In this candid episode, Andrew Hulbert, Founder and Vice Chair of Pareto Facilities Management Ltd, shares lessons from building, exiting, and redefining purpose post-sale. If you struggle with post-exit identity voids and legacy planning, you won’t want to miss it.
You will discover:
– What mindset shifts empower everyday people to launch successfully
– Why aligning business with personal purpose sustains fulfillment beyond exits
– How to structure companies for independence and multi-generational impact
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the start, scale and succeed. Podcast, the only podcast that grows with you through all seven stages of your journey. As a founder, I’m your host, Scott Ritzheimer, and I want to talk to the founders out there who are building toward an exit, but in a moment of honesty, realize they have no idea what actually comes after that exit. You’ve got a vision for your company. You’ve got a growth plan. You may even know the multiple that you’re targeting. But the question that I have for you today is, have you thought about what happens to you when you’re no longer the one in charge? What does life actually look like when the business that consumed all your time, energy, and maybe even your identity for a decade or more, suddenly doesn’t need you anymore. And here’s what’s tricky about this phase, because just about everyone talks about building the company and how to sell it, but almost nobody talks honestly about navigating life after the company. What are the trade offs that you didn’t see coming. What do you do with the drive that got you there? And how do you think about legacy while you’re still young enough to build something else entirely? Well, I have no real hope of dealing with all of that alone, so I’ve got with me here today Andrew Hulbert, who is a founder and entrepreneur himself who built Pareto FM from scratch into a $50 million company with 500 staff, culminating in a nine figure private equity exit raised on a council estate. He created his own path through grit and people, first business culture, and his story is one of real trade offs. There’s financial freedom or early retirement for his father, but also missed moments with over 40 Awards, two books and track record in leadership, diversity and mentoring, Andrew now speaks candidly about entrepreneurship, legacy and men’s wellness. His conversations are honest, unfiltered and grounded in lived experience, and he’s here with us today. Andrew, welcome to the show. Glad to have you on joining us from the other side of the pond and and you know, here to keep everyone interested, there was a podcast, and folks who listen to the show will know, podcast changed my life, mostly because the gentleman who was speaking on the podcast as a guest had an Irish accent. And so anytime we get a wonderful accent from anywhere else really, I think it’s just a bonus opportunity to keep people on to hear something great. So I know you’ve got a lot more than wonderful.
Andrew Hulbert
Oh yeah, I tell you, the Irish accent. I did a lot of work in Dublin, so I was going to like Ireland every three weeks or so. And when you get two Irish people together who talk in English, but in like a Dublin accent. It’s very difficult to keep hold of them, especially when they’re drinking in it at the same time, it sends it in a completely different path. But yeah, my really nice.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, that’s awesome. My first time in London, we were at my my wife and I were at a hotel or something, and some guy comes in and he’s talking, and I don’t understand a word he’s saying, like, not a word. And I look at my wife, who’s from Norway, and I’m like, what language was that she goes English?
Andrew Hulbert
Yeah, I’ve been to Norway many times as well. One very quick story. I went to Norway just before Christmas, and my car got stuck in the snow, and a Norwegian farmer very kindly came and pulled me out. And luckily he spoke English, because my Norwegian is awful. So yeah, I was saved by a Norwegian farmer only about six, seven weeks ago. So yeah, thank you to the Norwegians for that.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, there you go. And a Norwegian farmer is a great group the consoles, and surprisingly, a lot of them speak English, which is wonderful as well. But all right, well, but All right, we’re not here to talk about Norwegian farmers. We are here to talk about what happens for founders who achieve everything that they want and find out that it might not have been everything that they wanted. Tell us a little bit what happens after the sale.
