Will Critchlow, who has recently sold Distilled, the international SEO consultancy that he co-founded discusses how he developed the brand in response to the needs of the business as it grew. They looked at what the whole organisation stood for, and what was their meaning in the marketplace as it helped them recruit the right people.  

• Post the sale of Distilled, Will retains Search Pilot, a SaaS product the business had developed.
•  Helping his father in his electronics business influenced Will's entrepreneurial leanings as he saw the time and freedom setting up his own business gave his father.
•  Brand came late in their journey. Reputation came first, then looking at what the organisation stood for later.
• Used their company values to hire and promote members of the team they developed a checklist to evaluate candidates against their core values.
• Built a training platform Distilled U both as an internal resource and as a digital asset with a subscription service
•  The most admired brand is Wistia run by some good friends of his. Loves the way they have infused their personalities and a sense of fun into their business
• Click the link to Wistia 

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Shireen: Hello and welcome to Brand Tuned, successful brands successful business, the show for entrepreneurs and brand creators, where we discuss personal and business brand to give you ideas and inspiration for your own brand. I'm Shireen Smith, lawyer, entrepreneur, author, and advocate for developing purpose based brands to change. Will Critchlow is the co founder of distilled an SEO consultancy, that was set up in 2005. He and his co founder Duncan first met at school, and they founded distilled soon after finishing university. So they are entrepreneurs through and through our live will to describe their journey which culminated with the recent sale of the business. So welcome to this podcast. We'll back how are you?

Will: Yeah, I'm very well. Thank you. Thanks for Thanks for having me on.

Shireen: Great. So we'll tell us a bit more about distilled. What did the business look like when you sold it recently? How big was it?

Will: So in total, it was around 50 People across three offices in the UK in the US. So we got started in London, that was still headquarters. And we had about half a team in the UK and then a smaller team in New York and Seattle. And we were primarily doing SEO, consulting, search engine optimization, agency and consulting work. We also ran the search love conference series. And both of those bits of the business will what what were acquired which we can we can come on to. And we also had a business unit that was at the time called the ODM, the optimization delivery network, which is a technology platform piece of software that we had developed, which as I said, was a business unit within distilled, but it was part of the transaction by the m&a we span that out into a independent business and rebranded it such pilot, and we continue to own and operate that.

Shireen: I believe you'd already embarked on a venture while you were at school as well, what made you so entrepreneurial at such a young age before it became fashionable to be entrepreneurs? Was it your parents who inspired you to think entrepreneurially, or what?

Will: I think you're probably a few different effects, I mean, the one I can most obviously point to is my earliest memories of my father, starting his own business. So that's not quite true. I remember him with having a job when I when I was very small. But when I was five or six, he started his own business, working from home. And he'd previously been a Sales Director at a company in Leeds. And so he used to commute to the office. And in fact, the office was attached to a warehouse. And so some of my very earliest memories are playing in that warehouse and riding on ride on toys on the massive concrete floor. But I remember him being at home a lot more. And when he was working from home, obviously cutting down getting rid of the computer, and all those sorts of things. And I got involved with everything from in the very early days, I guess things like stuffing envelopes, licking stamps, and then probably as a 10 to 12 year old getting involved in things like some basic arithmetic, you know, balancing the checkbook. And those kinds of things up to once once my voice broke, I was allowed to answer the phone. And so just before I left home, I was I would occasionally work for him in the business. So I think that's probably a a bunch of my entrepreneurial background. I think, also, broadly, Duncan night, some of it was that I think the timing, you mentioned that back then it wasn't necessarily. It wasn't so cool to be an entrepreneur. And I do remember that I do feel like the last couple of decades have shown that there's a different kind of person who springs to mind I think when you talk about business or entrepreneur or founder. These days, people probably think of tech founders and those kinds of things. Whereas I think back then it was much more. I mean, maybe Richard Branson, but but probably mainly just boring businessmen, as it would have been back then. But I think because it was the early tech era, it was also just we were attracted to, to the technology. And so some of it was this is what we're interested in, oh, I wonder if we can do this instead of getting a bar job or a restaurant, waiting tables and those kinds of things. And so yes, I think there's a bit of opportunity. It's a bit of inspiration.

Shireen: Wow. So what did you say your phone others business was.

