[00:00:27] Jay: Hi, everyone. Welcome to The First Customer. My name is Jay Aigner. Today, I am lucky enough to be joined by a different type of entrepreneur, an acquisition entrepreneur, Adrian Knight. He is a World champion participant in the Sparta games, which I definitely want to talk about here at some point soon, a spectacular group, a lot of fun stuff you have going on, Adrian.
Thanks for being on today, buddy. How are you? Can you
[00:00:50] Adrian: I'm so good. Thank you so much for having me here, Jay. It's yeah, it's great to be here.
[00:00:54] Jay: give me the snapshot? We talked a little, a second beforehand, but you're about to go to Greece to compete in a very cool competition. can you tell us a little bit about that?
[00:01:03] Adrian: Yeah, sure. So, in 48 hours time, I'll be on a plane to Athens, Greece, where, on the following morning, I'm going to jump in the car and drive three hours through mainland Greece to Sparta, which, I'm going to be doing a lot of work on,A lot of people quite familiar with from like the film 300 and all of that good stuff.
And I'm participating in the Spartan races, which are like obstacle races. it's the world championships. So I've been very fortunate to qualify for that. And yeah, going along for the ride, I think in a bit of a, yeah, sort of self, self punishment.
[00:01:38] Jay: That's a very wild thing to be doing. But, so where did you grow up? I mean, and again, I say this to a lot of guests. there's some good information on just you out there in general. I think if people want to go find, you know, a very detailed profile of Adrian, I think we've got some goals for this time we have together to talk about how you built these businesses and your brands, but, where did you grow up?
And do you think that fueled, you know, you being an entrepreneur later in life?
[00:02:01] Adrian: Yeah, absolutely. So, I'm based in England. As I'm sure a lot of you can tell by my accent. I grew up in a town just outside of London. So, it's around 45sort of miles, sort of, excuse me, 45 minutes west of London, a fairly sort of large market town to a degree. And growing up in that environment, the one thing I knew for certain was that I didn't want to be in that environment.
I,just didn't see myself there. I wanted to go out and live life. And for me, entrepreneurship was a ticket. It gave a level or at least a perceived level of sort of freedom and flexibility. And, in theory could be transported anywhere around the world, whether that's through online business or simply just having a skillset of being able to start and run a business.
[00:02:48] Jay: Beautiful. yeah, it's the paradox of being an entrepreneur. It's like the ultimate freedom, but like also not at all. So it's an, it's a very interesting dynamic. so what was the first business you actually started?
[00:03:00] Adrian: So my entrepreneurial journey started quite early. I mean, really it was when I was 13 years old and I was just a car fanatic at that point. you know, very young age and I realized very quickly I wanted to save for a car, but to do that, I needed money. So, as soon as I turned 13, paper round, which is like the legal age in the UK.
And by the age of 15, I had 5 paper rounds, but I wasn't actually doing any of them myself. I essentially, franchised them out. To my friends who also wanted a paper round, but couldn't get one because I had all the routes. So, they were delivering the papers and I got a job in the, the local paper shop, like signing up new accounts and, just having a lot of fun there really.
And it seemed to work quite well because I ended up winning paperboy of the year in the UK. So that was pretty cool. But that laid the foundation for my first real entrepreneurial sort of venture, which was when I had joined university. So. started university. I just turned 20 at the time and I dropped out after three weeks.
Sort of just knowing that wasn't really my path, but I ended up staying for three years living the student lifestyle, living a great lifestyle because in those first three weeks I'd started a local business which essentially was an advertising company to local companies that wanted to reach students.
That evolved, and we ended up organizing the student event nights. And by the end of it, we were running, we were running for student event nights in sort of the local bars every week. We had the advertising, we had a paid weekly column in the newspaper, which had about 20, 000. Readership each week and we'd started a charity off the back of that as well.
And that charity is still run today by Hampshire constabulary. Nearly, yeah, nearly 20 years, 20 years old now. So it was, it was a great insight into sort of the world of business. And again, it was kind of that second stepping stone to sort of going into the real world.
[00:05:07] Jay: well, I mentioned the beginning that you're a slightly different type of entrepreneur, which is, kind of, you know, Funny after hearing that story, because it sounds like you were kind of built a little differently. all your businesses seem to kind of be immediately to outsource, you know, the work to someone else, which I think is how people kind of extract themselves, you know, you, you do the job, do you know how to do it?