Andrew Hulbert
It’s a really good question, and the first thing I would say is, if you don’t know what happens after the sale? You’re already behind. You need to be planning for what happens after the sale, if I just briefly explain our exit. So about nine months in advance of the sale, we knew we wanted to go to exit. We hired corporate advisors. They go to the sector, and they find investors that are interested in your business. So we went through a nine month process, but the actual due diligence process of exit was about four or five weeks. It’s very, very quick and intense when we were going through that. So it all happened really, really quick. And I started to work with a business psychologist, a guy called Stuart, before I exited, and he was helping me prepare for what it might be like after the exit. And I can share the advice that he gave to me, he said, entrepreneurs who get their exit one day are a little bit like gold medalists in the Olympics, who actually win the gold medal that they’ve been training for for four years and the day after, if you’re not careful, depression is a real risk for you, because you have all this adrenaline, all of a sudden you’ve achieved everything, and it drops so. He likened that to swimming towards an island. And what he said was you can see the island in the distance, and as you get bigger and as you get more profitable, the island is getting closer and closer, and eventually someone makes you an offer for the business, and you swim as hard as you can, and you get there. But what are you going to do when you reach that island? So we worked on lots of techniques around what was important to me as Andrew the human, as opposed to Andrew the entrepreneur, and that’s really where it started. We started to list those things down and actually create some new goals shortly after the deal was done. So that’s the very beginning of the journey that we have.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, I love that, that picture, and I think you bring a really important distinction is that there’s a difference between Andrew the entrepreneur and Andrew the human. And I think where folks get get blindside is they don’t start to handle that ahead of time. What did that? What does that mean? It’s one thing to say it. It’s another thing like, what did that mean for you? What do you see? What do you see that as in in other entrepreneurs,
Andrew Hulbert
something that really worked for me, which I came to understand was really a defense mechanism, was I almost thought about Andrew the entrepreneur as a external character. It was like a different person that I played. Because we all know when we’re at home with our family, wife, kids, whatever, we’re a certain type of person. When you’re in the middle of a sales pitch, or you’re running a board meeting, or you’re meeting investors, you’re a different person. You’re sort of the personification of all of the business bits about you that you’re trying to hit certain expectations and standards and your profitability goals and all that sort of stuff. So for me, I felt like I ran my business for nearly 10 years. I exited nine years after starting. I felt for those nine years I had created a business persona for myself, Andrew the entrepreneur, that I would put him into various situations. And the good news was, if people hated him, it didn’t matter, because that wasn’t me. And if people loved him, that was great, because we made more money. But actually there was this distinction that when I went home, I wasn’t Andrew the entrepreneur any longer. But there’s only so long you for me that I could live that sort of facade of a two life person. And really, when I knew that I was going to be coming out and I was going to be retiring, and I was 37 when I stepped back, I knew that there was going to be this period where my Andrew at home was 95% of me and Andrew, the businessman, was only 5% so I made a real distinction between those two people, and that really helped me with insecurities around taking bad feedback and going into a pitch and sort of really bigging myself up for it, and dealing with the challenges that come with all entrepreneurs, as we all know, around the difficult part of growing a Business.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, one of the things that can happen in in a life of an entrepreneur, especially a successful one, is that we can actually flip those identities where we start to believe we’re Andrew the entrepreneur and not Andrew the human. What would you say to someone who feels like they’re succeeding more at work than they are in these other areas of life.
Andrew Hulbert
I would say that hopefully life is a lot longer than work. So actually, work for me was always a definite cut off at some point that I wouldn’t be working any longer. And that’s how I really sort of compartmentalized my work life. I was like, I’m going to go and grow a business, hopefully for 10 years and exit if I can. That was always the goal to try and sort of cut it off, whereas you hope that life will be 7080, 90 years depending on each individual so I saw work to some degree, as a means to an end to be able to earn enough money to go back and live the life that I wanted to and look ultimately, for me, being a multi millionaire is not about buying Lots of bright yellow fast cars. It’s about having choices on a day to day basis about what you do. So for me, I’m a father. My kids now are four and six. They were two and four when I finished two years ago. And actually my whole life has just been around children and spending time and recouping being a dad and reconnecting with my wife and my friends and all of those things. So that is way more important to me than all of the money and the success and the business