Microlise - Nadeem Raza

Victoria Stevens

Hi, I'm Victoria Stevens and welcome to this podcast stock exchanges. In my day job, working as a fund manager at Liontrust investing on behalf of our clients in UK stock market listed companies. I'm fortunate enough to cross paths with some of Britain's most inspiring entrepreneurs. It's a huge privilege to sit across the table from the people who have put their heart and soul into growing and running companies. And in this series I want to share that privilege with you, our listeners. Today, my guest is Nadeem Raza, the chief executive and majority shareholder of Microlise. Microlise is a company which provides integrated hardware and software solutions to the operators of fleets of commercial vehicles. Their technology acts as a linchpin for their customers operations connecting those trucks, lorries, vans and the people driving them with the customers central hub. It allows the customer to plan and optimise the routes taken by the vehicles, improve the efficiency and economy of how they're driven, manage customer delivery, schedule expectations, enhance vehicle safety, adhere to compliance regulations and much more. Microlise customers include a roster of names which are instantly recognisable to our listeners from large grocery chains like Tesco, Sainsbury's and Asda to parcel delivery operators like DPD or Yodel, and Nadeem himself has been with Microlise for over 35 years, having joined as a software engineer not long after graduating from university. He worked his way steadily up through the ranks before leading a management buyout in 2008 and assuming the CEO role, and since then he's evolved the business model to become more robust and recurring. He's grown the company's market share to dominate the key large fleet customer segment and he's floated the company on London's Alternative Investment Market all while remaining laser focused on customer centric product innovation and retaining the business’ entrepreneurial and collaborative culture. Nadeem, I'm really looking forward to hearing your story and thank you very much for joining me on the podcast today.

Nadeem Raza

Thank you very much for having me.

Victoria Stevens

So to kick off, I think it'd be great if you could just explain a little bit about Microlise’s early days. So it was founded before you joined the company. So tell us a bit about what the company looked like when you first interviewed for it and what led you to want to work there.

Nadeem Raza

So when I joined in the late 80s, I was employee number 25. The company at that point was very much focused on delivering warehouse management systems to all sorts of large companies, retail sector and in brewing, and really it was building software on PCs - you know the personal computers that really came about in the early 80s, mid 80s and it was being able to deliver that warehouse management software on those low cost hardware devices, whereas previously people had run warehouses on large mainframes. So it enabled lots of companies to implement systems much, much more cheaply. And that really led to the success of the business in the late 80s. You have to remember, not all of us are old enough to remember, but I've I certainly remember it was a time well before mobile phones. There was no Wi-Fi. In fact, there was not even wired networks. At that point, no laptops. Most PCs had a green on black screen, no colour PCs etc. There were large boxes that sat on people's desks and pretty much everybody worked independently. There was no e-mail. Yeah, so it was a very, very different time. And it's been interesting over the last 35 years to see all of those technologies come in and really change the way that people write software and the way people consume software as well.

Victoria Stevens

We can pick up on some of those technology shifts later in the podcast, but for you, you know, you were quite fresh out of university, I think. Had you done a computing degree? Did that exist back then?

Nadeem Raza

Yeah, I did mathematics and computing at the university. I first actually started writing software when I was about 14. The school that I was at had about 6 PCs amongst you know, 200 or so people that were in that particular year. So you didn't get a lot of access to them, but it was the point at which lots of home PCs came up. You know ZX Spectrum, the Commodore Amiga and BBC Micro, etc. So it was the dawn of that age and it was something that really fascinated me. Hence I got into software and writing code and went on to do mathematics and computing at university and eventually a few months after university, I joined Microlise.

Victoria Stevens

Excellent. And I've heard or seen it written that the boardroom table at Microlise is still the same today as the one where you interviewed for that very first interview.

Nadeem Raza

It is. It's true. Yeah, we had a quite a large table and for some reason even though we've moved offices several times. We've ended up keeping that table. I don't know why there must be some sentimental connection to it, but yes.

Victoria Stevens

There's a valuable relic. So in terms of how your career progressed after you joined Microlise, I think I'm right in saying that you had multiple jobs within the company and worked your way up, as I said in my introduction. So can you tell us a little bit about how you progressed up the ranks?

