For your convenience, we include an automated AI transcription

 

Ollie Walsh  0:00  

The fit is the main thing. You’re not selling what you have. You need to sell what they want or what they need. It’s really spending the time to position it, so as not to give everybody, you know, a vanilla deck that they have to work out for themselves. Be very, very clear of this exactly is where we fit with your company, and this is the benefit to you.

 

VO  0:22  

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

 

Tommy Boyle  0:32  

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. I’m joined today by Ollie Walsh, co-founder and former CEO of Pipit Global, the Galway-based fintech he built with social impact at its core. In May 2025, after a 12-year journey, Pipit was acquired by the U.S. payments company Qenta. Before Pipit, Oli was a lifelong Galway entrepreneur, starting with a comic shop straight out of college and going on to run a market research and strategy consultancy for 20 years, working with around 200 Irish startups and SMEs. Ollie, you’re very welcome to Business Answers.

 

Ollie Walsh  1:08  

Thank you very much.

 

VO  1:08  

Welcome to the Business Answers podcast.

 

Tommy Boyle  1:12  

You’ve been an entrepreneur since you left school, rather college, I should say. Pipit was a completely different scale of bet. What was the actual moment that you knew that this one was different from everything you built before. The

 

Ollie Walsh  1:23  

moment it was different was interesting. So I had been involved in several startups before. I say Pipit was probably my fifth time at that particular wheel. In all those entrepreneurial pieces, I was never the ideas guy. I was the make it happen

 

Tommy Boyle  1:38  

guy. Right. Okay.

 

Ollie Walsh  1:39  

And I was kind of meeting people through my consultancy who wanted me to work with them,

 

Tommy Boyle  1:44  

partner with them. Yeah,

 

Ollie Walsh  1:45  

yeah, exactly. So I was in the market looking for something, and I wanted something in the tech space, and I wanted something that was impact. So impact, I decided. Like this was like when I was 40. This is my 10 year plan was impact tech. A friend of mine came with the idea of cash payments for internet orders, which is where people started, and it was for the the unbanked, you know, the socially marginalised people who who don’t have bank accounts, for them to be able to participate online. And I immediately liked the idea. I thought it was a great idea. And his eureka moment, Julian Callum’s his name, his eureka moment was, you know in the post office paying his phone bill? Why can’t I pay for my internet orders here? And he just had to come to me and said, “Let’s do a business plan. The market really spoke to me. This kind of the impact that it takes. I really like this idea.

 

Tommy Boyle  2:33  

Could you just briefly, Ali, just briefly kind of detail what Pipit actually did or does?

 

Ollie Walsh  2:40  

So yeah, so we started off e-commerce orders. So you could go to a website and order a jumper, and instead of using your this is 12 years ago, so a lot of payment types now didn’t exist 12 years ago. Instead of using your Visa or Mastercard, so you could select Pippus, and it sent a barcode to your phone, and you could go into in the UK, was into any post office in earnings, and he pays all, and scanned the barcode at pay order counter. And once the barcode was scanned, the website was notified. Tommy’s Patriots order; he can now ship his jumper. Well, that’s what we built initially. We got through some introductions, network introductions. We got 125,000 in angel funding in Dublin, we got an offer for to participate in a tech accelerator, tech for good accelerator called Dot Force in Sheffield. The accelerator included 25,000, but we had to move to England, and I was like, “Well, they’re not moving to England for 25,000. Can you match this 125,000? And they come back and said, “Yes, we’ll match it. So that was a properly seed funding,

 

Tommy Boyle  3:42  

and sorry, that was an accelerator programme. True, was it through Sheffield University? Was it? It

 

Ollie Walsh  3:47  

was through a key fund where the people behind it, which was a Northern England impact fund, it was actually set up on the back of the closure of all the coal mines back in the 80s. So it was an impact fund for community, but for impact businesses as well. Okay.

 

Tommy Boyle  4:01  

Yes.

 

Ollie Walsh  4:03  

So it was about 15 companies in this. About half them English, the other half from around the world.

 

Tommy Boyle  4:08  

Yeah.

