From Cookies to Cash-Outs: Real Lessons in Building a Business That’s Exit-Ready – with Brandon Harris

What does it really take to build a business that someone else will want to buy?

In this episode of the Exit Insights podcast, Brandon Harris – entrepreneur turned business architect – shares his journey from running a cookie start-up and owning a gym, to guiding other owners through succession and exit preparation.

Brandon’s story is rich with lessons learned the hard way. Like many business owners, he didn’t plan to sell – until market shifts forced his hand. And although his exit was successful, he now admits he wasn’t ready and could’ve maximised far more value if he’d been better prepared.

???? What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

Why misalignment between founders often leads to early exits or failed partnerships
The risks of assuming you’ll “know when” to sell
How to prepare your business – even if selling isn’t your plan
Why great businesses always sell (think gyms, food, even fish and chip shops!)
What really drives valuation beyond revenue and profit

Brandon also unpacks the importance of having the right legal documents in place, how to think clearly about what you’re building, and why you should never wait until you “have to” sell to start planning.

Main Topics Covered:

Entrepreneurial family dynamics and next-generation business ownership
Differences between building a business vs. a job
The importance of shareholder agreements and legal frameworks
Real stories of business exits gone well—and not so well
The power of strong systems and digital presence in valuation
The Fabric and EOS approach to owner independence

Actionable Tips:

Revisit your shareholder agreements—are they fit for today’s business?
Clarify your personal and commercial vision—are they aligned with your team’s?
Understand your business valuation drivers beyond revenue
Get the right advisors around you early

Transcription

Darryl Bates-Brownsword (00:33)
Welcome to the podcast that’s dedicated to helping business owners prepare their business so that they’re ready for exit and allowing you to exit on your terms. This is the Exit Insights podcast presented by Fabric. I’m Darryl Bates-Brownsword and today I’m joined by Brandon Harris. Welcome and thanks for joining me today, Brandon.

Brandon Harris (00:53)
very much my pleasure, I’m looking forward to it.

Darryl Bates-Brownsword (00:55)
Excellent. Now, Brandon, you are what we call a business architect in the world of fabric. But let’s leave that bit till the end, because what I’m really interested in is to learn a bit more about you and how you got here, because we were chatting a bit before in preparing for this. And you’ve got a bit of a fascinating background, which I guess prompted to this conversation and going.

That’s a converse. That’s a background that I want to capture and learn a lot more about. And I think there’s a heck of a lot of value here and background that working with clients are just going to get so much value from. So why don’t we start with giving us a bit about your potted background, bearing in mind we’ve only got half an hour to put it all on display.

Brandon Harris (01:45)
Well, I hear many people say they come from an entrepreneurial background and I’m also one of them with my dad starting the business that’s now Flowgas. So I grew up ⁓ playing soldiers on the back of a flatbed lorry and lifting heavy things, which was great fun. And it really did set me up for understanding the trials and tribulations of owning a business. saw many things in that world, including something I hadn’t told you.

when the whole thing blew up. My father had already sold the business but was still working for it. And unfortunately, and I’m pleased to say no one got killed, a couple got injured. But the main filling site, there was an issue there and it caught fire. And cylinders were blowing 300 feet in the air like missiles. So it literally blew up.

Darryl Bates-Brownsword (02:38)
Wow, so the business literally blew up, not the business blew

up.

Brandon Harris (02:43)
Yeah, so my first point is have insurance.

Darryl Bates-Brownsword (02:47)
have

insurance and do as much. ⁓ You can only mitigate risk so much as much as you can. then insurance is for what’s left.

Brandon Harris (02:50)
Yeah.