Nadeem Raza

Yeah. So, you know, looking back on it it, I definitely have a very much of a problem solving mindset. Which I guess is what drew me to mathematics and computing. It's all about solving problems. It's about solving puzzles and finding ways to make things work that don't quite work at the moment. And obviously in business that means that you can go into departments and look at particular processes or look at how certain things are being done. Maybe we should try doing that differently because you know these things are going wrong and so although I originally started off as a software engineer, I ended up working across lots of different parts of the business where we had to implement new software systems where we had to change processes or reorganise structures in some ways or just fundamentally do things in a different way, and so I got exposure to our sales and marketing teams, manufacturing, customer support systems and project management functions. So I was very, very fortunate that I often ended up going into different parts of the organisation to fix issues. And that's really, in hindsight, what helped me understand large parts of how the organisation works and how different departments work within that. And some of the issues that you know that often occur with different departments.

Victoria Stevens

And I would imagine not just being helpful to you as the leader of the company, but also presumably that makes you much more relatable to the people who work at the company. You know, as the chief executive and you know and over 50% shareholder, I guess one danger might be that you seem quite inapproachable, I mean you're not like that at all. But I guess it helps. You know, if the employees know that you've been at the coalface as well.

Nadeem Raza

It does. I think it's gets harder and harder as the company grows. I mean, we're now 800 people, so it's more difficult to have that kind of interaction when there's so many people across so many different geographic areas as well. But I think one of the fortunate things is that I can talk to anybody within the organisation and relate to the work that they're doing and the issues that they have or the problems that they might be trying to deal with because I know enough about the department or the area or the work that they do to be able to have a sensible conversation with them.

Victoria Stevens

Yeah, absolutely. And how do you try and keep that culture as the business grows of having, you know, hundreds of people working for you but still trying to strike that important balance between retaining the agility of tapping into the innovative mindsets of your people, but also balancing that against needing to be commercial, and you know not wasting time on vanity projects if you like.

Nadeem Raza

Well, I think it's been hard. It's been one of the things, it's probably as an organisation, one of our greatest learnings because earlier on in the first sort of 10/15/20 years of the organisation. It was run by technical people. You know, I was technical. Most of the other directors actually came from a software background as well. So we were all technical and we loved solving problems and we solved problems that didn't necessarily have a commercial requirement, which meant that we didn't necessarily make lots of money on different things that we did. And it was one of those learnings that I think you know during 2005 onwards where we really started looking at going well, OK, that's a great problem - solve it. We know how to solve it and come up with a great solution for it, but are we going to make any money solving it? And that really was a culture shift that the organisation had to go through at that point in time to enable it to grow, because we still have lots and lots of really very clever people. But it's all about, you know, can you solve things that are actually going to make you money? And should you solve things that that are presented to you by customers because, again, you're trying to make solutions that work for the for a large market, not necessarily for a small group of customers.

Victoria Stevens

Yeah, I think to be honest, that challenge is one that we see replicated across many growth companies at a certain stage of their evolution. You know, many of them are quite evangelical about their products, whatever the wares are that they are selling. But it's that point in the growth journey where you have to start being more rigorous, I suppose, or more streamlined about how you then prioritise that funnel and to make sure that you've got that key eye on commerciality as well.

So let's move on to the management buyouts. The MBO as we call them. Can you talk to us a bit about how that idea germinated and also who came alongside you in those early days? You know, as founding directors and shareholders of the business?

Nadeem Raza

There were originally 5 shareholders of the business right at the beginning. One by one they actually exited and retired. And the business was left with one sole shareholder, a guy called Roy Allum who coincidentally is actually still a shareholder today. But he was semi-retired, you know, he was working three days a week. And myself, Bob, Harvey and a couple of other people were really the people that that ran the business on his behalf. And in sort of about 2004/2005, he said to us well look, I'm kind of semi-retired here. I don't really want to come in for two days a week. I'd rather not come in for any days week at all. So would you like to organise a management buyout or look at selling the business now? Obviously Bob and myself and the other management decided that, you know, we were ambitious enough to go down the buy out route rather than sell the business on to somebody else. And Roy made it very easy for us to do the management buy out so you know, it was completely funded by him, effectively. He actually sold some of the buildings that the company owned and we use that in a combination of vendor loan notes to actually deal the management buy out. So we obviously put our own money in it, but it wasn't funded through any other VC or anything like that. So it was a very, very easy management buyout that Roy really facilitated and if it wasn't for that, then I don't think we'd be here and obviously Roy retained about 20% of the business at that time. And then over the years he's gradually sold elements of his equity and as I say he still owns about 6%.

