The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Adrian Knight, Acquisition Entrepreneur and Business Turnaround Expert

Episode Date: November 1, 2023

Adrian Knight, Acquisition Entrepreneur and Business Turnaround Expert Instagram.com/adrianjknight Show Notes About The Guest(s): Adrian Knight is an acquisition entrepreneur and business turnaround expert. He has successfully bought and sold multiple businesses, using his skills to build a multi-million dollar children's education group. Adrian is also an accomplished endurance athlete, participating in events such as the Spartan World Championships and running across countries like Scotland and England. Summary: Adrian Knight, an acquisition entrepreneur and business turnaround expert, joins Chris Voss on the show. Adrian shares his journey of overcoming personal struggles and finding his authentic self. He discusses his passion for endurance events and how they have transformed his life. Adrian also talks about his expertise in buying and selling businesses, offering insights into the process and the importance of understanding the motivations of sellers. He emphasizes the need for authenticity and moral alignment in business transactions. Key Takeaways: Adrian Knight turned his life around by prioritizing personal development and well-being. Buying businesses with no money is possible by understanding the motivations of sellers and finding alignment. Turning around struggling businesses often involves addressing toxic employees and making necessary changes. Creating time and space for personal growth and self-care can have a profound impact on overall well-being. Adrian Knight offers mindset and life coaching services, helping individuals improve their lives and achieve their goals. Quotes: "I wanted to get involved in this whole new world that I was encountering on the other side of becoming a dad." "Buying a small business is about being human and understanding the motivations of the seller." "Quite often, the problems in small businesses stem from the owners themselves." "Creating time and space for yourself costs nothing and can be incredibly powerful." "I've helped guide people in applying this philosophy, and it's been really eye-opening." Biography Adrian Knight is an accomplished acquisition entrepreneur, adventurer, and endurance athlete. Adrian buys and sells businesses for a living and has used his acquisition skills to build a multi-million children’s education group from the ground up in less than 3 years. Adrian spent almost a decade travelling the world in an attempt to run away from his addictions and inner demons. It was only when he started to be true to his authentic self and prioritized his personal development and well-being, that his life started to turn around. In 2022, Adrian ran/cycled/kayaked across Scotland, then in March 23’ he participated in a multi-day endurance event in the Arctic Circle. In June 23’ he ran across Northern England and in November 23’ he is competing in the Spartan World Championships (in Sparta, Greece). In March 24’ Adrian is on a 14-day Jungle expedition across Panama. Today, Adrian leaves the running of his Children’s Education Group to others, while he spends his time working on his own personal growth and mindset, which he undoubtedly recognizes as the secret sauce to his business and endurance success to date.

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We had an amazing gentleman. I'm excited to talk to him today. He's got some interesting stuff he's going to teach us from two different kind of paradigms that are kind of interesting. Adrian Knight joins us on the show today. He is an acquisition entrepreneur and business turnaround expert, and he's an accomplished athlete, endurance athlete as well. He's won some championships, and he's an accomplished athlete endurance athlete as well he's won some championships and he's uh doing some other stuff now we'll get into

and all that good stuff uh he is an adventure and endurance athlete on top of the acquisition entrepreneur i mentioned earlier he buys and sells businesses for a living and has used his acquisition skills to build a multi-million dollar children's education group from the ground up in less than three years i hope he teaches them not to cry on planes or something i don't know adrian spent most almost a decade traveling the world in an attempt to run away from his addictions and inner demons that's what i do on fridays uh it was only when he started to be true to his authentic self and prioritize his personal development and well-being, this life started

to turn around. In 2022, Adrian ran, cycled, kayaked across Scotland. Then in March 23, participated in a multi-day endurance event in the Arctic Circle. Just thinking about that makes an endurance event for me. In June, and how cold it might be, in June 23, he ran across Northern England. And in November 23, he's competing in the Spartan World Championships in Sparta, Greece. And in March 24, he's scheduled to be on a 14-day jungle expedition across Panama. This guy is on the run, but he stopped long enough to show up for the show. Welcome to the show, Adrian. How are you? I'm very good.

