEO of that is not doing right by
people's He's gonna get labeled as the CEO they destroyed Harley, Right,
So that's it. I'll write other stuff. I've had one before,
(18:48):
I'd be I'd be interested in own another one. Their
high maintenance still these you know, they've always been high meetings, Fike.
But uh, you know, as I get older and stuff,
I was like, can I get on something and just
ride and not have to work on it or do
anything to it? A lot? You know, So then looking
at other stuff you mentioned in your notes is to
turn around. So is it not just not as profitable
(19:10):
as it can be? Was it losing money? Where was
it when you when you first seen it?
Speaker 2 (19:14):
They went When I spoke to them, they'd lost some
money and the owner had been not involved for a
while and he'd had someone running it, and they clearly
communications hadn't.
Speaker 3 (19:23):
Been quite right. He'd had some personal problems.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
I think his mazar had died, and when he got
back involved, there was some quite big losses and there
was a falling out with Heson that been running it,
and technology had obviously moved on was leaving them behind
a bit, so he was in a difficult place, and hence,
you know, he was highly motivated to find a way out.
So it was hard for us because one of the
things they'd had was big problems with systems. So you
(19:45):
start asking for what's in numbers, and it was really
hard for them to tell.
Speaker 3 (19:49):
Us in any reliable way.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
For a couple of years, they've been running two or
three different finance systems alongside and not trusting any of them,
and they'd all been costing money. So one of the
things he'd done has gone down to one system, but
that wasn't great, and just getting good financial information was
one of the challenges of many I should say.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
Yeah, so you know that I've seen a lot of
stuff recently on different other podcasts and stuff like that
talking about how pro ball players and some other people
are getting in and making millions, if not billionaires out
of them by buying car dealerships up and I'm wondering,
why is the car dealership seemingly and I haven't dobed
into any of them, so I don't know the true numbers,
(20:27):
but it seems like they seem to be more way
more profitable than what I've seen the motorcycle dealerships being.
Is that because the manufacturers and the way they do
it or what do you think is causing that?
Speaker 2 (20:40):
I think it's just much more of a mass market,
isn't it. You know, motorcycling's not not been that well
a marketed, I would say the last few years. You
know that most like the audience, as we said, is
getting a bit older. But the car audience, okay, it's
you know, likely to decline with all the you know,
global changes that are going on and green movements, but
it's still huge, isn't it. So you can be in
(21:01):
a car dealership and just turning over tens of thousands
of vehicles, so and the value of.
Speaker 3 (21:06):
Each is high.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
So I think people put a lot of disposable income
into their cars, don't they. And you know, some people
put disposable income into the bikes, but it's a smaller market.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
So we want to see your bike's your secondary mode
of transportation to like for a while there, all I
had was my bike, but for you know, most of
the time, you know, I ended up having to sell
my bile moved to Hawaii and it has storms there
were little rain so art you can't see your hand
in front of your face, and then I couldn't get
anywhere because you can't ride a bike in that, like
you know, it's really dangerous to ride a bike is
(21:37):
super heavy rain anyway, just because the hydroplaning is not
in a car. A hydroplane you slide a little bit
and ooh, that's fun. And a bike you do that,
you're able to be ding on pavement for a while,
so you don't want to do that often. And the
roads there were grooved to let the rain off the road,
so you're even when you're riding a long casual and
it's not raining, it's kind of miserable because it's like
(21:57):
you're on this vibrating thing all the time. Your car
is pretty to absorbit it. That hardly wasn't. It's like
everywhere I went on the other roads that crowd across
the island, it was just like riding on on just
vibrating just the whole time, and it wasn't It wasn't
tough fun. I got three or four tickets too, for
the traffic was so horrible there. I was cutting traffic
and that's not allowed there, or riding in the the
(22:18):
mopeds could ride in the bicycle line. They'd let them
get away with that. So I'd be riding on the
motorcycle line with my motorcycle right down the bicycle lane,
and they didn't like that much. So, but if you bumper,
the bumper take you. You know, the island is only
twenty six miles or thirty miles, you know, route diameter,
but it might take you three hours to get somewhere
because it's bumper to bumper, right.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
It should be a quick well again on your buke it.
You should be quicker, right, you should be able to
get around. But if they're not, if you're not allowed
to pass the cars, you know, split.
Speaker 3 (22:45):
Lanes, then then it ruins the fund, rather does not
on the road.