Victoria Stevens

Inspiring story of, you know, a founder character just wanting to do the right thing for the next generation. That's really encouraging to hear. And I suppose probably the fact that it was such a friendly environment must have helped, because let's remind ourselves of what I said in the introduction, the year was 2008. So the very foothills of the global financial crisis, and I imagine those ensuing couple of years can't have been easy for the business or for you personally. Having just done that huge step.

Nadeem Raza

Yeah, it was really difficult, you know, and we often joke that we like to do things the hard way, and I think that the MBO was certainly, from a timing perspective, not the best timing for us to do that. But we grew much closer as a team, as a management team because of the hardships that we had to go through in 2009/2009 and so on. I think by 2010 we were in a far better place, but it did involve, you know, redundancies and restructuring that you had to do at that point in time to make sure the business survived. So it was difficult. It was a lot of tough decisions, but looking back on it, Bob and myself, kind of refer to that as that's when you know, who's got your back when you are in those difficult points in time and who you can trust to help you and get you through that process and so you know we built a very strong management team and a strong culture within the business through those hardships, which really led us to do very well from 2010 onwards.

Victoria Stevens

And was that also the catalyst for you to think about the resilience of the business model, moving it to that more recurring income type?

Nadeem Raza

It was a combination of different things. One that I think that did persuade us to go down that route, was that it was something that seemed to be happening in the industry anyway. That people were switching more to a recurring revenue model paid monthly as opposed to a perpetual licence that they bought and then paid for support to companies. So it was a shift that we saw happening. Now, it's quite a difficult shift for an organisation to do with their customers, because it suddenly means that you need a lot more cash to make that switch with your customers, and it's difficult to do that. It took us about four or five years to transition from one model to another, but it did mean that the big business was far more stable. And given the long term nature of those contracts, it meant we could think more long term with some of the decisions that we made rather than thinking only looking forward to the next quarter or the next six months.

Victoria Stevens

Yeah. So we're now in your story at the point where Microlise starts to look a lot more like the company it looks like today and we're going to come to that decision to IPO later. But I think at this stage it'd be quite interesting just to delve a little bit into your perception of the company's key competitive advantage and its growth prospects. So one thing that I wanted to ask you to describe for us really is the company's mentality around you know, research and development, intellectual property, technological innovation. My perception of Microlise is that you know it's the hardware is the functional part of the offering. But it's real value is in the software and it's deep, broad functionality across a number of different sort of use cases within a customer. Talk to us a little bit about that, that mentality around innovation and R&D.

Nadeem Raza

So one of the things that we've never been afraid of is taking on something new that we didn't necessarily have the skills for at the point in time, but knowing that we we could solve. And that's meant that we've got a lot of skills in house that a lot of companies don't have. Not just our hardware engineering and electronic design skills. At one point we actually manufactured, we actually did our own circuit boards and so on as well. But we also have, you know, networking expertise. We have airtime comms expertise. We have hosting expertise because we host our own equipment in our own data centres. So there's a lot of skill sets that roll under one roof, literally under one roof, which means that if you have a problem, you don't necessarily have to go and try and get support from a supplier. You can walk down the corridor to another room and find somebody who's got those skills and say, can you help me with this and get it resolved fairly quickly. And that really helped us grow our business and kind of things that we did because we were able to react very quickly to customer needs. We were able to solve particular problems that they had faster than other people could. And it meant that, you know, we could come up with more innovative solutions that other people couldn't do because they didn't have all of those skills in house.

Victoria Stevens

Absolutely. And how important you know from where we sit today is it to be utilising, you know, data - that really critical data coming out of your customers to continuously refine and augment solutions? We've all heard a lot about that in the age of AI, the increasing importance of data. How do you see that?