side. So I would just say it’s easy to flip, and we should take wellbeing out of the characters we create as entrepreneurs. That’s good because we’ve created that, but it’s not us. And ultimately, when someone buys the organization and you’re asked to take a step back, or you move to the side or you leave, you can’t have too much of yourself in that person, because you can’t forget who you are. And I worked really hard on that as I was coming towards the exit, and I started to plan things that I do, and I can give you some examples, if you like, of actually what I did because so I really mean it. I grew up in a working class family where community was really important to me. So every Sunday, about 30 members of my family would all go to my grandma’s house and eat together. It was non negotiable. Every Sunday, 6pm we had to be there. So for me, it was like I wanted to do this thing where our family is now so big that on Christmas Day We can’t all go to the same place, because there’s no how. Big enough to have all 75 of us, or whatever. So I hired an entire hotel on Christmas day, literally every room, paid for every meal, every drink, everything, and brought 75 people together on that day in the summer, I ended up buying a farm where I live. Now, very English. I live on a farm and plant trees and eat berries and all that sort of stuff these days. So on this farm, I hosted a massive party, 150 people. We had a hog roast, we had a pizza van. We had a burger van. Everybody came for like this Jambo Lee sort of thing, where they came to our house and celebrated what we’d done. I also I gave my dad quarter of a million dollars so he could go and retire five years early from the factory that he’d worked in. I bought my two sisters their house. I bought my mum and dad another house so they could move closer to where we were, and I financially secured all the people I cared about. I also bought my children a couple of houses each too, so that they had future investment properties for themselves as they got bigger. So just in case everything went wrong and I died the day after I’d done all those things to secure my family and support the family unit, and that was a massively, massively important thing for me, and that’s really what drove me to be very satisfied after I’d finished work. It wasn’t about going and buying the sports car. It was about going to my dad and saying, hey, you’ve been in the same factory for 46 years. Here’s $250,000 in cash so that you can leave the factory this month. And that’s actually what happened. And it was an amazing feeling. And I promise you cannot buy that feeling. Doesn’t matter how much money you have. Like, being able to give that back was really quite special.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, I think in some settings, Andrew the entrepreneur has an advantage over Andrew the human, in that there’s a lot more work being done in the organizational space around vision and purpose and direction. And I think one of the things that happens when we shift to 95% Andrew the human, is that we haven’t quite invested in the same degree of clarity on what our vision is for that phase of our life. And I think that is a big part of the depression that you talked about earlier. I think it’s a big part of the health issues that come up staggering amount of health concern in the first nine to 12 months after after exit. And I think it’s also why some people will, rationally get back into business deals almost immediately after trying to check that box again. What did you do to have such a clear vision of what was next?
Andrew Hulbert
I tell you the very first thing I did, I we between London and the north of Scotland. We have something called the Caledonian sleeper train, and you get on it at eight o’clock at night, and you sleep on it, and then you end up in Scotland in the morning the next day, the day after the money hit my account, I got on that train on my own and just went for a two day trip. And just went all the way to Scotland. I hired a car and drove to the very tip of the Isle of Skye in the rain, and then I took some photos, turned round and came back again. And that was a two day trip. I just looked out the window, no social media, no sort of planning what I was going to do. I just started the decompression that I needed to because I’d been so highly strung for like, nine years or so. So that’s how it started for me. But also working with that psychologist, I started to write down some things that were important. So buying the farm where I am now, being a dad, doing the school run, doing the homework, doing the swimming, all those things I knew were important to me, plus, and this was a big one. In the last five years or so of running the business, I totally neglected my friends. So I was a 32 to 37 year old man at that stage, and my friends, I lost touch with them because they got busy because they had families. I got busy because I had a family and I was running the business. So one of the things I really worked on was going back to organize little trips for us, organize us being together, even just getting the train somewhere and having a beer together, you know, just spending a bit of time back with each other. Because that was the easiest no when my friend said, Hey, I live in Oxford, come to London and have a beer with us on Friday. That’s an easy no, because I’m not seeing my wife. I’ve got work to do. I can’t be hungover. So those things really played into my mind, and I’ve really made an effort with my kids, my wife, my family, my friends, to integrate myself back into those circles, if I may, just add a bit about health as well, because this is a really important point. So in the seven months in the lead up to the sale that I just mentioned