Speaker 1 (22:48):
I tell you, I was in Mexico and it's scary
down there. I was in Mexico for four days and
I had to I was on the retreat most of
the four days. But on their way to the retreat
was forty five miles or so forty five minute drive
from the airport, and I didn't have to drive it
because we had private security pick us up and stuff.
It was a pretty luxury thing, and the driving along
(23:09):
watching the motorcycles there. They'd have grandma on the back
or something, and they'd be riding three people deep this
on a motorcycle and they're splitting lanes coming across us
while we're going forty miles an hour fifty miles an
hour on the highway. I don't know what seventy kilometers is,
but it didn't fill like sixty or seventy here, So
whatever seventy miles kilometers an hour was, that's what we
were driving on these roads. But yet to get I
(23:32):
think they're not wearing helmets. You know. Some of these
motorcycles look can made homemade. It was impressive to see.
And then we got into these little villages and people
were riding dirt bikes and four wheelers and golf carts
around like as not just like just to get around,
like as means of transportation. Right, you could tell that's
what they were driving to work.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
There's plenty of parts of the world on there where
you can see people riding on a motorcycle, as you say,
with a family of three or four, maybe with a
pot of strawbales on the back.
Speaker 3 (23:59):
And if you're lucky, then my even have a goat
strapped on the back.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
I haven't seen that down there, but it was feel
pretty impressive to see how well they use the motorcycles
and stuff. And uh, yeah, there's one guy. He come
flying by on a wheelie, right, and I thought, oh,
he's gonna ticket because we just passed a cop. I
seen him fly past a cop on that wheel and
they didn't know. The thing didn't bother right, And the
cops down there are serious. They have ars, right, they're
wearing They're wearing fully automatic or semi automatic rifles, you know,
(24:23):
in military uniforms down there. It wasn't like our local
cop has a little pistol on his side and it
says stop, you know, give you a ticket. I don't
think you'd want to tick one of those guys off.
But they didn't blink an eye. They just kind of
looked up and like, you know, whatever, right, you gonna
hurt himself, you know, like it wasn't hurting me. There
was nobody else on the road at that time in
the day. It was just heeling going down the road.
So let's go back to uh, what is the what
(24:43):
does you think the timeline is? Like, you you've got
this got some turnaround to do you think this is
something you're gonna own your whole life. Is this something
you're gonna grow and and add on to and kind
of do the roll up strategy where you bolt on
things to it. What's your what's your what's your current
I know it changes over time, but what do you
think your current plan is.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
We're definitely starting from the point of view of being
an acquisition entrepreneur rather than the lifelong motorcycle dealer. So
it's all about you know, building it and and you know,
being able to exit it later on.
Speaker 3 (25:13):
I should.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
I didn't talk about this much yet, but while I
was on the journey, you know, towards this, I ended
up partnering up with Rob Richmond and his Synergy Groups,
which means that we've got a whole structure here now
for building groups of companies and some really really good
people involved. So when I started talking to this company,
I needed to bring different people in, and I needed
to understand the potential deal better, and I brought in
(25:34):
role and the financials needed to be picked apart. I
brought in Steve Rumsey's and another you know, a great CFO,
and I brought the systems all had all sorts of problems,
and I brought in Rick Wilson, who's another one of
the teams. And finally we needed you know, we needed
to buy a property, and we brought in a property
guy that was able to unlock a part of the dealer,
and so I ended up building.
Speaker 3 (25:55):
A team of five.
Speaker 2 (25:56):
So now, between that and the Synergy Group's concept, we
have a really strong platform that we can build things
on so we can acquire other companies, and we have
we have one that's just about to be announced that
that's been worked on in a in a very closely
related space. And we we have opportunities in the whole
of not just motorcycling, but anything around e commerce or related.
Speaker 3 (26:18):
Engineering disciplines and or.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
Yeah, and sorry, let me say that around automotive and
motorcycling and related engineering disciplines, or entirely separately around e
commerce and logistics, because you know, that's half of our business.
So we have opportunities to synergistically acquire companies in both directions.
So so we're looking at both at the moment.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
Yeah, there's all kinds of other stuff you can do too,
I mean in the same realm of you know, street bikes,
there's dirt bikes, there's four wheelers, there's you know other
type of alterraated vehicles. There's you know, water watercraft. I mean,
if you ever got it, wanted to get into the
jet skill what you have there. And in Europe you
have lakes and stuff you goes take jet skis on and.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
That always yes, and those sort of businesses can be
very synogistic.
