Having spent the first part of his career in large agencies in the 1980s Pete Martin started to think about how an agency could be built in a ‘nicer’ way’. In his own words, agencies in the 1980’s ‘Sucked the money out when times were good, and kicked the talent out when times were bad’.
During this fascinating conversation, Pete explains how his agency AlwaysBeContent came into being and how they structure their business in a way that celebrates creativity, autonomy and responsibility. Pete also explains what defines a ‘Holacratic organisation’ and shares his experience of the journey to attaining B Corp status.
We also explore why companies with strong, genuine, ESG policies outperform and outlast other companies, and Pete reveals which (now defunct) former clients were ‘Bampots’.
The Scotsman article mentioned in the episode
Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage in Human Consciousness: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness (a book mentioned in this podcast episode).
Podcast Transcript
A Nicer Way To Build An Agency With Pete Martin of AlwaysBeContent
Andrew Laws: Hello and welcome back to the untitled SEO podcast. As you may know, if you listened before, we are not just about SEO, but also about sustainability and interesting theory in practice around running an agency, and I have a guest with me today. Would you like to introduce yourself?
Pete Martin: Hi there, I’m Pete Martin, I am the founder and I guess team leader at an agency called AlwaysBeContent or Always Be Content, or is it Always Be Content? I can never remember; one or the other!
Andrew: I wanted to ask you that in the future, but I quite like that you opened with that, because I like it both ways: AlwaysBeContent in SEO, and the answer is always be content. Also, AlwaysBeConTent is very good! So, you also mentioned something else in your introduction: You didn’t call yourself a CEO or managing director, you called yourself a team leader. Why is that?
Pete: Is it intentional? I think it’s become quite natural for us to talk like that. I mean, I’ve been in the agency business quite a long time and I suppose when we started AlwaysBeContent, the idea was to have a very flat structure and that’s sort of reflected in some of the language we use inside the business, and it’s reflected in the way we organize ourselves, so we don’t really have that hierarchical thing, you know.
We sort of mix everything sluggish and more formal than it has to be, it’s also probably reflected in some of the terminology we use. I mean, I don’t want to sound like one of these old war horses, but when we started AlwaysBeContent, we had come out of this agency PLC environment.
Nobody was really happy so, the joke is sort of in the name of the business and the plan was on the one hand to do content marketing, because everything is content these days, and also to find a happier way to do business and a more fulfilling way to run your career, and that’s reflected in the way the business is structured and the way it’s structured is reflected in the terminology we use and that’s probably why I said that.
Andrew: Okay, so let’s go back to the start and you can kind of pick and say how and why the decision to start this way. So, you started your career in the early ’80s, is that right?
Pete: Yes, I did, yeah. I’ve been in the business for long, struggling through. I remember which decade it was in, yeah. I suppose my career truly took off when…I started as a copywriter and you know, spelling and grammar, and I’d left university with a master’s in English language and literature…The most useless degree on the face of the planet.
Andrew: That’s probably useful for a copywriter, though, no?
Pete: You’d think so, but I knew nothing about the real world, you know, so starting work at an agency came with a bit of a shock to me. So, that’s where it started, but we started our own agency in the early 90s. An agency called Smarts and it’s still going strong.
We grew that to the point where we sold it to a PLC and PLC still wins that business. It’s got six branches across the U.K and I had stopped with the PLC for another sixteen years, worked in the U.S as the executive creative director of the New York agency for a while, and then came back to the U.K…
And this isn’t really to speak ill of any individual because people thought they were doing what they thought was best for the business and for themselves, but when times were good, they sucked the money out and when times were hard, they threw the town out and they got to the point where I was thinking “This is just no way to run a sustainable business” where people can have confidence, not just in the sustainability of the business, but the sustainability of their careers and how to bring some stability and growth into it, so that’s finally got to me and probably…
This is a bit of a diversion, a personal thing, but I came to the point in 2016 where my dad passed away and it wasn’t exactly unexpected because he was in his 90s but it did make me reevaluate my life and who I thought was important, and that was probably a catalyst for thinking I’ve had enough of this and this is not the way I want to do things and I think I should be putting energies into doing something different in a different way and that’s where the idea for AlwaysBeContent came from and we thought let’s do something different and start again, and we did with moderate success so far has to be said.
Andrew: So, you’re not just talking about yourself, how did you gather people?