 

Ollie Walsh  4:08  

Moved to Sheffield, and it was my only time emigrating and moving to England. Obviously, is about as easy as it gets in terms of emigrating from Ireland, England. Didn’t need a visa. Spoke the language, etc. And realised how incredibly difficult it is to move country in terms of getting a bank account and you know being able to pay rent. So, for example, I had to pay six months’ rent in cash in advance to get someplace to live because nobody would accept my Irish bank account for direct debit. So I kind of thinking, well, what if somebody’s just moved here from Nigeria or from India? What do they do? And we started kind of looking at the migrant community and looked at the level of funds being sent home through like the Western Union, which is about 65 billion a year, and the the fees. So that was you know to send money from the UK, send cash from UK to Africa is 9.5% of the transaction cost, which is massive. It’s a tax on the poor, basically. So we developed this cash platform for e-commerce. So we started contacting African

 

Tommy Boyle  5:08  

just to get the timeline right, because I know you you were working on this, Ollie, before you went full time on it around 2014, 2017. So it was just, and there was another guy involved there, Rory Ryan. Was there? Was there another guy involved? Was the 3/3

 

Ollie Walsh  5:20  

co-founder. He was so so. When you got the initial

 

Tommy Boyle  5:22  

money, your idea was for an e-commerce platform, which had a social impact. But then you really dug deeper into the social impact thing and started thinking more. This is a third world solution. Am I correct?

 

Ollie Walsh  5:35  

Yes, exactly, exactly.

 

Tommy Boyle  5:36  

And so, at what point did you? Was it when you went over to the UK? The three of you are all in at this stage. You were going full time at it, were you?

 

Ollie Walsh  5:44  

Two was when full time. I haven’t junior been full time at that stage. Rory’s the techie, kept his day job until actually the subsequent round of investments. So

 

Tommy Boyle  5:53  

apparently, I could afford him. Yeah,

 

Ollie Walsh  5:54  

yeah, okay, exactly. And you know, bootstrapping risk management as well. You know, it’s a dangerous game leaving a full time job to go into a startup,

 

Tommy Boyle  6:01  

it certainly is. No, it certainly is. And in the first year, did you genuinely believe that this would take 12 years, or did you think you were building something that would might move faster? I

 

Ollie Walsh  6:11  

expected to take 10.

 

Tommy Boyle  6:13  

You did, yeah.

 

Ollie Walsh  6:13  

That was my 10-year plan. Was impact tech company, but to exit it by the time I was 50. Sorry, I missed that window by two years, but I think that’s acceptable. Acceptable, yeah, very good. Of course, when we went to start selling it, COVID hit shortly afterwards. Okay, which slowed everything down. Obviously, nobody’s investing in anything at that stage. One of the first conversations I had was with the CEO of Kenta. They just kind of locked down their investments at that stage. So it was three years later, before I talked to him again, and we we got that deal done. Okay. So yeah, two of us went full time. So moved to England. We started connecting with African based fintechs. Banking is underdeveloped in Africa, but mobile wallets are miles ahead than they are in Europe. So if you buy a mobile phone in Africa, it comes with a mobile wallet, which you can transact in. So we connected one of those, so we could lodge physical cash in a post office in England onto an e wallet in Ghana. So that was our first kind of migrant model,

 

Tommy Boyle  7:15  

and you were doing that much much cheaper than

 

Ollie Walsh  7:18  

yeah, 3.5% was the fee instead of nine,

 

Tommy Boyle  7:21  

so that was much cheaper. Was that a new concept, or were other people doing that as well? Other people were doing that, were they?

 

Ollie Walsh  7:27  

It was a new concept after we got to share. There’s there’s a few people now.

