For your convenience, we include an automated AI transcription

 

Colm Lyon  0:00  

A sale is 100% contingent on the buyer wanting it, and you have to have demand for your business. If you wait to try and increase your price, you run a huge risk of not being able to do a deal at all.

 

DustPod   0:14  

You have questions about selling a business, we have the people who’ve been there. This is Business Answers with Tommy Boyle.

 

Tommy Boyle  0:21  

Welcome to the Business Answers podcast, where we look at the personal impact, both positive and negative, of growing a business, and in particular the experience of exiting a business. I’m Tommy Boyle. This episode, I’m delighted to be joined by Colm Lyon, one of the founding figures of Irish fintech, and a man who, in 2015 sold Realex payments to Global Payments of Atlanta for 115 million in what remains one of the cleanest and most admired exits in the history of the Irish technology sector. Most people in his position would have stopped there. Colm did the opposite. He carved a small piece of Realex out before the sale, a business called Fire, and for the last decade he has been quietly building it into a regulated payments institution that now operates in both Ireland and the United Kingdom. He is the founding chairman of the Fintech and Payments Association of Ireland. He sits on the UK Finance Payments Board in London and was given the Outstanding Achievement Award at the National Fintech Awards in 2023 for his contribution to the Irish fintech ecosystem, and not insignificantly, he was the student class rep for three years for the B Com class of 1984 when he and I both studied commerce in UCD. To talk about what it actually feels like to build, to sell, and then to start all over again. Here’s the founder and CEO of the Firecom Colm Line. Colm, you’re very welcome to Business Answers, and thank you for giving us your time today.

 

Colm Lyon  1:40  

Thank you, Tommy. Pleasure to be here.

 

DustPod   1:42  

Welcome to the Business Answers Podcast.

 

Tommy Boyle  1:46  

Colm, was it always your ambition to set up your own business?

 

Colm Lyon  1:50  

I would say that from, yeah, a relatively young age, I was very keen to be my own boss to try and do something where not that I wouldn’t have to be told what to do, but try and do something where maybe I could set the direction to steer the ship a certain way. So it was always a dream to be able to do something like that.

 

Tommy Boyle  2:09  

You were in Ulster Bank for 14 years. Yeah, when did the bank stop kind of being enough?

 

Colm Lyon  2:14  

I think the bank was a super experience in terms of when I started my career in the bank. We didn’t have desktop computers, for example, we had a calculator in our desks, you know, and then inbox and an outbox, people came and collected the left paper for you. Obviously, this stage of automation came, and I remember programming in different languages at the time, in Portrait, Cobalt, or Scout, whatever it was, the different exposures that I had to the technology, and then as technology took over, it was really interesting to see just the level of automation and the level of change that businesses underwent at that time. It was really phenomenal in terms of this, the changes that could be made, and I got to see the treasury side of the bank. I wasn’t involved in the retail side, I was involved on the capital market side of the markets throughout those years, I got exposed to different projects. You would have been a business analyst. What’s the official title that you would have had? And then, as you progressed over the years, you became a project manager, and you were responsible for delivering really technology solutions that would transform and re-engineer the way which the business operated, and that was really quite fascinating, and it also got you to learn about the different products and services as well, and so you learned about the how that you learned about the treasury operations, foreign exchange, and then later on asset finance leasing, because you had to implement technology solutions that were going to help these functions run, and you could remember how you know before we did these kind of projects, particular part of the organisation, you could see the customer’s name and address being stored 17 times, or whatever. So, when a customer changed their address, you’d got a lot of systems and things to update, and so you learned about the normalisation of data and bringing things together, data in a structured manner, and then being able to layer applications on top of that, and you learned your out of superb boss in there who taught me about managing the project, then how to manage issues and risks in a project, how to, I suppose, create the vision of where you want it to be, and then people would buy into that vision and that journey with you, because it’s never easy or straightforward to implement change of that nature, but it was, yeah, it was a great upbringing. And then,

 

Tommy Boyle  4:22  

how did Realex come about? Then, Colin,

 