Will: So he had the business he set up when I was when I was very young was he bought and sold electronic components, so pieces of computers, RAM, computer chips, all kinds of track components. Mainly, he was a kind of middleman. It's a very pre internet business, it was all done over the phone or on the fax machine. And he would, broadly speaking, that the big suppliers would only sell you these things in very large quantities. And so if you wanted five of these very specialist chips, you couldn't buy them from the manufacturer. And so he would buy large numbers from the manufacturer, and sell them in smaller batches to everything from hobbyists, universities, to small businesses. And yeah, I just remember him building that business up, and he actually still runs it, although he's kind of semi retired these days and also drives taxi.

Shireen: So basically, it did involve tech in some way. Were you quite into tech when when you were younger? Before you went to university?

Will: Yes, I mean, so Duncan was probably more document University to study computer science. And so he was the more techie in that kind of tech startup world language side of things, I guess. But in the broadest sense, yes, definitely. I mean, I mentioned that my dad's business involved, fax, and telephone calls, and those kinds of things I do remember, he had one of the first fax machines that any of our family and friends had ever seen. And even before that, the business that he used to work in, had a telex machine, which again, is one of my earliest memories was this thing, the size of a fridge, that you could was like a typewriter on a fridge, basically, that you could type at one end and the paper came out the other end, you have somebody else on the other end of the phone line. And then I remember, I remember getting us getting the first what's probably a 286 PC with a an orange, black and white, black and white, black and orange screen. And I do remember getting access to a spreadsheet for the first time, it was Lotus 123. And I was I was probably more into maths and science than I wasn't a pure technology. But that was the that was the time when that kind of came together. I was like all this, this thing can do maths. That's really cool. And that's kind of how cool that was as a kid.

Shireen: Wow. So you weren't kind of listening to motivational tapes or anything with your dad at all, no?

Will: No, but that would definitely not go into that kind of thing. He's he's quite straight talking. I don't think he'd be interested in those those articles at all. I was much more just I saw, I think it's different in different environments. If your parents are teachers, then you probably get interested in teaching. I saw the freedom that came from being your own boss, I saw the opportunities for self direction and continually learning things and just diving into what you're interested in. And I got interested in the business side and in the money side. And that, you know, I mentioned kind of balancing the checkbook, and so forth. I think that money became a thing that I understood in business sense, probably before I understood it in a personal sense. So So even before I would have had much pocket money or anything like that, I was seeing the volumes of money that went through a business that was hardware based, right. So the profit margin might only be 10 or 15%. On some of these things buying and selling. And so there were large sums of money flowing through for, you know, obviously, a good living, but but a kind of normal sized amount of money at the other end. And so, yes, getting some sense of what profit and loss looked like, at that stage was, was probably the other part of it. So alongside the technology side.

Shireen: Wow. That's really interesting. And what about something like building the brand? Was Was brand something that you even thought about before you set up your own business?

Will: No, not really. I think that came later. So that was probably more actually really quite late into the journey, I think, if you went back when we first met, so when we when we were very first going to the breakfast, networking events, and so forth. Yeah. We had no sense of brand at all. And I think it developed in the years after that, as we gradually started piecing together. I think probably reputation came first first for us, and kind of thinking through it. And obviously that's kind of one meaning of brand in a sense, but but getting known for something was the first taste of brand. And then as we started growing the business and hiring other people and trying to say okay, how what does this actual whole organization stand for rather than just what do these what are these two individuals or handful of individuals capable of That's when we started to get some sense of it. Yeah, having meaning in the marketplace?
Yeah, it's almost indispensable, isn't it as you grow a business to be able to absolutely do have a purpose, vision mission and all? Yeah.
So that's something that we've the the literal version of that was something that we've always struggled with of trying to tease apart, what's the difference between a vision and a mission, and values, and so forth. And I think we got ourselves tight knots over it, and I think many entrepreneurs do. Having said that, there's something that we definitely got right in there. And we saw that in the m&a process where the I think a big part of the reason that distilled was acquired was because of the brand in the broadest sense, the reputation the standing that the understanding what it stood for, and what it's trying to achieve, which is essentially, an encapsulation of those things are the vision and the mission.

Shireen: Yeah. So it doesn't really matter what they're called, as long as you get it right, I guess. So how did you operationalize your brand, so that people in the organization would make on brand decisions weren't around.