Nadeem Raza

I think there is lots more still to do on that front. We have lots and lots of data. And I think really we've only scratched the surface in terms of the solutions that we can create for our customers with all of that knowledge. For example, you know today a lot of our customers are talking to us about their emissions targets and what they need to do regarding their emissions over the next five years, etc. We have all of that data. And so one of the things that we are working very closely with our customers over the last two years is really helping them understand which bits of their supply chains are actually producing what kind of emissions and what they can do to help reduce those. And when you think about the fact that you know a retail organisation like Tesco -You know they transport goods via train, they transport via ships they have many, many warehouses, they have trucks, they have different types of trucks, some that are hybrid trucks, some that they've actually now got some electric trucks. All the way through to delivering to your doorstep, they've got electric vans etc. so working out, you know, your groceries, that arrive on your doorstep. How much carbon emissions have they produced over that life cycle of from point at which they're manufactured to the point at which they arrive at your door. It goes through a very, very complex supply chain to get there and we've got all of that data so we can actually help them look at how they can reduce some of those emissions. And that's one of the areas that we, you know, we've got more work that we can do certainly on that front too. Deploy that data better.

Victoria Stevens

And for a customer that's not just, you know, dare I say it a nice fluffy ambition, you know, that has genuine commercial implications as well because of course, you know, they're also managing the cost around that. But they're also increasingly in the new world having to report on that themselves for regulatory reasons. And demonstrate what they're doing practically to reduce those emissions. So there's a genuine commercial advantage being able to do that as well.

Nadeem Raza

That's right. And you know there is a view held by many people that at some point there will be, to encourage a lot of those moves, there will be taxes that will come along that will, you know, will be imposed on those emissions to help companies you know, to focus companies’ minds on reducing them. So that may well happen in coming years. But yeah, understanding how those things operate through very complex supply chains and what you can do to help make them more efficient is really what we're all about.

Victoria Stevens

And your sweet spot that you've built up is very much today in in that large fleet segment. So you know customers that have got, you know, 100 plus vehicles. Can you talk to us a little bit about how the complexity of requirement of those customers have helped the company in terms of making sure that they're truly embedded in what the company's doing and therefore their solution, your solutions become even you know, very, very sticky within that customer?

Nadeem Raza

Sure. Logistics is fascinating, you know.

Victoria Stevens

There's A phrase you didn't think you're going to hear.

Nadeem Raza

Yeah. Well, it's fascinating. Like a lot of things, to be honest, when you when you look under the covers and understand how it operates. You really see the complexity behind something today. You can order something on your phone and you can have it delivered within 30 minutes. In the 1980s, I remember mail order being, you know you rang up and you ordered something and it was 28 days. So there's the, you know, there's been a huge advancement in being able to have those things operate through a very complicated supply chain. And one of the things that you know we find particularly fascinating is all of the different ways that people can send goods through that supply chain and all of the things that go wrong because genuinely so many things go wrong on a day-to-day basis within those large operations. You know, vehicles get stuck in traffic. OK, it happens all the time. But when you've got a coordinated supply chain where one vehicle has to bring in goods into a location for then another vehicle to take those goods to somewhere else. If the first one is delayed, you can have all sorts of knock on effects to the next one and the next one and the next one, and trying to coordinate all of those things is hugely complicated. And that's what we do on a day-to-day basis. And I think that if there's anywhere in the anywhere in industry where you've got people with a can do attitude, it's actually our customers in logistics, it's so impressive. Even with all of the obstacles that happen on a day-to-day basis, they find ways to still get goods delivered and out the door. They are incredible at solving real time problems and making things happen.

Victoria Stevens

Yeah. Amazing. And for you, you know, having built up that dominant position here in the UK. You're a relatively early stage of then trying to expand out internationally in certain kind of key markets. Can you talk to us about how you see that opportunity to take what Microlise has done so successfully here and replicate it abroad?

Nadeem Raza

So one of the interesting things about the UK is, you know, as a geography, we're a pretty small nation with 66 million people. All in a small space, relying on pretty poor infrastructure when you think about our roads, etc. So to get that efficient supply chain, we have to be very good and in fact we are some of the best in the world, if not the best in the world in how our logistics operate and because of that and because of those things that we've solved here, actually, we can take those solutions to lots of other places in the world that are four or five years behind us in in real terms. So in one of our fastest growing markets is Australia and it's fair to say that Australia in various aspects of logistics, including home delivery and so on, is a few years behind where we are in the UK and they recognise that, and as such a lot of the things that we've developed here are usually applicable to their kinds of operations, and that's one of the reasons why we've been so successful over there.