Pete: Some of the people who coalesced around that idea came from the other agency. Fortunately, my wife was one of them, so they found it pretty hard to argue with my wife who wanted to leave the business the same time I did, but another handful of people also had enough and were subject to contractual obligations, they all left, and then we grouped together 6 months later and started the business, and that’s just how the cookie crumbled.
Andrew: So, I’m really interested in that gap of time between making the decision and actually starting the agency. I know there’ll be people like those listening to us who want to start an agency and sort of mystical period of how did people get from nothing to running an agency that reflects the values they wish it to. Did you spend a lot of time or did you just say right, on the first of September the agency will start and you just sit there drinking coffee…I know that’s probably not what happened, I thought I’d find it a little extreme.
Pete: Yeah, after starting two agencies, if you count a relaunch of two PLC agencies, I’ve done it four times, and on the one hand, it’s easier than you think, you know the journey of a thousand miles begins with but a single step, said the ancient Chinese sage Lao Tzu, and that’s what you do you just think well, I’m just gonna start, I’m just gonna do it, and that in itself has the power of life-changing magic, but prior to doing that you have to do a little bit of due diligence, you have to be realistic about what your likely revenues might be and what your likely costs might be, you know, how you’re going to “Duck and dive” from the first period till you get yourself set up. You will need a little bit of money to tide you over and a little bit of money for some equipment and so on, so it’s a lot easier to start an agency these days. When I first started, agencies were the principles and all the client’s dealings, so you had to have some financial solidity. An agency has been busted back in the day because a client has failed and you were on the hook for what they owed. So, it was a lot harder, you needed media accreditation and stuff, so it was a lot harder to start an agency back in the day, but these days you need a good idea for what your client to do a bit different, and it really helps to have a network of people and contacts that might potentially give you business. Nothing in this world is guaranteed, but you know, you need a bit of a proposition to try and sell it.
Andrew: You’ve touched on network and I can’t tell how old I am, but I am not as young as others, and if people in their early twenties or even contemporaries who want to start an agency ask what’s the first step, I will say speak to people. If you don’t speak to people, then nothing is gonna happen…You can call that network, but I will say it’s just about finding your client and finding people who will then not find you objectionable and they might tolerate wanting to spend more time with you. So, you’re talking about having a proposition, perhaps a unique selling point or a theme?
Pete: Yeah, it’s interesting. I’m good friends with a guy who’s spent a lot of years as a consultant who advises clients on which agencies to select, and this is assuming someone is gonna start an agency that isn’t just a freelance business, it’s an agency with a bit of skill and a bit of oomph behind it, and he always says the thing that you have to go to a client with first and foremost is a recent letter of experience. Have you done something that’s a bit like what the client wants to do? You may have a different take on it or a different spin on it, but you’re going to have to persuade somebody that you have the talent and the experience and the track record to take their money and do something useful with it, so it’s quite difficult to say I’ve got a degree in basket weaving and by the way, Cambridge, I’d like your advertising account. That’s a stretch, so I think if you’ve got some reasonable experience…I mean, before I started, I had eight years as a copywriter and senior creative and I’d worked on TSB and other national accounts for four or five years, so I had got quite a lot of experience behind me even though I think we were relatively young and everybody thinks this in different decades. Ten years from now, I think I was relatively young and naive but looking back, we were thirty when we started our first agency and what we lacked in solidity, we made up for presumption, so we filled in the gap with purview. We learned pretty fast as we went along.
Andrew: I’m just making a note of that. What you lacked in ability you made up with presumption. I like that. Well, I think it speaks of enthusiasm. One of the things I like about people freelancing or relatively new agencies is that enthusiasm, the burning desire to make it, and going out of their comfort zones to do it because if you don’t do it, nothing is going to happen, so that’s why I like that quote. So, to kind of tie this with SEO, it’s a challenge in SEO to say we’ve done this before in this market because it’s unethical, but the way we relate it is to say yes, this is a similar framework or similar challenge that we’ve met before and this is how we made progress with it. Speaking of the word ethic there, the structure of your agency…I read an article from the Scotsman from a few years ago, and it talked about how AlwaysBeContent is a holocratic organization.