 

Tommy Boyle  7:30  

Wow, that’s incredible. That’s incredible. So obviously, along the journey, as all entrepreneurial and business journeys, there’s bumps along the way. Was there any specific year or week or moment where you went, Jesus, I don’t think we’re going to make

 

Ollie Walsh  7:46  

1. Like all entrepreneurs, I’m an optimist, so like there was a lot of ups and downs. It was a a serious roller coaster. So I mean, you know, you get your first 50,000 confirmed, and you think this is going to last forever, and it’s it’s a very short period of time before you’re you’re getting a million investment to realise in design last six months, we grew the team. I mean, let some of the team go, which was the worst part of being the CEO is letting people go. I think we many, many hard yards. You get funding in, but as the CEO, you’re the last one to get paid. So you’re kind of running a business full time, but also a lot of the time consulting as well, just to make sure the ends meet.

 

Tommy Boyle  8:20  

And what was it that kept you personally committed? Then was it this? You know, you did say at the very start that it was the social impact was your driver that kept you in the game, did it?

 

Ollie Walsh  8:29  

That kept all of us in the game, so it kept me in the game absolutely. And Julie and I come up with the idea, but he was very much based on the the social impact was why you want to do it. And then Rory was a friend of mine who was in tech, but he’d actually worked for two years for concern, based in Kenya. So he was very much front end of on the ground in Africa experience. So the impact, you know, really kept his callings.

 

Tommy Boyle  8:49  

You were very clever and innovative technologist. You’re driving this with a view with social impact, but then you kind of hit the ropes. Unfortunately, I agree with you. It’s everybody’s worst job in business to have to let go people who you’ve worked with and are friends and colleagues, but were you getting pressure from any of the funders to say, “Look, I know the social impact is a good idea, but it’s not actually buttering the parsnips at the moment. Maybe we should just go more into growth focused, where it might necessarily be social impact. Was that a constant tension?

 

Ollie Walsh  9:19  

It was a tension. I wouldn’t call it a constant tension. You know, an obvious market for what we were doing was gambling, and I just wasn’t prepared to do gambling, and neither were my or two founders. That’s not why we did this. So I think we could have gone down the gambling route and turned over a lot of money. But that was exactly the opposite of what we were trying to achieve. We were fortunate in our VC, the US boutique fintech VC called West Duke Partners. They were very understanding of what we were trying to achieve, supportive of it, so they didn’t overly push us into anything we didn’t want to do.

 

Tommy Boyle  9:54  

And then just walk me through the Qenta deal. Then Ollie, how did that come together? You said you had conversations in 2020. You did sell in 2025, so Qenta weren’t really interested at the time. Had you got other suitors? I’ve no doubt you had. So how did that all come about?

 

Ollie Walsh  10:10  

Well, we did have other suitors. I mean, we worked with a US-based investment banker, a kind of a one-man band specialist.

 

Tommy Boyle  10:18  

Yes,

 

Ollie Walsh  10:19  

going to get his introductions. I worked a lot with him on getting, you know, the IM ready, and we framed everything as a reference point from the potential buyer. So it was just we had one sales deck that went out to everybody. I did a dedicated deck saying this is how we fit with your comfort specifically.

 

Tommy Boyle  10:35  

Okay, okay, that

 

Ollie Walsh  10:37  

was a lot of work, and obviously data rooms and all that kind of stuff, as well as other work.

 

Tommy Boyle  10:42  

In hindsight, and again, I’ll ask you more about that later. But just in hindsight, was that something maybe you should have outsourced because of the time that it would take and the distraction from the running the business, or was that the right thing

 

Ollie Walsh  10:54  

to do? I don’t know if anybody could have done it the same way. You know, I mean, it would have been if we outsourced it, they would need to get the information off me to do it. So we just began; it gave me quicker for me to do it. The

 

Tommy Boyle  11:08  

only IM was fine, but I was about just positioning it specific to each potential suitor. Yeah, that was heavy lifting or hard yards. You know,

 

Ollie Walsh  11:15  

it was heavy lifting. Yeah, but I mean, we we knew who all these people were, so definitely was it like a finite amount of companies are going to buy a fintech company.

 

Tommy Boyle  11:22  

Yes.

 

Ollie Walsh  11:22  

So it was finding the fit. So a lot of the conversations were led from introductions through target companies that we’d already we’d already had some experience with, kind of introduces your M and A people. So we we kind of knew what they wanted. So so keeping it in house and me doing it made more sense than outsourcing it.

 

Tommy Boyle  11:41  

So after the 2020, when COVID was in and they shut down, when did kind of talks start again? Was it a couple of years later? Was it how long was the genesis of?

 

Ollie Walsh  11:49  

We talked really connected with with a Swiss fintech company. I’m probably shouldn’t name. We got a a 90 day term sheet off them. Spent a lot of time with them guys working on it, AC two days into that term sheet. We got an email off them saying that they’d lost their funding to acquire the company and calling out for the process. He asked earlier on about the down times. That was about three weeks before Christmas.

 

Tommy Boyle  12:14  

There’d have to be tears that day. That’s gut wrenching. It happens more often than people think, but it is gut wrenching. I’ve seen it so many times, just the 11th hour, and all of a sudden, for some reason, it doesn’t happen, and everybody’s invested in it. And it’s how did you cope with that? I mean, that’s rough.

 

Ollie Walsh  12:29  

You know, from from 30 plus years of entrepreneurship, I’ve learned that just spending all day, every day, the laptop doesn’t necessarily solve problems, and you need a lot of time to actually just walk away and let your head think about it. So I presume,

 

Tommy Boyle  12:42  

Ollie, you had had left England at this stage, or were you still in England? Yeah, no,

 

Ollie Walsh  12:46  

England was only to you. It was only a year in England. That was

 

Tommy Boyle  12:48  

only a year. Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah. It

 

Ollie Walsh  12:51  

was probably 2015, 2016, something like

 

Tommy Boyle  12:53  

that. Okay, yeah. So when that deal collapsed, it was the Christmas of of what year? What year was that? Was that 2022

 

Ollie Walsh  12:58  

or 22? I’d say

 

Tommy Boyle  12:59  

22. Okay, yeah,

 

VO  13:01  

yeah.

 

Tommy Boyle  13:01  

So okay, you know, cry, have a few pints and a few mince pies over the Christmas. Gather yourself. Lots of long

 

Ollie Walsh  13:07  

walks. Lots of Tai Chi. Tai Chi was my big, my big leveller. So I had a well-established Tai Chi practice. So no, lots of long walks with my wife and so on, and just those kind of

 

Tommy Boyle  13:17  

okay. Did Tai Chi got you through that? Did

 

Ollie Walsh  13:20  

it? Oh, absolutely! Yeah, calmness and clarity-a pretty much daily practice of Tai Chi. It’s well, well-established practice. So just set in the mind, calm. Let things filter. Let things percolate. You know, the the usual entrepreneur approach to that is to just to spend 15 hours a day at the laptop frantically typing, as opposed to just walk away from the laptop. We had a previous experience where we’d identified the three biggest risks of the company: one was losing a key member of staff, one was losing a key client, and one was losing a key bank account. And then all three of those things happened in a six-week period.

 

Tommy Boyle  13:56  

Wow! Who was the key member of staff? Was that unfortunate circumstances, or was it?

 

Ollie Walsh  14:00  

It was just totally left field. Just an email effective immediately. I’m no longer working with this company, and I haven’t seen or heard from him since. But he was a very board member staff.

 

Tommy Boyle  14:10  

You lost a bank account as well.

 

Ollie Walsh  14:13  

Yeah. So a lot of banks, a lot of the banks kind of don’t like fintech companies, and they especially don’t like cash. And we were a fintech company dealing with cash, so one of our key accounts that we were using for client money literally was nowhere because a 15 day notice we’re closing this bank account, so we had a 15 day scramble to kind of because obviously it’s all the compliance involved in fintech and a lot of compliance involved in payments and

 

Tommy Boyle  14:36  

this is all prior to 2022 Christmas 2022.

