Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Welcome to the Dealmaker Uncut podcast where we speak to some of the UK's most exciting entrepreneurs and hear their investment journeys. We'll discuss the challenges, successes and lessons they've learned along the way with expert deals commentary from Jonathan Boyers, head of Alvarez and Marcel Corporate Finance, and me, Chris McGuire, executive editor at Business Cloud.
Welcome everyone to the latest episode of the Dealmaker Uncut podcast, powered by Alvarez and Marcel. My name is Chris Maguire and I'm the executive editor of Business Cloud. As always, I'm joined by the multiple award winning dealmaker himself, Jonathan Boyers. Jonathan's been involved in deals totaling billions of pounds during his long and illustrious career and he's the managing director and head of Alvarez and Marcel's corporate finance practice in the uk. Welcome, Jonathan.
[00:00:50] Speaker B: Thanks, Chris. Great to be here. Very excited about today's session.
[00:00:54] Speaker A: I can feel it in your voice. This is a podcast that gets you inside the deal. So in the first part of today's show, we're going to be interviewing our special guest. After that, we'll have a little break. And in part two, Jonathan will be leaning on his 35 plus years of working in corporate finance to answer listener questions. Jonathan, you know our special guest better than most. Who are we speaking to today?
[00:01:15] Speaker B: Well, today, Chris, we're speaking to Ruth Percival.
So Ruth is the founder and CEO of Contolo Group, which is one of the more interesting buy and build platforms in the mid market the moment. Operating in the cost management and M and E consulting sector.
Ruth's overseen five acquisitions in less than 18 months and she's got several more in the pipeline. And from a standing start, Contolo has grown to a turnover of 35 million and 230 people.
Ruth is smart, intelligent and beautiful.
And I'm proud to say she's also my wife.
Hi, Ruth.
[00:01:55] Speaker C: Hi, Jonathan. Hello, Chris. Lovely to be here.
[00:01:58] Speaker A: Just full disclosure, Jonathan's never described any other guests as being beautiful, smart and intelligent. And they all are as well.
[00:02:06] Speaker C: I'm very pleased to hear that.
[00:02:07] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think only Jonathan Boyers would introduce you as a CEO of Contolo Group before mentioning the fact that you're also his wife.
[00:02:15] Speaker C: He does get his priorities right occasionally.
[00:02:17] Speaker A: Okay, good news. That's good news.
So, Ruth, as well as sharing my birthday of May 9, you've had an eventful career and before launching Contolo as well, you had more than 20 years working in M and A. But I know you best from your days at BDO where you had a track record for advising clients Especially on buy and build strategies. Would that be a fair summary of your early career, Ruth?
[00:02:36] Speaker C: So I had an amazing career at bdo. There was a great team there, really fabulous leadership team and they were really supportive of me. It's funny, at the time it didn't seem like a big deal, but when I look back and realize I was the first female M and a partner they'd had at BDO and I don't know, think there were many, if any, in the north of England at the time.
So they took a punt on me and I didn't realise they were doing that at the time.
And I look back and think it was fantastic. But it was a different era.
The track through for women in senior positions in professional services was really difficult.
I'd like to think some of those challenges that I faced then don't exist today. I hope there's less misogynism that than there was then, but I suspect a lot of the challenges for women in professional services are exactly the same.
So from my perspective, to succeed in professional services you need to be able to win work. And it's very often a culture of playing golf or having a passion for sport, lots of boozing with clients and other people and that can be really tough for a woman.
For a woman coming through. I think for ladies you've got to perform out of your skin to compete with quite an average male counterpart.
[00:04:00] Speaker A: Yeah, okay. Get off the fence, Ruth.
[00:04:03] Speaker B: So I'll just add one thing because obviously I observed Ruth coming through to the partnership at BDO and it has informed how I view our business.
Making sure that the gender balance is right and that females have an opportunity to progress properly.
And I definitely have been well informed and I learned a lot from observing the way that Ruth went.
