1 Product, 2 Customers: Donnie's Blueprint to a Multi-Million Pound Business with Minimal Hours

Transcript

Speaker 2 (00:00.078)
We've made a healthier pizza, designed with a professor of nutrition at Glasgow University. And we've tweaked a traditional Italian recipe and improved the nutritional balance. The priority is what we call health by stealth. Kids don't know it's better for them. One of the things that we've sneaked in is a highly nutritious seaweed. And I think if most kids were told that, they would turn their nose up. And we're now doing.

8 million portions and the turnover is about 2.5 million.

Speaker 1 (00:34.424)
Welcome to this week's episode of Wealth Talk. My name is Christian Rodwell, the membership director for Wealth Builders, joined today by our founder, Mr. Kevin Whelan. Hi, Kevin.

Hello Chris, good to be with you again and another interesting journey to go on today.

Indeed, another member sharing their story. have Donnie Maclean, who's WealthBuilder member since 2024, lives in Scotland and really is a great example, I think, of tenacity and resilience in business. We often don't see what goes on behind the scenes. We see the successes, but there's often lots of years of struggle that have led to that.

Everybody's an overnight success, but you don't see all the work that's put in to get that success, which appears to be overnight. He's still a relatively young guy, but as you hear his story, you'll realize there's been some trials and tribulations along the way.

At Wealthbuilders, we work with all types of members, Kevin, whether you're still employed or perhaps you're self-employed or in Donny's case, you know, the established business owner and successful now as well to boot.

Speaker 3 (01:35.086)
Absolutely, but as we'll hear, that success took many twists and turns and it's a long old story, including some real examples of his personal tenacity as well as his business one. And just wait till you hear what he did in Loch Lomond.

Indeed. Well, it's a great conversation today. So as usual, we'll be back with the debrief afterwards, Kevin, but I think let's head on over now to our conversation today with Donnie Maclean.

Donnie, welcome to Wealth Talk today. How are you? Very good, thank you. Really looking forward to talking through your journey. And it's an interesting one, I know, because we went through a bit the other day and I said, hey, we've got to have you on the podcast. And of course, you've been a member of Wealth Builders since May of last year, 2024. Time goes quickly. What were your reasons for joining, Donnie?

I'm good thanks Chris, how are you?

Speaker 2 (02:30.542)
So I have been, as we'll establish in this talk, I've been on a bit of a roller coaster, but thankfully I've got the business to a stage now where it's working well and I have some good income coming through. So when I was going through the troubles, I didn't get much income and I certainly wasn't putting anything into a pension. So I came across you guys.

I think it was the podcast that I started listening to first. And a lot of the things I was looking to do made a lot of sense to join up to Wells Builders. So I've subsequently set up a SaaS pension and I'm going through the coursework to just make sure that I'm doing it in the right way.

And shout out to a couple of coaches that you've worked with. I know Manish and John Dale as well. you know, for anyone who perhaps who's, you know, never worked with a coach, what are some of the advantages that you find to having someone there?

For me, because I work on my own, I think the accountability is probably the main driver for me. I've been a solo entrepreneur for the best part of 10 years and I didn't really have to account to anyone so that can have its pros and cons. I think I'm unemployable now, but in terms of actually making things happen and getting the productivity optimum.

Out of myself, having an accountability partner makes a big difference.

Speaker 1 (04:08.782)
And we advocate trying to build as many of those pillars, different income streams across different asset classes as possible. And I know you've definitely deployed some of those pillars, but we're going to focus on the business pillar today specifically, because it's quite a headline, right? One product, two customers, multi-million pound business. So we want to find out how on earth have you managed to achieve this, Donnie? And I know, as you said, it's been a bit of a roller coaster ride, but before we look back at where it began.

Just give us a snapshot of your business today. Tell our listeners what you do.

So yeah, you make it very simple when you say one product and two customers. I'll explain that when we get to it. My company is called Eat Balanced. And what we do is we've made a healthier pizza that I designed with a professor of nutrition at Glasgow University. And we've tweaked the recipe of a traditional Italian recipe and improved

the nutritional balance. So that means that we have brought down the stuff that was out of kilter, so salt and saturated fat were too high and fiber was too low. And then there was no information on all the vitamins and minerals that we need for good health. So by using all natural ingredients, we've sneaked things in to improve the nutritional balance.

and we sell into schools and family restaurants all around the UK now. But the priority is what we call health by stealth. Kids don't know it's better for them. So we've done the nutrition in a way that it's not obvious. It's not like it's got a bunch of broccoli on the top of a pizza.

Speaker 2 (06:06.71)
One of the things that we've sneaked in is a highly nutritious seaweed. And I think if most kids were told that, they would turn their nose up. the health by stealth principle works. And we're now doing eight million portions and the turnover is about two and a half million. So it's in thousands of schools. But as you said, the simplicity of my model is,

Quite a few people are envious of it because I can get into thousands of schools just through going to the two largest distributors of food. So Breaks and Bidfood. I've managed to chip away at them over the years and now we're national with those two and they can get us into pretty much anywhere that you can think of that has food that's not a retail outlet.

And when did you found this business?

I started in 2012 and that was an exciting year for me for various different reasons. The concept was well received. I was in a business incubator at the time and we won a few awards for the concept and that kind of stuff. then...

Because the professor of nutrition is well known and well regarded, we managed to get onto the BBC News. This was summer of 2012. And that was exciting. We were just on Scottish local news. But as soon as it got onto the BBC News website, then it just went crazy. Because I think the headline was, scientists develop the world's first nutritionally balanced pizza.

Speaker 2 (08:01.144)
So that really captured people's imagination. And that just, we were the second most shared page of the day on the whole BBC website. We couldn't get France's bearded feminists off the number one spot. And that was obviously more interesting to people. But on the day after the BBC News coverage, we were in all the national papers and like French papers, German, American, yeah, it just went.

crazy. But the problem was the product wasn't available. big lesson learned there. I don't think the BBC would have covered it if it was available. But we weren't. We were three months off actually launching. So we had to try and sustain the flashbang that we'd created so that when it was available, people would remember because you know what the news cycle is like.

changes every day and people forget very quickly.

So an explosive start. But I've got a few questions, Donny, before we carry on the story here. So firstly, why did you come up with the idea? Where did that come from?

Yeah, it kind of evolved. I was looking at my own diet. I've always been fit and I was doing marathons and triathlons and things. And I wanted to make sure I was getting what I needed for good performance. I, the more I looked into it, the more I realized it's actually not straightforward to be able to get a properly balanced diet. We're told we need this balanced diet, not

Speaker 2 (09:40.98)
Not a lot of people fully understood what that meant. And if you go out for dinner, like if you were out for a awards dinner or just out for a business meal or whatever, you would have no idea about the nutritional content of what you were eating. I investigated a few different ways that I could help people to achieve a balanced diet.

I read a trademarked eat balanced and I was surprised that I was able to do that, but thankfully I got it. And I had lots of different ideas. I was going to develop some software. This was well before all the my fitness pal and all those apps that do the nutritional analysis for you. But I I was never going to be an expert. wasn't going to have the credibility of

being an expert in that space. I approached quite a few doctors and professors of nutrition to ask them their thoughts. And the professor of nutrition at Glasgow University, he's quite a character. He lives in a castle. I think he's got three PhDs. He plays violin to an incredible level and he's always hosting concerts in his castle.

He's an arrogant bugger as well because he knows he's smart. But I've been in business for 20 years and I knew I could deal with whatever he was going to throw at me. Most of the ideas he shot down in flames, but the one that stuck was to create a pizza that was nutritionally balanced because the principle is if you... Excuse me.

That's you.

Speaker 2 (11:34.574)
have one balanced meal and you add them up throughout the day, then you will have a balanced diet. The problem starts if you have a sugary breakfast, then you have to kind of reduce the sugar throughout the day. So you want to try and keep your meals as balanced as possible. And he liked the idea of

The pizza, I suggest that because at the time I was working my family business and we had a pizza factory as a client. So I just joined the dots there and we came up with some horrible recipes. Some of them, there was a Mexican one that had kidney beans on it and that when you bake a kidney bean, it just starts to peel and it's very unappealing.

And so yeah, we, we narrowed down the options for our pizzas. And yeah, when we got the three that we were happy with, after all the flashbang from the BBC news coverage, we got into my first ever customers were as Dan Sainsbury's. So right in at the deep end, hugely exciting.

but also I've fairly quickly established a fantastic way to lose a lot of money.

So how on earth did you manage to secure such massive retailers? What was your experience of negotiating with people and businesses of that scale?

Speaker 2 (13:17.784)
So I think it's one of these things where when you get some good coverage like that, the supermarkets are happy to make the most of it. I learned that it's actually not all that tricky to get into the supermarkets. The problem is keeping in them. The vast majority of new products that go into the supermarkets fail, even like the big guys.

that have a huge process to get a product onto the shelves and have huge marketing spend, they still can't make sure that every single one of those products sticks. the supermarkets are happy for someone to come in and innovate in the aisle that the buyer's looking after. But there's always someone looking over your shoulder.

wanting that space back or another innovator looking for that space on the shelf. So it's really cutthroat in that sense. So I didn't find it difficult to get into the supermarkets, but once you're in there, it's quite daunting because you're always getting pushed for improving the rate of sale. And I wasn't keeping up with them because

In the frozen pizza section, is where I had the product, people have become used to buying just whatever's on promotion. And there's pizzas that are like a meat feast pizza with all sorts of different protein on it that is there on sale for two pounds. And you wonder about the quality of meat when you can have a pizza that's

on for two pounds and the supermarket is still making money off it. I was trying to compete with that kind of offer and it was very difficult. The only times we were selling enough volume was when we were on promotion and I wasn't actually making any money from that promotion because everyone assumes that the supermarkets are doing the promotion and it's them that's doing the discount.

Speaker 2 (15:43.672)
but it's always the supplier that's actually giving the discount. Quite often the supermarket doesn't reduce their actual margin. So yeah, I learned a of a lot from that process and got spat out the other end. But I am arguably pathologically tenacious. I was not going to give up. I knew I had a good concept. I just didn't.

execute it properly. So I pivoted a couple of times. The feedback I was getting from the customers when I was doing the sampling was they were actually feeding it to their kids and I had developed this for adults. So I focused on the kids market and evolved from there. Lots of battle scars and over the next few years had to take a part-time job to start paying back.

the debts that I had amassed when I was in the supermarkets had to sell my house, moved in with my mum in my mid thirties. So that was a pretty humbling process. She's a lovely woman and we are good for each other, but it's not where I imagined myself when I started this business. So I ground it out and got into the two...

big distributors that I'm talking about and slowly but surely built up the volumes from there.

Well, I'm sure there's lots of things that fill the cracks there in between. were you doing this? You said obviously the professor had developed the pizza, you know, nutritionally in terms of actually the day to day operations of the business. Was this all you? Were you working with anybody else?

Speaker 2 (17:35.118)
So when I started off at first, I had a brilliant lady who complimented my brain. We've obviously got through wealth builders, we've got the wealth dynamics report and I'm very clearly a creator. So I am not the kind of person to get things finished and do all the...

detail and the ideas guy that is always coming up with innovative ways of doing things or solving problems. this business partner I had was brilliant. She described it as having a butterfly net to catch all my ideas and then bringing them down to earth and actually making them happen. she was excellent at that job. when

We came out of the supermarkets and I tried to keep hold of her but I just couldn't sustain any income. She had been working for very little or if anything and that wasn't fair. So she ended up getting a job with one of my customers and she's done exceptionally well there since. So yeah, that was a good partnership while it lasted but

Since then I've just been working on my own so that's been about nine years.

We know when we start in a business, there's so many different hats to wear. You actually referenced that you already had some business experience beforehand through the family business. Was business something that you felt was kind in your bones? definitely.

Speaker 2 (19:16.91)
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (19:21.486)
Yeah, my grandfather, both my grandfathers were businessmen and I was sort of brought up in a household where my parents were always talking about business. And when I did business studies at school, I got straight A's all the way through and the teacher, I remember at parents' evening the teacher said, Donnie just gets business. It's like it's second nature. So yeah, I'm...

very grateful that I've just had that kind of environment to grow up in. And I enjoy it. It just feels natural to me. Just, it's so part of life, you know.

So the creator that you are, as you just mentioned, have you tried lots of different things before? The pizza right here and probably a few had crashed and burned.

Yeah, well, this is still the first business, eight balanced, my main business is the first business that I've actually started, but I've always innovated. I've always been entrepreneurial in other jobs before that. I actually tried, I was on a graduate program in London, a big blue chip financial services company. And I think within the first three,

months of working there, the head of my department pulled me into his office and said, the f do you think you are? Because I was, I was suggesting a few different ways that things could be improved in the department. And interestingly, although ruffled his feathers massively about

Speaker 2 (21:09.752)
Four months after I made that suggestion and being shot down for it, five of the six things had actually been implemented and he took all the credit. So the corporate environment didn't really suit me. I was too opinionated and I wasn't going to play all the games that you have to get through the ladder. I wanted to be promoted on merit, not on...

brown nose in or anything along those lines. So yeah, that was an interesting one. And my family business, I had to sort of break the mold from how my father was doing things. And I quadrupled the size of his company and improved the profitability and got some really good clients on board. I innovated the sort of backend system and ended up building a big

piece of software myself, doing the donkey work myself, to improve how things were done there. So in anything that I've done, I've always found ways of improving systems and solving problems. I love that kind of thing. That's absolutely my bag.

ties into, we talked about wealth dynamics is kind of knowing what you're good at, knowing what you enjoy. And sometimes you've got to find people around you who can take care of some of those other things. you know, often creators are always thinking about the next big idea, but not necessarily good at the detail of getting things done or the detail of checking the bank balance and things like that. So this is where having other team members and

And we're going to get onto this a bit more because I know, you know, I'm watching you now, Donny, looking very relaxed. You know, you've got this huge business, but you've got a lot of time freedom at the moment. And it's because you've leveraged software and systems and automations and want to find out a bit more about that. But I feel like we haven't fully finished the story off. So I want to dive back into where we left it, which was, you know, coming out of the supermarket, times were pretty tough. And then you were.

Speaker 1 (23:18.624)
Realizing that actually this was a product that you were aiming at the wrong avatar, which was adults and the avatar perhaps was the children. How then did you get into the schools? How did that all come about? Because I could say a big name and probably listeners are familiar with watching a certain Jamie Oliver on TV and the massive campaign that he had. It looked pretty difficult for him. How did you manage that?

It was a five year overnight success. It was hard graft, Chris. was...

Yeah, basically just making a pestle myself. As I said earlier, I think I'm pathologically tenacious. I will always keep going. I've done some crazy endurance things in my personal life. I swam the full length of Loch Lomond about five years ago, and that's 22 miles nonstop. And the guy who was on the support boat beside me,

The weather got really bad, but he said, I know that you wouldn't have let me pull you out of the water. You had to get that finished. I just needed to get it done. was 11 and a half hours of swimming and yeah, most normal people would have packed it in when the conditions got bad, but I knew I had the strength of will and determination to.

to get it sorted and applied the same methodology to this business where just don't give up, don't quit. I had to just keep finding little chunks of light that I was leading myself towards that were getting me through the dark days and when I was working 90 hour weeks for no money, actually.

Speaker 2 (25:15.998)
negative money, putting some of my savings in to try and keep it going. It was grim, but just kept going. And it seems like it's been a horrible journey. But as you've said, it's a nice position now where the business is pretty much running itself. I can do it part time and I'm now looking at other opportunities.

to buy businesses that are complimentary to EatBalanced.

I you told me yourself, Donnie, you lead a relatively modest life. You've got a successful business and you're now looking at obviously different ways to maximize returns. You talked about the SaaS pension. It's a wonderful tool to take profits from a business, put them into your pension, then you can use that to start investing in different areas. Commercial property, is that something that you're considering? Would that be a view for

to your business? Definitely. I'm doing what I can to try and find useful commercial property projects to get involved with. As I said, I'm looking at buying other businesses, so it would make sense that if I'm buying a business that has property, put that into the SaaS and siphon out the business.

So yeah, I'm definitely exploring the options for commercial property now.

Speaker 1 (26:46.574)
you're looking at new business opportunities, which must mean that the current business is running pretty well and not requiring too much of your time. Is that true?

Yeah, I'm fortunate that because of the market that I've chosen, the schools market, although it's bloody hard to get into in the first place, as long as you don't mess things up, then they're not likely to change. So I basically just have to keep funneling new business in at the top. And it's not a particularly leaky bucket at the bottom. I know there's plenty of sectors where

you're always spending money on customer acquisition because there's attrition at the bottom. But it's a good sector for loyalty, arguably loyalty, but apathy is probably more accurate. So yeah, I'm developing, I've got two other products that I'm going to be putting out. So at the moment I'm doing two and a half million on with one product, which is

is good. another couple of products will get the business up organically. So yeah, I'm still chipping away, still putting new sales into the top and growing the business that way. But I'm looking at acquisition. That's the next phase.

So tell us a bit more about this then and obviously acquisition in any particular areas, areas of business you're familiar

Speaker 2 (28:21.588)
with? Yeah, well, it would make most sense for me to build a group that is of product suppliers into education, possibly healthcare as well. Because, as I said, the hard part is getting into these places in the first place. So for me to acquire another business that's already supplying schools or

colleges or universities or private health care, then the hard work is done. So building a group that has that composition would make sense and having various operators all supplying into similar entities means that there's a great opportunity for cross-selling. So there'd be synergies and

and opportunities for the sales force to be just growing the whole operation. So yeah, let's see what I can do with that.

Yeah, and you're part of a couple of communities, I believe, as well, that teach the mergers and acquisition, how to buy properties and what would have been some of the learnings from being part of those communities.

Yeah, it's a very interesting world actually. A lot of things I didn't really consider previously. I think most people would assume that it's a really challenging situation to buy a business. But there's so many different ways of doing it. What I've established from going through the process of these courses is that

Speaker 2 (30:15.564)
the system's broken and this is where the light bulb comes on as my creative creator mind has spotted an opportunity here because the vast majority of businesses that are for sale are listed with brokers. So a broker's website. And the way that that works is that a broker gets a commission for listing a business on their website.

However, only about one in 10 of those businesses actually end up in a sale. So in that situation, there's 90 % of businesses that have paid a chunky commission. could be, depending on the size of the business, it could be 10 grand, 25 grand, possibly more. And then they come out the other end, demoralize further down the line.

They're worse off because they've had to pay this big commission. So I've basically established that by short-circuiting that, I'm able to join the dots with the communities of business buyers that are desperately looking for good businesses to buy that don't like brokers because brokers actually make it a different

difficult situation because they have a perverse incentive to say a business is worth a lot more than a normal valuation because that encourages the person to list on the broker's website. So I'm basically wanting to join the gap there and help, especially people who are retiring, looking to sell their business to retire because there's obviously a time pressure there.

And if they're putting a good chunk of money in to list their business for sale, and then it's on the website for a couple of years, and again, closer and closer to when they want to retire or they're in the retirement age that they ideally would have sold already. And then they come back out and face the heartbreak of closing down the business. So I've set up Sell to Retire.

Speaker 2 (32:44.686)
as a way of helping people to find the right buyer basically and make the process so much more positive for them because I understand business very well. understand I've got two parents that are retired and I think there's a real lack of empathy and care.

that's approached in this situation. It's an emotional process to run a business, but even more emotional when you're selling your baby, you know? So I want to help people to understand the process of how their business would be sold and

look after them throughout that process to make sure that they get the right buyer and they enjoy their retirement. They've worked bloody hard for it. So sell to retire.co.uk is going to give them a upfront, give them a report that shows how sellable their business currently is and then work with them to try and improve their business or improve the valuation of their business or just help them.

to find the right buyer by connecting them with the right people.

It sounds great. I can tell that building relationships is key, something really important to you. guess over so many years of business, you will have seen the power of trust and honesty and relationships. It feels like you're bringing your values into this.

Speaker 2 (34:34.786)
Absolutely, absolutely. So I would say for all aspects of relationships, the three tenets that I have are trust, respect and good communication. So with good communication, you can get through the vast majority of things. If the shit hits the fan, then as long as you're open and honest and able to speak to someone properly and get the best out of them, good communication will get you through.

But with trust and respect, as soon as one of those goes, it's very difficult to get it back. So this business is being set up with those three tenets as absolutely foundation stones for making sure that the people who are selling their business are dealt with with the respect that they deserve, that they trust us, and there's good communication throughout the whole process where

They understand what's going on. They understand why things are done in a certain way. They understand why their valuation is different from what they may have expected and what would happen, what would have to happen for that to be improved. Because the principles of what I'm trying to do there are very much related to what I have done with Eat Balanced. I obviously outsource the manufacturing of the pizzas and the relationship I have with my

manufacturing partner is absolutely crucial. If I didn't have their trust and their respect and they didn't have my trust and respect, then we would really struggle. They're actually my fourth manufacturer and I learned a lot from having to switch manufacturers through the process. That's another part of the journey that I didn't really cover.

Yeah, the good communication. If anything goes wrong, we're on the phone to each other and we always sort it out. There's plenty of love between the two of us. It's a family business and I'm dealt with as part of the family, which I really appreciate. it has to... relationship with who you're outsourcing to is that...

Speaker 2 (36:57.864)
The most important thing, everything else can get sorted if you've got a good relationship and there's good communication. So this is what I'm taking into the new business where whatever happens, we'll get something sorted out. So if someone trusts us to try and help them to sell their business, then they'll get a good level of care and attention and respect all the way through to make sure that

It's an enjoyable process and they can retire happily.

And another great domain, you seem to have a knack of getting this great domain.

There's another one that brought recently. was surprised that it was available. was sellmy.company. And nobody's gone for that. So I'll probably direct that to sell to retire, but watch this space. I've always got ideas coming out. But the retirement market for business sales is, I think, is a priority. And I heard the other day a stat that

There's something like 75,000 UK businesses that are turning over more than a million. there's the people who are the major shareholder, the person with significant control has as in their mid to late 60s or older. Like on companies, I see people that are over 100. Maybe they're gone, but they haven't updated the records.

Speaker 2 (38:36.255)
Yeah, there's plenty of people that are older generation that are still going, still with it, but would happily retire.

And why do you think the statistics are the way they are in that only one out of 10 successfully managed to sell their business?

The system's broken because I believe that business brokers don't fully understand the business. Their business model is based on commission. So they get rewarded for a listing. They don't get necessarily rewarded for the success of that transaction of getting the sale. The people who are looking to buy businesses don't trust

brokers and avoid them, actively avoid them. So there's a massive gap between the buying and the selling. And that's what I'm trying to short circuit with this.

in true entrepreneur style, spotting an opportunity yet again, Donnie. And if you were looking back and speaking to young Donnie sort of 15 years ago, at the early days of setting up Eat Balanced, what would be some of the things that you might say to yourself to do differently?

Speaker 2 (39:55.234)
Yeah, good question. Yeah, definitely don't give up. There's very, very few things that I've given up on in my time. There's always just other ways of looking at it. whether you've got that nature yourself or you've got good people around you that can help you to find better ways of doing things and get around brick walls rather than try and go through them.

Don't give up. Trust yourself. Trust your gut instinct. Any time that I've gone against my gut instinct has resulted in an issue. It's happened a few times and I always regret some of those things where it just didn't feel right. I was either advised to go ahead with it or I thought, okay, maybe it will work out, but it didn't.

So trust your gut and your heart. But yeah, just there's lots of different learnings. I think if you've got a good concept, don't expect it to be perfect first time. And also one thing that I've learned is you're perfect.

is not necessarily your customer's perfect. So if you take that principle and get your first iteration of the business, just get it out there rather than trying to perfect it for yourself, get it out there and have your customer refine it for you. Because if you are spending months and months trying to get your

perfect minimum viable product out there and then the customer's like, what the hell is this? Then it's either not the right customer that you've got there or you haven't really allowed your customer to evolve your product or your service. That's hugely valuable and it's something that I didn't get until I've made those mistakes.

Speaker 2 (42:17.32)
I just had lots of ideas, but I was developing them only in my head. You're much better to let your customer evolve it and take as much feedback as possible to get it right for them.

and safe, sell it before you make it right.

Yeah, get out there and enjoy the process. It can be really positive if you don't get too precious about certain things.

My final question for you, Donnie, is technology. Now we're living in an age where AI is obviously becoming really common. For someone getting into business now compared to, say, 10, 15 years ago, do you think it's easier? Do you think it's harder?

As both, think it's easier to do the operational stuff. I think it's easier to get answers because you've got things like chat, GPT. It's easier to have aspects of creativity. I don't think genuine creativity is quite there yet in terms of AI.

Speaker 2 (43:32.086)
I think it's possibly harder to stay ahead of times.

I think there's...

There's probably fewer innovations, like proper innovations that are groundbreaking these days. But yeah, that's just my take on it. I think AI is going to be incredibly exciting over the next maybe five years where all these new start businesses will start to get brought up and there'll be consolidation in the market and then we'll really establish what

AI is going to be doing for us in the future. I mean, I've got a six year old son and I'm very sure that the job that he's going to have or the profession that he's going to have hasn't been invented yet because the world is evolving at such a rapid rate. And so we'll find out our place and how AI sits with that. And I'm very fortunate that my son's a smart little boy and

I know that whatever happens, he'll thrive in that market, whatever happens. So yeah, I look forward to guiding him through that process and hopefully being able to impart some of the knowledge that I've gained from the battle scars that I've had on this process.

Speaker 1 (45:03.2)
Yeah, well, we very much appreciate the knowledge you've imparted with us today, Donnie, and look forward to continue working with you and seeing new ideas, I'm sure, flourish in the future. But I'll be sure to link to the Sell to Retire website and anyone listening can go and check out and get in touch with you,

Thanks very much, Chris. right. care.

Thanks so much, Donnie.

Speaker 1 (45:29.902)
Okay. Fantastic story there from Donnie. Before we dive in some of the wealth lessons, Kevin, I'm going to read out one of our latest reviews that's come in on Trustpilot. And this is from Mr. Jeh, who attended our Cashflow game in London just a few weeks ago. And he says, gamification is one of the most engaging ways to learn and playing the Cashflow 101 certainly does that. The gaming experience hosted by Christian offers the opportunity.

network with like-minded people, whilst also learning about personal finance fundamentals that changed the way you look at financial planning and financial freedom. The staff on hand were brilliant and patient, showing how the game should be played. A really great evening, which I highly recommend.

Well, it does seem that the game does give people a fresh perspective. And I think I often say to people, know, the power to create wealth is the degree to which you can understand the power of different people's distinctions. You know, and what I mean by distinctions is some form of way of looking at things through a slightly different lens, you know, a slight tilt here or a slight tilt there, you see the light in a different way. And the more that you can expose yourself to

other people's distinctions, including people like Donnie. He's got a distinction, hasn't he, on how we did his business. And the more you can do that and be open-minded and humble to that, the easier it's going to be to build wealth. But of course, you've got to be in an environment where people are willing not just to make those distinctions, but to share those distinctions. I think that's very, one of the powers of wealth builders is that environment of

people who are sharing because they want to share, they're not sharing because they've got something to offer all the time. It's much more about giving back and it often disarms people when they work within the wealth builder community and kind of look almost with a curious eyeball row and go, are they really sharing this with me? Are they really willing to give some time and energy with me? And they do. You heard it from Ian Block just a few weeks ago.

Speaker 3 (47:42.168)
you know, how much he was willing to give. And we just love in wealth builders giving stuff away for free, letting people to see who we are and how we are. And we love the fact that our members reflect those values, including people like Donnie as well.

Absolutely. obviously Donnie's done tremendously well in his business, but somewhat alone, not building a big team, outsourcing and working with really one distributor. However, he decided to join Wealthbuilders because he knew that surrounding himself with supportive people and having a coach for some accountability can really help maintain that momentum.

and now start to diversify into new areas. as a typical creator, he's always exploring new ideas. And as we often hear, leveraging the pension and the SAS pension in particular is certainly one of those new areas that Donny's exploring.

Yeah, and that's a perspective that we give that most people don't get. And surprisingly, there's only about two, two and a half thousand new SaaS applications every year compared with hundreds of thousands of conventional pensions and SIPs. So it's only the erudite view. It's only those people who normally get told about it, Chris, that make the difference and go off and start to learn.

to deepen their knowledge and then to see that we're passionate about trying to bring that concept. Not that it's right for everyone, let's not say it isn't, but it's definitely right for people like Donnie and the business owner because it puts them in the driving seat of their money and most entrepreneurs want that control and that's definitely one of the key drivers for me is I don't want to be told what to do, I want to be in control of what I do myself.

Speaker 3 (49:31.182)
That's where SAS comes in. But these distinctions are really quite powerful if you can act on them. And it's good that Donnie's recognized that. Yeah, you've got a really sexy headline for the podcast today. But he knew that if he's only got, very successfully, but a handful of business distributors, one of those goes wrong. It changes the success of the business. So building more diverse streams of income.

So to become financially independent of your business, very powerful thought.

Yeah. And the other area Donnie talked about was now with all of his business experience, being able to go out and look at other business opportunities to buy and went off and has done some education in that area and has now come up with a new business idea and a new site, which is Sell to Retire. And he talked a little bit about that. So if they are coming up to retirement and they haven't got

anyone to succeed them with the business, then Donny's really looking to establish relationships and help them understand how they can sell for, you know, what the business is worth after all those years of hard work.

I think business is Business is hard work and we need a return for our lifetime's worth of work to capture a lifetime value. But of course the real challenge is so few business actually sell for meaningful money. in fact Chris, we've got about five million business owners in the UK. And statistically when you sell a business in the UK,

Speaker 3 (51:05.326)
you apply for a tax dispensation, a lower capital gains tax called business asset disposal relief. used to be called entrepreneurs relief, I like better. It's much more of a friendly word. But the tax for selling a business is 10%. And it used to be 10 % on 10 million. It's now 10 % on 1 million. So it's very heavily restricted.

a very pernicious way to tax entrepreneurs who put in all the risk and taken all the risk. So I'm not much of a fan of the restriction. However, having said that, once you apply for it, it's a capital gains tax dispensation. So it's a matter of public record. And the number of businesses who sell, let's say for what would be a meaningful some million quid, say, because that's the entrepreneur.

or the business asset disposal relief limit, 1 million, 5,000 businesses a year. That's 0.1 % of the business buying population, or the business owning population rather, sell for significant sum of money. And therefore most businesses just don't sell, Chris. They don't sell. So I think as more and more baby boomers come to the point where they want to capitalize on their life's work, but they cannot sell or

Circumstances conspire against them health-wise, business-wise, they just can't sell. It's good to have an alternative that allows business owners to meet with others who understand business, who can help them find an exit. And that's just one of those. you can sell to an acquirer, you can sell to someone like the groups which we featured before where they try and create a of a vendor assisted sale.

you're working together with the vendor to get their business sold. But also you've got employee ownership trust. if you've got EOTs for short, so if you've got a business that's got employed people and you've got a good business, a good culture, good leadership, know, a solid team, then you can pass the business on to your team. And in the future we'll probably do another EOT podcast. don't think we've done one for quite a while, but the real value and the government support this.

Speaker 3 (53:32.542)
is that if you're the entrepreneur and you sell your business essentially to a trust fund run and managed by your employees with your input, there's no tax at all. You can sell your business with zero tax and there's no limit. So if you sell your business into an EOT for 10 million, you're gonna pay no tax on 10 million. So there's some very, very clever things that you can do. And so I'm just saying if you're a business owner,

And the average age, by the way, in that public information of the seller of a business, 57. So most people in their 50s are getting ready for sale. But here's an interesting fact, Chris. I meet business owners all the time. And I ask them a question usually after they've read my book called The Wealth Coach. And you can find that on Amazon, I guess. And if you read that book,

people come and talk to me and say, you know, I think I'd like to get to a position where I can either sell my business or build wealth separately to it. I asked them, how long do think it will be before you are ready to sell your business? And they always give me the same answer, give or take Chris, and 90 % of them give me the same answer. I want to guess how many years?

Probably less than it took Newcastle to win.

That was on time. You can go off somebody really quickly. I don't know how I can exit you from my business for saying that, but anyway.

Speaker 1 (55:08.206)
I know you're still on cloud nine from the big one. I'm going to have a guess. Yeah. Five years, I think.

Well that's all, bye bye.

Speaker 3 (55:15.256)
Five years, yeah, it is five years. And you know, if you were building a relationship with a business owner and you meet them again in a year's time or two years time, and you say, when do you think you're going to sell your business again? And it's still another five years. So there's not really a skill set for people to be able to create that. And we would much rather suggest that people become financially independent of their business in five years. So that if they sell their business to an acquirer,

to somebody in a joint venture to an EOT, it doesn't really matter because they're financially independent anyway. So you can use your business to fund financial independence if you know what you're doing. And I frequently talk about this, so it might be useful at some point, Chris, that I go into a little bit more detail of that. But it's great that Donnie is seeing his experience and now being able to see.

the experience of other businesses and what's valuable and what's not. And certainly, just as we focus on recurring income outside of the business to build wealth, we do talk about four ways to create recurring income in a business. But I won't steal Donnie's thunder, but I will say maybe Chris, I could do a video with the business owner listenership is out there and they want to hear me talk about the four ways to create recurring income.

inside your business so that can actually change the look and feel of your business within a few years to rely more on recurring income, not the transient nature of cash flow one month and then you've got to start the next month with a blank sheet of paper and a bit like a job really, you're in that constant cycle of trying to create enough cash flow to maintain your bills and then pay yourself what most business owners pay themselves, which is a...

relatively small salary and some divvies and a little bit of extras on the side, like a pension contribution, which they should do in a SaaS, by the way, because you can pay up to 60,000 a year into a SaaS and even go back several years. And if you really got a successful company, pay up to half a million in a single year. So lots of interesting things we know about business that I'd be willing to share if there was an interest in our listenership about that. So maybe we'll make that available, Chris, if...

Speaker 3 (57:41.944)
people want at least the four streams of recurring income. It would take me about half an hour to record it and that would be a good resource for any business owner to think about.

you'd like to get your hands on that, then click on the link in today's show notes and we'll provide that for you absolutely for free. of course, without blowing people's minds even more Kevin, but people who've got pensions, there's even a way where you can buy businesses using your own pension money. But perhaps that's the topic for another

Yeah, that is just too far. Now you went too far today. Definitely your Newcastle United comment. I'm always looking for that, at least not for five minutes and trying to go too far. But this is the point, isn't it? I mentioned in a previous podcast, think, that wealth is really often expanded and accelerated by the power of distinctions you get from others. And while we don't expect people to be able to pick up those distinctions, and if you're an employee,

I might've gone whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, and that's fine. Nothing wrong with that. But hey, you might be an employee working for a good business. You're spotting a business owner who's getting older. Remember that age, 57, and they might not know about an EOT. You think, well, hang on a minute. I could be a business owner by virtue of helping my business owner boss to create an EOT, and then I get a share of that business. And by the way, you get a tax-free bonus of 3,600 a year if you do.

So nice little Brucey bonus to end on for whether you're an employee or a business owner something to gain from today's episode

Speaker 1 (59:16.076)
Once again, thank you so much to Donnie for sharing his story today. Very inspirational. And don't forget to click on all of the links that we've talked about in today's episode. They will be in your show notes right now. OK, Kevin, we'll be back same time, same place next week.

Well, you know what? I'm not sure. Given that comment, I might go and look for another house. But until then, see ya.

Speaker 1 (59:41.454)
We hope you enjoy today's episode. Don't forget that we are constantly updating our resources inside the WealthBuilders membership site to help you create, build and protect your wealth. Head over to wealthbuilders.co.uk slash membership right now for free access. That's wealthbuilders.co.uk slash membership.