Victoria Stevens

Now I'm going to take this in a slightly different direction now because I said I'd come back to that decision to float the business on the Alternative Investment Market or AIM as it's known, that's London's junior stock market for growth companies. So you listed the business on AIM in 2021 and for me that feels like a real landmark step, you know, particularly for an owner manager with such a large equity stake. You know, you then move from being accountable to a very close knit group of people, to having a much more extensive list of shareholders as a public entity, so it'd be really interesting to understand what catalysed that decision to list and what your experience of it has been so far and that can be positive and negative.

Nadeem Raza

So yeah, I think there's a number of reasons why we decided to list. So in the late 2010s, so 2016/2017, we were looking at how do we enable some of the directors and shareholders at that point in time to exit and retire. We did some internal company restructuring, bought back various shares, which enabled two of our directors to exit the business in 2018. We were considering what else we could do. I wasn't really looking to retire, although one or two of my fellow team members were, and so we were looking at a way of how could we do that, where some of us could carry on running the business and others could exit. And you know, we looked at trade sales, we looked at bringing VCs on board, And somebody said, well you could list, and it wasn't something that we'd actually considered at that point. So we said OK, well that's interesting. We haven't really thought about that. We'll go off and investigate. So we spent about a year looking at what does it mean to be a listed business? How do you become a listed business? What are the pros and cons? So we did a lot of work. I talked to a lot of people. And in sort of 2019, we were, you know, a few months away from deciding to do. We had an acquisition that we’d decided to do which we did about 9 days before the 1st lockdown in 2020. So that was an interesting acquisition because we just bought this company and actually we couldn't really interact with all the people because everybody was working from home. So it was an interesting way of trying to integrate a business. Without really having all of that in place, while at the same time dealing with all of the other issues that COVID brought along to 2020. So our IPO got parked essentially. But it was still something that we wanted to do. One, to allow some shareholders to exit. Two, and this is something that is part of the culture, is we really wanted to find a way that our staff could come along with that journey. So you know, giving them some sense of ownership of the business or enabling a way that they could own parts of the business and come along for the for the success of that journey. And so we were still quite keen to do the IPO and then it took us another year or so after that before we finally had everything in place to be able to do the IPO and we successfully did that in July 21.

Victoria Stevens

Yes. And I think for investors like us who embrace that idea of equity ownership, not only in terms of alignment with us as shareholders, but also in terms of the benefit that it brings for thinking long term about building value in a business that that's hugely valuable and we were delighted to see that you didn't sell a single share at IPO which is relatively rare for an entrepreneur selling, you know, a stake in their business. But how important do you see the equity incentivisation for you and for your staff being in terms of bringing that long termism into the company?

Nadeem Raza

Well, I think that you know my logic was pretty simple in terms of not selling any shares which was that if I did sell some shares, I'd have some money that I'd have to invest somewhere. Why wouldn't I keep it invested in Microlise which, you know, I understood the business very, very well. I managed the business. So for me as an investment, it seems like a sound and reasonable investment. And so it didn't make sense for me personally to do anything other than that. But it also means that you know a lot of the other shareholders, and Roy being one of them still, were able to come along with the journey and continue that growth of the business and you know we've grown from sort of about £50million at IPO to you know £80,000,000+ now and hopefully continue to grow beyond that. So, we're very much focused on continuing to grow the business and helping all of those people that have been with us for many, many years to share along that journey. Now again markets haven't been great as everybody knows over the last few years but we recognise that they're cyclic and part of our long term thinking has always been well, you know, we'll do what we need to do to continue to grow and develop the business and the share price and the market will sort itself out. It's not something that we can control directly. So let's just focus on running the business and doing the best job that we can.

Victoria Stevens

I think it's so refreshing to hear that - it's exactly how we think. You know, you can't always control the externalities around you in terms of how the market's feeling. Sentiment moves, but actually just being invested in great businesses and holding them for the long term will reap rewards in the end. It's, you know, that long termism in the culture that obviously extends to your customer relationships as well. You know you frequently talk about how long some of those key customers have been with you at Microlise and I'm really interested in your transport conference. You do the conference every year. I think for 10 years now. Am I right in saying more you have over 1200 attendees at the Coventry Building Society arena? Customers, partners, everybody. Potentially down to the drivers as well. I don't know. I'm just interested to understand how that came about because it seems to have become, you know, really kind of seminal in your industry's calendar.