Pete: That’s a good question. I mean, if you’re interested in organizational theory, which if you’ve ever walked in larger organizations, you end up having to be interesting because you think how in the hell are things happening here and why don’t things work better than they do. When we were getting frustrated within the PLC environment, you end up thinking the way this is organized can’t be right, and it isn’t. I got interested in organizational theory and there’s a great book called Revolution Organization by Frederick Laloux and he talks about the history of organizations and he’s color-coded them and the first one is sort of red organization. If you went back to the brutality of the middle ages of people just fighting out and literally stabbing each other on the battlefield and killing each other, so it was a very dangerous thing to be a king. Those organizations are like the mafia, ruled by fear and power and they tend to leave very little of value in the wake. But as time went on, people realized that constant instability isn’t particularly good so you end up with what you’d call an orange-type organization. Like the catholic church or the army that’s designed for stability. They don’t change, they’re very rule-governed. They’re very stable, but they don’t progress and they get themselves into all kinds of bother in the background because they’re not meritocratic. So, they tend towards corruption and so then you come up towards the industrial revolution and you need a meritocratic organization, and that’s still a lot better.
Then you come up towards the sixties and get these green organizations where it can’t just be a meritocracy, the business has to contribute some positive to society and then you get where we are now where it’s not just about making a profit, and that tends to have consequences in the short term and the long term, so you need what you call a teal organization which is more focused on the environment and social government obligations, and each one of those types of organizations tends to be more productive and more effective than the previous forms of them and tend to do better, and so that’s the background to it, and those last organizations are also called holocratic organizations. I can’t remember the guy who started holocracy, but it’s a defined system with its own vocabulary and it’s trademarked and you can operate a business through their platform called Glass Frog and it’s all vernacular, which is possibly where some of the terminology we use comes from, but it’s actually very simple and flat organized way of organizing your business around core principles, as opposed to having a pyramidic shape and a classic hierarchal business organized into flat circles and each circle has its own level of expertise. All of the things that are subjectively assumed within a business. You think this is what somebody is going to do, this is what the rules are. They’re not spelled out and those rules are made clear in holocracy, you have to spell out what somebody’s domains are, what the limits of authority are, and the general principle is everybody is allowed to do and what they want within the level of domain with the proviso that it speaks to the people who might be impacted by the decisions. And that is an amazing break on what people might do, and it leads to better, faster decision-making, because you think I think I should do this thing but I’m going to have to talk to people who might be impacted by this, because in another organization, what usually happens is “I’m not going to do anything until somebody above me tells me to do it.”
Andrew: It’s a fascinating thing. I’ve never worked in an agency, but I have got people I work with who have worked in agencies and they tend to either appreciate the traditional hierarchy or absolutely appall it. I run a podcast called SEO or Die and we call it the unblocked side of SEO because it’s looking at challenging the misconceptions about the way we make money and how we operate and the ethics of being somebody who helps businesses grow and trying to work with people who echo the values that we have and they have to choose to work with a really big agency, someone said if you want some of your budget to be spent on a 5-star meal they take you out to, which I think I am paraphrasing, but that’s exactly what he said, but the style of organization that AlwaysBeContent seems to be…I don’t know if wailing against it is too aggressive in describing it, but it definitely seems to fit that tone. It seems to be more like…Here in Ipswitch, everyone who lives there makes a contribution to help in the house, essentially and it’s not autonomous, I forget which way it is, but all decisions get made by a committee. Some people move in and it drives them mad, but some people move in and absolutely love it and they’ve been here for years and years, do you see how somebody can come from that type of agency to a slightly newer kind of agency and just go “No, I don’t like this.”
Pete: Yeah, one of the challenges we found in the early days, and we have been going for 6 years now, was that some people who came from a different style of agency, and I mean some of them, not everybody, struggled to take us at our word, you know. You are empowered to do the right thing, as long as you tell other people what your intentions are. I intend to do X, and they just didn’t believe it, so they still tried to behave as if they were working in that sort of learned helplessness as if they were working in a traditional organization and that’s quite irritating for the style of organization we are. We were like, you have the talent and the training and capability and you’ve been told what direction we’re heading in, you’ve got the ability to make your own decisions and you keep on asking me to make the decision for you. That’s quite irritating, but some people struggle to believe you, really. And in truth, there’s a difference between what I would call…I’ve worked in agencies where it is disorganized, even if there’s a hierarchy but it is disorganized. I won’t tell you which agency it was, but I was sent by the PLC to look after the worst-performing agency and to turn it around, and it was dysfunctional only on the basis that it was very hierarchal but had a really erratic leader. So, I’m using leader…There was a guy who sat in the corner office who was really dysfunctional and he came in late, he left early, he spent a load of money on expenses, he chased the women…You could probably all of the traits that went with poor management and fiscal irresponsibility and that agency was losing a fortune on a daily basis, and I’d quite forgotten where this was going, but I think there’s a difference between being disorganized and being self-organized and that’s what we’re asking people to do, to take responsibility. This is your domain, these are the things you’ve been asked to do, and you’re responsible and accountable for them, but you’re running yourself instead of waiting for me to tell you what to do, but ultimately, if somebody comes to me and says I intend to do this and I’m like “Woah woah, don’t do that”, then there are still checks and balances and there are still more senior and less senior people, but it just means their domains are more restricted, you know, and domains is one of those words that means this is the area in which you have self-control, you know.