Colm Lyon  4:24  

yeah, towards, I guess, 1999 1998 the euro had come in as a currency, although not yet in notes and coins, and the Millennium bug was imminent at the time, and I remember just looking at the internet, and you know, again, you get quite fascinated with the things that you can do, you could take a picture of the tall ships, and they were in Dublin in 1999 I think it was, and you could email it to your brother in America, and you could have as a screensaver on his desktop a couple of minutes later, and it was like this is quite incredible, you know, we don’t even blink at that. Nowadays I remember speaking to people on the card side of Ulster Bank at the time, and they had merchants who were selling in the traditional way, and these merchants wished to sell online, and they were, how do we give them a solution that would allow these merchants to be able to accept credit, the other card details on their websites in a secure way. The cards were never designed to work in that fashion, so there had to be something that had to sit in between, and then you know, I worked on a project to do that in Ulster Bank for a while. I had considered different potential opportunities all around the internet space, and then I felt that this one was one where the banks might be slow to maybe implement the necessary technology to allow their merchants to sell online, that the merchants wouldn’t want to build the infrastructure themselves, so there was a classic kind of knot on the bow tie kite situation there, where you could make it easy for the businesses to sell online, but at the same time you’re making it easy for the banks to transact with those companies. Both sides would be happy with you being in the middle, which is often a great place to be, you know.

 

Tommy Boyle  6:00  

Yes, I want to burn what appeared to be a big part of that.

 

Colm Lyon  6:04  

Absolutely, yeah.

 

Tommy Boyle  6:05  

How would you describe your relationship with own?

 

Colm Lyon  6:08  

Owen and I, you started Relex. Well, I started for about a year, and then own joined, and then I would spend the time kind of documenting, if you like, the data model, the structures, what the system needed to do, and then own would be have the technical wherewithal to break the software to make that work

 

Tommy Boyle  6:23  

very good,

 

Colm Lyon  6:24  

so we knew it was a good tag team in terms of just being able to, and then I would test that after you got it done, so I was more the business analyst tester, and then he’d be writing the software in those early days,

 

Tommy Boyle  6:36  

so you built it up to be fabulously successful, and by the time of the sale, you are processing more than 28 billion a year for over 12,000 retailers. What would you think made the business so attractive to global payments? Was it the technology or was it the customer book? Yeah,

 

Colm Lyon  6:51  

I think we were, you know, 14, 15 years in operation, and many of the original team owned itself, and the management team stayed with the business for the full journey, what we found was that businesses wanted to sell online. We were providing solutions. The banks wanted to acquire those transactions and wanted to make sure that they weren’t losing out, so we were able to help them. So we were able to scale up, and then towards the end with a few financial institutions that would quite label our solution, and the distribution capability then also got large when you find you have a good product to soften the distribution that can be quite difficult to get so with the distribution by these acquirers that we had who were white labelling the platform that we had we were able to kind of accelerate that growth I remember we had a what is it that you need to be to be successful in the payment busting space, you know, and you need to be kind of constant, reliable, and secure. Three big words that we used to go around in our head the whole time. Very good. And how do we behave like a big company when we’re a small company? And how do we build infrastructure that somebody will be almost jealous of? Right. And we did that because we had a falling outage one day, which lasted for six hours, we never wasted good prices, if you like, and yes, we had a really bad time, because we had, you know, until some days we could have upwards of 2 million transactions coming through the system, you know, with big, big, big volumes, and people were depending on us to do their trade, to do their business, it could be earning this with a ticket sale, it could be Paddy Power with a match on, didn’t matter, like those volumes had to be processed, and so when we had the outage, I remember we kind of became quite determined as a team to make sure we never had this again, and so we built one of the first live live configurations, where we had two physical locations where we had all the data, and we put in our own private fibre between them, as well as an internet connection between the two of them, and we were able to have a 20 millisecond synchronisation, and we put in three of everything into each site, and then we got our own IP addresses from right, so we were like an ISP on the internet, which meant as well that we were able to take down an entire data centre. Back in those days, there was no cloud yet, right? So, yes, we were able to take down an entire data centre, and the service would stay running automatically, you know. And when we sold, what was really interesting was the potential buyers used to come to our office on them to John Richardson’s key, and they would come in, and they would look at the system, and the functionality was all fine, because you were authorising, and you were able to do all the value-added services for the merchants, but when they saw up on the huge big screens that we had, the two data centres going green all the time, and I remember one of them saying, “Gee, Hank, we don’t have this back in our operation. Yes, like this is it

