How Paul Marshall Built Rapid Fluidics into a Global Microfluidics Partner Through Curiosity and Good Engineering

Chris Whyte (: 00:01

Paul, welcome to the podcast. Yeah, thanks to have you. then, yeah, so I'm going to do my best to introduce you. This is the cringey part of the bit that every guest kind of really hates, but we'll just set up kind of what we're going to be talking about and just give a brief introduction to yourself. So Paul Marshall, you're an engineer turned entrepreneur and founder of Rapid Fluidics.

Paul Marshall (: 00:03

Nice to be here.

Chris Whyte (: 00:28

which is a UK based consultancy and prototyping business. One that's carved out a niche in the world of microfluidics. What started out as a solo consultancy project has grown into a full service design and production business with global clients, a team of six, and a strong brand built almost entirely through authentic, technical, personality driven LinkedIn content. It's a of a mouthful, isn't it? I'll keep going. Paul, you told me you didn't sign up to be a founder.

You just wanted to design and build great hardware. And five years later, you're doing just that. But also what learning the realities of sales, branding, cashflow and leadership. You're one of the most open and self aware voices in the space. And in this episode, we're going to dig into how you've managed to build credibility, pipeline and a sustainable business without ever raising external investment. So really

Really looking forward to diving into this poll. So yeah, we always start at the beginning of these episodes with the title of the show, Why Design? But in your case, why engineering? What drew you into design engineering and ultimately hardware product development?

Paul Marshall (: 01:46

I guess he could trace it right way back to, even before going to university and choosing to do a degree in mechanical engineering. And that pathway to engineering for me came from a grandfather. He knew everything. In my mind, he knew everything from how machines work to why the fairies lived at the bottom of the garden.

Yeah, you can either go into fairy tale authoring or you can go into engineering. And I just wanted to learn stuff. I wanted to see how machines work. I wanted to design machines. I was all as a kid, you know, playing with Lego, playing with Meccano, building things, breaking things, probably more breaking than building. And it just sort of led to an interest in mechanical engineering that led to a degree at Newcastle University and then a subsequent career of, I guess, coming up for 25 years now.

of various different aspects of engineering.

Chris Whyte (: 02:43

Fantastic, fantastic. did you always know then that it was going to be your career kind of with that kind of influence of early days? Yeah.

Paul Marshall (: 02:53

I'll say so. Yeah. Yeah. And when you kind of look at the early career decisions and where I thought I was going to go, I very much wanted to be a good engineer. wanted to design good equipment, good machinery, have a reputation for being a good engineer. I never wanted to go into management. Hell no. That was, that was not for me at all. for various reasons, I was wanted to make stuff.

Looking back, I would say I was an average really good engineer. I'm not exceptional. There's no denying that. There's lots of people I know within various industries who are much better than me. I would say I was OK, got by. And then I went through various different sectors within the industry. Actually, my career started out in microfluidics without even knowing about it. My first job as a graduate engineer was designing industrial inkjet printers using

Chris Whyte (: 03:49

Okay.

Paul Marshall (: 03:49

microfluidics and then went off on massive tangents into CAD software, FEA software, working on offshore industry, oil and gas related projects, offshore renewables, and eventually finally dragging it back towards life sciences because that became something I particularly interested in moving into something. I wanted to do something more worthwhile but all the time it was all about designing solutions to problems.

Chris Whyte (: 04:19

It just happened to be, know, was that going back into microfluidics, was that an active choice, you know, or was that again kind of fell into it?

Paul Marshall (: 04:27

No, that was an opportunity effectively. as I say, having gone through various aspects, various jobs in different industries within engineering, it was, I guess, 10 years ago, a bit more than that, must be 12, 13 years ago, when I finally got around to achieving chartered mechanical engineering status. And as part of that process, you have to prove certain competencies, whether it's technical management and whatever else. And one of the aspects that I'd

looked at was looking to basically doing, know, working out what have I done that's good. You know, there's a, forget what the terminology they used. I guess it's kind of sustainability linked, but I was, I needed to find something I had done that was worthwhile. And I didn't like the fact that I had to scratch my brain to kind of really work back and work out what have I done that's good. So I've got to, I've got to change this. I've got to get into something more worthwhile. And then through, through a friend of mine, I was introduced to

startup diagnostics company here in Newcastle who were looking to develop their own engineering and I thought as a career move it's a foot in the door. It's the experience of working in the startup, the experience of being the first engineer there, who knows where it might lead. So I started, know, I made the jump and changed careers almost. Again it was still design engineering, it was very much building equipment to solve problems.

And that was the first introduction I had properly to microfluidics because it was development of a microfluidic cartridge to go into a point of care molecular diagnostic system.

Chris Whyte (: 06:04

Really interesting. But before that, like you say, you were offshore oil and gas type.

Paul Marshall (: 06:09

Yeah, yeah, personally I wasn't offshore. I designing equipment to go offshore. know, big thousand tonne fabrications on the back of ships for laying pipes and cables and so on. A massive, massive world away from what I'm doing now.

Chris Whyte (: 06:22

Yeah, but in scale and, and let's say that sustainability that kind of social impact side of things as well. Yeah, in my line of work, you know, one of the first questions I'll ask people who are considering kind of a move is like, what is important to you? What makes you tick? What do you want to be doing next? And what don't you want to be doing? And that's often a, you know, a light bulb moment for people when they kind of step back and consider actually, what do I want to do?

Paul Marshall (: 06:30

Mm.

Chris Whyte (: 06:52

And it sounds like you had that relatively early on. Well, it's probably about 10 years into your career, was it? Do you realize? Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Marshall (: 06:57

Yeah, 10, 13 years into the career, was just, I had experience, I had exposure to certain other engineering projects. So one of my jobs I'd had, I was an application engineer for a counter reseller. So I was doing pre-sales, pre-sales demos, I was doing technical support, was doing training for a variety of customers using pro engineer, um, CAD software. And I did this in Cambridge for a few years. I did it in Auckland and New Zealand and then back in Cambridge as well.

And that gave me exposure to a wide range of customers from product designers, printer manufacturers, automotive, all sorts. But included in that was the life science sector, especially obviously working in Cambridge, actually the network of customers we had there who were involved in life science and med tech related projects. That started things ticking over in my head that actually the engineering is applicable to all of these different things.

I just had to work out how do I get involved? How do I make that step into an industry like that? And as it happened, it was brought to me on a plate and I couldn't say no to that.

Chris Whyte (: 08:07

with the power of network, I guess, kind of, and that's how most roles are filled is through word of mouth and networking. But I'm guessing you've been open to that, make that a lot easier. I'm just thinking what advice might you give to someone who maybe is in a kind of a role where they feel like they might be, you know, typecast for one of a better term, you you see, they might be working for

Paul Marshall (: 08:09

Yeah, yeah, very much so.

Chris Whyte (: 08:34

They might be working for a less glamorous, you know, more heavy duty engineering one. They really want to get stuck into something impactful like med tech or life sciences or consumer goods. Where would they start if they haven't had that exposure to, you know, this is what you could have.

Paul Marshall (: 08:55

Yes, it's tricky isn't it? And that was always one of my concerns of how do I get my foot in the door? How do I find that opportunity? I think where we are now in society compared to where we were 10, 15 years ago, it's so much easier to get exposure. You know full well that I'm an avid user of LinkedIn. And as a networking platform,

to give you exposure to anything you want to professionally, it's there, it's there for the taking. You can choose who you want to follow. I use LinkedIn, obviously I use it to post and promote the business and build things up that way, but I use it as a source of news. That's probably my main reason for looking out to see what's going on in the industries that I'm particularly interested in, in this case is life science and health tech.