Speaker 3 (27:04):
Can't they.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
One of one of the things we'll be doing with
this will be we'll be moving property for the main business.
There's a there's a rented building over in Cardiff, which
is the capital city of Wales, but we're based in Swansea,
which is kind of the second city.
Speaker 3 (27:16):
Of Wales, and we'll be moving buildings.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
We're looking at something even larger and more interesting than
what we have and build this out as a destination
with multiple retailers in their different sorts of businesses, and
that would be the place you could bring in the marine,
you bring activity centers definitely, cafes, make it a destination
that the whole city wants to Counting.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
Yeah, I've seen some of these kind of where they
have the motorsport you know, just called the Motorsports Center
and you walk in and you know they've got motorcycles
and four wheelers and street bikes and different two or
three different brands of each you know they might have
here in the United States they have Yamaha and Suzuki
and Honda and maybe even Dakadi. You know, Harley's are
(27:55):
never usually in them because those are so unique here
that I mean that you kind of have to I
don't know, hardly in the United States allows themselves to
be and other stuff. And then now I've seen a
lot of these places they have at least one that's
some form of electric have you have you looked at
have you seen that already? Do have electric bikes on electric.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
We have some smaller electric bikes, but in our part
of the country there's not much enthusiasm for them yet.
So I think if we were near the city and
there were lots of you know, bus lanes and bike
lanes and you know, more traffic jams, they would be
a great demand for it. But where we are in Wales,
we're near some of the biggest hills in the UK,
miles of forest with off roads and just open roads
and beautiful roads. So we're kind of in a part
(28:34):
of the country where I don't think people feel the
needs to go electric yet despite.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
Maybe they should.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
But if they're you know, like us, a die hard biker,
they currently still like an engine.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
Yeah, and there's something about are of an engine, right,
But uh, like some of these things are doing good.
They've gotten you know, I'd say that there's there's short
trip ones right because there they remind me of the
Sports where it's a small tank on it. They've got
eighty to one hundred mile ranges most of the time, right.
So that's the reason when I when I had my Sports,
So the first thing I did is found someplace that
it did. He did custom work and he built a
(29:06):
tank that was like a full sized tank on there.
Because I knew I was going to take this drive
and the original sports a tank all he could go
about eighty miles, Like I didn't want to pull over
looking for gas station. There's some spots along the way.
There's no gas station for about eighty miles. Right you
go through the Arizona Desert, you'll see signs of you know,
nest gas stations one hundred and twenty miles away. Well,
if I had the little Sports, I would have been
stock i'd have to be like hauling gas tanks on
(29:28):
the side of the IK or something. If I didn't
have you know, if I didn't hadn't put a bigger
tank on there.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
So the arrange can be an issue, gun't it. And
you know whether you got a small tank or a
small battery. But you know, with the electric that's going
to improve, isn't it. And I think, although you know,
we might be dinosaurs, I might be a dinosaur. We
all love an engine, but it's probably not the future.
Most European countries have got some legislation moving towards the
end of the internal combustion engine, and so that you
know we will be doing you know, I think maybe
(29:55):
electric vehicles and a long term thing. It should be
hydrogen at some point. But the movement is on right,
and it's going somewhere, and eventually we won't all be
guzzling gas, I suppose.
Speaker 1 (30:07):
And I tell you the electric motors just have so
much more torque it's insane. I have a contact he
has the Tesla plaid and I got to be the
passenger in it, and he put it ludicrous mode. We
went out to a long road and nobody was and
he just let it go, and it's like being in
a rocket. It just throws you back. I've been in
race cars before, you know, I grew up in a
(30:28):
redneck boy. You know, I've been in drag race cars.
It felt like he's been back in a drag race car.
The launch on that thing was amazing. And imagine putting
that in a bike. You know, as long as you
keep the front wheel down, you know, and the tires
you know, you know, but with the computers and stuff
and these things, I bet you could bet that he
can do that where they he just has amazing launch.
But you know, he knows traction control, that knows what
(30:49):
it's losing interaction, knows when the wheel's coming off the ground,
and it just tunes it because that that that tesla,
the computer in it keeps the tires from spinning, right.