 

Tommy Boyle  9:35  

was very clever, very clever,

 

Colm Lyon  9:37  

you know. Yeah, and yeah, the thing that we did was we used to monitor the transaction from our key clients, and we would have for each one a threshold and a frequency of which they would be sending transactions to us for authorization, so it could be like, say, four a minute for one client, or it could be 20 a minute, depending on who they were, and what we used to do was we used to I. Them up on another screen, where we could list them all down, and if we didn’t see a transaction coming through outside the threshold, it would go orange, and then if it went to two or three times that, it would go red, and then we could call them, and we could say, hey, we’re not seeing transactions coming through, is everything okay at your site? And I remember the amount of times that we would call people, and they’d say, oh, thanks. We had no idea our website was down. Yeah, yeah. So that was a great way of making sure you know. And then I think they just loved the traditional card acquirers at that stage, had great solutions in place for stores and shops, and you know, card present, what we call card presence, but they didn’t really have the solutions in place for the card not present, and for the e-commerce world. So, what was amazing about Global Payments was they were able to take the Redux platform and that Redux gateway, and then they made that the gateway for all other e-commerce card processing across the world. So, Relex became a mega piece of infrastructure for global e-commerce, you know, which was great to hear.

 

Tommy Boyle  11:03  

So, you sold in March 2015 and as I say, 415 million. Describe Colm the feeling the day the sale was completed, you know, the day the money landed in the account. What was that feeling like?

 

Colm Lyon  11:16  

I guess the overwhelming kind of sensation you have is relief, you know, that it’s, it’s over the line. There’s a lot of people, obviously, you know, shared in the outcome. We had no VC or PE involved, so it was private, and many of the people that I’d invested in the early days in the BES scheme got a good reward for their early stage investments, which was wonderful to see, and the staff as well.

 

Tommy Boyle  11:37  

And what was it like in your house that evening, you know, with you and your wife, it’s amazing,

 

Colm Lyon  11:42  

like at the same time life goes on, because it’s that freedom, the sense of independence, perhaps, but I think predominantly you get a great sense of relief as well, and the relief that you’ve got a home for the business as well, and the home, you know, that’s a good home for the staff and for the customers as well, it’s a holistic kind of feeling that you feel it. It’s never really about the money per se, it’s about the outcome that you’ve managed to get to this point, you know.

 

Tommy Boyle  12:09  

And obviously, all of the staff, you know, they were well looked after, and all of that. And that obviously sounds, yeah, was very important to you, wasn’t

 

Colm Lyon  12:15  

it? Yeah, 100% Yeah, I mean, you never do these things alone, and you’ve got great support from your team, from your family, whatever, and you have to realise that it’s an outcome, and you’re very fortunate to be in that position, as I say, but I do recall that sense of relief, and also there’s an element of relief that tomorrow I don’t have to worry so much about the operation of the business, because you’re very involved as a CEO, and you know if you’re responsible for running a business, and you’re responsible for attentive processing of large volumes of payments, and that you don’t have a quiet moment to yourself. See, you suddenly realise, as well, God, I was doing so much, and my mind was like completely taken up with a lot of stuff that was going on at the time. So, I do recall that that’s kind of a welcome sense of relief, you know, that this is now done, and it’s in the right place, you know. As well,

 

Tommy Boyle  13:02  

I know Colm, you said before that prior to that deal that you had turned down a huge UK bank earlier in the journey. Looking back, was that the right call at that time? Or

 

Colm Lyon  13:13  

no, time’s a bad time to sell your business. Like, if you get the opportunity to sell your business, I would always encourage people to do it. I know there’s some commentary sometimes that Irish businesses sell too soon. I don’t think that they sell too soon. They certainly sell early in the process, but whether that’s too early is, I think, the question. And I don’t think it is. I think that, like, we’re in a part of the world, and we’re in a certain economy here where you know, if you get the opportunity to exit from the business, I would take it. You know, I think it’s very important.