Nadeem Raza

Yeah, well, one of the things, again, part of the culture is we're not happy to stand still. Change is continuous at Microlise. It's one of the things that happens all of the time, and originally that conference started off as 10 people in a meeting room at our offices in Eastwood. That's how it started in sort of about 2003/2004 and we said, OK great, that worked really well. How can we make it better? And we developed it next year. It got bigger and made sure it got bigger still and so on and even today. We do that conference and immediately after the conference we all sit around and go right, that was great, but what could we do better next year? And you know, there's 30 people there. It's interesting because we run the conference, we don't outsource it to anybody else, it's actually organised by our marketing team and a whole variety of other people from within the business that go and do this every year and so you know we all sit around afterwards and think about all the things that we could do to make it better and hence why it's continued to get better and grow and have more prominence within the industry. It's the largest conference of its type in Europe. So you know that's taken us a few years to get to that stage, but we're still not, you know, we're still not satisfied with that. We're still looking at, well, how do we make it better still. And you know, this year we've changed the format and done various changes to it this year as well. And as I say, I think in another one or two years and we will definitely have outgrown that. And you in terms of the number of people that are coming along, we'll have to find somewhere else. But yeah, it continues to get bigger and better.

Victoria Stevens

With that number of attendees coming year in year out, I mean you must be doing something right in terms of providing something that's genuinely of huge value to the customers and something that seems really quite innovative in in your sector.

Nadeem Raza

Yeah, and it goes back to the customer relationships that we have. We think about those very much in the long term view and saying well, OK, we're not trying to generate some revenue from this customer for this quarter. We're you know tied into a five year contract with this customer. Ideally, you know year 4/year 3 that contract will get renewed for another five years. So how do we build on our relationship with that customer? How do we help them become more successful? What's problems do they have that we can solve for them? That then means that actually, they'll spend more money with us and continue developing that relationship. And that's the attitude that we have, hence why we have that really low churn rate, you know sub 1% of our customers by revenue leave us. Which is incredible in in the kind of software industry - you don't normally see that kind of low such a low level of churn at all.

Victoria Stevens

Huge loyalty and trusted relationships, trusted partner kind of status. It's hugely valuable. Now before we finish, I wanted to delve into a little bit more on how you deal with challenges. Now we've already covered the initial challenge that you had after the MBO obviously doing it at such a challenging time for the global macroeconomic backdrop in the global financial crisis. You've just told us about, you know, 2020 just before the pandemic doing an acquisition which with the benefit of hindsight, a wonderful thing, was timed at a very challenging moment with us all about to go into lockdown. You've just had another challenging period that you've just gone through in a very short period because you've had to deal with the implications of a nasty cyber attack. Now we're definitely not here to get into any detail on current trading or anything like that, so I'm not going to ask you anything about that. But more I was just interested to understand what happens when a successful entrepreneur gets a sideswipe from an unexpected set back. You know how? How do you cope with those moments of peak stress as the leader of a business?

Nadeem Raza

Well, I think the first thing to do is not to get angry about it, not to get emotional about it. And one of the things that we're good at is treating it as another problem and going OK, well, we've had that happen, right? How do we solve it? How do we get our customers back up and running as quickly as possible, what do we need to put in place to make that happen? And really that's the approach that the business took. We of course we have business continuity plans and disaster recovery plans and so on. But none of those actually work as well in real life as you thought. I think it's fair to say there is no so greater experience than going through that kind of event - you learn so much. But it is about looking at it, each problem finding a way through it and working closely and communicating continuously, not just with our internal team but also with customers. You know, we had a lot of compliments from our customers about the fact that we kept them informed hour by hour, day by day, as to what was happening, what we were doing, what we were planning on doing to help recover and so on. And that's the kind of relationship that we have with customers and the kind of relationship that we have with our staff. We're a very open company because you know what's the what's saying? You know, a problem shared is a problem halved or whatever, but it is that kind of view that when we can talk about it and put lots of brains at work, rather than trying to just solve it yourself, when you put lots of people at work focused on solving the problem, you can get there much more quickly. And you know, I think the cyber attack showed some of us at our best in terms of how we go about solving things and how we deal with problems that that we weren't expecting that appeared out of nowhere.

