Hello, I'm Mark S, the host of the Channel Chat podcast show and today we have Paul Hamilton, the CEO and founder of Halo in the studio in London. How are we doing? >> Hey Mark, I'm great. Thank you. Looking forward to a good chat about uh Halo and software and channel partners. >> Great. Great. Well, let let's start it off there actually, Paul, because for the listeners that maybe don't know Halo and don't know what you're about, give us a bit of a two-minute synopsis on how you started 20 years ago, 20 plus years ago. Yeah, I mean 21 years ago was when I when I started doing this. I started employing people 14 years ago. So, um when we started it was it was imagine sort of low-end basic ticketing platform. Didn't do anything like what what it does today in terms of maturity, but obviously a lot less expensive. Um we didn't really say no to anything back then or I didn't. Uh and uh yeah, we just it was a hustle and yeah, you're just doing whatever you can to to to grow the business. terms of what Halo is today. I mean, we we've evolved into two decade journey, but we we have evolved into a a digital workflow platform for for enterprise for sales and service, which is interesting because most enterprise organizations kind of either start off in sales or start off in service, but we've kind of just always done done both. I mean, there's so much overlap as we're now seeing with service now entering sales and CRM and Salesforce entering ITSM. So, it kind of makes sense to do do both. >> Give me an honest answer. Did you think it'd ever get this big? >> Absolutely not. No, >> you didn't. >> It's crazy. I mean, every 12 months when I look back and think, well, would I have visualized like where we've gone in the next 12 months and it it really is a wild journey. Um, and people want me people often want the answer to that question to be yes. they they want to know that there's like been this this blueprint, this plan so that they can then find out like what they can do to then like I don't know try and replicate or do something similar but um no there is there isn't really a I mean there's a blueprint I guess in some ways in terms of our philosophy um the bit but what I would say is it's very rare to ever come across any people or organizations that have the patience to do what we've done because it takes a hell of a long time to do what we've done. You're now, I think, if I'm correct, the second biggest privately owned software company in the UK. Have you ever been tempted to sell? People must be coming up to you all the time thinking, I want to buy Halo. >> We're actually the second largest uh software company of any. So, Sage is public company. They're first. They're about 12 billion valuation. We're now about two billion valuation. Was Dark Trace. They got acquired by um our friends over over the pond. And uh so yeah, Halo is now the the second most valuable. Um and I think in terms of will we sell, why don't we sell, I mean we've had offers now for a good five years or so and it's a mixture of mostly private equity. um some competitors as well over the years have wanted to to acquire us and I think I mean it's we're really interesting company because all the leadership we're all technologists none of us are finance people we're not our primary objective is not to make as much money as we can in the shortest time possible the objective is and it just dates back to like literally when it was me programming away till 1:00 am or whatever in the morning just because I'd have done a demo to someone and they'd say oh it would have been great if it could do this and I'd be like I reckon I can make it do that and it's because I just love problem solving and I think we've now got a culture of people in the business who love problem solving and I think whether it's the commercial team that are selling and they they they so they listen to the problems and they build out a proof of concept and I mean that's problem solving the marketing team is problem solving it's there's just problem solvers everywhere and we just love the challenge and it is a different challenge as you kind of progress up the ladder we're in a position which again is very unusual to have operated throughout the whole scale of business. So right from the most basic ticketing cheapest systems into the mid-market and up into enterprisegrade platforms where we've now got some of the world's largest organizations in highly regulated industries um using Halo for enterprise service management. So, and because we've gone through that journey, it actually puts us in a really good position because I think there is flaws with the enterprise software industry and and and we've got comparisons. We can compare it to like the midmarket and the lower end and it's in terms of like standards and uh oh yeah, I could talk for hours about that. But >> when you get when you get approached by a private equity firm or another company and you don't have to give me names, but what actually happens? Do they start talking numbers with you straight away? Where's these valuations come? Because if it was me, I'd be thinking, "Yeah, let's just do this. Let's just do this. Do go." >> Private equity is very relationship based. So, it doesn't just you don't just like get a proposal with no relationship with numbers. It doesn't work like that. It takes I'd say from the So, I've had a couple of offers of over a billion valuation, which for up to 50%. One was two billion valuation. The thing is like, so you think, well, okay, what would you do with the