 

Tommy Boyle  13:44  

It’s also, when is enough enough? You know, when is enough enough? There’s an element of that too.

 

Colm Lyon  13:48  

Yeah, yeah,

 

Tommy Boyle  13:49  

that 100 and 15 million in that context, though. Was that the right number Colm, or.. and again, I don’t know how it played out for the purchasers, but you know, if you had waited another five years, would the multiples have been completely different, or will we ever know?

 

Colm Lyon  14:04  

I don’t know. I mean, as a what we call a gateway only business, so a pure technical business. I always felt that, like, if it was to really scale up, it would need to become a regulated business as well, you know. And it would maybe need to get into the card acquiring itself.

 

Tommy Boyle  14:18  

Yes,

 

Colm Lyon  14:19  

so I felt that, like, and also, the card acquires the big ones, like, you know, this four or five huge ones across the globe. The time would come where, if we didn’t sell to them, somebody else would sell to them, and then the number of potential buyers would start to diminish.

 

Tommy Boyle  14:33  

Of course, absolutely,

 

Colm Lyon  14:35  

a sale is 100% contingent on the buyer wanting it. You know what I mean, and you have to have demand for your business, if you wait to try and increase your price, you run a huge risk of not being able to do a deal at all. What you’re selling, what I like is the idea of not so much selling a business for core financial value, but selling a business because it’s got. Strategic value to the buyer, so in other words, when you have something that somebody has wants to use,

 

Tommy Boyle  15:06  

it’s the growth potential they’re buying, isn’t

 

Colm Lyon  15:08  

it? Yeah, and this energy that they get from that, and the ability to upsell what you’ve got to their customer base, that’s a huge, huge opportunity, and many times in the financial services and in the payment space, you find that the big companies are really good at distribution, and they’ve got great products and services in a very large base of customers, but when it comes to making new products, sometimes it takes a little bit more effort, and they’re slow because they’ve maybe got to keep the operations, the resilience, the compliance of their own tech in order, and therefore they don’t get to make the stuff that maybe the smaller companies can be so it’s a very natural thing in the payment space for smaller companies to empower big companies and smaller companies who’ve made nice product to empower big companies with distribution, and that works really, really well as a partnership. And then over time, if their partnerships are successful, the big companies will buy the spot,

 

Tommy Boyle  15:56  

buy them out, exactly.

 

Colm Lyon  15:58  

Yeah, so I always saw it like that, because we weren’t going to become an independent, scalable company, you know, where we were, we would have needed a lot of money to scale up Relex as an independent financial, you know, company.

 

Tommy Boyle  16:14  

Yes, you’re not unlike the oil prospecting companies that are bought out by the big majors, then, yeah, and they strike it, you know what I mean, so that’s how that works. So, obviously, you’ve earned a life-changing amount of money Colm. So, what’s kind of different about an ordinary Tuesday compared to an ordinary Tuesday in 2014 before you sold out?

 

Colm Lyon  16:34  

Not a whole lot, really. Yeah, if I’m honest, like it’s fine, it’s there, it’s great. And yes, of course, you’ve got that sense of financial independence, which is fantastic, wonderful to have.

 

Tommy Boyle  16:47  

Are you enjoying that success?

 

Speaker 1  16:48  

Yeah, yeah, I mean, it gives you a great opportunity, like what we did was we set up an investment office, you know, to manage that. One of the things that’s great, I think we’ve invested in over 22 different startups now, you know, and that’s been a great thing to do, and we’re also a limited partner in five different VC funds, who in turn invest in startups, you know, and a lot of those are Irish-based companies and Irish-based funds,

 

Tommy Boyle  17:10  

mostly in the tech sector, or

 

Colm Lyon  17:12  

yeah, tech, and we’re in one biotech med tech fund as well, so we would diversify where we can, some of those startups are fantastic, and it’s good to be able to help people. I trend not to give them advice, but I tell them the story about what happened, and they can take from that whatever is good or bad for them, because it’s important not to be too opinionated about what’s right and wrong these days, because you just don’t know.

 

Tommy Boyle  17:39  

Did you treat yourself to anything? Have you a garage full of cars somewhere, or a holiday? Is there any niceties got out of

 

Colm Lyon  17:49  

it? No, I mean, it was like, you know, life goes on, basically.

 

Tommy Boyle  17:53  

Yes,

 

Colm Lyon  17:54  

you know, as I said, you got that buffer, and you’re very aware, are you conscious of that? And that buffer gives you an independence and an opportunity to be able to do things that you hadn’t done before.

 

Tommy Boyle  18:04  

Most people who’d sell a business might stop, but you certainly didn’t, and you had already carved fire out of Realex before the sale, but you went straight back to work. What was the reasoning behind all of that?

 

Colm Lyon  18:16  

Work is an interesting word, like you have a choice there, to you know to do something or not to do something, so you’re not doing it for money. For me, I’ve always been really interested in the changes that are coming in the way in which people pay and get paid. There are some kind of deeper, important issues here, in terms of like the accessibility, for example, of different payment systems, and a lot of it is dominated by banks, obviously, or you know, the primary institutions that hold accounts and process payments, and there’s room for a lot more players in the industry, and there’s room to bring in a lot more innovation and competition into the industry, so back when we set up fire, I was really interested in this idea of people paying for goods and services, either at point of sale or online, and paying directly from their account rather than with a card, because the technology has changed now, so that you probably have two or three bank accounts on your phone, and everybody does nowadays, so but yet when you tap your phone at a device, there’s a token created of your Mastercard or Visa card, and it’s sent all the way through four different parties to go around to eventually take the money out of your account to eventually transfer to the merchant’s bank account, right. And in reality, we don’t need that anymore. In reality, we can actually instantly move the money from my account to the merchant’s bank account, that’s technically possible now, and you’re seeing those trends emerge. Obviously, it’s emerged big time places like India and Brazil and China, and now we’re seeing it starting to emerge across Europe, places like Spain and the Netherlands, and also in Poland, where we’re seeing. Different localised photo, called account to account based payment methods emerged, and so I got to join the UK Finance Payments Products and Services Board as well after the deal was done, and that was really interesting, because I even yesterday, now and today, I had calls with, like, the Bank of England and North and the PSO and UK the Payment Systems Regulator, and I’d be feeding back to them about potential barriers that I might see, which hinders startups and scale-ups from entering into the payments market and bringing products and services to market. So it’s important, albeit quite niche, that somebody takes on that mantle and helps the regulators to inform their policy with regard to making sure that new players can come to the market, that people want to invest in creating, you know, new products and services, that they’re able to bring these things to market without unnecessary burden in the way, and I don’t mean regulation, because it’s regulation pretends to everybody, that’s fine, but this is natural, it’s not about regulation in the regulator, this is about accessibility to the different payment systems, so I’ve taken the mantle on that over the last few years, and I enjoy that, you know, it takes a long time, but I can see how things are changing, and people are open to those discussions.

 

Tommy Boyle  21:07  

Do you see far being as successful as Raleigh’s come,

 

Colm Lyon  21:11  

potentially? And it’s hard to know at this stage. There are a number of trends, which are I described in like waves coming in, and sometimes you think it’s a big wave, but then you realise it’s not as small, and it’s by the time it gets to the shore, you’re very disappointed, you know. Yeah, and it’s kind of like, oh, there I’m not going to surf that one, so I think that, like, and we can’t really control the rate at which the market might adopt something like we can be ready for when we think it might happen, and we can be positioned, so positioning is really important. And what I’m building at the moment with fire, what we’re trying to build here is similar infrastructure, it’s a product play, and it’s an account, or a whole series of accounts, an embedded account that sits between businesses and financial institutions. The account can be used for a whole range of different purposes, but primarily we see people wanting to embed, if you like, the functionality of an account into their own systems. So, in other words, as a financial manager, you don’t want to be logging in to see if you’ve been paid. So, why do I still have to log into my bank account to see if I’ve been paid? If I walk into a restaurant, Google will tell me I’ve been here four times in the last three years, usually. So,

 

Tommy Boyle  22:33  

yes, yes, yeah.