Andrew: Yeah, it sounds a lot less stressful in a lot of ways because I can imagine working in a far more traditional top-down thing worrying about what the boss might say. It’s kind of frustrating and possibly a bit sad that some people might think that having the sort of, and I mean that in a positive way, having the anarchist freedom might be a trap to undo that in some way. It might just be in a hundred years’ time if all businesses are run in a similar way, there might be history books talking about how in the early days, adoption was challenging, and then several hundred years ago…Looking back, you go I remember that, that seems like a very different world. So, I could certainly see how running an agency with slightly more mark out is a good thing. One of the reasons I wanted to speak to you on the podcast in the first place is because you’re one of the first agencies I’ve met who are Eco-certified and that has its controversies like anything else, but I’m just interested in how you came to the decision to pursue Eco and to talk a little bit about ESG.
Pete: Yeah, it was quite interesting because we tender for a lot of business and we have in the past, and there’s almost always some question around environmental certification, which is fine if you’re a massive conglomerate of some kind, if you’re a massive contract that’s tendering to build a per plan or something, all those ISO questions become relevant to you, but we’re a human-driven, small to medium-sized business, and the whole paper-based framework still don’t make any sense for us, so we’re always looking for a simple answer to that question, a sort of hand cracking an answer every time we filled in a form, and we sort of built up the level of expertise in environmental sustainability and to some extent government questions, sort of by default. Our biggest customer when we first started was British Gas and all of the energy companies are interested in environmental impacts and advising their customers on how to reduce carbon. So, it was sort of one element of it and SSE were another one of our clients, one of the biggest renewable producers in the UK, so we ended up knowing a lot about environmental standards and credentials. And then equally, we worked with the Scottish government in places like Liverpool and NHS square and there’s a lot of social marketing involved, so we got an angle on the social aspect. We already talked about having an interest in formal structures and impact of those structures, so we had a bit of an interesting ESG and when I was in New York, we walked a lot on walk street and ESG investings are very big, so we had that angle, as well. So, almost by happenstance, we sort of came across B Corp and we thought this looks very straightforward, they’ve got this self-quiz thing, let’s fill that in. You take that self-test and the trick is to get to 80 points, and if you get to 80 points, you’re probably in scope for certification, and what we found is that the first 65 are dead easy, and the next 5 were pretty hard, and the 10 after that were hellish. So, it was sort of a reality check on what we thought of our own accomplishments and what we were doing, so having just gone through the relatively simple process, it sort of forced us to take a solid look at what we were doing and then the other part of it that came in as a bit of a shock to the system when it came to certification is filling in the self-completion part. It was tough to get to the last few marks, but when it came to the certification part, it started to ask the really hard questions from documentary evidence, and that came as a shock to the system and partly because of my own behavior or style, I guess. I talk like “Hey! Who needs paperwork?!” That’s tough, so we had to really dig for the evidence and place processes that collected the evidence that not only that we did the things that we said we did, but we actually then tracked what the impacts of those are, and that was the hard bit. It took us ages and a lot of tooling and fooling with them. It was probably the best part of two years, to get from “Hey! 65!” to “Oh my God!”, you know.
Andrew: There are things that are a step, you’ve called it. There are things I had never considered in the three years of running my business. These things are just…But my foolish emotional look is, I don’t have a car, and in terms of environmental sustainability, there’s a lot about it which is about people as I understand it. I found that process really interesting and useful, and I haven’t actually thought about what I would do in this circumstance. So, I found it good that now I’ve seen sort of behind the curtain, as it were, and I’m quite impressed that somebody has managed to get out there. It’s not an easy thing, it’s not very greenwashing.