You train somebody else, teach somebody else. Then you extract yourself up another level so you can hire other people to do more of that stuff. So I think it's a great kind of Genesis. so what is an acquisition entrepreneur? I mean, I think a lot of people don't even know what that term means.
[00:05:41] Adrian: Yeah, so an acquisition entrepreneur is an entrepreneur that is essentially buys companies. So you're acquiring established businesses. And what you just touched on there, Jay, is so insightful. I've never actually made like connected those dots myself. but that has just touched me. Immediately thinking about that, that has been a key component of the success I've seen in business where essentially I recognize, and it's quite late into my journey, but I recognize that by taking me out of the equation in terms of like the daily stuff, that's when the businesses Seem to go quite well.
So acquisition entrepreneurship is rather than starting the business, you're buying an established business. Very often these businesses are 10, 15, 20 plus years old, and you're going in there with, you know, a ship that's already moving, but typically there's some problems. In the ship where the owner or owners are looking to move on, they want their business, which they've been sort of working on for a large majority of their life.
In most cases, they want it to go to a safe pair of hands and yeah, it's going in and it's been able to fix some of these problems and depending on how stressed or possibly even distressed the business is, you're turning that around and looking to do it in a way where you can add value to it, not just in terms of the value of the business, but in terms of.
yeah, you know, you're adding value. And at that point you can either retain the business or, you can sell or you can do a combination of both depending on, you know, how many businesses you acquire.
[00:07:14] Jay: How did you get into that?
[00:07:27] Adrian: it was such an absurd, like idea in so many ways, because there was just, I didn't know anyone doing this. I had absolutely zero connections.
There was no, celebrity entrepreneurs that I knew of certainly who was doing this, but I just had this idea. That I wanted to buy and sell businesses, but I also felt, like instinctively felt that I had to do a startup first, almost as like a rite of passage, because there's certain things you learn when starting a business from scratch that I just felt would stand me in good stead.
And I didn't really do anything like, like on that, like on the buying side of things for quite some time. Until I discovered I was going to be a dad, which was, I was, what, 34 years old. and that was when I sort of stopped in my tracks and like, wait a minute, I'm about to be a dad. Like, what's changed here or has anything changed or what's the vision?
What type of dad do I want to be? And I started, Asking myself all of these deep questions. And I realized that nothing had changed. If anything, I was even more driven to make a success of my business life. But I felt that the vehicle I was in at the time of business, I'd started and had been running for six, It's about six and a half years that wasn't going to do it.
And so buying a business seemed a very, like, it just seemed like a good time. And after making that decision, I went and had a bit of training. And then it was three months after that training, when I acquired my first company, which was a 30 year old consultancy. And I bought that business for a pound and I sold that a couple of years later for a very healthy six figure sum.
[00:09:01] Jay: You bought it for a pound?
[00:09:03] Adrian: Yeah,
[00:09:04] Jay: Is that just because the owners wanted to get out of there? Or like, what is how do you buy a business for? And again, dumb American. I mean, I'm assuming a pound is close to a dollar. not sure about today's exact exchange rate, but I mean, how do you buy a business for a dollar or a pound?
[00:09:18] Adrian: it's understanding the motivations for the seller. So you kind of touched on it, Jay. So when you're dealing with, When you're dealing with sellers, like a lot of people think that it's all about the money. And don't get me wrong. The financial component of a deal is really important, but it's not always the most important.
There's other motivations there. And so it's understanding the whole picture. Like, why is this owner looking to sell? Why are they looking to sell now? You know, what's changed? What's going on in their world? Like, why isn't the business more profitable? Like what's actually going on here? And it's just understanding that in a big part of being successful with buying small businesses, like so many people think it's about.
Having a high financial IQ, you tend to think of like the movies and sort of boardrooms with 20 lawyers on each side. that's not how it works at this level. The key to being successful as an acquisition entrepreneur with small businesses, it's just being human. It's being able to sit down and have a conversation with someone and to be able to understand really what's driving them and equally, you know, what's driving you and just to be able to have that open conversation.
So I've acquired. 10 businesses in the last three and a half years. And every single one of them have been acquired in a way where I've taken out. You know, I've not put any of my own money in. I've not taken out large amounts of debts. I've structured them in a way so that the, like my risk is protected because it is risky buying a small business.
but equally the seller is getting what they want. And I think the final point to say on this is that the big misconception is that people think. Like people will think like when you hear sort of no money down, they will assume it's buying a business for a pound. My first acquisition was genuinely for a pound, but I've done a number of no money down deals, but I've bought those businesses for hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pounds.