 

Ollie Walsh  14:40  

This was a couple of years before that for me. Okay, we just turned off. Oh, sorry, a

 

Tommy Boyle  14:43  

bigger pardon, a bigger pardon. Yes, I understand. Yes, yeah, and then you lost a big customer at the same time, so it was a triple whammy. The three big risks they say they come in threes, don’t they? All of a sudden, then the big customer goes as well. Yeah,

 

Ollie Walsh  14:54  

my way dealing with that was also to I actually scaled down and just to do like four hours a day work for. Following a couple of weeks and long walks in the morning, just let the head clear, do a few really creative hours work, and then walk away and just spend some quality time with my family, as opposed to going in at five in the morning and working till 10 at night.

 

Tommy Boyle  15:16  

What about professional advisors in that Ali? Did you rely on any outside professional advisors, was there board members who were non-execs, or was there any other?

 

Ollie Walsh  15:25  

Yes, we do. We had a good board. We had a really good non-exec Dublin-based fintech expert, Pete Townsend.

 

Tommy Boyle  15:31  

He must have been a big help,

 

Ollie Walsh  15:33  

was he? Oh yeah, Money Never Sleeps podcast. You probably heard of that. His podcast. I had kind of a few of my own advisors who were like super angels in the business that’s come along later on, and then I’m also kind of a member of a peer leadership group in all the years.

 

Tommy Boyle  15:48  

The senior management team did they obviously they’re feeling the pressure here. Did that start causing tension and friction and rouse and blame game and pointing fingers, or how did that manifest itself within the team?

 

Ollie Walsh  16:00  

Well, the senior guy leaving blindsided everybody. There was no lead up to it. There was no intro. Nobody suspected there was anything wrong. We just left, so it kind of left us scrambling at it to kind of replace his functionality. To blame game? No, not really. We were relatively aligned around kind of the direction of business and what we were doing. It just made a serious scramble to try and solve those problems. The

 

Tommy Boyle  16:21  

culture and the business was obviously very good. That could actually enable that too.

 

Ollie Walsh  16:26  

Yeah,

 

Tommy Boyle  16:27  

yeah,

 

Ollie Walsh  16:27  

yeah, yeah.

 

Tommy Boyle  16:28  

Quentin then came along. What that was at 22, so 23. Did they start appearing after the Swiss people had left the field?

 

Ollie Walsh  16:37  

Yeah, we had two more offers after the Swiss people that fell through fairly quickly. We had one term sheet that didn’t even get signed. Fell through that quickly, and the other guys made us an offer, but would fail to follow through the term sheet. Then it was February 24 when I reconnected with Kenta. It started off very rapid. Like I sent an email Tuesday to the CEO. I meeting with him on Thursday, and he made the offer on Friday. And we had a 60-day term sheet that took 42 weeks to complete.

 

Tommy Boyle  17:17  

You had done all your due diligence. You had prepared the IM. I know the legals can take a bit, and there’s this and that and the other, and all of the due diligence is tortuous, and it has to happen. But 42 weeks, where did that come from? What was the big, big stumbling block there?

 

Ollie Walsh  17:32  

Stumbling block. We had with a couple of big problems with our cap table. Warren was that we did a crowd funding round that made the cap table quite messy.

 

Tommy Boyle  17:40  

Had to be unravelled or unwinded.

 

Ollie Walsh  17:43  

And yeah, and

 

Tommy Boyle  17:44  

yeah,

 

Ollie Walsh  17:45  

we also had agreements that need to be done with the bank because there was a loan involved that needed to be transferred, which took ages, and it wasn’t a massive loan or anything like that. But it was just a really long process.

 

Tommy Boyle  17:56  

It happens, you know. Things get delayed, but like given the start, you had started off so well. You had three days. You done the deal, and it took you a year to complete the deal. And that’s the frustration in that. So the day the deal closed, what did that actually feel like after 12 years of a roller coaster ride?

 

Ollie Walsh  18:15  

It was great. It was like I’d say over that year, the deal probably only fell through five or six times, lots of sudden flights to go for meetings and smooth things over and get them up. But like the the buying company was also buying two other companies at the same time, which was the other half of the delay. The delay wasn’t just our side with the Sofia to unravel. We had a lot to unravel, but I think the fact that they had so much on, kind of allowed us the time to unravel it, if you know what I mean. If they weren’t so busy, they might have lost patience with us. So it it might have been this your glass half full approaches again.