funds? Because you you well you could either retire and like do your own thing and do nothing, go to the beach the rest of your life and for me I don't know you'd lose purpose, you lose fulfillment. We have so much fun like doing what we do and and that would all be be gone. And I've spoken to a lot of tech founders as well. almost all of I'd say unanimously the biggest regret they've all got in their life is just selling the majority too early and kind of so but then you think because there is in many industries there's so many reasons why it's good to raise money and good to sell minorities and to to raise funds whether it's through VC private equity IPOs whatever so many industries like manufacturing highly capital intensive um industries you kind of have to if you want to grow and you want to become market leader, you have to raise a lot of money. There's no no two ways about it. But I think in the software industry, it's very very different. We're big believers in Brook's law. Brooks's law is a theory where you cannot just throw more resource into a software development project and it so if you double the resource, it doesn't just double the output. In many ways, there's a lot of um a lot of sort of studies behind this now to show that it gets to a point and then every extra bit of resource you throw at it, it's actually net negative impact and it slows down the agility, slows down the uh delivery, slows down the quality or reduces the quality. So, we've got like a real sweet spot in our engineering team. We're absolutely content and we believe we can scale to market leader with the exact engineering resource we have right now which means we don't need money finances to grow to become market leader if we've got a product if we've got time and reason I say that is if we wanted to hypers scale and throw hundreds of millions or billions at a sales and marketing engine which people do I mean that's what uh a lot of the enterprise software organizations when when they start up um they do throw hund and you see it time and time again you'll get a big big sell off to private equity they'll raise hundreds of millions we got it going on a couple of examples at the moment in the industry and um it they lally go from maybe a couple hundred staff to a couple of thousand staff big new offices in all the tier one cities culture dilutes standards drop majority of people don't really have anything like the knowledge of the people that we used to have so who's suffering it's the customers like the at the end of the day. Yeah. Okay. You're you're selling. So when you're going out to all these markets and you you are picking up business because you're you're almost living off your reputation, but that only lasts so long before all of a sudden there's a tipping point and then you you kind of have this new reputation for being a company that's maybe lost its identity. Um doesn't have that same level of customer obsession, doesn't have the same standards. Um but maybe you've achieved your objectives, which is to get to like half the market share. Perhaps it's worked, but a Halo like we because we genuinely do. It's an infinite game for us. We're never going to sell. We're never going to IPO. Um, we're productled, which means it's it really is just the technology itself. And as I say, we've got that sweet team of people that are developing it and the agility is phenomenal. The speed they develop is phenomenal. We feel like we've got like the perfect formula right now. So, there's no need to raise money. It's the the long answer to that question. >> You you mentioned there you said you're never going to sell. You you really believe you're never going to sell. >> Really believe that. Yeah. People don't believe me and they say like >> I don't believe you. >> Imagine what you could do with 100 billion or like you could buy I mean I'm a massive football fan. You could buy whatever football club in the by Barcelona if you wanted to. Maybe not 100 billion. I don't know. But um yeah I think we're we're just we're just having too much fun doing what we're doing. And I think in due course I mean Halo as a brand we're becoming so Halo way is our philosophy. There will there will be a book at some point um depending how crazy the journey becomes. Maybe there'll be a film as well. Who knows? But um but I do think we'll begin to transcend into different uh different industries. I think Halo as a brand um I think anyone we always like prioritize character uh passion over like experience and and qualifications. And I think when if people come through and they're they're passionate about any particular area, um we'll sort of just run with that and we'll create we'll just create opportunity from I I just think you got talent everywhere like throughout the whole throughout the whole world. I mean we're in the UK um at the moment but but take the UK. So there there is there's smart driven great people throughout the whole country. Um, the problem we've got is we're kind of in a society where all the best progressive opportunities are in the big cities, particularly the likes of of London, Manchester, places like that. Um, what Halo, what we're all about is because we don't hire experience, so we don't need to go to the big cities where that experience resides. We end up just creating real like there's so much gratitude like from the the team as well from just like what we're doing in Suffach. It's transformational and the so Ipsswitch is a town 120,000 population something like that and as with every other town