I just haven't paid. A lot of money on day one,
[00:11:16] Jay: Mhm. Got it. Got it. Okay. Now that makes more sense. I was going to say, that makes a lot of sense. And I have friends who do this. so it's been something that's, you know, it's an interesting, it's a very interesting and like you said, scary slash risky, Thing for somebody who's never done it before, right?
Like, I mean, I went, I had a conversation with somebody who did it and I went to my local laundromat, nice old lady that runs it. And I said, would you ever be interested in selling it? And we kind of went back and forth and like, you know, it turned out the, dry cleaning is not the business to be in just from like, if you're trying to make money, at least not in, in where I live. but it was an interesting conversation to kind of open my eyes up a little bit. So I do, you know, I personally. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Want to get to that point if somebody's never bought a business before but they want to do it What would be your advice to them?
[00:12:10] Adrian: you have to get educated. Like you really have to get educated around this. And I mean, there are risks with buying a small business. not just financial risks. You've got legal risks. You've got HR risks. You've got safety risks with some businesses, depending on the sector you're going into. And you need to be very mindful of that.
And I certainly wouldn't. like let that like put you off.
if anything, it's a good thing because some people will be put off, which means there's okay. Like, you know, less competition to like, to an extent, but you just have to know how to protect yourself and how to protect yourself, like legally, financially from a HR perspective, which is a part of that, like a part of that process is structuring deals in a ways where you're not re mortgaging your house.
taking out your life savings, selling everything you've got and putting it all on the line. You don't want to do that. And I would highly like highly advise someone do not do that. the sort of a quick and easy example why you don't want to do that is when you buy a small business, let's say that business has 10 employees and 10 employees is quite a lot for a small businesses.
There's a lot of small businesses that don't get to 10 employees. my last acquisition had 10 employees. Now, if two of those people left, just two people, that's 20 percent of your workforce. And if you've remortgaged your house and you've got your life savings and you've sold everything to buy this, and all of a sudden 20 percent of your workforce leave, like you can just get a sense for the type of risks there.
So you need to structure this. And this goes back to again, being able to, at a very basic level, have a very open and human conversation with the owner. Because also, like, there's not a queue of people lining up to buy their businesses. They become aware of that the longer they try to sell their companies.
And so it's about reaching a place where you genuinely. Both winning, like that's the key to it has to be when,
[00:14:09] Jay: You mentioned training, what training did you do and is there any that you would kind of recommend people look into?
[00:14:17] Adrian: yeah, there's, so the training world around in sort of small business M& A has got, it's got a little bit diluted. I'm very fortunate to, sort of be on the circuit with training. So I speak at a lot of conferences, I'm in Dubai in December, speaking at my next one and I've got to know. like a lot of the providers there.
And yeah, unfortunately it sort of turned into a bit of a world where it's, they just want to sell sort of training. it's kind of diluted the content, but fundamentally you need to provide, you need to find a provider that is credible, that they've actually done what they are teaching you to do for start.
but also you need to go in with an understanding that you're not going to learn how to buy businesses by sitting in a. conference room for two or three days. You're certainly not going to learn to buy a business by doing a two or three day, like online zoom course with some like Q and A's like, it's a very experiential process.
So, the way you want to kind of go about this is to look more for mentors and coaches who will be with you longer term and actually be able to, like analyze deals with you to be able to really like go to like the. Like the full journey.
That's how you learn it. I was quite fortunate in the sense that because I was expecting my daughter, like I had to make this work.
And so I've done the training, on the day after the training, I sat down with all the materials. I was sort of going through it, starting to rewrite my notes. I was like, this is ridiculous. Why don't I just go out there and start talking to people? and I just took a lot of action, but I've mentored a lot of people around and that's the bit where people tend to get.
Stuck like there's almost so much information that they end up doing nothing. So I just say the key thing is to, yeah, just to look at the different providers and, just try and go with the one that will give you the most support.
[00:16:10] Jay: Got it. so talk to me a little bit about spectacular group. children's, I think education and a bunch of other kind of, sister companies. Maybe what's the structure and kind of how'd you set that up?
[00:16:20] Adrian: Yeah. So, I have absolutely zero background in children's education. prior to coming to dad, becoming a dad, I was so ignorant about this whole world that is children. And it was only when I was going to children's classes with Evie, my daughter, who's now, four years old. It was only when we was going to classes that I started to look around as like,someone doesn't feel quite right about this.