Less than half a percent of the managing directors or partners in the investment banking community in the uk, partner and director are female. And that is an astonishing statistic, which really means that our industry needs to change.
[00:04:51] Speaker A: We were putting together a list last year of, and I was trying to get a list of female deal makers and there just aren't enough and there aren't. It was, it was, I mean, it was, it was almost embarrassing because you get people coming and join the profession but then they don't, they don't continue through the partner level, etc. Etc. Etc. Okay, this is about your good self, Ruth. So you spent a couple of years at EA Technology, but the bit of your career I want to talk to you about next is your time at the Chief Integration Officer at a company called Fisherwack Group of Companies, where you ran a team of 150, a big company. People might not realize what it does on the size of the scale of the business. Just tell us a bit about fisherwack.
[00:05:28] Speaker C: So fisherwack is a medical communications business and latterly marketing business as well, and it served big pharmaceutical clients like AstraZeneca, GSK, Sanofi. They'd grown to 1400 people by the time I joined them through acquisition. So they'd done a buy and build. In fact, I'd advise them. That's how I'd got to know them. And they'd been a client of mine and they bought 17 businesses over a period of about 13 years.
So my role was, as I say, chief integration officer, which was quite a wide ranging role. So I did lead a team of 150. They were sort of internal people serving the rest of the business that think about digital editorial, videography, that kind of thing. But I also did lots of work commercially and operationally. So I spent a lot of time renegotiating pricing with all these large pharmaceutical clients, which I've really enjoyed actually, and then lots of operational integrations. So there, if you think about harmonizing payrolls, harmonizing pay and benefits, rolling people onto the same, the same platforms for managing projects and timesheets and that kind of thing, that was really difficult. So some of it went really well, other things didn't go so well and it was quite a steep learning curve. But I did form a really clear view of how I would love that to work, which is the ethos I brought to Contolo and that is really people and culture first. I think if you can get people in the right frame of mind, then the integration can run smoothly and be a lot less painful.
[00:07:10] Speaker B: You were working at fisherwack? As it happens, I'd sold fisherwack to bridgepoint.
[00:07:16] Speaker C: I'd introduced you to them.
[00:07:19] Speaker B: So I sold Fishwack to bridgepoint. It went well for a couple of years, didn't it? Profits were growing and then unexpectedly, the founders left. And as a consequence, following on from that, then several of the management team left again, quite unexpectedly.
And so you found yourself looking for new opportunities and having to decide what to do with the rest of your career might just be worth talking about that period.
[00:07:49] Speaker C: Yeah, it was a very humbling time for me. I was 49, I spent 20 odd years doing M and A and then I'd made this what felt like a brave, possibly mad career swap to do. And I'd spent four years in commercial and operational roles, and I just didn't know what to next. I thought I was unemployable, which I think is from speaking to you, Chris, is a sentiment you hear from lots of entrepreneurial founders. My father was dying as well, so in the end it turned out to be serendipitous because I did actually get to spend quite a bit of time with him in his last few months, which I don't think I'd ever have done if I'd have been still going hell for leather working at fisherwack full time. So I guess stuff happens for a reason.
My friend Oliver, who was one of the founders that you mentioned, he asked me, he was looking at what to do next and he asked me to work with him just a few days a week looking for investment opportunities. And that turned out to be a bit of a lifeline because it gave me some focus and back into this sort of office environment, even if it was a few days a week. So it helped me get my head back together.
It turns out finding investment opportunities was really a lot more difficult than we thought. But in the end, probably after a year or so and quite a lot of work, we came up with two viable projects. Contolo is one of them, and then we had another developing a healthcare offering. And I focused most of my time on Contello.
[00:09:17] Speaker B: So I know a bit about the journey, obviously, but I think listeners will be interested in hearing how you and Oliver went about identifying the sector and identifying targets and just how you brought the Contolo opportunity together.