across the country of that size it's going through hard times at the moment all the the retails all closing down the center of town and there's a lot of hybrid working from home and stuff which means that people aren't spending the money that they were at lunchtimes and after work um so these towns are really struggling and I think Halo um we've got a bit of a master plan which um so Halo HQ will always be an IP switch, but we we're actually figuring out how we can now do a bit of a leveling up thing where we're literally picking like random towns across the UK to think the likes of like Kingsland or I don't know, Lincoln perhaps or or Scarbor, like places where there really aren't a lot of opportunity, but there's a bunch of people and I believe like in all these places there's so much talent and it just needs a a good and yeah, it's uh so it's really interesting to see where we're going to go with that. >> I think you're going to be the chairman of um It Richtown. That's what it's going to happen. 5 years time. Private equity is going to come in. You're going to you're going to sell out and then you're going to just be a football chairman. That's what's going to happen. Maybe I'll see you on Sky Sports Paul in a few years. It'll be uh it'll be great. Now, apart from having no shareholders to answer to and no private equity firm saying you've got to do XY Z, what is the benefits of being a privately held company? >> I mean, they are the main benefits is that you're in complete control. the decision- making you can think so long term like there's no even private equity they'd want a return within three five years they buy the asset sell it on three five years time like we can't even we can't do we were having a a discussion the other day where there's some work we're doing now we won't even begin to see the benefit until five years time we're going around every school and college in Suffukk talking to students 16 17 18 years old they're still to go off to uni for like 3 four years we're hoping that they will there's a lot of excitement and we areing hoping that uh they will come back and and and work with us at Halo at some point. This is how far in the future we invest and you'll see we've now got across all the universities across not all of them a lot of the key targeted universities sponsoring like the football teams, the hockey teams uh we've got uh these power boost gadgets at the local bars around the universities. that and again like that is we're probably doing more because I said we're productled productled doesn't work from a recruitment point of view. You have to be you have to market yourselves as a employer as you'll know more than anyone. Um and I think the the way to and it's really hard to connect with students. So, we're putting more effort at the moment into marketing into like our employer branding than anything else in the business, which is again just flips around entirely the approach of of our sort of peers in the enterprise software industry. >> Yeah. Because you've mentioned it there. You you you've built a product business. There's no flashy marketing department or marketing engine. There's no big sales force, which is obviously hugely disappointment for for myself being a recruitment company. But was that by design or do you just hate hiring sales and marketing people? >> So it wasn't deliberate why we've uh evolved into a a very technical organization. What we realized um quite early on I think is that we would have one person who has maybe done a few years of of consultancy um so implementing Halo for for clients, delivering training basically becoming a true Halo expert. you can pretty much field any question about Halo. But at the same time, and this is part of the the checklist for any new graduate that comes into Halo, they have about 20 items on a checklist and it's to become an allrounder. So like we it will be things like attending trade shows where you speak to clients and you speak to partners and you're getting a feel for like why is it that people are paying us us money to use our platform? Um what value are they actually getting? They then are things like uh being part of an interview panel. So they'll actually get involved in the interview process. Um they'll also have as part of the the program to lead an actual site visit. So maybe one of the smaller ones initially, but where we're going out to the client, we're implementing our platform. We're giving them training. So we our whole graduate program in terms of how we develop talent is we create all rounders. What that then means is that after a couple of years, three years, however long it takes, they make the best sales team. Because if you think well what is sales? We're not selling widgets. Like what we sell is something very complex. People don't spend millions of dollars a year on um platforms that don't solve complex problems. Like it is a complex thing. Yes, we ideally you want to do it in in as simple a way as possible. But you see some of our requirements document they're like hundreds of pages long. This is a complex solution that that we're selling. Um, so you need you need very you need pe to sell that effectively. You need to have a really deep understanding o of the platform or you'd need to have a whole team maybe of a dozen people that have expertise in all the different areas. But what we find is from a customer's point of view, it's not so enjoyable for them to work with 12 people because then it becomes a bit more fragmented and someone will have to, I don't