earlier on, I woke up one day and I decided I was going to lose some weight, and I went on a 500 calorie a day diet for seven months straight, and I lost 130 pounds in seven months. So like, Absolutely, like, down to the bone. I got down to my healthy weight for the first time in my whole life. Wow, I’ll tell you. I got down there. And on the on deal day, we had lots of photos taken. You can see how thin and skinny I am, and gaunt and gray, because I pushed myself right to the limit to get this deal done. And about the week after us, my wife said, because we’ve been together for 20 years, my wife. Said, I don’t like skinny guys, right? I don’t find it attractive when you’re at this weight. That’s all I needed to hear. So donuts and pizza, here I came, no and I put about 25 pounds back on something like that. So I got back up to looking a little bit healthier again, but I managed to maintain my weight after that. But do you know that is how intense I was for those seven months to make sure that I was going to do it. I ate once a day, and I ate 500 calories, no caffeine, no alcohol, nothing like that. Just focus, focus, focus. And now that’s the unbalanced person that I am. But nothing was going to stop me from getting to that. I would also just say no Manjaro or pills or surgery or anything that was just mindset. I wouldn’t recommend it. It it gives you lots of bowel issues in the future when you start eating more than 500 calories again. But it worked for me, and actually I think it was a form of control, because I when you have, like, we had nearly 1000 questions in the due diligence of sale, so then, when you had all these questions and these numbers and this pressure, the one thing I could do daily was control how much I was eating and then weigh myself and see that I’d lost weight at the end of the day. So health really plays an important part, as you just suggested as well.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, yeah, Andrew, there’s this question before I let you go, that I want to ask. I asked one of my guests. I’m interested to see what you have to say, especially at this stage in your career. But what would you say is the biggest secret you wish wasn’t the secret at all? What’s that one thing you wish everybody watching or listening today knew?
Andrew Hulbert
I think that I don’t believe everyone can start a business. I don’t think everybody has them, has it in them. I think those with the right mindset can start a business, and they can try and make it a success. In the UK, 80% of new businesses still fail within the first two years. So running a business is hard, but with the right mindset and with the right sort of focus on what you’re trying to achieve in life and what’s going to be important for you, I think more people can start businesses than believe that they can. It’s actually not that hard. And the sector I look towards is charities. I see lots of amazing leaders, often women who run these charities, they started it themselves, and now they’ve grown it, and it’s been a success. The skill you need to run a charity and the skill you need to run a successful, profitable business are the same. And actually, a lot of people put their heart and soul into doing something that’s right and never get a financial rewards. So actually, if you’re just a mum out there that happens to run the school association, or you do something with the church, or you do something over here. I actually think you have the skills to be an entrepreneur, but you just need the mindset and the support and the confidence to be able to do it. So not everybody can do it, but more people can do it than they think is probably possible.
Scott Ritzheimer
That’s so good. Andrew, so good. I love the example as well. So Andrew, there’s some folks listening. They’re thinking about their exit, or they’re right in the middle of it. They just want to know more about the work you’re doing now. Where can they find out more? Where can they connect with you?
Andrew Hulbert
So for my businessy stuff, they can go to LinkedIn, and if you search Andrew Hulbert, you’ll find me on there or on Instagram. I share much more insight. So it’s underscore Andrew Hulbert on Instagram, but look, I have nothing to sell. I’m just trying to tell the story. I’m in an incredibly fortunate position as a 39 year old now with more money than I’ll ever need in my life. And I’m just trying to share the story and let people know it’s not always the big secret that people claim that it is, and actually it’s probably a bit easier than you think.
Scott Ritzheimer
It’s fantastic. Andrew, thanks so much for being on thanks for sharing your story and your success with us. It was a real privilege, and honor having you here with us today. For those of you watching and listening, you know that your time and attention mean the world to us, I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact Guest Name
Andrew Hulbert is a founder and entrepreneur who built Pareto FM from scratch into a £50M company with 500 staff, culminating in a nine-figure private equity exit. Raised on a council estate, he created his own path through grit and a people-first business culture. His story is one of real trade-offs—financial freedom, early retirement for his father, but also missed moments. With over 40 awards, two books, and a track record in leadership, diversity, and mentoring, Andrew now speaks candidly about entrepreneurship, legacy, and men’s wellness. His conversations are honest, unfiltered, and grounded in lived experience.
Want to learn more about Andrew Hulbert’s work at Pareto Facilities Management Ltd? Check out his website at https://www.paretofm.com/
Connect with Andrew through his LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewhulbert/