067: Taking That Step and Starting Something with Nigel Lake co-Founder of Pottinger and Atomli

We are in this place now, where doing things the same is becoming progressively more dangerous. And you see this is in the world’s top 20 technology companies have created several trillion dollars worth of value in the last 15-20 years. Despite the fact that they were up against some of the richest, most powerful best connected businesses in the world. That’s because the old guard did not deal with change.

#00:00:58-2# #NDB# Hello its Neil Ball here, thank you so much for joining me today on the entrepreneur way. The entrepreneur way is about the entrepreneur’s journey, the vision, the mind-set, the commitment, the sacrifice, failures and successes. I am so excited to bring you our special guest today, Nigel Lake. But before I introduce you to him, I have a little quote for you, Mike Wallis said, ‘we were the first people who did investigative stuff, who asked occasionally abrasive and occasionally confrontational questions.’ The entrepreneur way asks the questions so we all get the insight, inspiration and ideas to apply in our businesses. Nigel, welcome to the show, are you ready to share your version of the entrepreneur way with us?

#00:01:49-0# Nigel Lake co-Founder & Owner of Pottinger and Atomli : Yes I am Neil, I am looking forward to it.

#00:01:51-7# #NDB# Thank you for coming on the show Nigel. Nigel Lake is a corporate advisor and entrepreneur based in New York, Sidney and London. He started his career with KPMG and then Bearings in the UK. In 2002 he moved to Australia and co-founded Pottinger, a pre-eminent corporate advisory business, and in 2015 he co-founded Atomly – a programmatic analytics business based in New York. Nigel, can you provide us with some more insight in to your business and personal life, to allow us to get to know more about what you do and who you are.

#00:02:33-1# Nigel Lake co-Founder & Owner of Pottinger and Atomli : Sure, I guess I started out my career in the UK and I went through a pretty conventional education, I went through the chartered accounting path, with one of the big four firms in London and then went in to the world of what was once upon a time called Merchant Banking at a business called Bearings, which was a one-time famous business, long since gone, rather sadly, and again followed a fairly conventional career until gosh about the year 2002 when for various reasons I moved to Australia, I had met my wife who is also my business partner, and as we landed in Australia we decided we really did not want to work for anyone else any more. We wanted to have much more control over our own destiny and the environment we worked in and what we did and how we did it. So we took the rather bold and perhaps crazy decision to set up our own business.

#00:03:21-4# #NDB# Your business that you have got now, can you just tell us a little bit more about it?

#00:03:21-4# Nigel Lake co-Founder & Owner of Pottinger and Atomli : Sure, so what we did at the first part of this journey was to set up a business called Pottinger, which is part a pure advisory business, so a little bit like the bearings of old and like businesses like Lazard and Rothchild, and part of it is a strategic consulting business. So we took two businesses which have historically operated completely separately despite having quite overlapping skillsets that are required. And then added in to that mix, the whole notion of using much more robust data and analytics, to create a new breed of advisory company, really aimed at large companies and governments. That was kind of the first iteration, where we are now is we have started to spin out a number of very specialist companies and one is a data and analytics company called Atomly. And I can talk more about that later, but that’s really about going beyond an advice business which is very dependent on people. To have something which is much more of a machine and hence much more scalable.

# #00:04:26-1# #NDB# And what is it you enjoy most about what you do?

#00:04:30-5# Nigel Lake co-Founder & Owner of Pottinger and Atomli : For me, I think its freedom. I think what has appealed to me and all the things I have done as someone who is self-employed or an entrepreneur, whatever you want to call it, is just the freedom to follow opportunities. The freedom to be able to do things differently, the freedom to act. When you have an idea, or an opportunity arises, you don’t have five layers of bureaucracy to fight. You can simply decide to go and do something and make it happen, and I think that is an amazing luxury, and its incredibly empowering.

#00:05:05-9# #NDB# And what is it that drives you?

#00:05:05-9# Nigel Lake co-Founder & Owner of Pottinger and Atomli : I think for me, its a variety of things. Part of it is the ability to have a real impact, to leave your clients in a place where they are just massively better off than they were before and for me then its not just about clients, there is a variety of things I have done over time, which have been about having a wider impact whether its from a social point of view or an environmental point of view where I have been able to use my network and connections and the things I understand about how the world works to make things change that might not otherwise have changed.

#00:05:44-0# #NDB# So when you talk about having a real impact, give an example of how you might do that with your business?

#00:05:53-3# Nigel Lake co-Founder & Owner of Pottinger and Atomli : So one example and this is an example of something very big and very bold. I have spent the last 12 or 13 years in Australia and one of the things that Australia does not have is any good high-speed rail connectivity. So the East Coast of Australia has got three big cities, they are about 7, 8, 900 km apart, as they are two of the world’s 20 busiest air routes, and two of the busiest over land in the world, and yet everybody in Australia thinks that the country could not possibly have high speed rail, it would never work there. And so I have spent quite a lot of time with my partner, Cassandra Kelly and some people in our business, helping build understanding of the economics of that project at the highest levels of government in Australia, also working with some of the fine proponents of the project to help them understand what they would need to do. And where this project lands? who knows? but there is a growing I think realisation in Australia that actually the project is viable, could be almost entirely privately financed, and if it was built, it would be the single most influential thing on the economic development of Australia for 100 years.

#00:07:04-7# #NDB# That would be a pretty amazing achievement.

#00:07:07-6# Nigel Lake co-Founder & Owner of Pottinger and Atomli : Old ambition, who knows what happens with that but if it comes about, I shall be very happy.

#00:07:12-4# #NDB# Yeh. And on a sort of more personal level within your business, how have you done that?

#00:07:21-2# Nigel Lake co-Founder & Owner of Pottinger and Atomli : In terms of what we have done within our company to achieve change?

#00:07:24-3# #NDB# Yeh well to achieve real impact as you were talking about. I am just thinking with clients maybe.

#00:07:30-7# Nigel Lake co-Founder & Owner of Pottinger and Atomli : So in terms of clients, I tell a real-life story which is a good example of where we have also been able to use a fresh approach and data and we did some work, gosh three or four years ago now, maybe five for the largest water authority in Queensland. Its called Queensland Urban Utilities, and it was created by bringing together five separate water businesses in to one. And we were answering the rather boring financial question around ‘what should the capital structure of this business be? How much equity? How much debt?’ So we did some very robust analytics, around this, and without getting in to all the grisly details, we ended up recommending a structure that was quite cautious, because there were all sorts of risks that you could demonstrate, could quite realistically come to pass. Anyway, the company took that advice, and this was implemented, and then six months later as many people probably recollect, there were then huge floods through Brisbane, so the whole city centre was flooded, it was the one and a hundred year flood, it was the second one they had had in 35 years. And as a result of our advice, the water company did not have to go back to its shareholders for more capital, to pay for all the unexpected bills they had. And those shareholders were the councils themselves that were struggling to deal with the aftermath of the flood. So you don’t expect the one and hundred year event to come up six months after you have finished your work, but it did and the advice we gave, stood the test of time in a very thorough fashion.

#00:09:15-1# #NDB# Mmm, it must be quite fulfilling knowing that you have done that.

#00:09:16-7# Nigel Lake co-Founder & Owner of Pottinger and Atomli : Yeh its quite amazing to look back on it, I mean no one really thought about it at the time, you know the floods came along, they had $100 million dollars of unexpected expenses, and they were able to just get on and deal with those problems without even thinking about the money was already there. Or even thinking about ‘well why was the money there?’

#00:09:37-4# #NDB# Yeh and how do you relax when you are not working in your business?

#00:09:41-6# Nigel Lake co-Founder & Owner of Pottinger and Atomli : I have to do things that get me out of my mind and out of thinking about things all the time. I suspect this is a common challenge for a lot of people, so for me it is things like certain sorts of sport, I play tennis, if I am playing tennis, I really cannot think about anything else. Scuba diving would be something else, it ticks the same box. I also play the piano a bit and again, if I am playing the piano, its just impossible to think about anything else.

#00:10:09-3# #NDB# And do you have any entrepreneurial role models?

#00:10:13-3# Nigel Lake co-Founder & Owner of Pottinger and Atomli : Hmm its a good question, I do not think I have got people that I look at and think ‘I wish I could be that person’ but there are definitely people that I have found to be inspiring. I think that have given me the courage to say, ‘well just go do it’ I think well one of the architype ones is Richard Branson, of course there are great things about him and like every one he has got plenty of flaws. But has been a great inspiration for people saying ‘look just go and try and see what you can do and aim high.’ I think another person that is quite inspirational is Elon Musk in that he has built a couple of amazing businesses, has generated an enormous amount of wealth, and he is then able to use that, to pursue things that he cares deeply about. Such as a transition to electric vehicles and he honestly does not care I think whether Tesla is the one that wins in that game, he just wants everyone to drive electric vehicles and that must be an amazing place to be in your life, that you are that empowered to go and do things you really care about.