Pete: No, I think it’s genuinely difficult and they’ve certainly put in enough checks and barriers to make it genuinely difficult for you to achieve this certification. I think in some ways, the process is easier if you are a small, social business, you know. I’m hesitant to say not a real company, but if your fundamental setup is to serve a community of some kind and it’s slightly not profitable, I think that makes your task a lot easier. It’s possibly easier as well if you’re very large and got the capacity and people, and the paperwork and all the rest of it to track. Being a medium-sized business, we found that difficult. One, some of the things that came out of the woodwork were things we hadn’t really considered. We had all the carbon stuff, you know, we covered off all the sort of external t quite easy stuff to do, but what is your local impact, what do we do? And we were like, yeah. We had taken students for a paid internship and we make sure they come from certain backgrounds and all the rest of it but have we codified it? No, we haven’t. Did we have reports of it? Not really, it was done in the back of a fag packet. Have we tracked any of it? No, we hadn’t, and the same with some of the stuff they asked about, what our working under certain communities. Did we do it? Yes we did, did we track it? Yeah, but it was in a client document and it was done for presentation purposes, so we had to go in and really rake for the evidence amongst our own systems.
Andrew: Yeah, part of a pro-Bono network here in Suffolk, these kinds of questions even at my early stages. Someone from the pro-Bono network says well this organization needs some support, can you do it? I go hey, that would be cool, yeah, and then we talk and then we do stuff and we both go well, that was smart, and that’s it. Doing paperwork for it…I never even considered that. We did it as we would any of our clients, and with a lot of client work, we don’t document every step of every way, and that’s it, so that’s one thing and you mentioned that you had conversations before about ESG, and in an email you sent me just before this recording, you mentioned ESG being essential to long-term profitability. We touched on that with some of the things we talked about already, but that specific phrase of ESG being essential to long-term profitability. I should ask, do you remember writing that and are you okay to unpack it?
Pete: Yeah, there is a load of evidence that.. and this comes from the sort of financial markets, that companies with strong ESG credentials, a portfolio of funds, and companies that have strong ESG credentials outperform the index by 6 or 7 percent a year, and that’s an astonishing number, really, in financial markets, because 7% a year compounds. You double your money in 10 years, so it makes an astonishing impact. One of the background questions is you go “How does that happen? Why does a company that’s interested in environmental credentials and social organizations and government structures of a business, how does that deliver 6 or 7 percent more returns than your average business that isn’t interested in those things?” Because classically, if you’re back to the 60s and the godfather of Friedman, the pursuit of profit is the only business of business, you know. It’s but nothing else: Your return to the shareholder. Even if you talk to some business people these days, they go “Well, environmentalisms are costs, isn’t it? It adds money, what could lead you to Greenium and people don’t like paying extra, and why is that?” The evidence for the financial markets is that companies with ESG focus do better. How does that work? I’ve rationalized it to myself in this way in that a company that’s taking care of its environmental, social, and government obligations is just better managed. I jokingly referred to the bloke in the corner office with a load of bad traits, which had loads of bad business outcomes, and if you’ve magnified that up into a large business, you can sort of see how one lack of government sort of breeds bad practice and financial irregularity on a large scale, and those catch up with people eventually.
I was in New York and had the great misfortune to work with Lehman Brothers at one point and they were the rudest, most unpleasant client I’ve ever worked with, and if you had asked me rationally at the time in the early 2000s, I thought these guys think they’re the kings of the universe and they’re making a fortune, but if I had thought about it with what I know now, I’d think actually this probably stinks, these guys are in a Scottish phrase, bampots! They’re bampots. It’s probably rotten at the core in some way, so in contrast, businesses that take care of their environmental obligations, their social obligations, and their government have covered off their future risks much more clearly, and what they’re doing is much less likely to come back round and bite you and society in the ass.
In some ways, I think the sort of government aspect…It was a famous example with one of the car manufacturers in the Superbowl a few years ago where they put an ad talking about how it’s important that females should be empowered and there’s a little girl in a Go kart with her dad or something. It was a beautiful, expensively made ad about the importance of empowering women and then they released a photograph of their board of directors, which were 13 middle-aged white men, and everybody was like…It just sort of cut the whole thing off at the knees and that company was part of the group that was also part of the scandal around emissions, misrecorded emissions. So, these things are not disconnected, because they’ve just not thought them through properly.
Andrew: There’s a brilliant phrase I learned just a few days ago from a PR agent I’ve worked with in a charity that did Pro-Bono work. She used the phrase “Pale, Stale, Male”. I can see that can summarize quite a lot of things. So, just an awkward question I guess because I can see that your mission towards sustainability and ESG and B Corp things are aligned with you. I think you very much that way already and today the ESG and B Corp things helped you flesh it out a bit more, but it was something that was already in evidence. How far do you think it’s fair to go to make it clear to people because I’m thinking it’s become increasingly apparent that millennials, just to picture a whole generation, are now looking for an ESG link in a website. What dangers do you think there are? Have you got any examples, of course without mentioning any company names?