 

Tommy Boyle  18:50  

Tell me about that day. Yeah, what did it feel like?

 

Ollie Walsh  18:52  

It was such a relief. I suppose was the initial

 

Tommy Boyle  18:55  

get it over the line.

 

Ollie Walsh  18:56  

It’s over the line. It’s done. It was a Saturday afternoon. I got the email saying that the document had been signed by the buyer, and then Monday morning I started my new job as as the president of FinTair Care Payments.

 

Tommy Boyle  19:11  

In terms of the Tai Chi, I mean, do you go to the Tai Chi in times of enjoyment and happiness as much as you do in times of stress? So,

 

Ollie Walsh  19:18  

well, every day, yeah, every day, pretty much you. Yeah, right.

 

Tommy Boyle  19:22  

Okay, yeah, okay, very good.

 

Ollie Walsh  19:24  

That’s really part of having that constant. You know what I say to people is like the roller coaster is like this always, but you as CEO need to be like this, country to middle. You need to stay grounded when there’s highs and stay focused when there’s lows.

 

Tommy Boyle  19:38  

Very good. And is there anything about the deal itself, the structure, or the timing, or the valuation that you’d have done differently in hindsight.

 

Ollie Walsh  19:48  

I think in hindsight, I wouldn’t have done a crowd fund to be honest with you.

 

Tommy Boyle  19:52  

Probably, probably didn’t raise a whole pile in the scheme of things, anyway.

 

Ollie Walsh  19:55  

Yeah, yeah, it’s kind of great for a lot of publicity and a little bit of money, but when it comes to our mining issues. It certainly wasn’t worthwhile. I wouldn’t do that again. When you’re a small company, so there’s only five of us. You know, dealing with a much larger company in a much quicker process unravel or identify who all the decision makers are, because we were kind of going through a process where we were, like I said, nearly fell apart a few times, whereas we were had a signing date lined up, and then the buyer brought somebody new into the process who wanted new information, but it turned out that you know the legal guy we were dealing with we thought was the top legal guy. He wasn’t, so then another legal guy came in. So kind of that happened a few times when more layers came in. So we kind of didn’t really understand their process.

 

Tommy Boyle  20:45  

Maybe some additional professional advice might have been useful in that process, over and above what you got. I know you had your good guy, but you probably could have done with more seasoned people who kind of could see around corners a little bit. Would that be fair?

 

Ollie Walsh  21:00  

One of our super angels was a partner in KPMG. One was former professor of entrepreneurship in Chicago Booth University. We had a very good legal team in Dublin, and obviously we had a VC. We had our own VC on our side as well, so we we did have a pretty high level heavy hitting.

 

Tommy Boyle  21:16  

Even with all of that, you had to overcome all those obstacles, irrespective of that. You had all that, and it still can be a bumpy ride. So, you then went from the CEO of your own company to president inside somebody else’s company.

 

Ollie Walsh  21:29  

Yep.

 

Tommy Boyle  21:30  

So you led the integration of Pipit into Qenta or Qenta. I call it Quenty. You call it Kenta. Is that correct? Yeah. Kenta is a Qenta. Yeah. What surprised you most about the shift in those two roles, we’d say, in the first couple of months,

 

Ollie Walsh  21:42  

having always been a kind of a startup person, I’ve worked kind of as a consultant with bigger companies, but my own team has never been more than 10, really.

 

Tommy Boyle  21:53  

Yes,

 

Ollie Walsh  21:53  

so I went pretty much overnight having a team of about 40.

 

Tommy Boyle  21:57  

Okay,

 

Ollie Walsh  21:58  

with the structure they had, so I was the insistent calling me president. I pushed back against that, but they were American company. So I was president of the payments division, and then they had blockchain division, and they had a licence entity division, and there’s a fork division in the fintech piece. So I was dealing with kind of three pure level presidents of their own. So altogether, there was about 150, 160 people in the fintech division, and then you were kind of getting into, as opposed to me saying to Rory, “We need this done, and Nor are you doing it. It came into well, okay, we can do that in four months’ time or six months’ time, and the decision-making process was so large, as opposed to yes or no, and then you’re kind of getting from a stage where you had a small team very aligned to being in a bigger team who weren’t necessarily aligned with her mission and you know had their own requirements.