[00:09:32] Speaker C: I've already described fisherwack, so it was a buy and build and it had been back through multiple, multiple phases of growth by private equity. And so we wanted to do. Decided we wanted to do that again. So can we do another buy and build? But we can't do it and didn't want to do it in medical communications. We want to be in professional services because we both understood professional services.
So we looked for a sector with a highly fragmented market, which means lots of small consultancies that are available to buy. There's lots of regulatory change going on in construction at the moment and has been for the last few years, and that will continue.
And there's also some big players who have been growing through M and A. So the, the concept of doing that isn't alien. It's not, you know, we're not creating some white elephant of trying something completely from scratch. There's. There's other successful platforms, but they're doing it at a bigger, a bigger scale.
The thing that's so. So Contolo is very much about bringing together the professional team which within consultancy to the built environment. So if you think about what that professional team is, it's everybody from architects, cost managers, planners, quantity surveyors, mechanical electrical engineers, civil structural engineers, that's what you would consider the professional team. We've chosen to build strength and depth in cost and project management and mechanical and electrical engineering. And the reason for that is, is firstly, it's probably the largest share of the wallet of that professional team, but it's also really exciting because by bringing those two disciplines together, you can deliver ultra low carbon solutions for clients. So when you think about a client at the inception of a project and the advice they need, navigating a really complicated world to bring down embedded carbon and operational carbon over the lifetime of their, of their asset, they really want the engineers and the cost managers to be talking right at the beginning and giving them those options. And that's what we're doing at Contolo
[00:11:45] Speaker A: to put you on the spot. Given Jonathan's background in corporate finance and deal making.
When you sit around the dinner table and you're talking about everything, is Jonathan a help or a hindrance?
[00:11:57] Speaker C: He's very helpful, Chris. I don't know how you could ever doubt it.
So we talk a lot about business and corporate finance in our home and several of our children are interested in it too. So it's a regular topic of conversation. I have sought Jonathan's counsel all the way through this. I wouldn't have done it without his support and backing in me.
It has to be said that it turns out taking actual advice from your husband in a formal setting is really very irritating. So I did try that at the beginning and that didn't last very long, so.
But I do rely heavily on Jonathan's council.
[00:12:36] Speaker B: So we're both running businesses that are scaling up, have been scaling up really quickly and now we've got several hundred people from more modest starts. So we have got a lot of shared sort of things that we think we're wrestling with.
[00:12:51] Speaker A: Well, that was an observation that struck me really in terms of Contalo, you made five acquisitions, I think in 13 months you got to 35 million turnover, 236 staff. If you look at what Jonathan's done, you know, since he joined Alvarez and Marcel, it's very, very scalar scaling, growing very quickly, interest all over the world as well.
I just imagine what, what dinner's like around your.
[00:13:14] Speaker C: In your house late.
[00:13:17] Speaker B: The only thing we talk about more than Corporate finance are our new kittens.
[00:13:22] Speaker A: Right, okay. Well, this is a different side of the Dealmaker Uncut podcast that our listeners never heard before.
Talk about your buy and build strategy.
You acquired five businesses. Your first acquisition was Abacus, a leading cost and project management consultancy. And your second acquisition was a mechanical and electrical consultancy called. Is it pronounced Taze?
[00:13:42] Speaker C: Taze.
[00:13:43] Speaker A: So can you talk us through the process of identifying acquisition targets?
[00:13:49] Speaker C: We're looking for small regional consultancies in project and cost management and M and A. And by that I mean anything from the smallest one we bought had 22 staff and the largest had 76. So if you think broadly, 30 to 100 people, that's our target. We want to be strong in sector because sector is really important to clients and it provides resilience to our business.
And ideally, we want consultancies that are serving national clients, often from a particular geography. So. So we can make that. We can really make the most of our expanded regional footprint. We've got 18 offices from Edinburgh all the way through England and down to Frankfurt, believe it or not.