It didn't like considering those first sort of five years of a child's life is like the most important formative years of a person's life. It just felt a little bit. Flaky and a little bit, underserved and just being myself, I just started to get quite curious about this and very long story short, I made a decision to enter into that sector and I done it through acquisition.
And when I made that decision, I certainly had no, no sort of agendas or building this big company and, serving all this. I just wanted to play a small part and just, you know, if I could touch one child's life positively. You know, it was worth it. within two years of making that decision, we'd grown to 20 employees, multimillion revenue.
And we're currently educating just under 10, 000, under five year olds, every academic term here in the UK. we have a couple of locations abroad, so we've got one in Australia and one in the Middle East and, yeah, like it's like, I mean, the business has just turned three years old. So it's been a really short.
Quite,uncomfortable in some ways because of the speed of like the scaling and having to figure all this stuff out, but it's been remarkable really, and it's all been done through acquisition.
[00:18:01] Jay: Wow. And what is the actual product or service that you guys are providing?
[00:18:05] Adrian: So we've got three companies, two of them are national franchise networks. So we are the franchisors, and between those two, we have around 70 locations, primarily in the UK and the third one is a business that. I acquired late last year, which builds playgrounds and outdoor learning environments.
So the idea here was that we're sort of educating inside the classroom, but can we also start to shape the outdoor environments where we can also, yeah, you know, educate out there as well.
[00:18:36] Jay: Wow. and, on the, in the, your bio mentioned, basically your belief. It wasn't directly said, but your belief in delegation, right, and creating a team under you. it sounds like that goes all the way back to the paper route days. but how did you do that with, you know, you acquire a couple of companies.
Do you just have a trusted kind of team that does a bunch of stuff across a bunch of your portfolio companies? Like how is your team and your delegation kind of set up?
[00:19:09] Adrian: Yeah, this is I love talking about this. And also I just want to plug a gap that sort of in between here. is that between the student business and then ultimately when I started to acquire in my sort of like early thirties going into my mid thirties, I had 12 failed startups. and, The reason I failed those, I can see clearly why with hindsight was because I was so bad at the execution, like the delivery aspect.
I've always been more entrepreneur, like taking Michael Gerber, if you have the technician, the manager, and the entrepreneur. I was always more entrepreneur and a terrible technician and the terrible manager. so.in the context of like a startup, like I was very good at seeing the gap, seeing the opportunities, having the ideas and getting things moving, but then it would quickly like fall flat quite early on in the journey.
so the whole delegation piece has come more out of necessity than anything else. I recognize it was my only, like, the only way to be successful was by simply doing it. Delegating to people who were literally better than me and getting out of the picture. and so with all of the acquisitions that I've done the very first one, I didn't really have that in mind, but I managed to sort of slip myself out of it almost by.
almost by accident in the sense, but with spectacular group in particular, the first acquisition I, I acquired because I just wanted to have a role and I managed to, spread, like, with my other business. I had like someone in there to manage that. And then the second acquisition that I'd done there, I made it because it had a general manager in place and it had more of a team there.
And I could see that I could start to plug this stuff in. And so. Yeah, that's been a really big thing. And at the moment it's like I'm going through a major restructure in terms of the team and spectacular group and essentially bringing in like professional management who can really start to drive this business.
So, yeah, I think the starting point with a lot of people when they start to think about this is actually what are your strengths? Like, where do you play best in the business and then start to plan out from there?
[00:21:18] Jay: I love that.yeah, it's just such a, an interesting and different story to hear.you know, that kind of just being in your DNA and I feel very similar to you in that. And I don't hear that often because it's a struggle for people to let stuff go and to give, you know, authority to other people.
And I'm, I feel similar to you where it's like, just go do it. Right. Like you are better than I am. Like for the love of God, like Let me go do the couple of small amount of things that I'm good at. You guys, you know, crushed these 50 million things that have to get done. So I definitely feel that. And I think it's important.
And I think, Yeah, it sounds like that's what kind of led you to a lot of your success is just that trust you have in people that you believe in. Right. And I think a lot of people can't get to that point. and you know, probably learning from your failures just like a lot of us have, maybe led you to there, but I love that story.
Now, do you,what is next for you? I mean, I know you're doing your Sparta stuff and a lot of personal development and, you know, maybe some coaching training stuff. what is next for Adria Knight? Yeah.
[00:22:20] Adrian: Yeah, it's, I mean, just to say on the delegation piece, the final bit there as well is that the, it can swing the other way. So I was almost certainly in the earlier days, like, just take the business, like, and almost like at any cost. And then I would wonder why 12 months later, it wasn't quite working out the way,
like the way I wanted it to.