Will: So I think, if you ever come across any of the books by an author called Patrick Lencioni, it's not just an author, consultant, as well. So he wrote a book called Five Dysfunctions of a Team, which is probably my top recommendation, I wish I had read it earlier in my career, for building high performance teams, but one of his other books, which he talks about, what's it called, it's called. I can't remember the number all of his books are some the habits of a CEO or an exceptional executive. Anyway, one of his books, talks about exactly that, how to operationalize those things that some brands, some companies can think can see as being fuzzy or soft, or kind of, I guess, tangential to the core business results. And his, the thing he advises you to kind of obsess over it is baking your core values, in particular, into all of the operating parts of your business. And so some things we did there, for example. So I think one thing we did pretty well was the values side, at the start, where we had a an approach where we took those values and tried to, for example, hire against them, promote against them, if it's in those unfortunate situations, need to fire against them, you know, those kinds of things. And I think probably hiring is, if I look back on it, the thing where that worked best, our alumni, like what our current team is, is exceptional, and our alumni are spread out across the industry, doing great things. And I think that's the thing I probably feel proud about looking back over at all. And one big change, we made that so we I think like many people we used to do interviewing by having the actual interview, and then the candidate would leave. And the interviewers would shake their hand, turn around, go straight back into the interview room, and debrief and discuss the candidate they just met. We made a change years ago, to say, don't you're not allowed to do that. Before you discuss the candidate you've just met, you must each go back to your desk, and write down your thoughts into a structured format that we had a kind of checklist that essentially asked people to evaluate the candidate explicitly against our core values. And that was everything from obviously there were some questions about do we think they'd be good at the job. But there were also questions about things like, Do we feel like this is somebody who would take ownership of problems? And it would ask for how much evidence they provided of those statements, and that kind of confidence rating, kind of an exponential kind of competence rating. And this had a couple of effects. I mean, firstly, it was we thought it was a good thing to do, I suppose morally, because it removes some of the bias endemic in hiring processes. But the the big thing it did put to your question of operationalizing values was it removed that thing of groupthink, and everybody deferring to the most experienced interviewer in the room, and instead got people to capture their own thoughts before they had a chance to be dragged away from that by other people. And then also turned to those conversations from how good we think this person will be into how well are they going to be aligned with our organization and where we want to go and what we want to achieve? And I think that made a really big difference. And I remember all kinds of government being on both sides of discussions of candidates, where, you know, where I'd scored them highly in my other interviews, it's called the blower or vice versa. And the discussions that came out of that were much more productive than they would have been if we just got straight into the discussion, because we'd put in black and white, our thoughts first off, and so we couldn't really fudge it. And so it made for very honest, open conversations about those things. And I think better hiring decisions. And so I think probably everything ties back to that. Ultimately, if you get the people, right, everything else follows from there.

Shireen: Yeah, what sort of values did you have that you could actually measure against?

Will: We talked about, so we wrote it as a manifesto. So it was almost prose. And it starts with, we believe communication solves all problems. And so we would evaluate people's communication skills. And that would be one of the key things doesn't matter what job they were applying for. We wanted them to be great communicators, then that covered everything from clarity of communication can make, right Can they speak competently? But through to? Things we define that broadly to include things like giving and receiving feedback, that that's a form of communication, and one that we value very highly? And so we would, we would ask explicit questions. So you tell us a time when you had to give somebody some difficult feedback, or tells time when you received some feedback that you didn't want to hear? And how did you react? And what do you do do with that information? Those are kind of typical interview questions that we would ask. And very values driven ones. So yeah, communication ownership. We always talked about smoking gets things done, that some of this language is a little dated. Now, we actually didn't overhaul it in the decade before we got acquired. And now obviously, it's undergoing some some revisions as we integrate into, into the quad acquiring company and in the spin out, but yeah, it was, it was that kind of style of, of core values that ended with kind of, I guess, one of our overarching goals, one of our overarching goals that wasn't a pure financial target, or whatever else, which was to build the best place for the best people to work. That's how we phrased it. And the there are various ways we hit the mark and missed the mark, I'm sure over the years, but But I think one thing we did achieve was that I think within our industry, distilled was, for a long time, one of the best places for somebody early in their career to join and get ahead quickly. If they were ambitious and capable, and were prepared to take ownership for their development, then we had people join us with no experience at all. And within a year or two, they were well known within the field presenting at conferences, for example, or writing well regarded articles. And I think that sort of stuff, mesh together.

Shireen: Yeah, presumably you had a training process to induct them into your values and make sure that they knew how you would operate in particular situations was your manifesto very detailed?

Will: No, the manufacturer itself was not at all detail there was it's less than a side of a4. It's literally just sentences. We were never very good at documentation and process, I think that's probably one one area of weakness. What we did do, I think was more baked into operations more than have it written down anywhere. So for example, I would always try and meet with every new hire, soon after they started. And the only thing I really, most of the agenda was just to hear about them, ask them about their background, and what brought them to be interested in working in the field and so forth. But the only thing I ever had on my agenda was to begin that process of talking to them about the values and why we thought they're important and how they correlated to how they would get ahead or distill, which I feel like was the the step after getting the job is getting the next job getting the step up getting the promotion or career development. And so I would, I would run through that with them. And then we, it was just all those other little ways that we operationalize things. So it would be there in promotion reviews, the language would come up in performance evaluations, all of those kinds of things. And so, yeah, I think it was it was more trying to bake it fundamentally in then it was having a process or a training methodology. And in fact, we would never get weird. We were never great at training. We think we're better at learning than we were at training. That was how I used to talk about it, that we hired people who are curious, and the kind of people who took ownership and were self driving in those things. And they were surrounded by smart people. And so there were there was a lot of a lot of opportunity for learning, probably more so than there was formal training that we already did some, but I wouldn't I wouldn't have said training was Asteron point but I would say that a lot of people learnt more in those years at the store, then that I think they would have many of our competitors.

Shireen: So that was really part of the culture that they had to learn learn the ropes for themselves work it out.

Will: Yeah, I mean, we hired people that we thought were capable of that. And we also pushed them in at the deep end a little bit, we'll get them exposed to clients very early on, obviously, with with experienced people around them to make sure the client experience was, was solid, but trying to get them to get as much experience as fast as possible, so that the most capable people could go as fast as they were able to really. And there were even areas where you can see other parts of business, right, we ended up developing this search live conference series, which is all about professional development. And it's not one on one level training, but it is, it is that, that staying at the cutting edge, and not only did that team attend those, obviously, because we were running them, but also we encourage people to put together talks to speak even fairly early in their career. And that's a huge, huge deal. I think, for somebody to you learn so much by trying to put together a talk that will impress Yeah, and not only impress but but teach people something. And so I think actually, a lot of our own individual learning came from that work that we each individually put in to teach others, if that makes sense. And then, we also built a training platform called distilled view, which is like an online learning and development system, which we opened up to the public. So it's a subscription service, people can sign up with a credit card. But we also obviously use it heavily internally. And that is more one on one kind of entry level stuff. So we would put all of their junior analysts and interns and people through it. And now 1000s of people going through that program in and outside our organization. And it's actually that's actually undergoing an overhaul right now, which is kind of one of the one of the cool bits of having a bit more resource, post m&a.

Shireen: Yeah, it must be quite useful as a digital asset for your acquirer to have.

Will: Yes, it's always been part of the kind of broader strategy for us. So we think that those people who get their start learning from our material, further down the line, they come to our conference, they spend 1000 pounds or whatever, of conference budget coming to our events. And then even further down the line when they become somebody who is hiring, or they become somebody who's looking for a more senior job, or they become somebody who's looking for an agency.

Shireen: We'll l take a short break is, as I'd like to mention the Brand Tuned series of webinars, which support founders to think through their brand, taking IP into account at the right time, which is good for you make firm decisions about what to create, just visit brand tuned.com. And the webinars are referenced right there on the homepage. Okay, back to the pod. So what did you find most challenging and most rewarding about creating this distill brand that you had