#00:11:19-0# #NDB# Yeh can we just talk about the time before you were an entrepreneur? What difficulties did you have to overcome when you started your business?

#00:11:26-8# Nigel Lake co-Founder & Owner of Pottinger and Atomli : We, that’s interesting, we were given some great advice, so just to put this in context, I guess I had worked in the world of investment banking for gosh about ten or so years, I had spent the last year working in Japan. It had been tremendously interesting but there was a real sense that the year ahead was going to be a pretty quite one, if there was ever going to be a good time to take a bit of time out from what I would be doing that was it. And I was given some great advice by a friend who is an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, and he and his partner said, to both me and my partner Cassandra Kelly who I am married to as well as in business with, ‘just put white space in your life, just find a way to shut out all the noise of what you are doing now, all the noise about what you might do next. Just get some silence and then see what grows in to that.’ So I think for me that was a huge enabler, and the barrier would have been ‘you have just got too many other things going on ever to stop and think really clearly about, what is it if you did something yourself, what would that be? How would you make it happen?’

#00:12:39-2# #NDB# And did you have any doubts that delayed you starting your business?

#00:12:47-0# Nigel Lake co-Founder & Owner of Pottinger and Atomli : I think the answer is absolutely yes, I think so we took six months out, we went travelling, we then moved back to Australia, we kind of landed there, we then spent another six months thinking about ‘what on earth should we do?’ we tried out all sorts of ideas, some of them were crazy, some of them were good. And these were thought experiments, we did not spend any money on them, some of them were great ideas but not for us to do. And ironically what happened is we had the guy that we knew that said, ‘look I think you guys should set up your own business’ and he gave us our first piece of work. At which point we said, ‘well let’s get on and do this properly.’ And so set about very much industrialising everything we did from a very early stage, I had to say, ‘look, lets imagine we are big and successful and do everything right from the beginning.’ And I think that starting point is often for many people the most difficult thing, simply saying ‘ok, let’s start.’

#00:13:45-1# #NDB# So when you talk about industrialising what you were doing from the beginning, what sort of things did you do to do that?’

#00:13:51-8# Nigel Lake co-Founder & Owner of Pottinger and Atomli : For me, its about thinking reasonably big from the outset and I guess its simple things like well when you set up, you get yourself proper IT architecture so that your IT is just going to be robust. You don’t have a Gmail account, you have a proper set of email, proper reliable servers or whatever else it is, and of course much easier to do in the cloud now than it was then. You have proper phone systems, you have all the kind of processes and procedures in place you might have, if you had a team of 50 or 20 people, you would do that right from the beginning. I think its hugely important, because the problem is if you build a business on, bit of string and sticky tape, then as you start to grow, all of a sudden everything starts to fall apart just when you are becoming successful. Whereas if you have got a really good set of processes and procedures in place, as you grow, it becomes, its just much, much easier to deal with the challenges of business getting bigger.

#00:14:48-#NDB# Yeh, and what mistakes did you make that slowed your journey?

#00:14Nigel Lake co-Founder & Owner of Pottinger and Atomli : I would say, I think like lots of people, we were probably not bold enough. If I look back and one part of the story is what we did was ridiculously bold, because we set about to take on the biggest investment banks and the MacKenzies of this world, in the Australian market, armed with no local relationships when we started which was pretty bold perhaps. But we could have gone harder and faster earlier on. And Cassandra would have pushed us to do that and we did not go as fast as she wanted to do, I think we would have been better if we had done. Lots of people have similar versions of that story.

#00:15:37-#NDB# Yeh absolutely. And what are some of the things you did before you started your business that would be helpful tips to some of the listeners who have not yet taken the first step on the entrepreneur way?

# #00:15:53-9# Nigel Lake co-Founder & Owner of Pottinger and Atomli : I think there are a couple of things, there is an awful lot of discussion at the moment and has been for a while, look you want to try things and fail, you know if you are going to fail, fail quickly. And I think part of that advice is good, but part of it is tremendously negative and I think you have got to focus really hard on you know what does success look like? and making sure that everything you do is lined up towards achieving that success. So I think that is sort of one part of it. I think the other thing which is quite separate is, its one thing to think about you found some customer need, there is an opportunity which you could go and meet. But you really have to look deeply in to the abyss and say ‘are people really going to buy this? are they really going to pay for it?’ even if they do, even if the business can then make money, how do you as the entrepreneur actually get out of that what you want? Financially or otherwise? Because there are amazing success stories of individuals who have made hugely successful businesses and huge amounts of money, without the company ever having been profitable. And there are also plenty of stories of businesses which were perfectly good businesses but just never scaled, or never really delivered for the entrepreneur themselves. And I think, as an entrepreneur, you are right to expect to get something back, lots of people do not do that, but it is a really useful acid test to say ‘well what’s going to make this work actually for you? actually for me?’

#00:17:30-0# #NDB# Can we just talk about the entrepreneurial journey a bit more? Is culture important from the beginning in a business?

#00:17:38-2# Nigel Lake co-Founder & Owner of Pottinger and Atomli : Look, I think it absolutely is. And I don’t think it matters too much what you are doing, I know we have got two very different businesses at the moment. On the one hand, the Pottinger business which is absolutely a super conservative, top end of town of consulting and financial advisory business. And then the Atomly business, which is an archetypal b to b tech start up on the cutting edge of new technology and analytics and statistics and so forth. And businesses are built on their people, and from a very early stage we placed a huge emphasis on simply cultural fit, and if there was someone that just jarred with that, then we knew we should not hire them and if we did hire them, then we knew we had to bite the bullet and let them go as quickly as we could, because they can drag, you know one person with the wrong attitude just can drag everybody else down.

#00:18:36-7# #NDB# So how do you determine whether someone has got the right attitude when you are employing people?

#00:18:38-2# Nigel Lake co-Founder & Owner of Pottinger and Atomli : Its not necessarily easy, I think the starting point is you have got to be very clear what are the things that you really care about? from a cultural point of view, and we have a number of values which are tremendously important to us and an example is diversity of views and opinions on lots of things, and we have used that as a filter. I think the other part of it is then if you have doubts about someone’s you know whether they really line up with what you expect about them, I think you have got to listen to those doubts really early on. You need to test them, in the end if there is something that is worrying you, get it out at the discussions at interview. Its the kind of thing people find uncomfortable to do, but either you will discover that you were right, and they just do not really fit with what you are trying to be. Or you will discover something about that person which explains why they are behaving that way, which and I can think of one particular example, I won’t share the details for obvious reasons but there was just an individual that came from a set of personal circumstances that was very difficult for them, and they had wrapped themselves up to kind of hide away from that, and I uncover that through the interview process, and if we can help that person kind of get beyond that, one they will fit massively better in our team, and secondly they will be a way more effective person in their life, because they will be able to let go some of the baggage that I think all of us bring from our past in some way.

#00:20:16-4# ##NDB## Yeh, knowing what you know now, is there anything that if you had known it when you started out would have helped you to shortcut the learning curve?

# #00:20:26-3# Nigel Lake co-Founder & Owner of Pottinger and Atomli : Yeh I think its the thing about being bolder at the beginning, and I know we are certainly taking that in to our Atomly business, we have set really very aggressive targets for what we need to achieve as landmarks for the businesses growth, we are trying to be very focused on making those happen, if we don’t hit those targets, then this is where the kind of fail fast thing is going to come around for us which is to say, ‘well why aren’t we hitting those targets? we set ourselves three months to reach this point, we have not reached it, are we realistically going to get there in the next month?’ if we are, well and good. If we are not, maybe this is an experiment we just should not push because we may have a great solution for someone’s problem, but if they don’t want to solve it? what can you do?

#00:21:13-0# #NDB# Yeh absolutely. And how much does gut feeling influence your decisions in your business?

#00:21:21-4# Nigel Lake co-Founder & Owner of Pottinger and Atomli : Oh there is a brilliant quote about this from the founder of Netscape which is where he says, ‘if we have got data, lets look at data, and if all we have got are opinions, let’s go with mine.’ That is a great quote and you can understand partly about look, there’s data and then there’s opinion. I think instinct is very important for finding opportunities, for looking outside the box, and as a kind of radar that you really need to stay attuned to. But you then should try to find the data to back that up and I have become more and more obsessed with the use of data and decision making, I think one of the truly shocking things is the bigger the corporate decision you are talking about, the less data is used and the more people are simply playing a kind of boardroom version of ‘spin the bottle’ and if someone is trying to buy a computer for a couple of thousand dollars, they will look at that decision really carefully. If they are trying to build a $50 billion dollar project, it is shocking how weak the data and analysis is. If anyone is interested in that, read the Bent Flyberg book about mega projects, its truly shocking. Anyway, I have become quite obsessed about this and so in our business we try to make sure as far as we can that we look for data in order to back up what we are thinking because otherwise you can sell yourself a whole story that’s based on hope and mythology and so called wisdom and experience that actually may not be worth as much as a row of beans.

#00:22:59-1# #NDB# Life is made of constant change whether we like it or not and some people say, ‘the only constant in life is change.’ Nigel, how do you try to keep up with change?

#00:23:12-7# Nigel Lake co-Founder & Owner of Pottinger and Atomli : This is another subject that I have become super interested in, in the last few years, I guess what I do is try to remain outward looking in everything that I do, it means reading news from all sorts of random places, twitter is still quite good in this regard. It means talking with people that are not directly relevant to my day job because you have an interesting conversation about something that you did not know was going to be relevant. And then either you learn something from that or it sparks a separate thought. So I think that outward looking mind-set, the continuous seeking out what is new, what is different is hugely important. And then for me, the other half of all of this is, ‘we have all grown up in world, not just we but many generations of people and animals have grown up in a world where doing things the same has historically been safer than doing them differently. The animal instinct, the whole notion that the animals follow the same path to the water hole every night at 5 o’clock and they don’t get eaten by the lions.’ The difference now, is that that rate of change has increased over time is like there is a Moors law for rate of change. And we are in this place now where doing things the same, is becoming progressively more dangerous and you see this in the world’s top 20 technology companies, have created several trillion dollars worth of value in the last 15-20 years.

#00:24:51-1# Nigel Lake co-Founder & Owner of Pottinger and Atomli : Despite the fact that they were up against some of the richest, most powerful, best connected businesses in the world. That’s because the old guard did not deal with change.

#00:24:59-3# #NDB# Yeh, I think Apple and Sony are a good example of that, aren’t they?

#00:25:03-2# Nigel Lake co-Founder & Owner of Pottinger and Atomli : Exactly right and then this comes to the thing in business which is absolutely fundamental and this is what my second book will be about, which is in business, people want a budget, they want a hard number, they want to know what is the base case, the thing that is most likely to happen. And all you really know about that number is its never going to turn out that way. Its someone’s guess at one scenario out of many. And where we have to get to in decision making in business is to say, ‘there is a whole range of outcomes that are not just possible but could happen’, and this is the case with the Queensland Urban Utilities example. We saved QUU because we took in to account the effects for one and a hundred year event, along with thousands of other things that could have happened. And we have to get in decision making to a place where we throw out the notion to a base case and say, ‘look, there is all this change and uncertainty, how do we wrap our arms around it? And make decisions which say, fine we love the uncertainty, bring it on.’ Our plan is going to work well more or less whatever happens within this range of possibilities that could quite likely turn out.

#00:26:12-3# #NDB# Yeh, what is your favourite book on entrepreneurialism, business, personal development, leadership or motivation? And can you tell us why you have chosen it?

#00:26:22-6# Nigel Lake co-Founder & Owner of Pottinger and Atomli : I am going to have an unusual answer here, which is my, Cassandra Kelly my business partner is in the process of writing a book which is called very brutally, ‘fuck failures’ so apologies if you have to beep that out. And this is all about this kind of culture that has evolved of people getting sucked in to having a go and trying and its alright to fail, at a human level, we don’t really want to do that. We want something that is bolder and more confident, so I am fascinated to read this book, I have not seen anything of what’s inside it as yet, I am not a massive reader of business books, but this is one that I have to say I am really looking forward to.

#00:27:01-0# #NDB# Have you read any in the past?