And I realize now that there's a balance with that of it's delegating, but. It's not abdicating the responsibility, and there's a fine balance there. So I still, I still sort of recognize that the buck stops with me. And at times that can be quite hard when, and there has been some major, like, mess ups and some of the businesses and I've had, had.
Screaming at me down the phone. I had a very bad situation earlier this summer, where that was happening. And I was like, I'm so detached from this business. I don't really understand what you're screaming at me about, but I have to take it because ultimately the buck stops with me. So it's definitely been a balance and a learning curve there.
but with, yeah, what's next. So,certainly more acquisitions and, Like smart acquisitions that are going to build and expand a spectacular group. because of the role that I play, I'm very blessed to have a lot of bandwidth and a lot of extra time. And I use that for things like ultra endurance events and, you know, Spartan world championships, but I'm also, I'm really like getting into the training and the coaching aspect.
And, specifically, like I have a handful of clients who are to acquire businesses, but I'm really very keen to work with established business owners, like more on the sales side and helping them to build value, to like prepare their business for sale and, see a successful exit because I've spoken with.
I mean, hundreds upon hundreds of small business owners. And it's, it can be really heartbreaking when they sort of start to realize that they've spent 20, 25 years building this business in their minds, all of their retirement or their wealth is tied up in this business. Yet they have absolutely no plan.
They've got no real indicator of what their business is worth. And, you know, if they're 60, 70 years old and they want to sell Within a year, but the business is worth a fifth of what they thought it was. It has very real implications on their retirements. And so I'm quite keen to, to start offering a bit more support there as someone who actively like buys businesses, but who's also exited a number of businesses.
So I can sort of see it from both sides of the table.
[00:24:51] Jay: No, I love that. well, this is, I love this question to somebody who is adventurous because it usually prompts an interesting answer, but non business related final question, non business related. If you could do anything on earth and you knew you couldn't fail, what would it be?
[00:25:09] Adrian: so,it would definitely be ultra, like extreme endurance. I was in the Arctic Circle in March of this year, doing some stuff that I didn't think I could do, but ended up doing. I'm doing, I'm one of 35 people to, be doing the world's first ultra marathon on the Galapagos Islands, in 2025.
And the next events I have in my sightlines are, Easter Island.of the, of Central America and most especially the South Pole. I've just got this fascination with Antarctica probably because I'm absolutely terrified of it. so yeah, I think if I could do anything, it would be successfully get myself and, you know, back home from the, from the South Pole.
[00:25:57] Jay: I love that. No, I love, do you see the guy that's running the full length of Africa right now? That's a pretty cool,
[00:26:04] Adrian: Yeah,
[00:26:06] Jay: journey. That's pretty well, I mean, it's a very like war torn area too. So to like run through that whole thing has been a cool journey to watch.
[00:26:14] Adrian: insane. Yeah. Fair play. Like, yeah.
[00:26:16] Jay: Yeah, that's a hell of a journey. well, Adrian, you're very inspirational guy. you're a little bit different than the guests we normally get. And I really appreciate kind of hearing a different perspective. I think that it's a very.you know, enticing thing to buy and sell businesses.
And a lot of people are just terrified of it, because of some of the things you mentioned, but, it can work and you've proven that to be the case. So, if you want to reach out to you directly, if they want to find spectacular group, how do they do that?
[00:26:43] Adrian: Yep. So, my website's adrianknight. co. uk is the best place to start. It's sort of like a central hub. I'm very active on social media, especially Instagram. I post on there several times a day and I really try to give people like a glimpse of like the reality of what's going on. It's not all, you know, Glitz buying businesses can sound really sexy, but trust me, I've had some real chain crashes, so I try to share as much reality as possible.
my social media handle for all of my social media is a LinkedIn, TikTok, et cetera, is Adrian J Knight. And, yeah, I love to speak to people. I love to hear from people here. What's going on in their worlds. And, yeah, just trying to add value where I can.
[00:27:22] Jay: Love it, man. Well, thank you for being on brother. Have a great rest of your week. Good luck at the world championship. Please send us pictures and video, if you hopefully, you know, crossing the finish line first. So, have a safe trip. Come back in one piece and we'll talk to you soon. All right.
[00:27:36] Adrian: Thank you so much,
[00:27:36] Jay: Thanks Adrian.
See you, buddy.