Will: So, well, interesting question, interpreted broadly, I think, probably the answer to both is the people. I think most business challenges really are people challenges somewhere along the way. And some of the kind of missteps or challenging parts of trying to get trying to get the alignment, you're trying to get people bought into a common vision. I remember a really rough time, in probably 2014 2015 kind of era, when we'd undergone the previous few years, we've undergone a really fast expansion that we'd opened up in the US in 2010. We've opened up in New York, Seattle first and 2010 in New York in 2011. We'd launched to still do in 2012, the conferences have been growing and all these kind of things we'd grown kind of quite quickly. And I think 2014 2015 was the first ever flat year, year of no top line growth. And it was we realized as well, that the in the growth, we'd ended up with groups of people who had different personal objectives, and not not all of those were aligned with where the business was trying to go. And that was a really, really tough time because it was it was being it was being pulled in lots of different, lots of different plausible, exciting directions by talented people. But the problem was there were different directions. And it took it really took years to unpick that and I think I don't know if I could do it better if I was doing it again, but I certainly would. You know, in search pilot the business we've just spun out which is currently 14 people and much earlier in that stage of defining who it is or what it is. I think it's something that we're much more rigorous about. It's much more like this is how we're doing it and If we want you here, if you want to be a part of that, rather than come and make this, whatever you think it should be. And I think some of that we have probably a bit too much of the latter, just for just for time there still celebrate the hardest part. And but I think the most rewarding part is that it's basically the same thing is is seeing the fruits of that pay off in people's careers. And whether that's people who stayed with us, and we've had people who've come, who've joined in, you know, graduate positions or without being without degrees, early in their careers, first job, second job, those kinds of things, who've gone all the way up to leadership teams, senior management, they've got, they've had equity in the business, they've had big paydays in the business, or whether it's the people who came, did an incredible job for us for a few years, develop their presence and reputation and all the rest of it and then went and got a job that they would have had no shot at before they even before that time. And I mean, they deserve the credit for that. I'm not trying to say we did that they did, they definitely did that. But the rewarding part was being part of that journey and being able to help build some some part of that platform that gave them the opportunity to do that. And I think I think that set that group of I mentioned, the alumni, so that the current team plus the set of people who we've we've ever worked with, spends lots of very talented people across across the industry, obviously, somebody moved out of industry now. And I think that's the one that definitely feels like the thing that you look back on a decade later and feel good about.

Shireen: Right. So search pilot is a product business is it that you you're holding on to?

 Will: It's software as a service. So it's it's software, but it's something that we host, and we offer up in return for a monthly recurring license fee. It's technology that we built in as part of the filter, we've formed an r&d team. Actually, the r&d team formed probably around the depths of that hardest part that I talked about that kind of 2014 2015 time. And initial initially with quite a broad remit, but just experimenting with ways that technology can make us better and more effective. And then this was just one of the things that they ended up building. And a few years later, it became not just one of many, but it became the thing that team was working on. And we changed it from an r&d team into a business unit, gave it revenue targets and the like and put a general manager in charge right now a VP who had responsibility for it as a as a p&l. And yeah, so it's it's technology, it's what it's for, it's mainly targeted at larger enterprise type websites, it has two primary benefits. One is that it allows SEO, AB testing. So it enables us to test SEO hypotheses and prove what works and what doesn't in the search engine in organic search, which is pretty groundbreaking and very difficult to do without technology. And the other part of the benefit is that it enables some of these large organizations to be more agile to make changes to their website that they otherwise wouldn't be able to make. And it's successful. But both of those angles, and it's it's grown to be a substantial team and said 14 people working on it. We've got some some of the team in the US as well. And what happened as part of the m&a was we essentially said this isn't really a business unit, this is really two businesses, and that what we did was split out the original shareholders of distilled so Duncan and I, to own the majority. Plus there was a, as I mentioned, a kind of a group of past and present senior team who had earned shares along the way. So they they between them owned a minority stake. And that group owned such pilot. So the people who helped us get distilled started as well have a stake in the technology business still. And then as part of the deal to spin out we also took some investment. So a small minority stake investment from the company that acquired distilled the company that acquired the rest of our business, the consulting and software consulting and events business, put a an investment into such pilot to help it get up and up and running and standing on its own two feet. And so they have a small stake but Duncan most alone at opposite between the two of us.

Shireen: So are you impacted by this Coronavirus in that business as a matter of interest? Have you Yeah, had to follow staff..

Will: So we we are impacted, thankfully not in the way that some businesses are. I mean, you know, obviously, I'm aware of plenty of businesses that are completely shut down if you're running a restaurant or a travel business or those kinds of things. So it's not like that. We're all working from home we can all be perfectly effective working from home. We do, unfortunately, but fortunately, as part of it, we do have exposure to businesses who then themselves are very heavily impacted. So some of our customers are in the travel sector, for example. And we've been working with them to give them as many options as we can. So we're letting them impose their subscription or reduce their subscription or giving them longer payment terms and those kinds of things. Obviously, all of those have knock on effects on Addison's, which is only a very small business without a deep balance sheet itself. So yes, actually, we have been taking her down, only just recently taking advantage of the of the UK Government fellows scheme. And we're applying for some of the stuff that's available in the US as well, what the US government is helping small businesses through. So we're impacted but not not devastated by it, the business will definitely survive it. And we our goal is to come out the other side with with the full team that we went into it with, we won't come out the other side with every client we went into it with, we know that but we want to keep working with as many of them as possible, and set ourselves up for hopefully some some growth in the years to come. I mean, you've tried it. We remember 2008 2009. Yeah. And I graduated into the.com. Bust as well. So but I think I'm much more worried about the health and locked down impact than the I feel like we can be okay, financially, and this business can grow. In even in even in the recession. I'm worried about the impact of the recession on other people, of course. But I believe that a technology business can can do well, even in what I imagine will be a recession that follows this spectacular economic shock. But yeah, I have no more information. Anybody else but how we get through it. But yeah, that's kind of where we stand is we'll get through it. But we are your impact.