 

Tommy Boyle  23:01  

What was kind of the single hardest call you had to make, you know, in the eight months that you were there as president to actually integrate and make the merger work? The

 

Ollie Walsh  23:11  

hardest call was around resources, probably that there was too much fat in the bigger entity. There was a lot of kind of products that were going nowhere. There was a lot of pet projects and things that needed to be brought to the attention of of the big boss to say, you know, this is a waste of time, which led to cuts being made to to streamline the company and bring some focus. So again, that kind of part is really hard because I mean the company was just spending money which shouldn’t be spending it, and they needed the focus on things that were ready to go to market, so there was a couple of hard conversations around that. Very good.

 

Tommy Boyle  23:45  

So in December, you announced that you stepped down as president, and you called it closing the entrepreneurial loop. What did you mean by that phrase, Ali?

 

Ollie Walsh  23:54  

Well, startups in general, in in all startups, you know that the failed rate is 90% in the first three years, and then at that last 10% 90% they’ll fail in the the following three years. So the success rate of a business is very, very small. But when you go to something high risk like a fintech startup,

 

Tommy Boyle  24:10  

yes,

 

Ollie Walsh  24:11  

fail fast and fail often kind of mantra is bandied around a lot. And and I would kind of say to people having failed in business before, you want to try it before you bandy it around. It’s not as cool as it sounds. To start a business, you know, from ideations level to building a strategy, to building a team, to building the funding, to growing it, to transacting across 50 countries and emerging markets, to dealing with a fee, Z, to getting funding from Enterprise Ireland, all the way through to it being acquired by another company is the full circle entrepreneur wise?

 

Tommy Boyle  24:42  

It’s classic and it’s well said and and well done to you. You should be really really proud of what you’ve all achieved. You said you’re taking time off to reboot. So what did that actually look like? Kind of, I suppose, day to day for someone who has been building companies since they left college and has been a busy man. So what does reboot. Look like on a day-to-day basis. Obviously, a lot of Tai Chi, but apart from that,

 

Ollie Walsh  25:04  

I took 10 weeks off completely. Didn’t open my laptop once for 10 weeks.

 

Tommy Boyle  25:10  

Oh wow! Yeah, what’s that like?

 

Ollie Walsh  25:14  

People laughed at me, including my wife. People like that said, “There’s not a chance you’re going to be able to do this. There’s no way going to be able to relax, and it took me about 15 minutes to set into a.

 

Tommy Boyle  25:24  

Well done, well done.

 

Ollie Walsh  25:28  

Yeah, I just kind of went for a complete reboot. So I kind of started January with I had lecturing in the university lined up, which is only two hours a week. Goal University of Galway lecturing marketing. Apart from that, I had actually nothing lined up for the year, and by the end of the first week in January, I had probably enough work to keep me going for December. But I kind of, you know, my days of consulting, where you have to take every job because you need the money, are gone. So I can be now much more selective and deal with nice people with interesting companies.

 

Tommy Boyle  25:58  

Is there another founder journey in you?

 

Ollie Walsh  26:01  

No, I don’t think so.

 

Tommy Boyle  26:01  

No, no,

 

Ollie Walsh  26:04  

1. Being there done that, you know, like

 

Tommy Boyle  26:06  

yeah. For a founder currently three or four years into a long kind of grinding build, you know, with no end in sight, what would you tell them about how to actually survive those middle years?