However, what I learned about integration at fisherwack is that success of integration and bringing businesses together really depends on the attitude of your leadership team. So the most important thing for these acquisitions is we're seeking leaders with a growth mindset. And what do I mean by that? I mean they want growth for themselves, personally and professionally. They're joining a leadership team alongside me, and they are helping form and deliver our strategy. So I want them to still be really interested in the next step stage of their own career, but we need them to want growth for their people and. And for their clients as well.
You get to see a lot when you're buying businesses. So when you're engaging through and negotiating a transaction that can take anywhere from three months to 12 months sometime, you get to see people in a very personal way, actually. So you see what they're like when they're winning in this negotiation, what they're like when they're losing. Do they consult with the rest of the leadership team? Do they take advice?
We want leaders who are worried about their team. So every business we brought into Contolo, the primary concern of that leadership team was very much, what's going to happen to my staff? Are my team going to be okay? Is this a safe place for them to come? And have they got opportunity here? And I think it's really important while you're doing all of that to tell them the truth about what's going to happen. So you've got to be clear about integration and the challenges of it, all of the benefits and the exciting stuff that we can do together as well, but also face into the difficult stuff. And then you're letting people make a choice, aren't you, about whether they want to step into that. And so far, everybody has chosen to do that with us. So it's easy to find the business businesses, it's harder to find the right people.
[00:16:33] Speaker B: In order to do the acquisitions, it was necessary to raise some. Some funding. You raised quite a bit of money from private equity and the bank.
You've ended up as an investee company of North Edge.
One of the things I will often talk to my clients about is when they're thinking of doing a deal with a private equity house. It's not just the financial metrics of the deal, but it's also finding the right private equity investor for the situation.
So I think it would be useful if you could talk about how you went about choosing North Edge and how that relationship has evolved.
[00:17:15] Speaker C: Personally, I think your likely success lives or dies by who your partner is. And even if the success financially doesn't, your enjoyment of the journey definitely will. So I've seen firsthand the consequences of a bad fit fisherwaq, and right now I'm enjoying the benefits of a good one. So what do I think? It looks like we have a no dickheads rule at Contolo. So that applies to leadership teams that we bring in, people that we employ, and it most definitely applies to your funding partners, both banking and private equity.
[00:17:55] Speaker A: Rudy, I'm just going to say one thing there, which is that I've spoken to about three female founders who are hugely successful and they've all got a no dickheads policy.
[00:18:03] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:18:04] Speaker A: And it's like there's a lot of
[00:18:05] Speaker C: them in the world. You have to be quite. You have to be quite discerning.
[00:18:08] Speaker A: It's refreshing, though, to hear somebody say, this is our policy, because there's no ambiguity about that, is there?
[00:18:14] Speaker C: No.
[00:18:15] Speaker A: Anyway, I interrupted.
[00:18:16] Speaker B: You flow.
[00:18:17] Speaker C: You spend a lot of time at work and business can be wonderfully pleasing and it can be really difficult. So you need people that you trust and like who you can have some fun with, don't you? And that's.
That's what I mean.
I think you have to recognise when you're choosing a private equity partner, even a banking partner, that the people you're building relationship with through your fundraising process aren't necessarily the people that you'll be negotiating with when things get difficult.
And so, in my view, you have to evaluate that team all the way up the chain. Particularly in a buy and build like mine where you're going to have to pitch the investment committee reasonably regularly for follow on money or simply consent to do a deal. And North Edge are consistent in the characteristics of their team from top to bottom. So that does make it much easier. And the chain of command is short there. So we have Liam May who sits on our board, who's now partner and our sponsoring partner was Ray Stanton and. And they sit on the investment committee also know all the other characters there because actually once you're in, you're considered part of the family, which is actually a really, a really nice, a really nice thing. You've got all of their resources, which are considerable at your disposal and so if you're in a mess or something isn't going right, you need some help.
They will help or they'll find somebody who can.
I guess the one piece of advice I would give anybody thinking about this is choose your partner well, but always be transparent because what funders and bankers don't like is surprises. So as long as you're straight about what's going on in the business, whether it's good or bad, then you can deal with things together and that's how you build trust.