And it's so easy for anybody to see what's going on. As brilliant as it is to go to a conference and go to a trade show, you can do it virtually, effectively. can do it in third person, watch it through other people's eyes, get opinions. That can start to help you build that network. I think it's easier now to learn what is available. And I guess there is the whole mental attitude of don't be restrictive just because that's what you've always done. There's absolutely no reason why you can't change.

It's totally possible to do these things.

Chris Whyte (: 10:15

Absolutely, yeah. As you know, I'm a big advocate and user of LinkedIn as well for my business. And like you say, you've got that kind of network, a thumbs reach, so to speak. You kind of you can go and connect with interesting folk and you're getting an honest kind of appraisal of what the industry is doing as opposed to the curated version that like say at a conference. It's like you're seeing genuine.

Paul Marshall (: 10:29

Yeah.

Chris Whyte (: 10:43

I say that with kind of air quotes genuine, but you know what I in terms of these are thoughts that individuals are putting out more so than kind of the organization. So really interesting. What would you say kind of your time within kind of oil and gas and the applications engineering roles, you know, what did they teach you kind of about product development that still kind of using today some of the kind of core lessons?

Paul Marshall (: 11:11

It certainly taught me good engineering. So having gone through, you know, when you look at the roles I had, I seem to change jobs every four years or thereabouts. So having done five years at Rapid Fluidics now it's not my longest ever job. Yeah. Yeah. And then you look at it you think, well, who's my boss? Go figure. But you look at the different aspects and obviously the printing side, the print side of it, that was, that was design, but it was more, I guess it was more packaging product design.

Chris Whyte (: 11:27

PB.

Thank

Paul Marshall (: 11:41

wasn't the fundamentals of mechanical engineering weren't as relevant there. The application to engineering role when I was supporting people with CAD and ultimately of teaching them to use a tool but it's down to them for the application and eventually then when I got the opportunity to go and work for the engineering business as it was called it's a great name for a company now IHC engineering business or IHC something else that took me right back to what I'd learned at university that was first principles

of stress analysis calculations literally written out by hand, pencil and paper, designing in 2D, converting it to 3D, and documenting in 2D. It taught me the principles of good engineering design, yes, on a massive scale, but the same concepts in problem solving were applicable to anything. And that's the attitude I've taken from them having moved into the microscale, the life science aspect.

If an engineer can design a solution to a problem, doesn't matter if it's a 36 inch pipe or if it's a 200 micron pipe. Yes, the fluid flow is different than so on, but the concepts of how you get stuff made and how you solve a problem, they're always there. it definitely helped me with that side of things. Other aspects, I guess, would be the documentation side of things. Again, the design documentation.

Chris Whyte (: 12:55

Hmm.

Paul Marshall (: 13:05

writing above calculations, the cross-referencing, and keeping everything absolutely defined. That does translate. Now we are, you know, we're a consultancy working with other people's designs, and you get some really nicely documented drawing packages that come through to us. And then sometimes it's literally the sketch on the back of a fact packet. And as long as the client is aware that they've given us a sketch and we need to work on that design to make it a solution,

That's fine. It's when you get the rough and ready drawings and the thought is, it's a design. It's all ready to go. Why can't you make it? Because it doesn't exist. So it's the application of good engineering to all product development is something that we're very keen on here. Within our team of engineers, we've got some young engineers. We've got experienced engineers. And it's really interesting, actually, that transfer of knowledge and seeing

Chris Whyte (: 13:43

Yeah.

Paul Marshall (: 14:02

how the younger engineers are learning as they're going along and fair play to them, they're doing brilliantly.

Chris Whyte (: 14:07

Fantastic. Fantastic. So if we come more to nearer the modern day, then you were at the Diagnostics Company up until 2019, I think, and then.

Paul Marshall (: 14:18

Yes, yes 2019, yeah.