Thank you, Chris. It's wonderful to be here. We appreciate you taking time out of running from everybody. How many police officers are after you, sir? You're just on the run everywhere. Oh, I don't know. I don't know. Hopefully not that many anymore.

Hopefully I'm outpacing them so uh well sounds like you're definitely ahead of them and ahead of schedule so uh adrian welcome the show give us your dot coms where do you want people to find you on the interwebs please yeah so the best websites for the central hub uh for myself is adrian knight.co.uk um as i'm sure you can tell by my accent i'm british uh british so okay we won't hold it against you thanks we're an international show i'm sure you know but uh yeah so there you go the british we love it how's that king thing working out okay i think okay i haven't really stopped long enough to uh um yeah to sort of observe too much but i think it's going well there you go i mean uh we we used to joke on the show, God save the Queen, whenever our British guests would leave,

and they would look at us askance like, what the hell? But why is the Yankee saying that? But, you know, I don't know. You guys get that new king, and I don't know. As long as he stays awake, I think you guys can do some stuff with him there. hope so yeah they've just uh changed the stamps so we've now got new stamps so all of the and i'm gutted because i had loads of uh i still have loads of stamps behind me with the queen's head on but they don't um yeah i can't use them anymore so

they're probably collector's items there will be collector's items maybe someday yeah there you go when people be like remember those good old days that queen lady she was pretty nice uh but anyway uh so i digress uh give us a 30 000 overview of uh what you do and how you do it there yeah so um from a career perspective a professional perspective i buy turn around and sell companies. I've used that skill set to build a small group of companies in the children's education space. Prior to becoming a dad myself I had no knowledge of that sector and it was purely becoming a dad that made me sort of realize I wanted to get involved in this whole new world that I was encountering. On the other side of that, I'm very much into my endurance events,

and they've been getting a little bit more extreme. So I actually fly out to Athens tomorrow for the Spartan World Championships. And yeah, it's given a whole new dimension to my life. So what are you going to be doing in that event tell us how that event works what are the activities in that event is it uh extreme eating um i don't know buffet style stuff what goes on there oh if it was definitely if it if it was extreme eating i'd be world champion several times over i promise you that sitting in a lazy boy watching tv for 12 hours at a time,

something like that? Oh, yeah. Yeah, something like that. So there's three races. You have a 5K, 10K, and a 21K run, and there's obstacles within each of those. So on the 21K, there's 30 obstacles. On the 10K, there's 25.

And on the 5K, I think there's uh 15 obstacles i'm having an obstacle just thinking about doing that right now yeah well there i mean it's it's great fun but when you're doing it well it's great fun in hindsight when you're doing it it's a little bit why am i doing this um but they have some cool obstacles so one of the obstacles is um like throwing a spear like an old spartan and if i'm honest that's probably the reason why i do it because uh yeah it's pretty cool to throw you really want to spear somebody you got some enemies going on there that's why i'm running yeah so uh spear yeah it's always good to be good at that spear chucking because you just never know

when shit goes full medieval and you know the zombies come you can spear chuck and you know the the zombies or you know if it's just you know it's full medieval you know we're going to go back to what is it you know crossbows and spears so it's a good talent to have especially like world of warfare world of one of those medieval video games you know it's good to have spear chucking down that's it and i've got my battle axe ready so uh is there an event for that too jesus if there was i'd be signing up for it so um what motivates you to want to do these things like what's wrong with you no i'm just kidding what's what motivates you to want to do these things i've always um i've just i mean fundamentally i've just got a thirst for life but um what's really uh what's sort of driving a lot of this was something that um is actually a therapist i've seen a couple years ago he said to me which didn't go into any uh confidential details but he said

that um he had a patient who was sitting on the same chair that i was sitting on at the time and um that patient said that their biggest regret in life was that they didn't use their body in every which way they could and i and i sort of thought about that i was like that's interesting because you normally hear about people saying i wish i hadn't worked as much or i'd spent more time with my family or i'd stayed in contact with a lot of school friends etc but i'd never heard anyone say i wish i'd used my health in every way i could that guy clearly didn't like his family then no i'd rather use my body screw that family bullshit yeah exactly i'm running away um but it really struck a chord with me. And I'd done some, like, I'd done, like, a marathon

quite a few years before, done a triathlon, and I just felt like, yeah, you know, something could happen. I hope it doesn't. But I didn't want to look back with all of these regrets about what I could have done, essentially. Yeah, you're only young once, it's, uh, and, uh, youth is wasted on the young and, uh, yeah, it goes quick. You got to kind of have fun while you can, cause you have to be my age and people talk about, um, people talk about, you know, doing these 21 K things. And I'm just like,

the only 21 K I'm eating is calories. So, uh, there's about that. So speaking of your therapist, let's talk about your journey. Were you always this way? Were you always active and busy? Tell us about your life history because I think you went through some stuff there. Yeah. I mean, when I was, what, 15, I was extremely overweight. I was obese. And, yeah. Thanks, Adrian. Yeah. I was extremely overweight you know I was I was obese and um yeah like I was yeah um but I was

really overweight and it impacted my life as um you know certainly as like a 15 year old you know in a very big way and um we was on holiday um up in Scotland actually and I walked past a mirror uh one day as we were just sort of going out and I sort of caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and I just saw this person staring back at me I was like that's not me and it was a it was a real like really stopped in my tracks I was like this person staring back at me is like that's not me like I just there was a complete mismatch of identities there and um very like shortly after that like literally within a couple of hours I made a decision that I was going to do something about my um about my weight and that started a journey really where I lost quite a lot of weight

over a period of a year um at that point I was 16 I was starting to get more attention from girls which is the first time ever and i was starting to find myself more socially like with friends and more socially out there and um yeah that started a journey but throughout my throughout my 20s my weight oscillated a lot so i never went back to um certainly like the way that i was but it was constantly up and down up and down and i always use like a um some sort of physical event like a half marathon or a marathon to like when i could feel myself getting out of control i'd use that uh to bring me back um i've i've shifted away from that sort of peak and trough cycle now to the point where i'm more interested in being in a state of like steadfast so if someone said to me right why don't we go and you know swim across

that river or climb that you know massive hill mountain or whatever it is or we run uh 10k 20k whatever it is just being in a in a mental and physical state of mind like where i could say okay like let's go um yeah and it's just uh yeah now you had a had a nervous breakdown at 19 right and some other issues tell us about that and your journey through it yeah so um i just come back from backpacking europe so i backpacked europe when i was 18 done 12 countries it's by far the best time of my life and I came back on a real uh real high um I started a apprenticeship working as a bricklayer I just got into my first real relationship so life you know certainly on paper should have been fantastic but within uh within six months I'd had um yeah I was like really declining like mentally and uh in under the 12 months i've sort of went

to the doctors and i don't know what's wrong but i i literally i just don't know what's wrong and they said we you're having a nervous breakdown which was astonishing to me it was the last thing i expected them to say and they they gave me a lot of different medications so everything from sleeping tablets because i wasn't sleeping all the way you know all the way across and I remember going home and again I was still like 19 I hadn't quite turned 20 and I was sitting on my bed in my parents house looking at this uh this medication and again just reaching a decision that I didn't want to go down that route that wasn't for me I wanted to figure out what this what was causing this and even though that may have been a longer journey and you know what

I thought would be more painful it was a journey I wanted to take so it was a process of like rebuilding myself like brick by brick and my confidence had gone from a state of where I was confident enough to travel around Europe by myself at 18 to, I literally couldn't look people in the eye. I was so bottomed out and yeah, it was, it was very long and painful journey, but one that I'm really grateful for having. There you go.

I mean, some, these are the great things about our stories and our journeys and our cathartic moments in life is learning to not only get through them, but helping other people through them as well. So where in this journey do you start with your first business acquisition or start your first business? So my first business, my first proper business was when I was at university and that was a student, a student business. So I after having this nervous breakdown, I knew I didn't want to be a bricklayer. But in hindsight, yeah, I've got I've got no like nothing against it. It just I just knew that wasn't tough work.

Yeah. Yeah, it is. And particularly in the British cold winters, it just wasn't really for me. But I knew I wanted to build. I didn't have that clarity back then, but in hindsight, I just wanted to build. So I went to university primarily because my girlfriend went to university. And I actually ended up dropping out after three weeks but I stayed for three years and the reason I stayed was because in that three week period I'd started a very small business which was advertising local companies to

who wanted to reach students and that evolved um to the point where we were running multiple student event nights uh we had the advertising and we had a paid uh weekly column um in our in a sort of the town newspaper and that was great fun and that was a real introduction to business but at the same time i was battling a lot of these sort of uh you know this nervous breakdown and trying to trying to sort of deal with the personal aspects as well as the learn how to do business. There you go. So one of the questions that we had here for you was, how do you buy a business with no money? Have you been doing that?

Yeah. I mean, I've acquired, I think it it's like nine ten companies in the last few years and every single one has been with none of my own money um there's reasons for doing that primarily to manage risk um buying a small business is very risky um and so the way you go about it is it's not what people tend to think which is yeah when people think of like buying businesses they tend to think of like a big boardroom and you've got 20 lawyers each side and it's all about the like hard financials like at bigger businesses like larger businesses i'm sure that's the way it goes but at the small business level um it's

actually about being human and it's about having a conversation with the seller and understanding you know why they're looking to sell why they're looking to sell now what's happened what are they looking to achieve and essentially it's about understanding the motivations of what's driving them and where they want to go and looking for a way in which it can marry up with yourself um the key to it is being extremely authentic and being extremely moral like if there isn't an alignment there then you don't want to move forward for like you know obviously for for both the buyer and the seller um but yeah essentially it's on uncovering those motivations and seeing if you can sort of match them up.

So what got you interested in doing it this way as opposed to, you know, a way where, you know, you just start a business and do a thing? What got you into it and what kind of keeps you fixated on it where, you know, you've gotten really good at flipping? I imagine you're flipping these companies, aren't you? Or are you stacking them? Are you keeping them all? Yeah, some of them. The children's education ones I'm sort of bringing together in a group. Some of the other companies I've bought have been more with the intention of going in.

I can see where I can add value, adding that value, and then looking to exit that, whether that be to sell the business to a new owner or to the existing management team or something along those lines basically to someone who will carry on that business um but you know you know much longer term than than i'm prepared to do um what got me into it is essentially I'm a terrible startup entrepreneur. I had 12 failed startups throughout my 20s. And the reason that I sort of came to understand was because I'm probably more of an entrepreneur than I'm not very good at the delivery aspect. So I was great at having the ideas, seeing the opportunities, getting everything moving.

But then there comes a point quite quickly where the focus needs to be on delivery and systems and processes. And that just wasn't me. And it was when I discovered I was going to be a dad, I took quite a bit of time out and just reflected on who I wanted to be, what type of life I wanted to have. But most importantly, what type of father I wanted to be, what type of life I wanted to have, and most importantly, what type of father I wanted to be. And I just realized that I had to make some changes there. And acquisition just seemed to make a lot of sense to me. There you go. So what sort of skills do you need to be successful at mergers and acquisitions

and business turnarounds? And talk to us a little bit about, you know, have you had to turn around some of these companies where they bottomed out and you were buying them on, you know, discount because they were hitting the wall and you had to, you know, make them run again? Yeah, definitely. I mean, turning around a business is hard.

It depends on the state of the business because a business can hard um it depends on the the state of the business because a business can range anywhere from stressed to highly distressed and so you need to understand what you're what you're going into quite often a lot of the problems that you encounter when you go into a small business is like they can be quite easier to fix than may appear because a lot of the problems tend to stem from the owners themselves and to give an example of this a lot of small businesses will employ like family members and close family friends and people where they're clearly not right for the role or they're doing the wrong job but the owner had just put themselves in a situation where by doing what would be right by the business makes it you know that they start

to jeopardize personal relationships and so um yeah quite often they want someone like myself to go in to be able to make these changes that they just don't want to make themselves because they still have to see their family at christmas i am going to fire them you know i when we did mergers and acquisitions we had the same problem we would go in and uh you know we we did a thing where we'd run an ad in the paper this is a little bit older um and you probably an ad somewhere now but we'd run it in the business section for business sales. And it would be basically that we had money to loan a struggling businesses. And what we would do is we get, you know, this flood of PNLs that would get sent to us, which is insane because we just, if you went into most businesses and go, Hey, can I see your PNL? I mean, it's proprietary, you know, off off. But these people would mail us like whatever we asked for

and so you could sit and cherry pick what you wanted i wrote about some of this in my book um and the interesting part and actually this is in the book um the interesting part was is sometimes we run in that family situation like you're talking about and you know you you show up at the office to give the you know do your due diligence walk around and you know you're like oh oh your mom works here and your brother and your son and all these people and you're going to hit bankruptcy probably in three months um i wonder why uh you know i mean families are really tough to have involved your business as our friends personal friends uh i don't i don't bring my personal friends into business because i gotta be able to fire you i gotta be able to fire people and i like to fire people that don't do their job

right i don't like to fire people that do good jobs but i like to fire people that are just shitty um and you know they're not they're just bad at everything and they're just being lazy usually it's a problem or fucking around um and so i have no qualms about it whatsoever after thousands of employees um but yeah i mean i would sit and give them a you know an offer and uh i'd be like but here's the deal and they'd always they, they'd always be like, uh, so, um, what about my family? Can, you know, guarantee that you don't lay off my family and me? I want, I want to stay on. And I'm like, no, number one, you have to go.

Cause you're part of the problem. So we're going to give you some money to hit the road. Your family's probably going to get laid off because they're part of the problem too. And, uh, and I was like, well, I don't want them. I don't want to, you know, I don't want them to be laid off. And you're like, dude, you're just, we're just putting off the inevitable dude here at this point. You're three months away from bankruptcy. You're fucking around.

Um, you know, you got to bite the bullet. Um, and they're probably the ones taking you down, which they usually were. You know, I come in, I'd be like, these people have no idea what they're doing other than they're related. Um, but yeah, I've seen that a lot it's freaking crazy so um you have any stories about bringing uh any of the companies back from the the dead and then flipping them or or uh turning them into massive success yeah absolutely yeah so one of our um so business i still own um i bought that two years ago it's a national uh children's franchise network so we have 70 uh franchisees across the uk ireland scotland and a couple abroad in australia and the middle east as well and that business was severely

impacted by covid because that you know none of the children's classes could run and the owner had been trying to sell this business for five years and they had several failed attempts and she was at her wits end um she just had another grandchild come along and she just wanted out but like this is a 30 year old company like and she had a large franchise network she couldn't just walk away she felt incredibly um you know sort of responsible for it and rightly so there's you know a lot of families being fed from from this business and so um she had heard that i had acquired a smaller children's franchise and they approached saying would you be interested and when we looked at the financials i mean they made a massive loss they just posted

their their year end it was significant and like six figures and that that sort of meant we had to act really quickly and we didn't know what was going to happen with uh with COVID and when I say we I mean my team around me and so I decided to to go for it and 12 months later we posted our accounts and we'd actually made a six-figure profit from that business but the turnaround process was it was actually quite in the grand scheme of things compared to some of the other ones I'd done it was actually a lot more lighter touch like we had to make some a few changes here and there there was a very toxic uh person managing the business extremely toxic who was poisoning the next the network against the owners oh wow and yeah what we found out post sell what the owner just happened

to forget to tell us before going in was that they they had previously hired 12 people in that business and every single one had left within two months because of this manager. And so I was like, right, okay, it would have been nice to know beforehand. So- Thanks for telling us, buddy. I know, right? Yeah. So as soon as we took that person out of the equation and made some just really minor changes, it started to turn around quite quickly. And quite often when you go into these businesses, the very fact that you're going in and bringing in some energy can be enough to prop up the people, the employees, the partners, suppliers, etc.,

who want to do good and want to make the business work. So that was, in the grand scheme of things, quite a nice one. And still got that business today. And, yeah, it's going from strength to strength. There you go. That's quite the challenge to do. You know, a lot of times it is. There's those employees that are holding you back and being a dredge.

And sometimes they're just being jerks to be jerks. So that's like an awesome journey to go on. I thought I had lined up to ask you about that organization. And I thought you'd start as a a charity but you actually picked it up in acquisition the children's education group then yeah yeah it was an x yeah so the children's education group has been built entirely from from acquisition but that was a that was a very nice one i've had some yeah i mean my last acquisition like it was i bought the business off um a gentleman he was one of two brothers um he had his wife employed in the business off a gentleman. He was one of two brothers.

He had his wife employed in the business. He had his stepson. He had his best mate from school. And this guy was in his 50s who was a sales manager. And he had a guy he used to coach on the football team when he was in his teenage years. And he's now, that guy was in his 40s. But that guy who he was coaching he was stealing from the business the sales manager was making sales but they had no margin so it was actually costing the business um the wife bless her she'd spent her 20-year career as a dinner lady and was now

running the finances so everything was paper-based and the stepson was lovely guy but didn't have a clue what he was doing and they were all being paid very very well and like this was a lovely guy but didn't have a clue what he was doing. And they were all being paid very, very well. And, like, this was a 10-person business, which is quite large for a small business, like, to have 10 people in. And you're looking at, like, four or five of the staff. So it's, like, 50% of them. So that was very challenging. That's crazy, man. So on your Instagram, you're doing a lot of things over there what's going on

over there yeah i mean i'm i'm very blessed to um because of the role i i play in the acquisitions i intentionally keep myself out of the day-to-day aspects of business so um i'm far more involved in the strategic side and uh yeah essentially employ people much better than me to go in and deliver so I have quite a lot of bandwidth like a column of bandwidth and I've been using that bandwidth to to participate a lot more in like endurance events and just like try all these different parts of life that I wanted to try, but also to help people who may be in a situation like I was previously in, if they're struggling with alcohol or addictions or various sort of vices or things that are holding them back

and just to help them just get on the right path, really. And that's been incredibly fulfilling, like really, really fulfilling. There you go. And so I know your website is coming up soon. You're making some changes to it. What are going to be the offerings on your website? What are people going to be able to take advantage of yeah so there's there's going to be two core offerings the first one that's already live on my instagram which is essentially mindset and um like life coaching and that's very much focused around um like habits fitness and nutrition and using the three combined to put you into a a far more like higher version of yourself um it's i've got a small group of

of clients who i work with and it's it's like it's been very transformational for them and it's something i live by day by day uh very transformational for me as well and um that's more like the personal development side and on the business side I am currently working with a small group of people who want to learn how to buy businesses but I'm particularly interested in working with sellers people who might be looking to sell their business at some point down the line helping them to um to position their company and to get as much value as they can out of it and that's purely stemmed from the fact that I've looked at so many, like hundreds and hundreds of small businesses,

and it's really heartbreaking to see or to speak to an owner who spent 20 years building their business. They have their whole retirement tied up in this, and they're just completely not ready, and they won't get a tenth of what they think they're going to get. And, yeah, I just want to help some people there. Definitely. You know, you can run a great business for a long time.

And it can seem like everything is going really well. And, you know, you can go 10 years down the road and suddenly the market changes. And the world changes. And everything kind of gets turned upside down. And then you're like hey what's going on with this and uh you know it's it's sometimes sad because you know i i ran i mean our longest running company was like 20 years and then came the 2008 mortgage crisis and it was a mortgage company um you know i built companies i thought i would have for a lifetime and there's

sometimes where you know especially with great recessions, that it just all gets taken away from you. And sometimes you can save companies. You can bring them back. Sometimes you can put the work in and change them. You just never know. But being able to save them, definitely, and being able to have that skill set. How do you, with what you do in your life in

in the athletics you use and the development of yourself your core strengths and improvement i noticed there's a picture of you on instagram here with david goggins i read his books and he's an extraordinary man not only from his masochistic abusive exercise but also his his discipline and determination. Um, sometimes read his book and I'm like, Jesus Christ, dude,

what happened to you? Um, but he, I mean, God bless him. He can kick ass and take names. And, uh,

I, I, you know, he, he can run around the block by the time I get up out of my lazy boy recliner. Uh, so, you know,

he's got some on me. I think he's my age too, which is really shameful. And when I see his videos, I'm like, she's like, guys, myliner. So, you know, he's got something on me. I think he's my age too, which is really shameful. When I see his videos, I'm like, she's like, guy's my age and I'm getting tired just watching him. But, you know, how do you transform some of these sort of things that you use to be disciplined in your exercise

and these achievement things that you're on? And how does that play in your personal life and your your these achievement things that you're on and and how does that play in your personal life and your and your executive life yeah in a very big way so um the big changing point in my life and um i always say this is like the secret sauce like to anyone listening like this is really it was when i um when i started to create some time and space in my life to focus on me so the way I done that was by getting up earlier and I just I started by getting up 15 minutes earlier and simply just having a cup of tea because I'm British and I like my tea and just having like before any emails any social media family instead of sleep just that time for me and in a very short period I

started to notice that I was feeling better and it was having an impact as I sort of went into my day and then I thought well this is cool why don't I make it half an hour earlier but I use um that sort of extra time to read 10 pages of a book and again it started to have more and more impact and I just kept going from there so I started off by getting up about quarter to six um I now get up at 4am every morning and the first three hours of the day is purely for me I read a journal I visualize I meditate and I work out and what what has happened is whereas before I was getting up as a like a level two version of myself a level three version um I still get up as a level two or level three version but I spend the first part of the day like priming myself so then when I come back from the gym and

I walk through the door and I see my four-year-old daughter and I see my wife and I I'm starting to think about my day I'm more like a level seven level eight version of myself and that that that has had a very profound impact because what it's done is meant that I'm going into like my working life my personal life and I can see things clearer and I've got more confidence to be able to like follow through on any decisions I make and that really in a very short period of time just turned my life around in so many ways and I've I've helped uh to sort of guide people on applying a very similar philosophy in their lives like doing this with some of the people that I work with and seeing some of the changes they've had in such a short period, it's been like, it's been really eye-opening.

Like this stuff is powerful and it's so accessible to anyone and it costs nothing. Like it's, you know, it's just the willingness to get up sort of 15, 30 minutes earlier. And so, yeah. And so anyone who might be struggling, I always suggest like that's the place you have to start. You have to create a bit of time for yourself.

There you go. You know, I like this morning thing. I didn't used to do a morning thing, and I started doing one this year, going out and sitting in the vitamin D sun, spending time with my dog, starting my circadian rhythms. And having just more time in the morning instead of just waking up, hit the bell, and you're like, rush, rush, rush, rush, rush, rush,

open the emails, instead of pacing myself and taking myself down the road and going, hey, I'm going to get to everything else when I get to it. We're going to have this peaceful sort of thing. I remember watching Jeff Bezos. to meet the day, the demands of the day. You feel less being, you're not being pushed or browbeaten all day long. You know, you're just being attacked by everything sometimes. And you're just trying to sometimes react to stuff. Where if you lay that foundation in the morning

of taking your time and peace, and I love like going to the gym at 4 a.m. because no one's there. Like it's just me and maybe like a couple other people. And then it's a giant gym, and I have the whole place to myself. And so I can wander around. I can just kind of be peaceful. I don't have to wait for stuff to get on or off it.

I don't have to put it with stupid people wandering around me. I can just kind of enjoy the gym. I can go in the jacuzzi or the sauna. I've got some peace. If I go in there when it's busy there's always some idiot in the sauna wanting to talk and you're like do you understand this is kind of a meditative area like you know i don't want to hear your life story like god especially your life buddy um like i i'm not even sure why you're telling anybody about it because it's awful

uh but you know and so i like being going in those quiet moments, but yeah, I've kind of learned that laying that foundation, having that quiet time, uh, and building on that just makes a whole difference in your whole day. It's, it's huge. And I never really appreciated how big an impact this was having until I stopped doing it. And so it was last, uh, last October, we went on a week longlong family vacation, and it was a really nice vacation. And the whole trip, I felt terrible. And I couldn't understand why.

We're in these lovely surroundings. We've got my three-year-old daughter at the time, my wife. Life couldn't be better. I'd just made an acquisition. So I really felt everything across the board was fantastic and yet I felt awful and I just couldn't put my finger on it and it was the day before we came home when I woke up and I was like I get it I understand why I'm feeling like this it's because I haven't done me I haven't taken the time because I was waking straight up and going straight into dad mode even

though he's in his lovely like surroundings straight into dad mode and i hadn't done me and that's what i had struggled with particularly after like months and months of always having this um this time sort of set aside every single day seven days a week and that that just cemented it for me and that if anything sort of evolved uh i think at the time i was getting up about five five a.m maybe 5 30 And I was like, I want more time for me. What impact would that have? And yeah, it's just been sort of evolving ever since. There you go. So give us your final thoughts as we go out

and pitch to the audience to reach out to you, work with you and et cetera, et cetera. Yep. So I love working with people who are looking to improve their lives. People who may have a sense that they've got a lot more in them, but don't quite know how to access that. I've already worked with people in various situations, whether they're actually combating addictions or whatever, all the way through to life's pretty good but I want it to be great um the best place to get me is uh my website which is adriennight.co.uk um and I'm also very active on social media especially Instagram uh I normally post on there several times a day and I try to like give people an

actual glimpse of what's going on beneath the surface um so some of the struggles are still you know face day to day and uh sort of work through so um yeah even my website or social media and the best uh uh the handle for my social media is adrian j knight and that's for all of the all the channels let me on the show man people need your motivation and need to do more and you know people always you, I don't want to start a company until I get some money or, uh, you know, I put this together and people need to realize that they can go do it. It's, it's, it's not that hard. Um, it, it's sometimes hard to dig companies out of thing, but you can cherry pick because, you know, when you look at, uh, acquisitions, you know, it's what Ted Turner famously said, you never lose anything saying no to a deal and walking away.

So if you see something you don't like, you can always come back, but you can say no to it and turn it away. It gives you a whole lot better opportunity, and it's interesting how many businesses, when they're in trouble, will share just all the data with you. And sometimes you can learn more from that than you can from buying them out or getting involved in their business. You're just like, wow, I won't do things that way. Kind of like the family situation.

So, Adrian, thank you very much for coming on. We really appreciate it. Give us your.com once more as we go out. Yep. It's adriannight.co.uk. There you go. Thank you very much for coming on. Thanks, Mon, for tuning in.

Go to goodreads.com, FortressCruzFoss, LinkedIn.com, FortressCruzFoss, YouTube.com, FortressCruzFoss, and all those great places on the internet. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.