Digital marketing was not really a thing. It started by just going out and networking, listening to people, asking them what worked, what didn't work, you know, ringing up estate agents saying, look, I'd love to do your mortgages and walking up and down the high street with my briefcase, really. I just recently went with my cousin who works for Virgin Atlantic on a trip to Austin, and I ended up doing both of the pilots mortgages!

Like all businesses, it's about understanding the customer's needs, their pain points, and trying to work out where we can stand out and make a difference and have an incredible customer experience and good customer outcomes where others can't.

Australia for whatever reason, is unnecessarily divergent and complex, not in the pricing aspect of the lending, that is fairly competitive, but when it comes to the approval part of the process, there is a huge amount of customer confusion as a result of that.

And one, if not the highest penetration of mortgage broker deals as opposed to direct lender deals. The way a traditional broker would solve that level of complexity is through deep knowledge and expertise and experience in having done lots of deals, and usually a close working relationship with a small number of banks. And so the reality is, and industry data supports this, that most brokers will typically use one, two, maybe three lenders for overwhelmingly 80% of their loans.

When we looked at online mortgage broking we looked at how might you make that better and different investing in incredibly high quality tooling for the broker to turn that broker to a superstar?

That's why you're hear 'the problem is the deposits', but people don’t need to have to high deposit. Not really, because they only need a high deposit, because you can't lend them enough, because you put all the risks to them. You know, if you change your product into a long dated fixed, you protect the borrower, you can lend a higher amount, they need less of a deposit. Right? It all depends on how you explain things.

And this is what other countries have done for a long, long time: Denmark for over 200 years, the Netherlands for 40/ 50/ 60 years, the US obviously, after the savings and loans crisis, they started protecting borrowers by making long dated fixed rate mortgages the 'cool product', and that protected them over the crisis against these shocks. And that in turn, helps the economy.

I worked my way, literally, through elementary school and through high school. In high school, I caught a break, I was on my way to buy a Slurpee, like maybe 12 years old, and a guy dropped something on the street, and I went and picked it up for him and put it on the back of a truck. And they're like, Hey, why don't you help us load this truck. I said, sure, I got nothing going on. And I just loaded a truck with them. And then like an hour later, they said, Well, hey, kid, why don't you come deliver the truck with us. And I said sure.

Now remember, this is time where parents didn't worry about their kids. It was relatively safe. I'm a 12 year old getting into a truck. We drove to Westchester unloaded the truck. I get back four hours later. And the guy says What are you doing tomorrow? I'm like, I don't have school tomorrow. He goes, we'll be here at four o'clock in the morning and you can work.

And I worked every minute of my life through high school.

Distressed property - maybe it’s dated on the inside with bad cabinets - can always be repaired, not distressed people. And so we focus on distressed properties, not distressed people. And that platform has worked very, very well for us.

When you have a contract like ours, in which you gently transfer the value of the property to the tenant, there is no capital gain or very limited capital gains. So now the yield differentials are stark: why is it that you can get 30 million pounds per billion invested over and over again, in London and 100 in Middlesbrough, compared to 30 over and over again for two human generations?

I don't think those portfolios are worth the same. I don't think ordinary people (if you took the capital gain away) would say, well, I'm quite comfortable getting 100 in Middlesborough and selling that and getting 30 in London, over and over again for two human generations.

Those properties are not the same. The one throwing out 100 million is worth more. It just is. And people look at you blankly and say how can a an apartment in Middlesborough be worth more than you can buy and sell an apartment and Middlesborough? The answer is, well, it's not, the apartment is completely perfectly priced but 10,000 apartments where the rent is commingled and you've broken that asset into two economic units, one which wobbles around and one which is stable, one is a bond and one is equity, and if you separate them out until the equity, it's like, I'm an M&A banker, right? Broken up companies and sold them in pieces. And the two pieces don't add up to the whole, they just don't.

When you then take the rent and tranche it and this is a repeat of the theme, it take a little bit of time to absorb the simplicity of it.

Entrepreneurship is a profession, a profession that requires close attention to details, and discipline on multiple facets of the business. And if it is justifiable for a person to get an MBA and transition from finance to product management, or transition from product management, to consulting or transition from sales and marketing to something else, then it absolutely is justifiable to get an MBA to mass not to master maybe, but to be a jack of all trades of all of those aspects.

The likelihood of starting a company and being successful is very low already. So arming yourself with education that is tailored specifically for that purpose, that sounds to me like a very good investment.

And I have to say it was it was an immense investment in myself.

So where does Lenuity fit in? Well, financial services and construction are the two most important things to get the UK out of a recession. Construction is building wealth for the economy. It's providing homes. For people, these are really important things, it's providing jobs, this is an incredibly important thing to drive us out in a recession. And what we're doing is enabling them to thrive in the current environment, to sell like they've never been able to sell before. Not even in boom times.

When you if you take a look back at what happened to the car industry, when they started financing their customers, it was just a massive boom for them that they could create better offers, their business became more profitable, that they had a reduction in costs. Now, when you get into house building and construction, this is magnified for bigger reductions in costs, an area of waste that they never even talk about that, you know, they talk about waste on the building site, we're talking about the financial waste of holding costs, we're talking about the difference between completions that take three months, four months and five months coming down to two weeks.

I'm a firm believer of being mortgage free should be achievable for everyone.

It shouldn't just be for the wealthy because just the concept if you go to like www.sprive.com, just three pounds a day, five pounds a day, you'd be amazed that if you just regularly chipping away the impact that it can have.

The next feature that we're launching next month is this concept of Shop with Sprive, so everyone has to go to their weekly grocery, whether it's Morrison's or M&S or ASDA and so every time you shop with Sprive, using this Sprive app, you went to Morrison's you spent a £87 on your weekly shop, you then pay that via the Sprive app, you get a code that comes up, which you're going to use at checkout to pay for the basket and immediately get extra cash that goes towards helping you pay off your mortgage faster. It's almost like cashback on steroids.

There is a mix, but the really large crypto holders tend to be ones who were just very early to the space. They are an underserved market and a lot of their holdings remain in crypto.

A lot of these people didn't get into crypto to then move back into fiat, they go into crypto because they think they're going to stay there for the rest of their lives. So it's more that they're dabbling in the world of fiat, but living their lives in crypto as opposed to the reverse. |That's the kind of odd customers that, I say odd customers, is the kind of customers that we're seeing that typical banks just don't have exposure to which I think will make it quite an interesting space in the future. Especially if they begin to move into the space themselves.

I had a conversation with the Mortgage Club yesterday and it's the same conversation. It's, you know, how do we make sure how do we bridge the gap between the innovation that we're bringing to the market versus what they know, and what their what their their fears could be based off of past products that have been a market. So really, it's it's right now. It's about communication. It's about patience. It's about empathy for us. And we want to make sure that we partner with these intermediaries because they provide the crucial advice to first time buyers who are vulnerable in this process. They've never bought a home before and the home buying process is to put it simply an absolute nightmare to go through. So a broker that can, you know, take a accurate financial snapshot for that customer, break down the process a bit for them, make them feel comfortable about them, you know, making the largest purchase their life is important for our customers. And that's why we want to make sure we partner with them.