Building a 20-person Lifestyle Agency, with Gareth Hoyle

I mean, I've always been a bit lazy, I suppose.

Well, I think it was Bill Gates that said, if you want a difficult job doing, give it to a lazy person because they'll find a quick way of completing it.

So at one point, my agency was touching 300 people, but a lot of those were offshore.

So they were almost at like arm's length.

Any good manager should only ever have six people that report into them, no matter the size of the organization.

So with 300 people, you just have layers and structure.

Google changed what it needs in 2012.

So we needed a hell of a lot less staff, which is when we reduced our numbers heavily.

And it was at that point that I kind of thought, well, if I was working in venture capital or private equity, would I want to buy a business that's built on sand in a way, because we're just trying to manipulate Google at the time then.

I think we've got a slightly stronger foundation these days, but back then it was just gamifying a machine at scale.

And I guess I just thought, well, if I'm not going to sell this thing or I don't think it would be appealing to somebody to buy, then let's just take a total different approach with it.

Let's look at it as a cash machine to do other stuff with.

And at the time, you know, I was taking the money that the agency was making.

I was buying Bitcoins and I was – I've been buying a video stock for a long time.

So if ever I write a book, it's going to be called Build to Spend.

So I've already bought the domain, by the way.

So don't worry.

Don't try and steal it, you domain botters.

Because... ultimately and so i have exited a few software businesses so i have walked the route to exit and it's you know and i made some some nice not life-changing money by the way but like six figures a couple of times so that's that's nice that takes the edge off you puts you into the 50 loan to value on your mortgage bracket So that's quite nice.

Divorce brings you back up, but that's a different conversation.

Ultimately, a service-based agency will probably get three to four multiple of EBITDA.

Unless you're doing over a million EBITDA a year, which I've never got to that stage.

I've never desired to get to that stage.

So if I'm only ever going to get three to four times annual profits on exit and probably have to do a two, three year earn out where some guy or girl is going to want some kind of PowerPoint on a Friday afternoon to explain what I've done this week.

I'd rather just play it by ear and just run the business as I do every day.