 

Colm Lyon  22:35  

How do I do that? So, with Fire, obviously it’s an API-first account, payment services associated with it, and businesses can open 1000s of accounts if that’s what they need, all with an individual I band stored account, sterling euro, and every time money hits those accounts, we automatically update your system and send you messages, so that you know, and you can use the API to do payments out, you can do payments out in different currencies, you can receive money in different currencies, you can get a debit card, you could have tables of debit cards, if that’s what you need. You can change the account to which the debit card is linked through the API, you can block a debit card instantly through the API. So it’s to give people the ability to embed the functionality of the account of the payment service into their own system. Spot on. Yeah,

 

Tommy Boyle  23:20  

very,

 

Colm Lyon  23:21  

yeah,

 

Tommy Boyle  23:21  

yeah, yeah, excellent.

 

Colm Lyon  23:22  

So that’s one of the big trends. The other one would be the account to account, I think account to account will come. I’m not too sure about this, exactly how far out that way it is, but I’ve seen it in some in Spain, is a great example, and Blick component is another example, where banks collaborated together. It’s really interesting to see the Irish banks with Zippay get in the first phase of a new payment method, potentially into the Irish market, which would see that then that you know if in the evolution of that could actually mean that you can walk into a store someday and you want to pay, you’re going to pay by Zippay, and you’re going to pay directly from your bank account, right, and again this is the whole trend I think that we’re going to see the digital euro, the ECB are pushing that, probably motivated by payment sovereignty, because they want to have a non-US based, they feel there’s an overdependence on bees and Mastercard, so the digital euro is another really interesting one, and I think that that will change the way in which people get paid in AO, does the AI? Then I mean, we’ve had like so many people in the last just couple of months that’s been bizarre who have completed integrations into FHIR using Claude and never coded in their lives before.

 

Tommy Boyle  24:35  

Yeah,

 

Colm Lyon  24:35  

like, so they’ve developed a piece of software. Right?

 

Tommy Boyle  24:38  

What’s happening with Claude is just mind-boggling. It’s absolutely on a daily

 

Speaker 2  24:41  

basis, quite

 

Colm Lyon  24:42  

incredible, like

 

Tommy Boyle  24:43  

it’s mind-boggling. Yeah, really, really, yes. But so fascinating, and so brilliant. What a tool to have at your disposal.

 

Colm Lyon  24:48  

Yeah, and what we’re finding is there are loads of people out there who are all of a sudden released from the traps, right, because they now have this tool available to them, they’re able to develop bespoke software for their core. Customers, and what they’ve done is they’ve incorporated FHIR into that, and what they’re doing is they’re saying, for the customers, go open up a FHIR account, because if you have one, then you’d be able to see all your balances, you’d be able to open up all new accounts, to be able to get web hooks every time your debit cards are used, to be able to send out invoices and put payment links on it, and you’d be able to, you know, have your customers automatically pay, and then we’ll be able to update everything when they pay them, and so we were finding that then the AI is

 

Tommy Boyle  25:26  

propelling our business. Is it? Yeah,

 

Colm Lyon  25:28  

yes,

 

Tommy Boyle  25:28  

yeah,

 

Colm Lyon  25:29  

not so much for us using it, which we do, but more for a new breed of platform, a new breed of software developer out there. Yes, now really keen on using Fire and integrating Fire, because it makes their software better, you know,

 

Tommy Boyle  25:40  

very good.