Yeah, and I went into the aftermath to try and help clear that up over many weeks. Quite an intriguing thing to see. Anyway, moving on to my background, many things as a kid, I’m sure we’ve all done little businesses and I did many. But my first proper one after sort of education finished for me was opening and running for three years a business making giant cookies. It’s a strange thing to be in, but we loved that time. I did it with a younger business partner.

who had spent a little bit of time in Canada and seen a product that wasn’t available in the UK and we got together to develop an even better product than that and weirdly it’s 30 odd years ago now but it had a healthier recipe made with many oats you know something like a flapjack but in a cookie form and the equipment of the day couldn’t make it so we had to even modify

machinery from the meat industry to make the product. And lots of people said, why don’t you just change the product? But we were very, very keen that we had something different. And long story short, over three years, we really did learn everything around running an ill-funded startup, getting to national distribution. And the takeaway from…

was stick to your guns. You know, we felt like we had a really interesting, novel product and we were able to sell it to many, many people on our own brand and also white label for others and won quite a few contracts when they were, you know, comparing all sorts of competitor products. As far as I’m aware, we won every one of those we went into because the product was better. Anyway, we sold that business successfully after three years.

of working probably six days a week. And it was a real interesting introduction into genuinely owning a business and developing it.

Darryl Bates-Brownsword (05:02)
So I’m just wondering, Brandon, you mentioned earlier that your dad, your father, you grew up in an entrepreneurial household. How much of that do you think influences someone becoming, starting a business themselves and entrepreneurial as opposed to someone who grew up in a family where their parents were in, I guess, I don’t know what to call it, traditional employment?

Brandon Harris (05:25)
Well, I don’t have a huge amount of data other than my own, but weirdly I have two sons, 23 and 21. The 23 year old, I am the EOS implementer for his business, which is hyper niche, delivering entertainment experiences on super yachts. And that must say something about what he felt he could do, because he had a great degree in film and TV, but opted to do this.

And then my youngest son, still at uni in Plymouth, but we were at a networking together yesterday, he’s on holiday at the moment, and he’s starting a skincare brand. So both my sons have gone into self-employment, entrepreneurial businesses, and I did too. I can’t really believe I’d be happy working for somebody else. And I’ve had that feeling for many years.

Because after the cookie business, I did go and work for a range of other people, small entrepreneurial businesses and a larger corp, a large publishing business called EMAC. And I had two fantastic years there. They paid for me to do an MBA. I loved working for them for that two year period when I was sort of quite junior. But I realized climbing that corporate ladder is not going to be for me.

That’s when I then decided to do something else, which was open my first gym. And I opened that 22 years ago in Hove. It’s still going, I’m pleased to say. And that was a success from day one, even though it was just a warehouse when I got there. And it allowed me the sort of financial engine, if you like, to open around 10 other.

fitness and health businesses. We stayed quite local because I wanted a decent family life, but we went into most areas of fitness and health over a 20 year period. And the vast majority of those businesses were successful, selling many of them on the way to effectively people who had been my staff, became my business partners. A couple didn’t work and we learned from that. And I finally exited from the main business there in 2019.

just for COVID touch wood, that was luck. And prior to me spending five years up until now doing EOS.

Darryl Bates-Brownsword (07:57)
So what I’d love to do is just dig into that for a sec. So, because it’s, want to explore the entrepreneurial flair and what it means to, I guess, be an entrepreneur, because, you know, what I heard is, is your father had one business. You start, the only way, I guess, that you followed in your father’s footsteps in that you, is that you were being a business owner. You didn’t follow in the same industry. Your lads have done the same thing. They’ve both gone off and started their own businesses in two,

totally different niche areas. We know already of your first business was a cookie business, you giant cookies. Your second business was a gym. So two totally different industries there. What is it? What’s the common thread of how in your mind, your experience, how you identified an opportunity or an ease to go, Hey, look, I need to start a business doing this. Yeah, it was it.

a realization that, look, there’s a market segment out there that has this problem to be solved and I need to solve that problem for them and provide them with cookies or a gym, or is it a case of, ⁓ hey, look, all other cookies are bad. There’s an opportunity to do cookies differently and set ourselves apart. There’s an established cookie market, or there’s an established gym market, but everyone else is doing it wrong. I know a better way of doing it.

let me prove that to myself and to the marketplace. Because yeah, it seems to be always one of two different streams. ⁓ I’ve got a new product to take to market, or I can service the existing market better and just do a better job of it. Is that what was going through your head? How did you make your decisions?