[00:20:20] Speaker B: So I've advised for 20, well, 30 years people raising private equity and the deal that the private equity house does with the management around the equity stakes and the rights and controlling rights and things like that.
I must say having been involved and observed the negotiation that you did and the deal that you've done with, with North Edge and how that's worked, I've been dramatically more well informed about how important it is to tailor those negotiations and in some things are vital, vitally important to whole really firm even if they feel off market.
And I must say in the last sort of 18 months when I've been negotiating with private equity houses on behalf of management teams, I've definitely been, been doing so with an additional level of gusto. So it's been really interesting. We've probably both learned quite a lot from that.
[00:21:20] Speaker C: Yeah, most definitely. It is different being on the client side of those conversations.
[00:21:28] Speaker B: So the business is now at 35 million of turnover and 230 people.
Obviously you've talked about integrating the acquisitions.
Obviously the business is growing.
I guess there's more in the pipeline.
Might just be worth about how you've been managing that growth and that integration.
[00:21:50] Speaker C: We've bought businesses that are all growing. So they've grown historically and they're continuing to grow.
Actually, one of the biggest challenges for our businesses is finding good people. So finding great engineers and project managers and quantity surveyors is really difficult. So we are growing our own. We're fairly keen on our apprenticeship program and leadership. Sorry. And training and development of our people is absolutely fundamental to it. But you're right, we bought five businesses in 13 months. The last one, that's between February 24th and April 25th. And then we've spent the period since then doing lots of integration work. So we've set the mission vision, values for. For Contolo. We've pitched that to everybody in the organisation. We've had everybody involved in developing out the value proposition.
We've moved most of the businesses onto the same IT platform. We've done a lot of work on branding. So the businesses are all now part of the Contolo Group. They've all had new websites which got launched just before Christmas. We've been harmonizing roles across the project and cost management side of the business and we'll go on to do that with M and E. The leadership team meet in person once a month. That's been really important.
They get to know each other. They're winning work together.
We won and delivered half a million pounds worth of work together last year, which is work we just wouldn't have had if we hadn't brought those businesses together. And we're targeting a million for this year, which doesn't seem much in the scheme of 35 million of turnover. But actually it's really important that we do that.
And the team like each other and they're building trusted relationships and they're happy to introduce each other to clients. So that's going really well.
The team also really like the opportunity to meet each other and get together. So we're having our first all team meeting with everybody and in Manchester on 12th March, which is exciting too. And then we're very. We're going really hard on the next round of acquisitions. So I want to.
We're really ambitious and we want to buy another 7 million of EBITDA in 2026. So that's probably another, I don't know, three to five acquisitions and we've got some in the pipeline and hopefully I'll be able.
[00:24:17] Speaker A: There's a serious point to this question, which basically means there's not a serious point to the start. Okay, so I've known you for quite a long time. I've known Jonathan for even longer. I'd be fairly confident. Jonathan's never been on Tinder. But if he was on Tinder and he said, I'm looking for somebody who understands private equity, buy and build and ma, that'd be quite a small pool of people, wouldn't it?
[00:24:38] Speaker C: Especially if you wanted a woman.
[00:24:39] Speaker A: Absolutely. Who did he specify? I don't know. I don't know if he special. All I'm saying is that when you're working in this sector, in the deal making sector, to find somebody to be with somebody who actually understands that sector like you is a rare thing. Would that be true?
[00:24:56] Speaker C: It is a rare thing. It is, but it's probably quite annoying at times, isn't it? Because I've always got a view and an opinion and Jonathan possibly doesn't always want to hear it.
[00:25:06] Speaker A: Yeah. Jonathan, what's your response to that?
[00:25:09] Speaker B: So, as I said, I think we synergize really well. We've got. We've got a great relationship, obviously, generally, but the opportunity to counsel each other. We understand difficult times and we understand deeply some of the problems that each other are facing. So I think it's a real asset for us, certainly. I feel like it's a real asset to me to have that counsel.