 

Colm Lyon  25:40  

When they can do that, so

 

Tommy Boyle  25:41  

is the goal Colm a second exit, or is it to build, you know, fire, and kind of run it for the rest of your career? Or

 

Colm Lyon  25:48  

it would be the same strategy that we are building good product. We built it to a high spec, right, as always. Did the platform, and it’s got like a lot of automated services within it. We don’t use any third parties run the core platform, we just do it ourselves, and so, yeah, we will be hopeful into the future, where we have some good case studies up there on our website, where one of our big clients, for example, is AIB Merchant Services, which are the FiveServe Group, and they have, you know, 1000s of merchants in the UK, and we’re doing the settlement to those merchants on a daily basis for them, you know, we’ve got some super, super customers now. We’ve another bank in the UK, they’ve launched an open banking payment acceptance solution. So, in other words, they have hundreds of 1000s of merchants, and now what FHIR does is it enables that institution to go to market to offer open banking payment acceptance, so now their merchants can get paid directly from people’s bank accounts as well, and so, like, for us to enable those institutions to bring those products and services to market is fantastic, and we’ve got about a half a billion euro month coming in and out, so it’s quite a large volume. Then a payment flow going through

 

Tommy Boyle  26:54  

it, it’s motoring now, isn’t it? It fire seems to be really,

 

Colm Lyon  26:56  

it’s good now, like all these things, it takes time, you know, and you’ve got to persevere, and you know, I did make a few distractions along the way, as you do, and now I think we’re very focused on being that

 

Tommy Boyle  27:07  

you’re going to get distracted, and it’s part of the makeup as well. We do tend to run after the shiny things every now and again, and we need to pull ourselves back again.

 

Colm Lyon  27:15  

Yeah, we’re delighted with where it is now.

 

Tommy Boyle  27:17  

But Colm, can an entrepreneur really retire?

 

Colm Lyon  27:20  

I guess you could. There’s a lot of other things. I think you would retire from, you know, the operational side of what you do, but maybe not the strategic side, you know. So, you might end up in a position where you’d remain on boards, you remain as an investor, but it would be nice at some stage, obviously, not to have to worry about the day-to-day operations of the bisques, you know, I think that’s an ideal position.

 

Tommy Boyle  27:44  

I do it myself as well, but I’m, you know, half the people listening to this will be kind of having their accountant in their ear saying, “Oh, you know, you should sell up and take a step back and whatnot. And most entrepreneurs, they wouldn’t have had to do with themselves, you know. It might sound a little bit attractive, but then when it comes down to it, more often than not to say, well, actually, like what I’m doing, and it seems to me, and so what else would I do, you know?

 

Colm Lyon  28:05  

Yeah, you know, I found myself recently doing some vibe coding myself, you know, and so developing software now myself, which is really interesting. And then, as I say, with the investment office, then we’re never going to be not this each, just, I mean, because we’re always looking at opportunities, and we have a diverse range of different asset classes into which we invest, and restructuring that at the moment.

 

Tommy Boyle  28:26  

Would you encourage your children to start their own business? Colin,

 

Colm Lyon  28:29  

I think owning your own business is well, for me it was a dream, like, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s big or small, it’s that freedom to be able to make your own mistakes, you know, to be able to just to do things, and you know, if you’re fortunate, yeah, you do come out with a good financial gain, but it’s a really nice thing to have, and the opportunity to have your own business, no matter how big or how small it is. I mean, it’s just a personal opinion, gentlemen, that I certainly found that, and I think people are probably starting their businesses much younger than I would have. I was 38 when I left, you know, the bank to start, and nowadays you see people very young starting businesses, and there’s so many super clean air resources, or like dog patch and things available to them, where you know they can get the assistance to support the network and all that. It’s brilliant to see.

 

Tommy Boyle  29:13  

I totally agree with you, by the way. Working for yourself and running your own business, it’s heaven, really. Someone, actually a relatively young person, asked me there the other day, they were thinking of going out on their own, and we were in company, and somebody said, Well, what do you think, Tommy? I said, to be honest with you, it doesn’t really matter what I say, because if you’re going to do it, you’re going to do it. It’s irrelevant, so I’m not advising it one way, because if you’re going to do it, you’re going to do it, you know, but if you’re going to do it, you’re going to do it. But it is, it’s a wonderful way of life, but for the listeners, Colin, who are considering selling their business in the next two or three years, what three pieces of advice would you give them?