#00:27:04-8# Nigel Lake co-Founder & Owner of Pottinger and Atomli : I have read some, not lots, I guess I would love to have more time reading but I have not read lots and lots of business books, I think there are little ones like, ‘who moved my cheese?’ is quite interesting because it distils things down to saying effectively, ‘take ownership of your own life and don’t be a passenger.’ But I think more of my influences come from people than from what’s written in books, so many of the books are kind of a moment of their time and sometimes they are almost more interesting as a historical item like ‘in pursuit of excellence’ which was one of the great books of the 1980’s, I think if you look back at some of the company’s profiles in that, well they were terribly excellent then, but they may be not so excellent now. So whatever they were doing worked at the moment, but it was not a universal guide to success.

#00:27:57-7# #NDB# Absolutely. Everyone, when you have a busy life, listening to audio books is a great way to expand your knowledge in the time when you may be doing other things, such as driving or when you are at the gym. We have a special offer for you of a free audio book of your choosing, to choose your free audio book go to www.freeaudiobookoffer.com. As long as you have not already signed up, then you will qualify. Nigel, we are now going to fast forward a little bit and speculate about the future, so what one thing would you do with your business if you knew that you could not fail?

#00:28:34-8# Nigel Lake co-Founder & Owner of Pottinger and Atomli : So I will take specifically the Atomly business here, because its a really early stage where we are just spinning it out in to its own entity. I would go harder and faster with that, I would put more of my own capital in to it, I would hire more people more quickly, because I know we have something that is very special, and having more feet on the ground and more of a team around the table to help drive it, would accellerate its growth.

#00:29:01-0# #NDB# So what is Atomly?

#00:29:04-6# Nigel Lake co-Founder & Owner of Pottinger and Atomli : So Atomly is a next generation predictive analytics business, so what it does is it creates a unique day by day, store by store, skew by skew forecast of product sales extremely granular. And all of that is done on a programmatic basis which means its done inside the machine, so a typical platform and there are lots of people that have got sales forecasting platforms out there, first of all you need an army of data scientists in white coats, to come and figure out what settings, what dials you need, what settings you need on those dials. How to configure the whole thing to make it work and they spend months bugging your staff, to learn from them what is needed. We don’t do that, we just take the data and we let the data explain what is going on, and the entire thing is driven by the machine. So it is a little bit like what IBM’s Watson is doing, but on Steroids and focused on specifically consumer goods, package goods etc. and similar things to that.

#00:30:02-0# #NDB# Mmm hmm, so is that a piece of software that bolts on to existing software or is it something else?

#00:30:11-2# Nigel Lake co-Founder & Owner of Pottinger and Atomli : Yeh exactly so, it will take data feeds from anywhere, it can come from all the internal systems whether its point of sale or warehouses stocking systems or scan data or the general ledger, external data feeds, whether its propriety things like Nielson or simple things like whether, sucks in all of that data, analyses what’s going on, and then provides this super granular forecast.

#00:30:40-0# #NDB# Is that how you predicted the floods in Australia then?

#00:30:43-8# Nigel Lake co-Founder & Owner of Pottinger and Atomli : Its analogous to that. So the underlying statistical approach is quite similar, its saying there is a whole, with floods you have got a certain amount of data, you need to extract from the data about whether how likely do you think that particular event is, and then you need to figure out what the impacts are. So its similar conceptually, the work around floods is much more bespoke. That was a 4.3, 4.4 billion dollar transaction, so it was worth looking at pretty hard at it. If you just try to figure out how many tins of beans you are going to sell three weeks on Wednesday, then you kind of need an entirely automated approach to do that in a cost effective way and that is what we do.

#00:31:25-6# #NDB# Yeh, what skill if you were excellent at it, would help you the most to double your business?

#00:31:32-8# Nigel Lake co-Founder & Owner of Pottinger and Atomli : I am torn on this question, I think one part of it is simply the sale part, which is the challenge with a b to b technology company is you have to be able to make sales at a very high level. The plus’s I have spent my whole career pretty much advising and working with chief executives, boards of directors etc. So I am very used to operating at that level, I have been doing it for 25 years. The thing I am not though is an archetypal salesman, so I think if I had a little bit more of the relentless pursuit of a sale that a good salesman has, that would probably be helpful, that’s one part which is the capital raising part, and we have done lots of capital raising for our clients, we will come around soon to a capital raising ourselves for the Atomly business. And it will be interesting to see how we go with that, that will clearly be a critical point in the company’s development.

#00:32:30-5# #NDB# Yeh in five years from now, if a well-known business publication was publishing an article on your business, after talking to your customers and suppliers, what would you like it to say?