[00:25:34] Speaker C: It most definitely is. And to both be doing it at the same time. I think it would be really hard if one of us was embarking on something like this and the other one was sort of kicking the heels or sat around. I think it's. It's healthy that we're both very driven and ambitious.
[00:25:50] Speaker A: I mean, my wife and I are both journalists.
She's moved into comms, but. Yeah, exactly. But she understands my situation and vice versa as well. Final question before we go to the break, and that's this is that everyone knows Jonathan's got a big interest in music.
He regularly posts on social media about various concerts that he's been to. And I know Oasis was a particular favorite of Jonathan's as well, but he must have dragged you to a few concerts that weren't memorable or were memorable for the wrong reasons.
[00:26:15] Speaker C: I have been to a lot of concerts of varying calibres and descriptions over the years. I think ELO was possibly one of the worst. So that was last year. And Jeff Lynn appeared to actually have a stroke whilst on stage. To be honest, it was a lesson in team resilience because the band just played louder, danced harder, to kind of obfuscate from the fact that their leader was slumped on a chair at the front. Eventually he was actually carried off in his chair and they quickly turned the lights on, which was a signal frizzle all to go. So I left hoping that he hadn't actually died, which he hadn't. So the happy ending to the story is Jeff Lynn is still alive and well, but it was a low moment in concert going.
[00:27:02] Speaker B: He did manage to get through Mr. Blue sky at the end, albeit he was lying pretty flat on the floor.
[00:27:09] Speaker C: You might have said, right, I'm going to give this one a go. It literally was serious.
[00:27:15] Speaker A: I mean, he did actually take ill and he was supposed to be performing what was described as his last ever concert, a live concert at Hyde park, but he had to pull out because of ill health. Well, we'll have more stories about concerts that you've been to that haven't quite gone to plan after the break, but thanks very much, Ruth. And we're going to go for a quick break.
[00:27:33] Speaker C: Thank you.
[00:27:38] Speaker A: Welcome back to the second half of the Dealmaker Uncut podcast. We've just interviewed Ruth Percival, CEO of Contello and wife of Jonathan. Jonathan, what do you think of Ruth in terms of that story that she had?
[00:27:51] Speaker B: Well, I've got to say, I mean, I think Ruth is a remarkable person.
If you look at what she's achieved professionally, I think she, she's done an amazing job. What she did in the corporate finance industry was very impressive. But what Ruth and Oliver have created in Contolo is remarkable. And I'm just full of admiration. I mean, I love her to bits and for a whole load of other reasons as well. But professionally, she wouldn't describe herself as a role model to women in industry. But if there are women females looking for CEOs who have been doing a great job or females in my industry who are looking for inspiration, they don't need to look much further than Ruth.
[00:28:48] Speaker A: Yeah, I thought, I've known Ruth for a long time. I thought the Fisherwack story was really interesting, actually, in the way she opened up about the fact that it gave her time with her dad who was dying.
And also success isn't just a straight line. M and A isn't everything doesn't always go to plan.
And she spoke with a real, real rawness, really, about the denture of confidence in terms of, you know, what happened. But then the way she's come back with Contolo and she's, it's just, it is inspirational, actually, not just to other female deal makers and female founders, but, but other founders generally as well.
And like I say, anyone who can use the word dickhead on the Dealmaker on podcast definitely gets a thumbs up from me. So no and there's no excuse for not remembering my birthday now, Jonathan, because we share it.
May 9th. Okay. This next section is called Ask Jonathan is when listeners can ask Jonathan any question they want. So question number one, Jonathan, we've heard a lot about buy and build strategies and we've heard about it today. And the biggest challenge is managing and integrating people from acquired businesses into the larger group. You wrote a blog recently on this very subject in which you said the best guide to how people will behave when they join a business is how they behaved in the acquisition or recruitment process.
What are the red flags in your view?