It just maximizes every little thing.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Yeah, and there certainly when I was doing it, getting
the front wheel up in the air, you know, when
you know a maximum acceleration was a big issue. But
now the electronics stopped that happening. And it's odd story.
I took some of the guys in the business to
a race recently and I hadn't been to one for
a while, and it turned out turned out unfortunate with
that with quite a bad accident. But when we got there,
(31:21):
I said, we have to go to this place on
the circuit. I mean it was actually the place where
I had my last racing crash, so I knew the
circuit really well.
Speaker 3 (31:26):
It was a beautiful circuit in England.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
In fact, the Americans used to come over and do
the Transatlantic Trophy on it every east so it was
great racing. But they would go over this hill called
Clay Hill pulling massive wheelies on those screaming race bikes
in the seventies. I said, we've got to go and.
Speaker 3 (31:39):
Look at that.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
We got to the hills, not a single wheelie was
being pulled. They all had that front wheel flat on
the grounds, absolutely ruined it. The spectacle has gone.
Speaker 1 (31:47):
So you're you're going to buy other stuff. You're gonna
acquire things. You're gonna make this, you know, kind of
a roll up or something with the intent at some
point to to build it as if you know, to
exit and build it to where it's can be sold.
That's when wealth generation really happens in this space. You
make a living, You can you make yourself be able
(32:10):
to pay your bills and eat when you run it,
you make generational wealth when you sell it, and you
do that MUL on multiple occasions. It's the horizon you
see here. You think this is going to be two years,
three years, five.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
Years, certainly in that range, yes, you know, and with
work going on in the marketing group as well, and
there's there's a group also are v RP companies coming
together nicely now and some in kind of solar. So
there's some really interesting groups of companies coming out of
our group, and all of which will have you know
the way it works, obviously, but it's worth telling people,
(32:43):
isn't it. Once If you look at any one of
these companies and you try and sell it when you
want to retire, if you're lucky, you may get two,
three or maybe even four times.
Speaker 3 (32:52):
It's it's a bit as it's sale price.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
When you can get that group to a certain level
of ebit, which with enough companies in there, and you
get past the combined profit, say five or ten million,
the whole thing changes completely. A new valuation can be
sort of six to ten times to anyone what's sector
you're in, So that really the play is, even if
each of the businesses doesn't expand, you bring them together
and their value increases. But if you bring together good
(33:16):
businesses and help them work together synergistically, they will expand
as well. So each owner can come into this group
and they can take they can get their business to
the point where it's actually an attractive sale of value,
which they normally won't on their own, is the truth
of the matter. But this allows them to get to
that point and then to exit with a whole exit
process set up and in a collaborative journey with the
(33:39):
arther owners, so everyone.
Speaker 3 (33:41):
Gets the exit they want. So that's the long play.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
I think we actually have a window here right now
that is going to just take anything else. I think
here in the United States especially probably will bleed over
to where you're in the other side of the on
the other side of the big old pond. The you
selled across the pe here is causing a problem, and
(34:05):
it's just now getting some attention. And that private equity,
which is one of the one of one of your
exits would either be private equity or a strategic purchaser.
So basically they're another big dealership will buy you at
the end of this journey, or you're going to sell
their private equity. I honestly think here in the United States,
maybe in a year, maybe in three or four years,
(34:25):
but fairly soon in the next four to five years,
are going to become heavily regulated. And it's because the
same corporate raiders that actually took advantage of the real
estate boom and basically cause the real estate financial crisis
in two thousand and seven two thousand and eight are
playing the same game in private equity right now. They're
(34:48):
buying companies. They're buying companies, over ledveraging them with bank loans,
stripping the real estate and all the assets out of them,
forcing them to pay usual leases on, sell lease backs
and stuff like that for those real estate and then
turn around and they can't afford anymore and they're going
to bankrupt. So here, in the last five to ten years,
(35:08):
we've lost things like Hooters, which is a restaurant, adult
theme restaurant. We've lost Joints Fabric, which was one of
my wife's favorite stores. It's an arts and craft store
and you know TGA fridays about it. I don't know
think that was pe based, but a good dozen great companies.
We just got to email this morning and my wife's like,
I gotta email the right it's going to be. I
(35:29):
think it's going away, And I said, but it's a
pe play. I haven't looked it up yet. But you
can't continue to do this without starting to get you know,
more rules and more laws put in place in it.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
So I wonder if he'll be tweeted the same though.
The reason why I ask is obviously if you know
the way it went with the banking crisis, a lot
of it were based around personal savings, wasn't it, and
people's mortgages, their houses, and it was what was the
It's like Freddie mcka and Fanny Mail or something, the
American one and Layman brother.
Speaker 3 (36:00):
And when they will win.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
It affected millions of people potentially losing their house. Isn't
it really affects the massive the mass of the population,
doesn't it? But I think when a business goes bust,
it affects the employees of the business and the owners
of the business, but actually other businesses just come in
to fill its place, and so that there's a kind
of a case to be made. Isn't it that it's
all right? For a business to go bust, because then
(36:22):
a better one will come in and fill that gap,
unless it's so large that it starts causing sort of
a knock on effect through the population.
Speaker 3 (36:29):
I don't know the answer. I'm just speculating now.
Speaker 1 (36:31):
These guys are taking one hundred million, two billion dollar
companies though and overburning them with strapping them down with
all kinds of debt, forcing them in the bankruptcy and
leaving the banks holding the bill. Right, And those banks
are the ones that you know are also paying They've
they've got their own lobbyist, right, They've got their own uh,
(36:52):
and it's causing there's there's a it's a dual effect
right now. One of the biggest money making things that's
happened in the United States is what's called private bank.
It's basically when you when you've become so high risk
as a business that the banks will no longer lend
you money. These PE firms are starting to lind it
out at higher risk loans and they're killing it doing it.
So that's the kind of life cycle of you know,
(37:13):
one of these things failing is they sell at overpriced
overvaluation to a PE firm and they're sitting on, say
multiple locations of real estate, and real estate is valuable
here right now. So the PE firms is like, hey,
let's sell that real estate over. I'll even give you
more money if you sell the real estate to me.
I'll place it in my real estate investment trust and
I'll give you you know, this one in the real estate.
(37:35):
Now you've got a lease, right, And this whole thing
cascades up to where they have a lease. They are
paying another paying for extra lease, extra debt, extra you know,
warehousing and stuff because they used to own their warehouses.
All that stuff adds up and then the economy shifts
a little bit and they can't afford all these payments
and are like, well, I guess you have to go bankrupt.
But all this the PE firms safe because they've stripped
(37:57):
all the equity and all the all these other valuations,
all their other little entities have all this stuff, and
if the company itself goes bankrupt, they're fine. You know,
the bank's the one holding the bill because they only
have twenty percent of their money in the bank finance
seventy percent of it seventy five.
Speaker 2 (38:12):
I guess it's kind of fraud on the bank eventually,
isn't it. And the banks have enough cloud to get
laws changed.
Speaker 3 (38:16):
So I'll take your side.
Speaker 2 (38:18):
If banks are losing out heavily, then eventually the laws
will probably come in.
Speaker 1 (38:23):
So that's what that you know, what you know basically
you can you know, I used to tell all the
time that in the real estate world, you know, these
real estate investors, they come up with a new way
to make money. I said, yeah, And some of the
times I own the RIA for a while, they would
come to me. It's like I'm going to do X,
Y and Z. I said, yeah, if that ever catches
on that that that'll work. Until this first time that
that happens to some senator's son or some you know whatever,
(38:45):
and you get a little cloud about it, and then
there's gonna be a law passed. You can't do it anymore, right,
And like you can't go around being predatory and not
have problems caused. And that's what's going on right now.
This is it's a very predatory thing happening here.
Speaker 3 (39:00):
And maybe the pe world.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
Right.
Speaker 2 (39:01):
But you don't have to go that way, do you
As there's multiple ways of exiting a business, and you know,
there's there's other really creative and and and interesting ways
that hero. Obviously, management buyout has always been an effective thing,
and of course it means you end up business has
a natural management team.
Speaker 3 (39:17):
Probably ownership trusts are really popular over here and really
good to attacks. But then with a couple of our groups,
so right now working on on listings and you know,
secondary market listings. It doesn't need to be as big
and complex as an IPO, but it's a brilliant way
of helping a business to grow. So so all of
these present really good options to business owners for the
(39:38):
for their future.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
And now it's solve the private equity program. Right. If
you get to the point where we just nobody wants
to sell the private equity because they're playing dirty tricks
and there's other alternatives, then you know, all of a sudden,
either have to change their ways or they're not gonna
they're not gonna get these these things sold. They're not
there's not gonna be a they're not going to be
a market to where they could purchase things.
Speaker 2 (39:58):
Right, there's always it's it's a if I think for
a business owner is the particularly small business owners think
they're going to sell it like this old their house,
and you know they're just going to decide to sell
it one day, give it to an agent. Someone's going
to give them what are you know, a million dollars
and they're going to go off and spend the rest
of the rest of the days or a boat. Of course,
in reality, that doesn't happen, does it. A business sale
is more complex because a business can so easily fail
(40:20):
having been sold, so people will very rarely give you
the money up front. You get into complex deals, you know,
you get into deferred payments, you get into all sorts
of interesting arrangements which can give the owner of the
value they want in the long term, but not exposed
the buyer to risk.
Speaker 3 (40:37):
But what happens is that the.
Speaker 2 (40:40):
Business owner's not really interest in that, So I just
want my money, don't do all this fancy stuff. So
if pe comes along and says, hey, we'll just give
you the money, They're going to jump at it, aren't they.
And you know, the future be damned, however, that business
is going to get milked and destroyed.
Speaker 3 (40:52):
Is no longer my problem because I've got my million
and I'm on the boat.
Speaker 1 (40:56):
There will be some people like that. There's always those people,
and I've seen more often not here, I've seen smaller,
especially as small the medium businesses. The legacy and the
legitim you know, basically a safe parent hands for the
business often becomes probably you know, two or three times,
you know, fifty sixty seventy percent of the time is
more interesting and more important to that owner than the
(41:16):
actual monetary values. After I interviewing three hundred people, I've
actually asked many times, who was the highest bidder, the
one that got the got the company, And there's like not,
you know, not normally it's the one that the owner
felt safest. Usually the bids are pretty close, they would say,
you know, within a few hundred thousand or within one
hundred thousand or two hundred thousand dollars of each other.
But it wasn't the highest and best they got the offer.
(41:38):
It was the ones that the owner trusted the most,
the one that the owner believed that would take care
of the best care of their customers and employees. You know,
they would trade that over a few hundred gard Not everybody.
There's some I think their lines drawn, especially in the
United States and maybe there too is when you have
more than two to three owners you start to have
to have a cap table. Then it's all about the money,
(41:58):
because you got to appease for people, and somebody's going
to be a holdout, right. But if you're a single
operator's mom and pop, a lot of times it's just
who's going to be the safest person? Right? You know
that that motorcycle dealership, he's seen you as a safe
pair of hands. You really because you've been in the space.
You know, the space I would imagine, you know, you know,
(42:19):
if somebody offered him just a few more dollars than
what you could come up with, he would say, and
they you know, they came from engineering or something else.
He's like, no, I'm gonna this thing's in danger. I'm
gonna give it to the motorcycle guy.
Speaker 3 (42:29):
It can be a bit of self interest as well.
Speaker 2 (42:31):
I think if it's in a safe pair of hands,
presumably of yes, your your local reputation has a better
chance of staying intact.
Speaker 3 (42:37):
If you've got deferred payments, you feel you've got a
better chance of receiving them.
Speaker 2 (42:41):
So I think, yeah, you can see why just the
biggest cash offer may not necessarily be the one you jump.
Speaker 1 (42:46):
For, right. And I know Rob and Rod Richman, and
I know what he's doing in this Synergy group a
little bit. But are you participating in some of the
other are the marketing thing? Are you going to be
a part owner some of the marketing things if you
go through that route, or yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
You're going to have my own digital marketing agency. It
makes makes sense for me to do that, right, And
you know the way thing is, isn't it. We have
a business which is you know, fifty percent e commerce.
It's almost a marketing company. So sometimes you wonder which
which side of the fence it should go. Should it
be a marketing company, should it be an automotive company?
So there's there's it's an interesting space because you know,
there's a lot of technology in both areas, and some
(43:24):
of it is integrated between the marketing and the automotive side.
Speaker 1 (43:27):
You know, almost all businesses should be a marketing and
sales company. And the product is in your case as
a motorcycle. The product in another case might be, you know,
I'm writing the software app and proper products are there.
I should be a marketing in and sales agency. The
product is an app, right, you know, it could be
almost any business that they're really focused on how do
(43:48):
I run the business? Is the business the product? You know,
whether it's cars or motorcycles or widgets, you know, that's
definitely a part of it. But you know, you can
make the best widget in the world, and if you
can't market it and sell it, you can't drive numbers.