Pete: Yeah. The biggest examples are the fossil fuel industry, everybody knows that. The classic example…I mean, it’s not dissimilar to the previous example. I wouldn’t name the oil company that did it but they put out a tweet saying what are you going to do for climate change and everyone went like “What do you mean? What the hell are YOU going to do?”
So, there’s a load of it around and the challenge is…It’s interesting because everybody understands that they want to do their own bit and save energy at home and recycle and all the other things that are part of being a decent citizen, but there’s a limit to what the individual can do, and what the financial system. and I mean it’s not a secret that fossil fuel companies are making money hand over fists right now, profiteering off the back of a war, but it’s pretty much disgraceful I think that they’ve been allowed to do so. I think all of that, you can see how as an investor, you’ll say “Well, there’s a load of money to be made in there.” So, the whole intermingling of the financial and I suppose the way the governments of society, how we tax and levy people who are making exorbitant sums off the back of public suffering, you know.
I think that there’s something to be said about that, and they’re all interconnected. How do our pension funds, our banks, our investment companies, and the fossil fuel companies themselves? How is all of that tied together to incentivize investors to support it? I think all of that needs to be unpacked and looked at. I’ll give you a very straightforward example of why I think it is systemic, it’s completely systemic and it really is a question of governments in the way it works. If you went back a few years, the now infamous Kwasi Kwarteng was business secretary and he was responsible for shutting, or let me rephrase this, he refused to help fund Britain’s biggest gas storage facility. So, it got closed, but it was owned by Centrica but it needed upgrading and he refused to help fund it so it got closed.
Fast forward a few years and as part of the glide path to renewables, gas was cheap, it was about 2p a kilowatt and people were all we’ll use cheap gas and that would fill in the gap between building enough renewable electricity. We’ll have to electrify the country at some point to get rid of emissions but in the meantime, cheap gas will fill in the gap and that would be fine, but you can see exactly what the problem with that is going to be because suddenly, we’ve got a war in Ukraine, the whole surplus of gas goes through the roof, it’s now something like 25p a kilowatt for electricity. And the sudden lack of storage meant that the UK’s whole energy security was compromised, so the complete lack of foresight from systemic government forward thinking to properly funding and structuring renewable energy investment to try…It’s just completely mistaken, you know. I don t know if any of that made any sense to you.
Andrew: it does! You’ve tied it together in a way that makes a lot of sense. It’s not about what you’re doing right this second, it comes down to good business management. Again, you can’t cut your nose to spite your face. It may be that you can’t make massive changes right now, but you can make decisions now that will lead to you and your organization having the flexibility to make larger changes in the future. It’s always difficult to talk in definite because businesses are so different, but I think that’s why seeing more people doing ESG policies is kind of helping everyone move that way. My own experience of it is that the more other people’s policies are used, the more ideas I get for my own business. It’s making conversation that doesn’t seem out of place. It’s part of the natural flow.
Pete: Less pepper in your dinner, I think.
Andrew: This has been an absolutely fascinating conversation, Peter. I really appreciate it. We went on a little bit longer than I intended to, but I understand it when things are so interesting. We’re going to have to act out now. Is there any sign-off you’d like to give, any final statement, or something that appeared to you?
Pete: I am allergic to cats, so you’re fortunate that we do have a cat in this house. This is my wife’s plan to kill me earlier, I think, but yeah, no that was great, Andrew, I really enjoyed that. I don’t know if what I made was completely coherent at one point, so if you want me to clarify any point for everybody listening, you can just reach out via LinkedIn and I do enjoy a good debate.
I think the other thing I’ve been saying to people, and this goes for younger people, as well as older punters like ourselves, or like me, is they often say “Keep your opinions to yourself in business. Your boss or your company might disagree” but I think F it! The time has come for people to say what they think and there’s no shortage of people with regressive ideas willing to stick their heads above the parlor pit and say horrible things. It’s time for all men of good conscience to say what they think.
Andrew: I think that’s a wonderful way to end things. I’m gonna say goodbye to people. Do you wanna say goodbye?
Pete: Goodbye, everybody! Peace out y’all!
Last Updated on March 23, 2023