Chris Whyte (: 14:20

and he spent a year or so consulting as a engineer. What led to that change or was it redundancy? Was it an active choice to leave?

Paul Marshall (: 14:32

It was an active choice to leave. As the company had developed and it was moving more towards the final production stage of things. Now I've been there for four years, I've built the engineering team, if I was running a team of 20 people, I had some good experience and ultimately, I wanted to see where else that could take me. I was aware of the wider industry, the skills I had.

One thing led to another and it became the right time, the right opportunity to see what else was out there. Initially, I was looking just to get another job. I assumed I'd be able to go into another head of engineering type role. But in the interim, I think the first role I was offered was part-time as a contractor. So I set myself up as a contractor, registered my own business, and started doing some contracting and took on various projects.

Chris Whyte (: 15:14

Okay.

Chris Whyte (: 15:24

Okay.

Paul Marshall (: 15:31

ends up working for the Gates Foundation on some water and sanitation projects, is that led to some interesting developments as well. So I effectively was contracting for a while. That did, however, give me the opportunity to start thinking about rapid fluidics because I was three days here, two days there, whatever. I had time. And as I was talking to companies about opportunities and seeing

the demand for microfluidic cartridges, I saw there was an opportunity to take the knowledge that we'd gained with the development work previously of prototyping and using 3D printing. There's a real opportunity there. So that's how the idea of setting a rapid fluidics kind of came to be. And that's where we are now.

Chris Whyte (: 16:19

Oh, wow. So was there a kind of a defined kind of tipping point where it kind of transformed from one man bands to kind of the consultancy? Do you remember that point?

Paul Marshall (: 16:29

Yeah, mean, was, there were three of us who founded the company. the original, the process that came from, that we based it on was, it came from a PhD at Newcastle University, which I was the commercial supervisor for. So my co-founder, Babis Tsevelekis, carried out that PhD. We came up with this process for 3D printing microfluidic components quickly and accurately. And along with another X,

quantum engineer Tom Wilshire, we set up Rapid Fluidics to offer this service. We did some market research. We realized that actually on paper the market was growing. There's some real good opportunities. It was a fairly unique approach that we took of using 3D printing commercially. We were also lucky enough that we had a customer from the moment we started due to a contract that I was working on for a company called Chromec of developing a microfluidic system.

And so we had an immediate demand for prototypes. So I was working on one contract designing microfluidics, and then my business on the side was making the products to supply. So it worked out quite well. So we were always revenue generating from the moment we started. That meant we bought a couple of printers. We rented a room. We had a room in a church in Biker in Newcastle where we could actually set up and actually get stuff made.

And initially it was the three of us were working around our other jobs. know, Tom and I both had contracts, Babbitz was working at the university doing postdoc research and it was evenings and weekends, make a few parts, sell a few parts, enough money to pay the rent, buy some more material, make a few more. And it just kind of ticked over like that for probably the first six months or so, gradually trying to learn more about what we need to do for a business. Then we got a larger, we had a couple of larger projects kind of come in.

enough that we needed some extra help. So we took on an intern over the summer to help us with the manufacturing. At the end of the summer, proved that actually it was really useful having that extra pair of hands. So we offered him a job. And that's the point where if we're to have employees full time, I need to do this full time. And that's when I made that switch from rather than renewing the contract that I was working on, I let that go and said, right, I'm going to do this full time. This is my main job now, albeit one with zero salary.

Paul Marshall (: 18:49

Yes, questionable decision, number one. But we thought the only way to grow this is to commit to this and make it happen. So that would have been six months into actually having Rapid Fluidics as an entity. I went full time to push it forward and to try and grow the company.

Chris Whyte (: 19:10

Wow. And at that point, how were the projects coming in? Because obviously we touched on LinkedIn. That's a big source at the moment. But in those early days, was it through your network? Or how did you win those early few projects? Yeah.