Nobody's going to know and nobody's gonna you're not going
(44:09):
to pay your next year. You're not going to keep
the lights on.
Speaker 2 (44:11):
One of the things we're doing wrong is in terms
of our operational strategy. We really needed to sort it
out of the back end systems and make sure that
you know, our financials worked properly and that you know,
the operational side runds smoothly. We really needed to renew
the e commerce and get that working.
Speaker 3 (44:25):
There's a whole piece for.
Speaker 2 (44:26):
Us about building out building out more e commerce products
so that we can list more products faster from different
manufacturers and different suppliers, and we're building out an AI
based workflow for that which we help What we'll have
is actually a template of the integration between between all
those elements which would be able to drop into certainly
any similar businesses, any similar business and also maybe dissimilar
(44:50):
businesses with the back end and the front end and
the AI workflow is working together. So a big part
of our play should be to again to acquire similar
businesses that need that digitization and then drop the template
in and reapply it to them. And that is I
think where we could probably add the most value for
the owners of those businesses.
Speaker 1 (45:08):
Yeah, I've spent the last four weeks writing code. Again,
I haven't wrote code in twenty years, and use an
AI and use an AI tools to help me write code.
I'm in four weeks, five weeks, I've written over eighteen
thousand lines of code. So I don't know, if you've
ever been in the IT world, you know that that's
not on a one man's shop. That's a little bit
of code, and it's all because of what the possibilities
are with the stuff. Now. I think there's a possibility
(45:31):
in the near future to where you can have AI
out there. Not just I'm playing with all these different tools,
but as a marketing datacy, I could create a product.
I can give my AI now a picture of a
product and say write a product description of it, and
then I can say, here's my five competitors, go dig
through their reviews and tell me what are the customers
(45:53):
missing on that? And then if I have it fixed
in mind, highlight that as part of my product description. Right,
centiate myself by being the positive of what everybody else
is having a problem with. And AI can almost track
that in real time making. You need to have a
tool that crawls and watches those customer reviews, watches the
different things, and watch the markets. What are people talking about,
(46:14):
what do they want, how are they using the product?
All the stuff that takes a lot of man hours
to do things. I'm a marketing nerd. I have an
MBA in marketing. Right that said, all the stuff that
takes many of people and man hours to do. When
I was doing this fifteen twenty years ago, click tracking
on the e commerce site, what's the path they took
through a website. I actually helped build some software a
long time ago, back in PHP that I could actually
(46:36):
see somebody where they entered the website, what was the
path they got to the product and when they sold it?
How many clicks did it take to get that? And
then I would track all the products on our sites
because I had a few ecmarmerce sites. How can I
get the key products that are the highest sold in
front of people, and less clicks because you know, they
shouldn't take it nine clicks to get something if it's
my number two product on the site. Right, So you
(46:57):
know we could track this stuff. All that could be
done in real time now where it took us a
long time to write code and we'd have to always
review these your statistics and webb Ana Ladys and all
this other stuff. Not only could it do that in
real time, you could do a b test between descriptions.
Once it got there, it's insane. What's capable now? And
then basically it's like, how do you manage it all?
(47:19):
How do you put it to something that get something
out there that's working using AI? Because AI is changing
so fast by the time you get it done, you're like, oh,
I'm going to add this to it too, now that
I can have this other thing going.
Speaker 2 (47:31):
Yeah, now you're talking about my bread and butter on
and it's fantastic, isn't it. Whether you're using the same
sentiment analysis tooled on your social media and you know,
creating alerts for the business when they need to act,
or whether you're tracking user behavior and then using that
to personalize that. Once we've got the basic platform in place.
Speaker 3 (47:47):
Which is what we're working on now. We'll be launching
that in July.
Speaker 2 (47:50):
But then you know, you got I'm gonna be able
to say on I know what bike you look you
brought from us, I know what things you looked at
last time. I'll then be serving you up products I
think the most likely to take your fancy, So it
won't even be our best seller products when it'll be
the products that I believe are the best suited to
you based upon the the your your desires you've expressed exactly.
Speaker 1 (48:11):
And think about me, right, if I live on the
specific coast up north to San Francisco, if I were
to ride a bike, I would constantly be encountering fog,
mist and damp roads. So when I come to your website,
you could position the products that are best for that,
the tires that are best for that, the you know,
the helmets that have you know, you know rip off
(48:32):
codings in case that you know, or whatever it takes, right,
you know that if I'm riding in this area because
of this, you know you can see my social media.