 

Ollie Walsh  26:19  

Taking care of yourself is key. Resilience is something you can’t learn in school. It’s purely on the job you learn resilience, and the way to create that resilience is by taking care of yourself. So I’ve given many talks and many blogs about this kind of culture of 12 hours a day, seven days a week, being trendy at the moment, and that just leads to burning out. Once you get over 40 hours a week, you’re just not really working at capacity properly. You’re just using time as opposed to correctly spending your energy. So, whatever your thing is, whether it’s tai chi or swimming or walking or yoga or just reading books, make sure you keep time for that, and make sure you keep time for for family and friends, and and I would also recommend having that kind of advisor pool in. You know, I mentioned kind of all the advisors we had in the company and the peer leadership group, but I also just contacted a friend of mine to say, “Listen, I’m going to need to meet you every week for 30 minutes just to vent. So, you know, I met him for a cup of coffee, literally every Thursday morning for a year, and it was just 30 minutes of me giving out and got up my chest. But the direct answer to your question is you need to look after yourself.

 

Tommy Boyle  27:30  

Making that time commitment with your friend to speak with, I think that’s really really clever, and I think the advice you’ve given there is really really wise. So just in relation to a piece of kind of standard, how to prepare for an exit advice? Is there a piece of that that you would say that you know that everyone says you should do? That’s actually wrong, based on how that pipet deal went. So you know this is how you should do an exit, and you’re going well. Actually, I’d advise you not to do it that bit.

 

Ollie Walsh  27:56  

We talked to a lot of the the usual names that you hear in terms of working with big firms to do an exit, and the approach that I was kind of getting off them was very templated. I mentioned earlier on that we had a dedicated tech document IM for each company we were talking to. The fit is the main thing. You’re not selling what you have. You need to sell what they want or what they need. Really spending the time to position it so as not to give everybody, you know, a vanilla deck that they have to work out for themselves. Be very, very clear of this exactly is where we fit with your company, and this is the benefit to you.

 

Tommy Boyle  28:37  

Again, really good advice. You’ve mentored fintechs, and you’ve and social impact founders and you know you’ve you’ve lived kind of through the fuller arc from build sell integrate walk away type thing. What’s the single most common mistake that you see founders making that maybe even made yourself a pivot?

 

Ollie Walsh  28:56  

Most founders. So I’ve come academically. I come from business background. So you know my my degree is international marketing from what was it on RTC, which is now Atlantic University, I think. Okay, yeah. You know, a master’s in strategy and post grads in innovation. Most founders are domain experts, so they’re a software engineer’s or even idea to build a product, or or for a chef who opens a restaurant, their expertise is in the product or the service, and that’s their focus. Running a business and growing a business and scaling a business is a distinct skill, so it’s not the same as being a software engineer. So most founders, and this is kind of where my consulting world comes in. Most founders I deal with are overly focused on what the product is and not focused enough on what the market

 

Tommy Boyle  29:48  

1. Okay, yeah. Again, really good to hear that. If you are 28 again and with everything you know now about the 12 years ahead, the year on the other side of the. Deal, I suppose. Would you still do it all again, or would you build something else completely different?

 

Ollie Walsh  30:05  

Oh, I do it again. Yes, like I said, there was lots of troughs in that roller coaster. There was lots of peaks as well. You know, lots of exciting times. You know, going back and forth to England the whole time for meetings isn’t great fun. But you know, going to I’ve been to into Kuwait for a meeting. Many people have been to Kuwait, so there’s good times as well. I spend a lot of time with good people. Met some great people along the way. So yes, I would do it again. What would I do differently? It’s hard to say what you do differently because you learn the lessons while you’re doing it. So back at the start of the journey, I was doing those 15-hour days, you know, all the time. I don’t think I would do that again. I think you’re actually more productive by just focusing your time into something that’s that’s manageable, as opposed to just working constantly.

 

Tommy Boyle  30:49  

Ollie, I’ve really enjoyed speaking with you. Thank you for your honest account today about the years that weren’t always the easiest and what it actually took to close the loop on the other side of a deal. Think for anyone listening who’s in the middle of a long, you know, uncertain build with no exit in sight. I think what you shared today will land well with them. Particularly like your piece on, and I think it was really solid advice that should land about looking after yourself primarily. That’s so so important because if you don’t, as you said, you’ll burn out. So thank you so much, Ali, for joining us here today. That’s it for this episode of the Business Answers podcast. Until the next time, take care.

 

VO  31:28  

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