Brandon Harris (09:42)
Two different stories. ⁓ the first one was really by luck. I won’t elaborate the story much more. I said, take up your half an hour and I’d probably cry. But I met my business partner in cookies at a business show where we were trying to win an award from Shell of all people, the petrol people. And I had a fledgling business prior to that. I won’t bore you with the details. He had a

tiny idea of the cookies and we met at this show and realized we were both a little bit lonely as leaders, you know, we very young, but and we got on so well during the judging of this show that we decided to dump one of the businesses and do the other just because we got on so well. And I love food, you can’t tell I’m not a particularly big guy, but I could lose a few pounds.

I’ve always loved food and sweet treats particularly and it just seemed compelling to me to do something in that industry. So it was kind of luck.

Darryl Bates-Brownsword (10:54)
a bit of fun, a bit of luck,

a bit of opportunity. ⁓ know, things come together. You saw a need in the, guess, and you thought, we can do this.

Brandon Harris (11:07)
I would be lying to say we saw a need. The food industry is so huge and it’s probably even bigger now than it was then with coffee chains and everything else that’s come in in the last 20 years. If you get a great product and have some nows around distributing it in some way, I think you can probably create a small business in food without too much difficulty. Scaling it, that’s a whole other conversation.

Darryl Bates-Brownsword (11:09)
Right, okay.

Brandon Harris (11:36)
But no, just, one thing I have had, I’m so lucky to have done this, because I can’t think of a job I’ve had right up to now that I haven’t been passionate about. You know, I said I loved food, it was a great product. And so why would you not love it? But moving to the gyms, that was a completely different scenario, because I just moved to Hove from the Midlands.

I engineered ⁓ a move with my publishing company so I could work from London and I commuted to London every day, which was tough back then. But young, I’d just been married. We had planned to have kids. We hadn’t had any kids just at that point. But slight aside, the week I opened my first gym, my wife gave birth to Oscar, oldest son, and she had to ring me three times in the Porter cabin.

where I was pre-selling memberships because there was a queue and I didn’t want to let the memberships go. She’ll never let me forget that particular story. But anyway, back to the point. That was an extremely conscious decision. if my memory serves me right, it was for three things. One, I wanted a balanced life where I could control my time.

And in the gym industry, I felt as though that was likely to be possible. We opened long hours, but I didn’t have to be there all those hours. So I felt like, well, you I think when the kids are young, I can pretty much manage my own time. And that proved to be true. Number two, I wanted to do something positive. My father, love him to bits, died quite young at 69.

and maybe the last 10 years of his life were not as good as they could have been due to health. And that health was super fit guy who played rugby for the Tigers when he was young, did not maintain that and had a heart attack 10 to 20 years before he died, so quite young, but did not follow a healthy regime during that period. And I saw that if he had regularly exercised.

and not smoked and eat. Well, he was never a big guy, but he didn’t eat great food, too many buns and cakes. And if he had changed his ways, I’m sure he, one, he would have been healthier, two, he’d have lived longer. And the gym was a little bit to do with that, providing something to a community that was positive rather than negative. And then the third thing was local.

Darryl Bates-Brownsword (14:09)
Cookie.

Brandon Harris (14:30)
So it ties in with the time management thing that I wanted to do something significant in a local area. Gyms typically have a five to 10 minute pull if you’re driving less, you’re, well, maybe the same if you’re walking. And so it was bound to be a local group, a community that I was involved in. And I think we did some great work in that area of the club over a 20 year period for older people.

for people that had difficulties getting to gyms, or for women who didn’t really have comfortable and easy places to exercise back in the day. When I started gyms were a bit male and sort of heavy weights based, unless you went to classes. And so all of those things combined to go, what can I do that will hit all of those marks? And the gym was one of those. And weirdly, the fourth and least important of all,

Darryl Bates-Brownsword (15:11)
Okay.

Brandon Harris (15:27)
was there was a chance I would make reasonable money. You know, I wanted a decent standard of life, but it was not the overarching reason why I started in gym. And I had amazingly some opportunities to grow one area of what I created ⁓ over the 20 year journey, a very early adopter and quite novel leading the way really in small group fitness, which is everywhere now, but it-

kind of didn’t exist back then. And I was offered by John Trahan, the ex owner of the gym group, an opportunity to put one of these in every gym group that was opening in the early stages and they have well over 100 now. But you know what? I didn’t do it. I was nervous of the financial implications. So that’s just experience and financial literacy and attitude to risk. And secondly,

it would have taken me away from home. And so it crossed off one of my tick boxes, which was I want to be with my family. And so I didn’t say yes to that. And financially, I’m sure it’s a mistake, but in terms of my family life, it was positive.