know, take a note and then go and ask someone else. And what we find, we just turn up, couple of hours with a client, bang, bang, bang, bang, we just answer all the questions and they're just blown away. Um, and we've we've we're just doing it time and time again. And I think honestly, like part of the reason why we our conversion rate, so anything that hits our desk that kind of gets to demo stage, so where they're seriously injured in Halo, we're converting like 70% of every single transaction that gets to that point. And it it's completely unheard of in the industry. So it seems to work. >> That sounds great. how you were breeding staff and and making them all around us in the business. That's great for an internally, but externally, you know, Halo's been growing quietly as I would say. No flashy campaigns, no big PR machine around it. How are you getting inquiries? How are you getting people to hear about Halo? Obviously, it's great when you get in front of them, but if they're not hearing about you, how are you getting inquiries? >> 90% plus is just word of mouth. So, it's >> 90% >> 90% plus. Yeah. And this is the whole point of a productled strategy. So we don't we yes we've got an it switch town front of shirt deal that's a community thing it's an employer branding play it's not necessarily to directly generate business all we want so our almost overarching goal of of any any deal we we do any transaction we just want to get the the client to a point we call them go live happy and we track it we got data in our platform go live happy so it's not just getting them live it's getting them live and getting the feedback to the point where we know that they're really satisfied When you get a client to go live happy, you know, due to the industry we're in, people talk. There's a lot of peer-to-peer networks. That one recently, a CIO peer-to-peer where I was told the only reason they'd ever consider speaking to a vendor is if one of their other peers has said to them to go and check out this vendor. Really, doesn't matter what trade shows you're at. And you're not just going to like wander past a stand and think, "Oh, that looks interesting. I'm going to go and check out that software vendor." You're only going to check them out if your CIO peer has said to you that you know there's something really interesting going on at Halo at the moment. Go and check out those guys because there's an amazing journey and amazing story building there. Um so that's yeah 90% plus of the business we get is word of mouth. Um and it may be that because we have a lot of channel partners and uh the partner ecosystem is very important for us but it will kind of be the same thing like you yeah you might use one of one of the leading VARs I softca SEC CDW whatever it is then you may be a client of theirs but you you still you'd still tell your your peer who is also a client of one of the and so it still builds through the partner ecos system. Um, but ultimately it is just through word of mouth. >> Now, you've mentioned a couple of things there. It could be through a partner. It could be word of mouth. It could be when you've done the demo. What's working best for you in 2025 winning net new customers? What method? >> I mean, authenticity is like really important like as selling anything. I think once you can connect a proper connection with the buyer >> is so important. Um, and we do it with such authority and confidence because we know like we just back ourselves and we know we know our technology so well. Our tech stack is like seven years old. It's so responsive and fast and and modern compared to what we're coming up against maybe like 20-y old tech stacks in some cases. And I think when you when you just know in inherently and you believe in what you're doing, that helps build that connection. And I think uh so it's not about oh Halo has Halo has this capability which other platforms maybe haven't. Honestly we're not going to claim to be market leader or anything in terms of capabilities. We're not like we the capabilities are in terms of actual functional problems you can solve with our platform. It's probably like very very similar to what you can achieve with Service Now very similar to what you can achieve with Salesforce. >> Do you believe you've got the best technology? >> Without question. Yeah, it's without question >> without question in digital workflow for sales and digital workflow for service are techn if it's literally a technology comparison there is no comparison it's it's it just honestly anyone who's not experienced Halo go to our website now download a trial just see how quick it is see how responsive it is see how clean it is um and you'll know what I'm talking about >> impressive impressive Paul software pricing models I don't know this completely but in my experience very complicated very convolutes very very different you've gone the complete opposite way pretty simple >> why have you done that and I want to caveat that as well is aren't you worried about your c customers thinking >> just leave leave in January forget it turn off >> no because we believe in our technology they're not going to leave like our our churn rate is like it's less than 1% Customers generally don't leave. If they do leave, it's because there's been an acquisition and they're using parent company software or there's been a change of staff because sometimes when a new head of service delivery comes in, they're just used to some other platform and they want to get their team using that. And that's