#00:32:43-5# Nigel Lake co-Founder & Owner of Pottinger and Atomli : Look what I would like it to say, what I would like them to hear the customers saying is, ‘these guys completely changed the way we think, and not just the way we think, the way we actually act.’ They have allowed us to put our arms around all the uncertainty in the world, and now we think uncertainty is great and it powers our business. I think that for me is the absolute essence of what we are trying to do. And that’s true, whether its the Pottinger Business and advice at the very top end of big companies, or the Atomly business which is at the much more prosaic level of forecasting of sales volumes.

#00:33:23-3# #NDB# We are now at the part of the show where you share three golden nuggets with us, so Nigel, what is your favourite quote and how have you applied it?

#00:33:29-4# Nigel Lake co-Founder & Owner of Pottinger and Atomli : The thing that I have found most useful as a quote that came from, I don’t know that its from anyone famous, but I took it away from a negotiating skills course, I did gosh, 5, 6, 7 years ago. And that’s the wonderful old advice in every negotiation in life, which is ‘give them what they want on your terms.’ And there are all sorts of times when you are trying to make a sale or you are trying to get something and the other party just does not quite want to deliver what you want. If you can sit back and say ‘well what is it they really want? how can I give them what they are after? in a way that works for me?’ just been time and again, really liberating in breaking through some of those difficult discussions or negotiations you have. Works hugely well in your personal life too.

#00:34:24-9# #NDB# Yeh I like that. Do you have any favourite online resources that you can share with us?

#00:34:33-4# Nigel Lake co-Founder & Owner of Pottinger and Atomli : Look the one that I think I find the most useful at the moment, is something which is called Crunchbase which is the database of private equity financings of the venture capital world, I think its just crunchbase.com there is a newsletter you can sign up for, it comes out most days and this is useful because it gives you a snapshot of all the new start-up businesses that have just raised money and kind of what is going on in that space. And its an amazing window in to the nature of activity where people are focusing, and the amount of money that is going in to that. So whether you are an entrepreneur thinking about what’s hot and what can get financed, or you are a CEO of a very large company, and you want an honest view about just how terrifying all this innovation really is. It’s an amazing thing to read, you get an amount so its like another 241 companies have just raised 729 million dollars. Now its insane, its really quite fascinating to follow.

#00:35:34-0# #NDB# And what is your best advice to other entrepreneurs?

#00:35:41-3# Nigel Lake co-Founder & Owner of Pottinger and Atomli : I have been thinking about this quite hard and have reflected back over the journey that I have been on. I think the thing that I have loved most about being an entrepreneur which I wish I had kind of known in advance, is it is an entire parallel universe. If you are out there today in your day job, working for somebody else, then most of the other people you know, almost certainly are doing exactly the same thing. And when you become an entrepreneur and you start to say to people, ‘look I have set up my own business.’ Suddenly you discover there’s this whole other set of people, this whole community that are also entrepreneurs that are somehow invisible. Its a bit like when you have your first kid, you did not notice how many other babies and one year olds and two year olds there were, until you had had your first child. And its the same with being an entrepreneur, and I think simply taking that step, and starting something and becoming part of that community, then you get invited to be a member of this whole different clan. And that is exciting, its different, its challenging and for me I think was one of the most telling learnings along the way that I never really saw coming in advance.

#00:37:02-8# #NDB# Everyone, if you did not manage to get a note of Nigel’s favourite resource, or his favourite books, you can find the links on Nigel’s show notes page, just go to theentrepreneurway.com and search for Nigel or Nigel Lake in the search box. Nigel is there anything else you would like to add about your business?

#00:37:24-2# Nigel Lake co-Founder & Owner of Pottinger and Atomli : I think not so much my business but the encouragement for anybody that is thinking about being an entrepreneur is on one hand its not for the faint hearted, there’s ups and downs and all sorts of good times and bad times, but the single hardest part about this is just starting, so if you don’t make that first bold step, you never will, so I would just encourage people to channel a little bit of that just do it energy, and take that first step.

#00:37:54-6# #NDB# Nigel, its been an honour having you on the show, you have shared a lot of your wisdom that you have picked up over the years and you have given us some really great tips and some of your experience from what you have been doing, so thank you very much for coming on the show.

#00:38:09-3# Nigel Lake co-Founder & Owner of Pottinger and Atomli : Its a real pleasure Neil, I am delighted to do so.

#00:38:12-1# #NDB# Thank you.