[00:30:06] Speaker B: So buy and build. I'll just do a second or two on buy and build.
The private equity community really love buy and build opportunities because they get the opportunity to invest in a platform business and do one deal and then they can do a load of follow on deals and they're investing money in the business that they already know and they have a much higher level of control over the ability to buy well within the aim of effectively selling at a higher multiple when the business has been integrated.
There's more buy and build platform deals done now than any other type of private equity deal. So buy and build is now a really important part of the private equity market.
The buy and build model falls flat when you can't find things to buy.
And I think the things that we talked about in the session with Ruth, finding businesses that can be integrated is probably the most difficult challenge. Anybody can go and buy a business that doesn't really fit, maybe overpay for it and then, and then try and partially integrate it and hope that somebody will buy that enlarged group off you. But that model doesn't really work anymore. You have to be buying a business that can be integrated and can be integrated properly. And finding the people who are willing to join the team and find the right sort of people is a challenge. And some people are only interested in maximizing their own value, maximizing their cash out.
They'll walk away. Some people are even thinking of setting up to compete again.
So finding people who are passionate about the business want to ideally want to roll over an investment into your business and then becoming part of the leadership team. They're goldust and in the negotiation you would normally find out what makes people tick as Ruth talked about earlier.
So yeah, so that it's different. And like I say, Ruth's done an amazing job of doing that effectively.
[00:32:15] Speaker A: You just come alive when you talk about deals. It's like you're possessed. Jonathan 2025 ended with a late surge in megadeals. So how's 2026 started?
[00:32:26] Speaker B: So we've been talking about the possibility of the M and A market improving for a few years now.
We've come into this year. There's, there's still some difficulties in the market. Deals are still, there's lots of macroeconomic factors that create uncertainty and people are still a little bit nervous. But we have seen the back end of last year and the start of this year. We've seen a number of completions happen.
We've found that there's been loads of pitching, we've certainly been appointed on loads of new things. We're seeing the market feeling similar.
So I'm pretty confident that the market will see more deals during 2026.
It probably won't be the best year ever, but I think it will be better the best year of the last two or three.
[00:33:17] Speaker A: And just finally you posted a very youthful photo of yourself on LinkedIn. And if you're not following Jonathan on LinkedIn then you should about a deal that you concluded way back when. Now back then you said there were no mobile phones, no Internet.
And I know our younger listeners will be saying what? No Internet, no wi fi? And all those deals back then were done in person. So things have changed a lot since then. How big is AI now when it comes to actually that deal making process?
[00:33:42] Speaker B: So AI is becoming more integrated in certainly our deal process and I guess most people's deal processes almost every month now.
Most of our people now will be, well, almost everybody will use AI in one form or another every day.
We have our own platform that we security protected that people will be using all the time. People are using all the time.
Researching buyers, researching targets, gathering information is now AI is the natural route and even the traditional research tools will now be significantly enhanced by AI.
The research market is going through a period of change as AI takes hold. But in terms of production of information, we've now got a model that can help us produce information memoranda or sales documentation very, very quickly.
We did an exercise the other day where we, we'd written an IM in the standard way. It had taken four or five weeks. And then we applied the same information into an AI model that we've got written and it produced a version of an IM in 10 minutes.
Now it wasn't final, it would have still needed a lot of work, but it just shows that AI is now being integrated into documentation, production as well as, as well as research.
[00:35:17] Speaker A: The key is with AI and it's a different conversation entirely. It's, it's to assist. It should never be to replace. I'm seeing that a lot with content creation and so called journalism now as well. So that's all for this episode of the Dealmaker Uncut podcast, powered by Avros and Marcel. Massive. Thank you to you, Jonathan.
[00:35:35] Speaker B: No thanks, Chris. That was an obviously a special edition for me, which I really enjoyed.
[00:35:41] Speaker A: And more members of the Jonathan's family will be interviewed in due course. But a great story and Ruth's got a great story as well. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast, tell your friends and family and follow us on social media. Thank you very much.