Darryl Bates-Brownsword (16:41)
So you touched on a couple of the lessons there. I’m wondering, Brandon, what were the lessons that you learned in the first business, the cookie business, that transferred into the gym business that were ⁓ able to get you up and running perhaps a bit quicker than you would have if it were your first business?

Brandon Harris (16:58)
There’s two I can think of. I love him to bits and we’re friends now but one of the reasons we sold the cookie business was our business partnership went astray. Now, bearing in mind my business partner was 20, I was 25. I was with a steady girlfriend who became my wife. He wasn’t. And the six days a week work ethic

over in year three just started to grind him down and I think he needed a break and we you know some things happened that meant that I couldn’t or didn’t really want to work with him anymore. And so ⁓ be careful of who you partner with and we didn’t have anything such as an EOS style VTO back in the day which is a vision document super simple one and if we had and we’d also

considered our vision personally, maybe we’d have picked that up earlier and been able to make some different choices. What else? We had no money and starting any business with no money is tough. So we organically grew. I was very naive at that point in my life around ⁓ investment, partnering. We got some money from the Princes Trust.

But we were mindset of ⁓ transaction day to day, what gets us into next month, what might get us into next year. We weren’t investment growth minded. Okay, we have done well. We’ve gone from nothing to step one. What do we want step two to be? How should we get there? What financial options are there? Taking an investor, et cetera, et cetera.

We did not really think of that business in that way. Too business naive at that point in my life.

Darryl Bates-Brownsword (18:57)
And everyone starts off naive the first time they do it. So if we were to put out a couple of lessons there, it’s cultural and commercial alignment of the founders, i.e. commercially, where do we want to take this? And culturally, lifestyle, aspirations, energy, how much do we want to put into it? Are we aligned on both those sides of the equation to take the business, are we pointed in the same direction?

Brandon Harris (19:23)
Can I just interject? In my five years of EOS, I have seen the same issue in businesses. Several I’m thinking are up to 20 million pounds revenue. And two things in that point come to mind I’ve seen many times. One, multi-generational family issues that the sons or daughters are just not on the same page as the parents and are taking the business over. And some of the family

Darryl Bates-Brownsword (19:31)
Yeah.

Brandon Harris (19:52)
who are all working in the business just have very different aspirations and some other partnerships where they just clearly wanted different things. And so I’ve really seen an accelerated version of that, a much bigger version of that in some of my clients. And EOS luckily, and Fabric will help them in the early stages, part of a CSA or the first year of working with them, help resolve that for sure.

Darryl Bates-Brownsword (20:22)
Yeah, it’s a common issue where business owners ⁓ aren’t aligned and it’s so often they never have that conversation beyond a concept level of detail. They just go, here’s an idea, let’s run with it. But they don’t think upwards and think of where do we want to take this as a business and, know, visionally, from a vision perspective, where do we want it to go? And a culture perspective. What do we want the style of this business to

Brandon Harris (20:50)
Also,

you’re right. And to add to that, something really close to home that I got from Dean, our MD, about ⁓ three or four years ago, was I must have been talking to him about a particular client who had an aspiration for 30 million turnover. And actually, I think the early days of Fabric were in his mind at the time. And I connected him with my client, owner of the business.

because I used him as someone who had a bit more experience with larger businesses about, you know what a 30 million pound business will look like in your industry? And when he was just better at explaining that at that time than I was, he pointed this out to her and we extrapolated into people, teams, geographical locations. She ran a mile and that business has actually been scaled back.

to be more of a family lifestyle business now and they’re very happy. But when I first started with them, they were expansionary minded and they didn’t really want it. It was a misfit. So understanding what the next jump is, whether if you’re 10 million or less potentially, and you’ve got some mental aspiration for times 10, 50 million pound business, it might be very helpful.

to have an understanding of what that actually looks like in terms of managerial and leadership structure. And a lot of people haven’t done it.

Darryl Bates-Brownsword (22:25)
Well, exactly. The other thing I wanted to pick up on and ask you a question around is when business owners aren’t aligned and they haven’t had those conversations around alignment and both culturally and commercially, is it typically they don’t have a shareholders agreement that ⁓ protects them and provides a framework or a pathway of what will happen at some point in the future when they do need to separate and go ways.

It’s a bit like a pre-nup for a business. Did you guys have one of those?

Brandon Harris (22:58)
We did not in the main, the cookie business, no. In the gym, when I started to create partnerships with staff who elevated to ownership, I had met the powerhouse that is Penina Shepherd from Acumen Business Law locally with me, it’s quite a well-known lady.

And she had really made sure that I understood all of these risk elements of partnerships. And I did indeed have a director’s agreement, shareholders agreement, all of that stuff in place for those. So it was a lesson learned. And I did have some issues where they needed to be used. Yeah. Luckily in my second business, as I started expanding it, yes, we did have those in place. But your question was about clients, a mixed bag.

Many have those typically that haven’t been looked at since they started the business and the business is very different even with different people in it. So they’re no way up to date. They’re not fit for purpose. They have risk there for sure. And right down to a relatively recent, I kind of hope he doesn’t see this podcast, relatively recent situation where a owner of a business has a leadership team and

This was brought up by me because he’s very reliant on them. And he got a bit nasty, didn’t want to do it. Not because of not wanting to lay out the future. He was just nervous of it, the immediate cost of it and the time that it would take. just, he obviously had a raw nerve and knew it was out of date. A whole range of risk of…

aversion in his business and he didn’t really like me bringing it up because it was a raw nerve and he knew he hadn’t got it done. But in true fashion, you know, we’re going to go there. People like business architects at Fabric are not going to shy away from laying out the reality in front of business owners. I hope most of it they’ll love, some of it they might not like.

Darryl Bates-Brownsword (24:59)
Yeah.

It’s good.

It’s a really good point because I think ⁓ human nature is, you know, if it raises fears, we want to run away from it and, and mortality fears, you know, at some point in the future where it’s not golden like it is today. ⁓ We don’t want to talk about it. We, tend to keep our heads in the sand and ⁓ we, we benefit from someone like a business architect, someone like yourself, an advisor of some sort. Probing and prodding us.

Brandon Harris (25:24)
Yes.

Darryl Bates-Brownsword (25:46)
to address that risk because it ain’t gonna go away if we just keep our head in the sand. And what you touched on earlier is you mentioned a good commercial lawyer. As businesses grow, the owners, don’t have all the answers, but you pointed out the importance of surrounding yourself with great advisors who have your interests, but they are proactive in pointing out these things. I think you said your lawyer Panina.

⁓ did that. said, here’s the issues, Brandon, and you need to get these agreements in place to protect you at some point in the future. may not feel like you need it now, but she’s going, I’ve seen it before. I’ve walked this path. You need to protect yourself in this way. And it sounds like you had to use that at some point. And so it was a valuable ⁓ investment that you had made protecting yourself.

Brandon Harris (26:42)
Exactly that, exactly that. You just can’t know it all. And I see this all the time.

my future work with Fabric and what I’m up to now, we don’t have to be experts in the client’s business. How can you be? You know, I love to immerse myself in it and we certainly will do that. But they should know their operational business better than you. They’ve had many years of experience, but they can’t possibly know the entire environment in which they’re working. You know, we mentioned risk. There’s also the financial element of it.

I’m regularly shocked, I’m sorry to say, but how weak the financial function in many of the significant businesses that I work with is. You know, they don’t really understand scenario planning and tax at a higher level and many other areas that a really great CFO can deliver for a business that’s growth orientated and possibly exit orientated. And that’s a big eye opener for them.

and weirdly for the financial lead in the business in many cases. They don’t know what they don’t know in some cases.

Darryl Bates-Brownsword (28:01)
So you’ve moved away from, well, you’re still running your own business, but you’re now working with a number of other businesses in an advisory space yourself, understand as an EOS consultant and part of the fabric business team. Brandon, what is it about this work as an entrepreneur yourself? What is it about this sort of work, working with clients, guiding them, pointing them? What is it that you like about that? And

What are some of the lessons that you feel that you’ve learned that you can bring in in part on the businesses that you’re working with or importantly, the shareholders, the owners of the businesses that you’re working with?

Brandon Harris (28:37)
There’s two main things that I can think of. One is I’m lucky to just have an innate love of business. I can’t help myself. My son and I go to coffee shops all over Sussex. Brighton, you may know, is like the coffee capital of England. And we just rate the service and the layout and the how is that delivered? How is it sold? Could they have upsold us something? And we just…

absolutely fascinated by the levels that exist out there in such a tough commercial world. So I just have a genuine passion for business. And I suppose the other part of the answer to that question is I’ve done a lot of this myself and I’ve made plenty of mistakes.

So as many, maybe many advisors, maybe many BAs will be, you just want to help people not make those mistakes. You you’ve been there and done it smaller or larger than your client who knows, but you know, so many of the same mistakes get made again and again and again in varying forms in different industries. it’s, know, we can help people move.

work around those issues and not suffer the same problems because they’re fixable before they happen. And I’m pleased to be able to be celebrating other people’s financial wins. Hey, I like to be well rewarded. There’s nothing wrong with that. But if I can help a client exit a business for a life-changing amount of money.

That’s such a massive win and I’ve seen it and have many colleagues who have done that and you can see what a difference it makes. And you know what, one of the biggest differences is not the financial wealth itself, but the weight off their mind. When the exit is complete and they are no longer totally accountable for all of those people and that machine that they’ve been accountable for, for sometimes decades.

It weighs on you in many cases I’ve experienced and when that’s finally shed people feel very light and it’s not just the money.

Darryl Bates-Brownsword (31:09)
Yeah, it’s a important and privileged role that we have ⁓ being able to get that close to business owners and help them and guide them. Brandon, am I interested in your thoughts of what, because effectively you’re talking about working with business owners to prepare their business so that it could be sold. you know, sometimes that’s called being exit ready. I’m wondering what your response is when people and business owners you meet say,

Hey, I have no intention of selling my business anytime soon. Why do I want to get it exit ready?

Brandon Harris (31:43)
I had no intention of selling my gym when I sold it. I thought it was going to be two or three years into the future, if not more. And I had some vague idea that it might be ⁓ under management with possibly some ownership with the managing team. And I would be a visionary ⁓ owner’s box ⁓ owner, not actively involved in the business. But sometimes things are out of your control.

And ⁓ in this case, it was multiple large big box gyms coming into my geography at one time. Just at the same time, we’d almost hit a peak or it was even gathering acceleration. The boutique, personal training setups and small group gyms, which I mentioned earlier, we’d started years ago. But there seemed…

five years ago to be an acceleration of them. And they just all take five or 10 clients, five or 10 clients here, five or 10 clients here. And then the big box opened and took 200 of my, you know, 1500 members, but it was all the profit. And suddenly for 20 years, I was quite conscientious in having a, at least a 12 month cashflow.

scenario in front of me every week of how do we think we’re doing and over 20 years you get pretty good at you know being accurate and for the first time I saw a downturn. I thought this profitable business that’s fed my family for 20 years incredibly well for the last 10. I cannot see a good future for this and I had to make a call whether I was going to invest

anything up to half a million quid to reinvent the gym and the physical space to compete or maybe exit. And so I don’t want it all to be about me, but I opted to exit. So it wasn’t the exit that I had planned. And I suppose that’s my answer to the question is Always better to be exit ready, maximize what you have. It’s a huge asset. And then if you are caught short, it’s maximized and you can make a quick

healthy exit. And if you choose to do that over a longer period of time, the work has already been done. You’ll probably be running a better, more profitable business for the remainder of your time as owner. So there is just a lot of pressure and positivity in being exit ready early, early doors.

Darryl Bates-Brownsword (34:29)
And it sounds like the fact that you were ready and prepared and your house was in order, so to speak, that when you had to change your mind and go, we need to go down this route, there was no delays, which means you could get interest. when people came to lift the hood and look under the covers of your business, there was nothing scary. There was no additional work or minimal additional work that needed to be done. And they could actually. ⁓

Brandon Harris (34:55)
I’ve got to put my hand up, Daryl. I was not ready.

