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Mark started his career at Ernst & Young writing transaction reports for corporates being sold, then walked away from big-business M&A to work with his dad in the family accountancy practice, the one his dad had spent 30 years turning into a growth-focused consulting firm for entrepreneurial SMEs. Years on, Mark has taken those big-firm disciplines pricing analysis, forward forecasting, Michael Porter's competitive strategy and applied them to a corner of the market where most accountancy firms rarely go beyond filing tax returns. In this conversation, he unpacks the "consulting accountant" model, the frameworks he brings to every founder, and why forward-facing beats historical every time.

In this episode:

• Why Mark walked away from Ernst & Young's transaction services team to join his dad's accountancy practice, and the reverse psychology that seems to have worked
• The "consulting accountant" phrase, borrowed from Rick Payne, and Mark's blunt take that most SME accountants are great historians but poor strategists
• The full-day (or half-day) in-person planning session that starts every client relationship, with personal objectives before business objectives
• Why he treats costs as resources: renaming the P&L, spotting the areas where founders are chronically under-investing training, marketing, people
• Peter Drucker's line that the purpose of a business is to create results outside yourself, and Michael Porter's two-part framework: create value, then capture value
• Why pricing is one of the biggest untapped levers in SME businesses, and Mark's simple rule for choosing clients if they can't get 10x the value back, don't work with them
• Michael Gerber's "the boss doesn't have a boss" problem, and why the accountability of a monthly meeting with an outsider often does more than any tool inside the business
• OKRs (courtesy of Measure What Matters), cascading business plans, and the client who has every single person in the organisation present their own mini business plan at an annual day
• Rick Payne's shift from Key Performance Indicators to Key Predictive Indicators, and the "desert island" test for how few metrics you actually need
• The Harkham property client (Mark's own brother-in-law and brother) that grew from six people to 30 by taking the process to heart, and the dental practice founder who stepped out of clinical work and eventually sold with far less stress than she expected
• The "Draw Toast" TED Talk exercise Mark uses to visualise how a business actually serves customers, and the moments of innovation that fall out of drawing rather than talking
• HIPPO the Highest Paid Person's Opinion and why Mark's first question in a strategy session always goes to the person with the least equity and the least influence in the room
• The mini MBA programme Mark runs with Paul three topics (leadership, finance, competitive strategy), ten business owners a year, three hours a month, and a business simulation game that has founders running a fake company on eight decisions a month
• Working alongside other accountants rather than poaching them, and why Mark's firm trains 60 other accountancy firms in the same approach
• Mark's definition of true wealth: having choices, and never playing with scared money

A conversation about the forward-looking discipline that almost every SME accountant leaves on the table, and why the founders who get it done tend to end up with far more optionality than the ones who don't.

Book and resource recommendations: The Go-Giver by Bob Burg, What is Strategy by Michael Porter (Harvard Business Review), The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt, Measure What Matters by John Doerr, and the Happiness Lab podcast.

This podcast is produced by Tribunista

Sponsored by Capital Partners

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Nigel Shanahan started his working life as a chartered accountancy trainee who "failed miserably", found his feet as an IBM salesman for 12 years, then left with a colleague and £250,000 of business angel funding to launch a text-messaging business at the start of the 2000s. It took another 20 years, one dilution to 5%, one buyback of his own company from the VCs, one moment of clarity at an M40 service station, and one 4:30am deal signing to build Rant and Rave into a business he sold to Upland Software in 2018 for what he'd told his team eight years earlier it would be worth: £50 million.

In this episode:

• Loughborough University, a failed 18 months as a chartered accountancy trainee, and how a graduate management programme at IBM turned him into a salesman for 12 years
• The Warwick University EU-funded programme (six Saturdays and Sundays in a row) that separated the entrepreneurs-in-waiting from those who'd stay in corporate life
• The mentor, Harry, who ran that programme, and who Nigel credits with being one of the most important business relationships of his career
• The first business idea: SMS broadcast for corporates in the days when only people with "status" at IBM had a phone in their car, and the £250,000 angel investment that landed six weeks after the first pitch
• The £100k+ IBM salary he walked away from, the £25,000 a year he paid himself for three years, and the young family who paid for it too
• The VC round that came next, the discipline it forced on him, and the phone call telling him his co-founder Ian had to go — and the "hardest business conversation" of Nigel's life the next morning
• Being diluted to 5%, working 80-hour weeks, having remortgaged the house five times, and the moment at the M40 Welcome Break service station where Rant and Rave was born
• The wife, Desi, who told him it was "bloody brilliant" before anyone else did
• Harry's response when Nigel said he'd walk away and start over: "Don't be ridiculous. Do an MBO"
• The Vodafone relationship changing at exactly the right moment, the board panicking, and the MBO that ended with the VCs getting every pound of their money back
• The sentiment engine that turned SMS broadcast into a two-way customer feedback business, and the ten further years of building that followed
• The £50 million valuation Nigel told the team was possible eight years before it happened, and the 64 staff on the Enterprise Investment Share Scheme who came along for the ride
• The wrong CEO hire that came from "meals and drinks" instead of a proper process, and the non-exec chairman Simon who asked the killer question over a curry: "what's the exit strategy?"
• Implementing the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), the beauty pageant with investment banks, and picking GP Bullhound
• The 2.5x ARR multiple SaaS deals used to go for, the £20M annual recurring revenue that got them to their target price, and the twin-track PE vs trade sale campaign
• Why the senior team chose Upland Software over a leveraged private equity offer at the same valuation, and the 40-day due diligence that followed
• The 4:30am signing after Nigel "threw his dolly out" and demanded the acquiring CEO come back from a golf trip, and "Disco Dave" — the M&A lawyer from Northern Ireland who arrived three weeks before the deal after the original partner left the firm
• Life after the exit: Mill Street co-working in Leamington Spa, the Make Good Grow philanthropic matchmaking platform, and Nigel's definition of true wealth — "happiness and contentment"

A conversation about betting on a technology wave before anyone else can see it, why not all VCs are the same, and how a 20-year "overnight success" actually gets built.

This podcast is produced by Tribunista

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Mark Mills started buying and selling at school — literally, with bags of broken biscuits from the biscuit factory where his aunt worked. Three decades and five businesses later, after a £20,000 debt from the failed pay phone venture that took years to clear, and a publishing business he sold for £1, he built Cardpoint into a £100M-a-year cash machine business turning over £2M a week. He now takes other founders through the 40-step process he ended up writing after selling his own company disastrously badly on the first attempt.

In this episode:

• The broken-biscuits business at school that started it all, and why he thinks the best entrepreneurs are always capable salespeople
• The pay phones business in the early '90s that made money on hardware but nothing on calls, and the recession that wiped it out
• The £20,000 debt he decided to pay off personally rather than take anyone down with him
• The mobile phone moment: sitting around a table laughing at the idea that "someone would want one for his wife" — and the revolution they completely missed
• The publishing business that got so broad it had no audience, and the £1 exit that followed
• The 1999 trip to New York with his brother "because all the good ideas come from the States"
• The five business model rules it took him three failed ventures to figure out: recurring income, location-independent, scalable, necessary rather than fashion, and of its time
• Cardpoint: 36,000 free ATMs already in the market, and the counter-intuitive decision to put paid ones in more convenient locations — corner shops, petrol stations, tourist spots
• The maths behind £1.50 charges adding up to £100M in revenue, and why the business ended up needing a lot of accountants
• Why he ran Cardpoint with an exit in mind from day one, and how that discipline shaped every small day-to-day decision
• The disastrous first attempt to sell it — running buyer meetings while trying to do his day job — and the Christmas Day conversation with his wife that reset everything
• The six-month "I'm not for sale" period he used to prepare properly, and why saying no created more interest not less
• The 40-step exit process he now takes founders through, from tidying up leases and share structures to sharpening the sales pipeline
• The four kinds of buyer he thinks about: PLCs, PE-backed roll-ups, private equity taking a hybrid stake, and pure trade sales — and the Minicam deal that used two of them
• Why buyer due diligence matters as much as the other way round, and the founders who took less money because they preferred one buyer's team to another's
• The anticlimactic feeling after selling — the founder who ate beans on toast and cried the night the deal closed, and Mark's advice to do nothing for 12 months afterwards
• Marking the occasion: daft cars, one burnt orange McLaren, and a pair of cufflinks Mark still wears years later
• The five "disinheritance events" his kids can recite, and why they occasionally try to talk each other into breaking the rules
• His definition of true wealth: not the money, but the choices — and why he'd rather be rich than famous

A conversation about ruthlessly interrogating your own business model, the discipline of running every day as if the exit is coming, and why the moment after the wire transfer clears is often quieter than anyone expects.

Mark's Website: https://www.mark.co.uk
Book “Making Your Mark” - https://amzn.eu/d/04iC0CF7

This podcast is produced by Tribunista

Sponsored by Capital Partners