You know, your AI and your tools can see where
I live where I what I'm doing. You know, I'm
you know, anybody these days if you go for a ride,
I post pictures from the coast all the time, even
though I'll have a motorcycle, like okay, the guy who
drives of the coast, you know twice a week. You know,
(48:54):
anybody with these tools these days, you'd be able to
customize that experience. When I got there, it's like this
guy knows exactly what I need. Right.
Speaker 2 (49:01):
And if you've been to the site and you've you know,
you've told us what sort of bike you have. We
know what hardly you have because you search for parts
for it. Well, we can when we get in some
new office, some special new part for that. We can
either have that going to you personally on email. We
can have it even you know, dropping into your Facebook
feeds saying, you know, whatever the new part is for
your for your sports stuff, and it's here in the shop.
So the tech is fantastic, isn't it. You need enough
(49:24):
time and skilled people to do it. We're in the
early stages of that with this business. But you know,
the potential is fantastic when we get it all in place.
Speaker 1 (49:31):
Yeah, and then that that applies to anything. You could
drop anything in there now you just need to you know,
whether it's water sports or helmets and loves or whatever
or whatever it happens to be. If you end up
with any of the you know, any of the auxiliary
products that go into that, the software you build is
you know, going to be able to plug into that.
(49:51):
You know it's going to make and it's gonna make
it a lot more valuable when you go to sell
to somebody will want your IP. You know, not only
do you just do you have a brand you can
sell Harley, you can sell your Dacatis or whatever you know,
BMW's there motorcycles. You also have this unique marketing system
and a unique intellectual property based you know, intelligent tool
(50:13):
that physicians yourself competitively or above the rest of the market.
And there's where you get your premiums. That's why you
get between you know, if even if you have the
ebit of you know, and that's where you get there
your what you call strategic acquisitions. Uh, the company that
will value at you know, fifteen twenty x because they
want your tech then you know, as opposed to pay
(50:33):
in seven or ten x because you know, you're you
have a market space they want to be in, and did.
Speaker 3 (50:39):
You know my plan? I don't believe it. I've been rumbled,
you troubled me wrong.
Speaker 1 (50:44):
It's that you know, I've been around for a little while.
I've got I've got the uh my blonde beard to
prove it. So the white so I think it's great,
and I was like, no, I just went blonde. That said,
good bid, I'll come grow a bit. It's all just
stop doesn't welcome me. So I'm very impressed. Enough beard
for most of us. So I did a funny thing
(51:04):
with the group. I'm helping a group here do acquisitions
and stuff. Yeah, a little bit like the Synergy group,
a little bit different, but for fun. One day, I
took the AI and I took my picture of me,
and I gave everybody on the board, including the women, beard,
So I wanted to make you guys all cool like me.
So AI is superimposed my beard on the whole crew,
and they thought it was amusing and told me to
(51:25):
cut it out. So, but no, I love what you're doing.
I love what you're working on. I really want to
see you win. Man. What can we do to help
you out? What is there if the audience is out
there and they're listening to this. Is there anything they
can do to help you out? Point you in the
right way of something good for sale or something. What
can we do to help you out?
Speaker 2 (51:44):
I mean, I guess you know, if anyone anyone over
this side of the pond mods a motorcycle, we could
definitely help. But people in the m and a community, Now,
if you've got some skill, you've got a business that
would match beautifully. Because the whole group thing is it's
very open. Someone's got a business they want and see
that it would work in the group, then you can
use that and participate in the group. So there's no
(52:05):
real barrier to people wanting to be a part of this.
And you know, we're looking people that can help us
to build out the AI faster. I've got people we're
working with that can help us with elements of the outreach.
Of course, you know, doing outreach to our trade customers
is really important. So there's no end of good people
(52:25):
we'd like to get involved. So if you think there's
a synergy, just please come and talk to me. I
think Rom's got all my contact details. It'll all be
on the podcast somewhere, won't it. So people that saying
they've got a business that would suit I'd really like
to hear from them.
Speaker 1 (52:38):
Well, Peter, thank you, hang up for a few seconds afterwards,
and we'll call that a show man.
Speaker 3 (52:42):
Thank you all, thank you everyone,
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