fine. We're that's just the way it is. We also benefit from that as well. We got one one person I can think of where they've literally moved around eight, they're on their eighth company every time they've implemented Halo, every organization they've gone to. So, it it swings and roundabouts from that regard. They're the best salesperson >> for you, aren't they? Well, this is the thing. This is going implementing it for you. >> It's back to product word of mouth. Like our sales and marketing engine is it's our customers. It's just word of mouth. We had an event recently. It was in London. It was called Halosphere. We had a few hundred people Westminster Plaza Park Plaza Hotel and who are customer by the way, great guys. Um and they people came up to me and said, "Do you know what? This this this event has a really great vibe to it." And we we were discussing it. I was like, "What?" They're like, "Just realize like there's not a single single nobody's upselling anything. There's nothing to sell. Halo has an all-inclusive license model." So, and we didn't didn't have any like partners because we thought about bringing in other technology vendors. They'd then be kind of selling their technologies as well. We might do that at some point, but but anyway, this one we just it was just Halo. It was purely a knowledge sharing event. So, it was peer-to-peer. It was for our customers to speak to other customers and to us. We had about a dozen seminars going on different topics and it was just fantastic. It was such a positive knowledge sharing community of peers and all we wanted to do if you imagine so a customer is paying let's say it's couple hundredk a year that's their contract. All we're doing is we're trying to get them to get more out of that. So it's get more ROI from what you spent. Um and that's the objective. And I think in terms of pricing and it's again really interesting how in the enterprise software industry typically the as you be as you acquire more and more market share I'd probably say traditionally the prices go up and up and up and up and up. >> Yeah. >> But when you actually think about it the cost base unless you're sort of hammering hundreds of millions of sales and marketing to grow that market share. But if it's a true productled strategy, the margin for us because we now got about 6,000 customers, but as we become market leader once we've got 60,000 customers, the cost per customer is going down and down and down and down, which means our margin is going up and up and up and up. So we've made a a deliberate decision and we've also got a a collab very good strategic collaborative uh relationship with AWS where we've managed to reduce our cost our infrastructure cost by about 20% or we will have done by the end of the year. So we've decided that from the 1 of January world exclusive but from the 1 of January uh we're actually implementing a 5% price drop off our list pricing um which just does not happen. That then got me thinking. Um, so we're at about 130 million US revenue. Actually, maybe a bit more than that at the moment. Uh, but we we we're on a path to billion. So, if you can imagine a page on our website, we're going to start gamifying our progress. You know, how transparent and direct we are. We want to get the public like really like backing us. And so what we're doing is we're going to create these milestones along the way that as we move up there and we get more and more customers that are bringing down our overall cost per customer, we're going to keep triggering these price reductions. And we believe we can get it down to about 40% less than what we're currently charging. Which means that as we go up and become market leader, it's just going to get lower and lower cost customers and get more and more value out of our platform. To execute that, you've got to think big picture. You cannot just think All right, how's next quarter looking? Um, but this is how much belief we have that we will be market leader in the space coming from a technologist point of view that we're just proud of the technology and we want customers to to use it and benefit from it knowing as well that we will end up doing different things and there'll be all sorts of opportunities to like once we do begin to saturate this market we will be getting involved in other bits and pieces. there's already there's bunch of people that keep coming up to me it's like for different product ideas and we're like yeah we will do that at some point but not just yet. Um so yeah it's it's really exciting. >> You mentioned there like keeping a long-term view. How do you maintain that? You talked about the graduates 5 years out you talked about mentality 10 years 20 years out. Every company I'm talking to this quarter this month what's the numbers? What's happening? How do you have that mentality that you can have that vision where you're going that far out? I think it's probably just a deep intrinsic character trait I have. I mean, I've always thought long term when making any dec like very long term when making any decision. I think it's just built into me to I I just can't I just don't think short term. I and whether it's in my personal life or business or I'm just a very long-term big picture thinker. And I think as well the type of people that have gone on and done very well at Halo and become part of the leadership team, it's just long-term intrinsically driven people who don't really care too much about like short-term exttrinsic uh benefits or anything. I don't know. It's it's it's different. But