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Mark Mills started buying and selling at school — literally, with bags of broken biscuits from the biscuit factory where his aunt worked. Three decades and five businesses later, after a £20,000 debt from the failed pay phone venture that took years to clear, and a publishing business he sold for £1, he built Cardpoint into a £100M-a-year cash machine business turning over £2M a week. He now takes other founders through the 40-step process he ended up writing after selling his own company disastrously badly on the first attempt.

In this episode:

• The broken-biscuits business at school that started it all, and why he thinks the best entrepreneurs are always capable salespeople
• The pay phones business in the early '90s that made money on hardware but nothing on calls, and the recession that wiped it out
• The £20,000 debt he decided to pay off personally rather than take anyone down with him
• The mobile phone moment: sitting around a table laughing at the idea that "someone would want one for his wife" — and the revolution they completely missed
• The publishing business that got so broad it had no audience, and the £1 exit that followed
• The 1999 trip to New York with his brother "because all the good ideas come from the States"
• The five business model rules it took him three failed ventures to figure out: recurring income, location-independent, scalable, necessary rather than fashion, and of its time
• Cardpoint: 36,000 free ATMs already in the market, and the counter-intuitive decision to put paid ones in more convenient locations — corner shops, petrol stations, tourist spots
• The maths behind £1.50 charges adding up to £100M in revenue, and why the business ended up needing a lot of accountants
• Why he ran Cardpoint with an exit in mind from day one, and how that discipline shaped every small day-to-day decision
• The disastrous first attempt to sell it — running buyer meetings while trying to do his day job — and the Christmas Day conversation with his wife that reset everything
• The six-month "I'm not for sale" period he used to prepare properly, and why saying no created more interest not less
• The 40-step exit process he now takes founders through, from tidying up leases and share structures to sharpening the sales pipeline
• The four kinds of buyer he thinks about: PLCs, PE-backed roll-ups, private equity taking a hybrid stake, and pure trade sales — and the Minicam deal that used two of them
• Why buyer due diligence matters as much as the other way round, and the founders who took less money because they preferred one buyer's team to another's
• The anticlimactic feeling after selling — the founder who ate beans on toast and cried the night the deal closed, and Mark's advice to do nothing for 12 months afterwards
• Marking the occasion: daft cars, one burnt orange McLaren, and a pair of cufflinks Mark still wears years later
• The five "disinheritance events" his kids can recite, and why they occasionally try to talk each other into breaking the rules
• His definition of true wealth: not the money, but the choices — and why he'd rather be rich than famous

A conversation about ruthlessly interrogating your own business model, the discipline of running every day as if the exit is coming, and why the moment after the wire transfer clears is often quieter than anyone expects.

Mark's Website: https://www.mark.co.uk
Book “Making Your Mark” - https://amzn.eu/d/04iC0CF7

This podcast is produced by Tribunista

Sponsored by Capital Partners