 

Colm Lyon  29:45  

I would say think about it early, put an actual plan in place to make the business integratable, so you have to make it as easy as possible for the buyer to be able to take what you have and for them to integrate that into. Their organisation always think about that, so it’s not so much what you’re going to get, but what they’re getting right, and you have to make any transition or any carve out of integration as simple as possible, because often what might put a buyer off is the integration, that the integration is too complex, too difficult, and it’s just not going to happen, so think like the buyer, and try and get your potential buyers to be customers before you enter into any process, so they get to know you. So, if you have a particular target area and you’re thinking, I could sell to companies in this sector, well, see if you can get them as customers, like see if you can do something for them now, right? For the next year or two, and then lo and behold, you never know. Take a turn and say, hey, this is great, like you know, we really need this. Like, so the closeness to your potential buyers is really good. You could always think like a big company when you’re a small company, you know. You can behave like a big company when you’re a small company, because sometimes when I see some of the companies that we’re invested with, I would always encourage them to, but maybe you need another director on the board to bring it in, bit of governance in a bit of

 

Tommy Boyle  31:10  

objectivity and challenge.

 

Colm Lyon  31:11  

Yeah, the team,

 

Tommy Boyle  31:12  

yeah,

 

Colm Lyon  31:12  

and your KPIs are, you know, they’re okay, but like maybe they could be better, right? And maybe, maybe you could track something and really understand what are the critical things that you need to work on to make it so that the measurement of the performance of the business is very clear, so that we know the most important thing is knowing what’s working and what’s not working, you know. And so, do we know what is working and not working in the business today? And you know, and if so, become a good chat of them.

 

Tommy Boyle  31:42  

I also know Colombia said that the worst thing a founder could do is kind of start conversations with potential buyers themselves.

 

Colm Lyon  31:48  

I would argue that having an advisor if you’re trying to sell the business is a good thing.

 

Speaker 3  31:54  

Yes,

 

Colm Lyon  31:54  

yeah, yeah,

 

Tommy Boyle  31:55  

being one of those myself, I would agree with

 

Colm Lyon  31:59  

that. I just think that, like, it’s not a process that you do that often, like, there is a great value in having a strong advisor, you know, who can help you navigate the process, for sure. You know,

 

Tommy Boyle  32:12  

if you were 38 again, Colin, and you knew everything you know about regulation and capital and competition and everything, would you start fire or would you do something completely different?

 

Colm Lyon  32:22  

Oh, I don’t know. I’m not too sure. You know, you like to kind of position yourself into a space where you believe there’s an opportunity, and you think you can make something to help with that problem, right? So, I probably would be attracted towards sustainability issues, to be honest, right now, and issues of, you know, like we’re really screwed, like when it comes to far-invented things, and you know, I think they’d be zoning towards that side of the world right now, and trying to find out and learn more about it, perhaps, you know, and seeing is there something that we could make or do to try and address problems in that side of the business, that side of the system. Yeah,

 

Tommy Boyle  33:01  

lastly, Colin, what, if any regrets do you have?

 

Colm Lyon  33:05  

Oh, I don’t know. I mean, you can kind of say that they, you know, maybe pivoting too easily, perhaps instead of sticking to the core proposition and the core vision of your business, and just recognising that that takes time, but like, there’s nothing, you know, I was very happy that I left my job when I did, or she could have left earlier, but like, is that a regret? It’s a different word now. My God,

 

Tommy Boyle  33:31  

the clock is against us. It’s been a real pleasure to speak in which I think anyone listening who’s in the middle of building or scaling, or you know, wrestling with the question of when to sell or how to sell, will take real value from your candour about the deal, about fire, about when the check clears, and what it actually means to keep going when on paper you never need to work again. So, Colin, many thanks. You’ve told a story that very few founders in this country have lived, and you told it so well, and with such honesty. I have to say, thank you very much. You’re very kind. Thanks a million, Tommy. That’s it for this episode of Business Answers Podcast, and until the next time, take care.

 

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