What I’ve learnt in the last five years in my EOS life has transformed what I would have done. I was very much running that business as a lifestyle business. I think when people asked me, I said I was building a gym group. It’s just not true. Now I look back on it. A lot of the decisions I made, financially, investment, funds, all this kind of stuff.

Well, really to feed the family in a healthy way. And if I had my time again, I would have done many things differently. We did exit very quickly. It was a very easy sale, very light due diligence. Luckily, really, we had a fantastic digital presence. We’d always done the right thing. We had great reviews, hundreds of reviews, because we had worked hard to get that both

posters in the gym and digitally as that came through. And we had a very good name in the market. And the guy that bought the gym came from the digital space. And the first thing he did was look at our digital footprint and was it well received. And it was so good that he didn’t really care about true due diligence. Yeah, I know, and bought it kind of sight unseen.

Really, it was a handshake deal and three weeks later the job was done.

So, kinda lucky.

Darryl Bates-Brownsword (36:27)
Yep. Well, yeah, a certain amount of business is, you know, comprises of luck. yeah, luck and hard work and a few ideas gets us there.

Brandon Harris (36:39)
But if we hadn’t spent 20 years looking after clients really well and getting great testimonials, whatever the format of that, that wouldn’t be in place. So don’t take away from the hard work of being that business, but because we were that business. And also something else you may know, fish and chip shops, gyms, there may be others. I just can’t quite think of them right now. They always sell.

Darryl Bates-Brownsword (36:46)
Yeah!

That’s the hard work.

Brandon Harris (37:09)
⁓ because people have a passion for their hobbies. In many cases, I don’t know why I said fish and chip shops. I just happen to know that they always sell. But gyms, there’s always a plethora of people who have got fit in later life and they maybe weren’t fit early and the gym has changed their life in some way. Or they’re kind of sport billies and they’ve always been gym members and they used to be captain of a team, but they are an accountant or something like that.

And they’ve always got this passion for, I’d love to own a gym. I think it might be the same with restaurants. Yes, this kind of stuff. So again, I was in a business where there’s always people interested. Doesn’t mean you’re gonna get the best deal, but you are probably gonna sell your gym.

Darryl Bates-Brownsword (37:44)
and wineries.

in. Brandon, let’s ⁓ see if we can pull it all together. ⁓ You’ve got a truckload of experience. You’ve built and sold several businesses yourself. You’ve come from an entrepreneurial background. You’ve learned you’re now operating in the last few years as an advisor, helping other businesses grow. What is it unique if there’s a stack of business advisors out there? What is it that your strengths and ⁓ that is unique about you that ⁓ I think will really add value to clients?

Brandon Harris (38:28)
Well, I have been there and done it to a certain degree and that really helps credibility and true understanding of perhaps some of the psychology of what ⁓ the leaders and owners of a business are going through towards exit. I have to say a huge thank you to my community. That’s people in fabric and people in EOS.

I meet a lot of advisors and I did so yesterday at a paddle networking event in Sussex. interesting, never done one of those before. And I meet a lot of people that work for themselves and say, that’s what I do. I’m a business advisor and I help people grow their businesses and stuff like this. And I think that’s interesting. You know, what format do you use? How have you got experience with just being one person to know this is going to work?

And they don’t. In many cases, they have owned one business, exited quite well, and think that their one experience applies to all. And unfortunately, it does not. And then I see people that have been in banks and things like that, somewhat advisory and in a corporate way. And they think that is enough. But they are talking about a

tiny slice of a really big pie. And because of the community I’ve been in and the wide plethora of businesses I’ve worked with, and that’s just me, but the community times that by 800, we have been able to get experiential knowledge from an enormous range of business sizes and business types and industries. And that is impossible.

to recreate being a solo advisor. So I have had that for over five years and the fabric team just makes that even wider and you cannot bring the depth of experience we can bring by doing this yourself. It’s impossible.

Darryl Bates-Brownsword (40:41)
Brandon Harris. Thanks for sharing your exit insights with us today.

Brandon Harris (40:46)
Pleasure, see you soon.