Victoria Stevens

And listening to you talk, I mean you come across as unflappable, almost, you know, very much focused on rolling up your sleeves, getting down to the practicalities of how to solve those challenges, as you've said. I'm interested in understanding a bit more about your hinterland and what gives you that kind of confidence - that self-quiet self-confidence to deal with those challenges in that way. So who's the Nadeem Raza outside of work?

Nadeem Raza

Well I think there's a few different answers to that question. One is I learned a long time ago that actually fear is a lack of knowledge. So if you're frightened about something, or you're worried about something or whatever, then turn it around to, well, why? You know, ask lots of questions like why and try to get to the bottom of it. And once you understand something or once you really get a view of the problem itself, then, actually you're halfway to solving it. You're halfway to getting an answer, and so yeah, I can be very unemotional on lots of things like that. Where you know, presented with a problem or something I don't end up being fearful. I don't worry. I don't have difficult time sleeping because I tend to look at it and go well. OK. What do I need to understand to solve this. I do get excited about some things. You know I can get excited when people show me something that's really innovative and so on, so I'm not completely unemotional outside of work, but yeah, being fearful, being angry is not is not some of the traits that I tend to exhibit.

Victoria Stevens

That's a valuable lesson for us all. Try and control the negative emotions and allow the positive ones through. Yeah. And what about your family, your life outside of work? In that sense? I mean, I can't let you go without pulling you off on something that I read on your website.

Nadeem Raza

Hmm?

Victoria Stevens

When I was just prepping for the podcast there was one of the more interesting hobbies, and this was from your own website so I feel OK to mention it. You have a quiet talent for fire eating, which is not something you often see associated with the CEO of a business.

Nadeem Raza

Yes.

Victoria Stevens

So tell us a bit more about who you are behind the behind work in terms of your hobbies.

Victoria Stevens

So I guess one of the other traits is I'm incredibly curious. And I have always been like that for a very long time, and in the 1990s that led me to do all sorts of different things. You know, I went off and did flying, microlights and gliders. I did fire eating, fire breathing as well. And all sorts of different things because it was a curiosity, and it was a challenge. So yeah, it's part of my makeup, I guess in that if you were looking at my browser history, you'd think I was a schizophrenic because you know, you'd see things in there that were everything from politics to chemistry to hydrogen generation, to history, to mathematics. You know, my mind wonders. All sorts of things and hence, you know, I ask questions and I delve into all sorts of subjects that most people might not necessarily think about.

Victoria Stevens

Absolutely. Including as you've just told us, fire breathing. Fascinating. Thanks, Nadeem. So I've got one final question for you, which is a bit of a curveball. So you've obviously been extremely successful in your career to date. But what would you say if I gave you the opportunity to exchange places with any other person in any other career just for a day? I mean, perhaps you're going to tell us a circus performer with your with your act, but I'd be really interested to hear that.

Nadeem Raza

So any other person? Well, I mean, one of the areas that I don't know a lot about is biology. And you know, I've done chemistry and I've done physics and I know quite a lot in those subjects, but biology is one of those areas that I never quite got my head round for a variety of, you know, for a variety of reasons. But two years ago, in in 2023, I was diagnosed with cancer. So I'm all fine now - there nothing to worry about on that, but it was a minor issue, but that often led me to think about, OK, well, you know, cancer research is huge. It's lots of stuff going on there. And the more I read about it, the more interesting I found it. And so on. So it’s an area that I would love to understand more about and you know, I think the job that some of those researchers are doing in that field and also obviously in the field of vaccines has been quite prominent in the last three or four years with COVID. And some of the, you know, latest things and advancements that are being done in biology. It's just fascinating. Yeah. And it's an area, certainly that I'd love to find out more about.

Victoria Stevens

Really interesting answer. Thank you. Another example of that inquisitive mind, that thirst for knowledge, that problem solving mentality that obviously pervades your career at Microlise and how you've built it up to the business today. So a really nice note to finish on. So thank you so much for joining me today Nadeem. It's been such a pleasure chatting to you and for listeners. Please do subscribe via Spotify, Apple, or your usual podcast provider.