I often wonder like why there's not more people like me like it's like why if I why are we the only we're the only bootstrap fully bootstrapped unicorn in history and certainly in software industry. I've never come across another one. If anyone knows or anyone let me know because but I've I've spoken to a lot of people and I asked that question. No one can come up with any other company that has got to over a billion valuation with zero investment and zero debt. Look, I I really admire the the act your long-term thinking. You've gone through from doing your own um implementations to 90% through partners actually pretty quickly over the last 18 months. You've changed that. Why? Why have you changed it? >> Uh two reasons I think. One to to realize our ambitions of becoming market leader. There's no way in the world we're going to do that without a very mature partner ecosystem. Both from the acquiring clients point of view, but also from the delivery point of view. So it's it's not just about VARs bringing in deals and then us to find someone to deliver. Um it's very much delivery partners as well in terms are we done so quickly. I think uh being honest I think word is spreading like wildfire at the moment is probably and there is a finite window of opportunity here. I think where because we will not I know some software vendors they honestly work with like over a thousand partners. I'm like how do you how do you do that? like we it takes so much and I think the the answer to that is we it's a very collaborative model we have with our partners. So we the the amount of time we spend in in that enablement process the upskilling which by the way there's no investment required from partners. It's it's we don't charge anything for the Halo certification courses. So it's not a profit center. It's not like again some of our uh competitors will see this as a whole money-making opportunity again because we think big picture. We just think well hold on a minute. This collaborative relationship is going to be win-win anyway. We're going to benefit. You're going to benefit. We don't need to like actually figure out the exact details or like monetizing all our time right now. This is a this is a long-term game. So we don't charge our partners to to work with. And I think just that collaborative nature of how what we're like to work with. It's just again word of mouth. It's just like so that side of the product. So our product there is is working with partners and upskilling partners. That's a productled strategy as well. So you won't find us like massively marketing our partner scheme or I don't even think we've transparently uh like particularly done done that at all. It's just literally been because we don't we've never done any outbound selling and you won't believe this but in our history we have never done any outbound selling at scale anyway. Um it's just so it's all inbound inquiries again word of mouth. Um and and the same thing with partners that we won't really we're not too proactive with how the thing is we and it comes back to how quickly we want to grow. We've doubled in size now eight years in a row. This year we're at about 60%. Slowing a little bit. Combination of two things. The bigger you get, the harder it is to continue to double. But secondly, um the market uh has slowed down a little bit. I think some of our competitors now having the the kind of the worst worst quarters in their history and stuff like that. And we're still yeah doing very well. We've just had our best quarter ever. But yesterday in incidentally was our best day in terms of acquiring new AR we've ever had. And it wasn't just one big deal. It was a bunch of deals across bunch of products. And uh it's incredible. We got 1.3% of what what has taken 21 years to build. We just did 1.3% of that in one day. Yeah. I'm definitely that the growth you've had 100% growth and you've only done 6% this year. I'm not going to feel sorry for you this year, Paul. I'm really not. It's still going too well for me. It's still going too well. Le let's talk about generally about what's going on in Halo because the Halo impact initiative. Let's talk about that. What's that mean for the listeners and what's that mean for the your team? >> There's two bits to this. One is uh over the years I've just heard about the size and how much some of some of the world's biggest charities. So think the likes of Oxfam, Red Cross, >> um UNICEF, these guys that they're paying a lot of money for their enterprise software. like they're paying millions for their enterprise software subscriptions. We just thought, well, do you know what? Halo, we're doing well enough. Like we've got good enough margin. We're making enough profit. And again, I think it comes back to us not really having anything too pressing to do with these funds. And we thought, well, it would actually be quite a nice touch to offer our our software and not just the license fees, but we we we thought because we really can solve some make a a huge impact with the with the the world's very largest charities. So, we're actually delivering the technology as well completely free of charge out of a funded pot. We're committing $10 million of our our own. People say, "What's the external?" So, it's literally Halo's money. It's in Halo's bank account. Halo's profit we've acquired over the years is going to to fund all this and as well you know I said about the the bar on our website where we're going to chart from zero to billion just over 100 at the moment uh and the milestones so what we're going to do is >> we're going to up the charitable pot as we go up the ladder as well to a billion we want to get to a stage where we can have every single charitable organization of any size worldwide using Halo technology completely free of charge Um, we can't do that quite yet because we haven't quite got the resource to do it globally for absolutely everyone. Um, but that's where we want to get to and we believe when we're at a billion we will be able to do that just completely free of charge for everyone. >> You should be end up buying a recruitment company. That's what I want to do next. That's what I'll be selling to you. I'll be coming and knocking on your door. >> But so that side of it just in terms of the I hate seeing the wastage charities and everything. But the other thing is from a internal team at Halo perspective and I was a bit surprised how many people were like there's so many people really excited to to get involved in the charitable initiative. Um and it just means it makes the employment more more fulfilling and uh there's more gratification and uh it's just a flywheel. It all feeds in that creates more good stuff. >> Yeah. Now, you've already said you're not selling and you can't get sacked really. But if you did get sacked or you left or you sold out, what would you do next? What would you end up doing if it happened tomorrow? >> If it was forced, and it is a very democratic environment, so maybe I could get sacked. Um, meritocratic as well. So, if I'm not pulling my weight, the team will have something to say about that. It'd have to be I'm I'm massively into sports. I'm a whether it's playing like honestly Halo is a sports team. Like we're in this tournament. We're in this league. There's a sports team mentality. We're kind of now the we're we're in the Champions League. We're we're not the Barcelona. We're the the minnows in the Champion League if you like, but we're we want to win that Champions League trophy. Yeah. We've we've always and I think hey if you if you meet the people and please do come to our office sometime and and you'll just see like the it's a young it's a young team uh and I say team it's more like a NFL team hundreds of people now rather than just an English football team but uh but yeah it's so I think for me it would have to be something to a sport whether it's but I don't again I don't like wastage so I wouldn't want to be one of these uh owners that just like buy a team and just throw hundreds of millions at it just it comes to nothing. >> This is back to my football analogy that you're going to be chairman of switch town have the best leadership and the best chairman and honestly it's really exciting to see where they're going to go. >> My last question and I don't want you to sit on the fence. I don't want you to say Halo. I want you to say a company that you've either worked with or as a competitor as a partner as a vendor or another distributor. Could be anything that you think is going to do well in 2026. So who's the one to watch in your opinion? >> So in the MSP space at the lower end you've got super ops has come along in the last few years. Um >> and being honest with you I think if you are if you're less than 10 agents uh and you don't want because Halo Halo PSA so the platform for MSPs you need to you need to have that properly implemented. It's a very powerful platform. You can't just expect to procure it and implement it yourself. It just it's it's going to be dis disaster. So I think at the lower end and so super ops have come along and I think they do a really good job at the lower end of the market for for just very basic simple MSPs that don't need a sort of complex powerful platform. Um, so I think they're going to continue to do good things in the ESM space honestly like it's in soon as you hear the word enterprise because it's the thing with the enterprise software space is there's not it's you almost never get newcomers anymore because these come if you think all the so who have you got you got like service now BMCanti then you got Salesforce HubSpot they're all like very mature established vendors um with almost all of the market share as well. By the way, you've got Atlassian now. I'd probably say some of the stuff Atlassian are doing is pretty decent, but yeah, I I don't know. It's uh and like then you then you got like Oracle and SAP and work. It's all the same. Anything in enterprise software, I just so it's because we've gone up the ladder and we've just seen like the further up ladder we go, the standards across the industry just drop and drop and drop and drop. It kind of makes it easier and easier and easier for us to compete because we we're building the business in a way where we will not ever allow our standards to drop and if we we've had waiting lists like we had a waiting list for for new customers last summer and it's because we were accelerating too quickly where things were getting a little we're like oh because we measure NPS like we've got an NPS score customer NPS is about 70 just below world class um and if you look at all the Gartner peer insights it's we are a toprated vendor and again because we think so long term if we ever see signals and we're we're honed into this like we're so like sensitive to it that we will take action we will think okay guys we need to just slow down a little bit consolidation phase and then go again and that's uh yeah that's just uh the way we approach business Paul you've been a great guest thanks very much for your time >> thank you