Deal With It! EOS Deal Advisory second-anniversary statement.

In this episode, Ina Kjaer and Maggie Brereton talk about the second anniversary of EOS Deal Advisory, their journey and how they have come. Thank you for all the support along the journey.

"It is funny to think that it was just an idea. And now it really is a reality, and we have a great team. We have great clients who are doing great deals. And sometimes that does seem a little bit surreal, but fun". Maggie Brereton.

Series presenters: Ina Kjaer and Maggie Brereton, co-founders of EOS Deal Advisory.

http://www.eos-dealadvisory.co.uk

Transcript

Hi, I'm Maggie Brereton.

And I'm Ina Kjaer.

Welcome to Deal With It!, our podcast series on business and deals.

In this episode, we talk about the second anniversary of EOS Deal Advisory, our journey and how far we've come.

Thank you for all the support we've had along our journey.

We're just impressed on how far we and the team came in those two years from a very small team in the UK. We're doing several partnerships in different countries. We have a partnership in France, one in Germany, one in the US and starting one in the Australasia region at the moment, which allows us to do much bigger deals with a much bigger reach.

And the deals that we work on always go global really quickly. So that reach of having those partnerships is really great. And actually, during the Pandemic and Covid times, we all learned to work differently, and that has helped us be more global because we haven't had to fly around the world.

Everybody can do everything virtually now feels very refreshing because we're back doing 100% of our time on projects. We love deals. We love to be involved in them. I think our clients sometimes get surprised by how involved we actually are on a daily basis, and I think that's the whole differentiator. For me was in terms of career, I never grew so much in my career like I grew in the last two years.

I think that's right. I think for me, it's for the excitement back into doing deals and the real enjoyment of it. And you've got enthusiastic clients, enthusiastic team, and we get to participate in that. And that is much more enjoyable than doing internal admin.

I think the main change is that we really work as an extension of our clients’ team. So, it's not about how we want to do the deal. It's about what's important for our clients. We spend a lot of time understanding what our client wants out of this deal, what's their model, what's the evaluation model, what they are trying to get out of it. And then we base our analysis on what they actually need. We're just overwhelmed by client support. Sometimes we cannot believe the deals we're working on, and the clients will work alongside with.

We're just so thankful and impressed by the support we've been received from the clients and from the market to what we're trying to do, the market is extremely receptive to what we're doing.

And if I think back to some of the early days and for clients to take that risk on us, it's always easy to go to something that you know. So then to come to us and help us build this has just been amazing. Absolutely amazing. If you're thinking about entering deals, it's exciting. You've got to be super curious. You've got to work very hard, and that's not long hours, hard. That's intellectually, building up relationships and really being prepared to think through a difficult situation and be quite creative in a way.

So those are the types of things and the types of attributes that we in particular look for. And the most important thing is you've got to enjoy it because it does take up a lot of your brain power, a lot of your day and a lot of your energy.

And I think if you're thinking about coming, joining us, what we're looking at in a candidate is people that really want to do things different and really want to challenge themselves and be willing to do things they've never done before. So, we get thrown at us quite complicated deals. And sometimes we say, well, we've never done one of them. But that's fine. So, let's see how we can figure it out. So, we are looking for people that are comfortable out of their comfort zone.

It's great to work with our clients and really be part of their team because you build up a great relationship, a great understanding. We can teach them things. They can teach us things. I just recently spent three weeks solidly out with a client on their site, and it was great. We got a great camaraderie. It was a very difficult situation, and it's nice. It's nice to also go down the pub with somebody different of an evening. So, it is really enjoyable. And I think the efficiency and the advice that we can give when we take that position is just so much better.

The future looks bright. The market has been very accepting of us. The market is liking what we're doing in a different way. The clients are coming. We're doing incredible deals, and I think more we do of them more we're going to get to do with them. So, we look very positively into the future. I think we just got started. I think we are very ambitious, and we see the market opportunity, and we see all the start-ups like us popping up everywhere in the world because that's what the trend in the market is, and that's why we partner with them, because that's where we see the way it's going.

I think we see we're still in the beginning of our journey. So there's a lot to do. And the best thing about it is that I think we're always aligned. We get extremely well together. And I think a client used an expression the other day, which I thought was very interesting because she said that not only, we complement each other, but we amplify each other. So, I think it was a good way of describing how we work.

And it's just never going to get boring. So as long as it never gets boring, we will always enjoy it. And like Ina says, always be ambitious. And we've changed so much in what we thought we were going to do and what we plan to do. But in a good way. And that's the thing. It's constantly evolving and giving us new opportunities. Did we plan to do all of these partnerships that give us global reach?

No.

But it's brilliant, and it's completely changed our way and the way that we go to market. So as long as it keeps really dynamic like that, we will just keep doing it and growing.

People talk about diversity. And while they talk about diversity many times, they don't mean it. That's what we bring to the table. That works really well. We are very diverse team. And Maggie and I are very diverse and different people. We think about deals differently. We have very different personal lives. We have very different personal tastes and what we look for in our future. And that's the brilliant part of it is because we always bring in a different perspective, and that's what we're looking at as part of our team members, people that look at the world in a different perspective because that's how you bring an interesting point of view to the conversation.

That difference and that challenge I haven't had for a long time, and I really enjoy that. And I can feel myself growing and developing and learning because of that difference and because of that challenge, and at times it makes me very uncomfortable. But I'm really enjoying it because I can see the change in myself and the development of myself, which you just don't often get the opportunity to do.

The way we build EOS is always with a team in our mind. It's less about me or Maggie or Martin or anybody else that comes joining us. But it's more how we come together as a team. It is a pleasure to work with them. Every time we have a session, we get out of this. Oh, how good was that? And I think that's why it works because we take pleasure in it. We'd be extremely happy when they're successful. They are happy when we're successful. And that's the way it works, because we are only going to get there as a team.

We're never going to get there as individuals if we're not getting it there as a team.

The whole thing about EOS, it was always never to be about a Maggie and Ina thing. It was always about to be bigger than that because we knew other people shared our vision. Other people wanted to do what we wanted to do. So, us just being able to start that platform for people to join was the key thing. And now we're getting really the right people in and the Halo effect and the synergy of these people coming together is so great to see. And it's challenging the way that we think challenging the way that we do stuff, and that's so much better for our clients and so much better for the growth of our business and makes it much easier to attract new and different people from very varied backgrounds, which just bring a completely different lens to a situation and may it long continue.

It's not about the number of people. We come with a very different view, how we work with our clients and how we do our project. Before, in the past, before EOS, we would think, well, the object was to get as many people in a project as we could. Right now, we're all getting the right people with the right level of device that our clients need. So, we actually don't need a lot of people to do the same deals. 

I think overall, we're just really happy and impressed that something that was just an idea two years ago out of a really bad situation, comes into life to something so amazing as it is now. It's been such a journey for us. But at the same time, if I look back at it, even on the hardest day we had, because Covid times were not easier for us. We never regret our decision of starting EOS, and it's the best professional decision we ever took. 

Definitely. It’s been a great journey and like Ina said, it is funny to think that it was just an idea. And now it really is a reality, and we have a great team. We have great clients who are doing great deals. And sometimes that does seem a little bit surreal, but fun.