Shireen: Yeah. So did you think about exit when you set up this build? Was it a long term plan of yours to exit?

Will: We weirdly, we used to talk about selling a business? Well, before we had a business, Duncan, I remember, I mentioned graduating into the.com Bust what that means is just before graduating, it was the.com bubble. And we in 99 2000, somewhere around there, Duncan and I used to dream up all kinds of internet business ideas and talk about selling them for millions, weirdly, then, when we actually set up our own business, we didn't really ever think we didn't really think that the exit and people talk about our exit strategy. Because I think that's the kind of thing that people ask entrepreneurs without really knowing what they are asking. I've certainly never found it particularly helpful to think that we basically figured maybe we maybe we would sell it one day when the time came. But it was not a thing that we were planning for, throughout. And I know some people who do and they've been very successful at doing that. But no, for us it was, we'll do this while we're having fun doing it and it's growing. And we can see the next opportunity. When it gets to the point that we think opportunities are different, or the right kind of opportunity comes along or any of those things kind of line up, then then we'll think about that. And really this was, this was a bit of a lightning striking in the same place kind of opportunity that there were three or four things that had to come together to make this even possible. Because it was a complicated deal, right to spin out the technology business, capitalize it with a small bit of investment, sell the rest of the business, manage my involvement in both of those things. If this was there, were not there. Were not a plethora of potential acquirers who would do all of those things. This was really, oh, yeah, just this one company we fit well with. And this makes this makes perfect sense.

Shireeen: What is a brand that you particularly admire? And why?

Will: So I've got there's lots of big company answers to this, but they're a bit tried and commonly covered ground. But the one I would mention, I think, is a company called Wistia, which is run by some good friend. This is a video hosting company, and they're headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. And we've known them since the very earliest days, I think they probably got started a similar time to distilled maybe, slightly. I don't know their timeline Exactly. But I've always described their business as they were always the standard answer to if you if you could run. If you if you could have founded one of the businesses that wasn't your own. Which business would you like to run? I think they've, the thing I love about them, their brand in particular is the way they've infused their personalities and their sense of fun through it. They kind of somehow remained professional, yet. They're obviously enjoying themselves. And I really, really respect that I love the I love everything about the brand. And in fact, I'm wearing one of their T shirts. Now it's so faded that you can't really tell. But it's probably a decade old. But they used to describe themselves as an unprofitable t shirt manufacturer propped up by video hosting platform, because they just used to spend a lot of money on things that they thought would make people happy, and that they would have people remember them. And I love the way it all ties together, it's really congruent with with the whole business. And, incidentally, they went through some really interesting decision making they've written publicly about this, I can, I can share it, but that some interesting decision making processes about what to do with their business they considered selling. And in the end, decided not to, but did a fairly rare kind of financing where I believe the founders took some money off the table, but they took on some basically venture debt. And in ways that that kind of leveraged structure that would maybe be more common in a bigger business. And I believe it worked out pretty well, where they managed to both take some money off the table, and then quite quickly grow the company and improve the financial performance to the point that the debt that they'd taken on to do that was was not a drag on the business, and they could refinance it or better terms and so forth. And I, obviously, I just think it's great when people take those kind of risks and make the payoff.

Shireen: That's really interesting. We'll have a mention of them in the show notes so people can reach.

Will: Or the founders wrote, wrote a really long piece on their thinking and why they decided not to sell it, and what their, what their, what they're planning to do. So hopefully, people enjoy reading.

Shireen: Thank you very much indeed, WIll, for coming to this podcast.

Will: Thanks for inviting me on it's, I love just talking through these things. And it's funny looking back over the over the history, which we met right at the beginning of this journey. So it's yeah, it's funny to look back on.

Shireen: Yeah. Thank you for listening to this episode of Brand Tuned, where we aim to answer the question, what does it take to create a successful business and brand? I'd love it. If you would take a moment to give me a review. If you have any questions, send me a message. You can find me on LinkedIn, or most other social media platforms, or on my personal website, shireensmith.com.