Paul Marshall (: 19:27

Yeah, there's an element of personal network, at that point it was still quite limited. I didn't have the experience. I hadn't met enough people to really build up on it. So LinkedIn worked well. When I look back at some of the early stuff we put out there, it's very questionable. I hijacked to the people's threads with blatant self-promotion, got cancelled so many times. I saw my post deleted so many times.

Chris Whyte (: 19:46

shh

Chris Whyte (: 19:54

Yeah.

Paul Marshall (: 19:56

because it was blatantly what I was trying to do. That gave us, it gave a surprising amount of traction though. And we started to kind of pick up on it. We had an incredible order from a therapeutics company in Boston. our first international client was from Boston. And I can't remember how they found us, but they placed the 10 grand order, which at the time was probably the biggest order we'd ever had. It's an incredibly high definition.

Chris Whyte (: 20:20

Fantastic.

Paul Marshall (: 20:23

parts that we said we think we can make those. We will give it our best shot. And I remember being scared to death at the amount of paperwork we had to sign all the preliminary agreements and non-disclosures, 16 page pre-agreement agreement confirming, yes, we've got security to the nth degree. We didn't. But we thought, well, it'll be fine as long as nothing happens. It's like insurance is one of those things. You don't need it until you need it. So we gambled and got away with it. But we made the parts. We kind of carried on working with that customer.

So that kind of helped. again, it was just then through use of LinkedIn and just trying to grow that network, finding interesting people to talk to. And rather than just watching from the sidelines, just being a bit more proactive, commenting on posts, finding people, connecting with them, sending them messages. And it was through a connection I had, had shared or liked somebody else's post. I saw, I think there's a company in the States who had another technique for making

microfluidics that was interesting and very different. I sent them a message saying, you're making cool microfluidics, we're making cool microfluidics, let's try and work together. And we got in touch and we tried to find a way of working together. Now their project kind of got shut down, but the people I was talking to carried on talking to us. That helped us grow our network even further. That started bringing more work in and it just kind of, without really thinking about it, it grew a little bit and a little bit. And one of the approaches I always wanted to take

was to appear as professional as possible despite the hijacking of threads and all the rest of it. So we were always keen on, we need a brand, we need a logo, what can we do? And again, what can we do on the cheap? We used a Wix template. Now, our website is still based on a different Wix template. We created a logo that was basically a particular font, but then a particular choice of colors that we could just reproduce very easily.

So we started going to trade shows, so we were either attending or when we exhibited for the first time at a trade show, that was possibly the scariest thing I've ever, ever done to actually go out in public and exhibit these are our products, this is what we can make, we are serious. When we'd only been going as a company for less than a year, I think at that point. And it was a massive step forward, but nothing came of that trade show other than when we went back the following year.

Paul Marshall (: 22:44

We have people come on, saw you last year and we've been following you. see it's good to see you still going. And it just builds up that conversation. And there's no doubt that that has provided the foundation for every trade show that I've done ever since then. And everything is all related to that. it's, it's yes, the way we've kind of grown and made the most of opportunities. It's, think it's beyond organic in terms of, you I don't know what I'm doing.

Chris Whyte (: 22:50

Hmm.

Paul Marshall (: 23:11

half the time. I'm making it up as I go along. If I look back to the days when I was the application engineer on the CAD stuff and doing technical training side of things, there were times when I was doing advanced training of particular modules with the CAD software where I didn't know. And I was literally a chapter ahead of the guys I was teaching. At times, I was a page ahead of them. But as long as I was ahead and gave the impression of knowing what I was doing, that's all that mattered.

Chris Whyte (: 23:37

Ha

Paul Marshall (: 23:38

know, it's, you know, wing it and somehow get through.

Chris Whyte (: 23:42

Yeah, I think a lot of people will resonate with that. And I appreciate your, your candor, because, you know, there's the whole kind of fake it till you make it side of things. But I think, you know, that that you probably don't give yourself enough credit, you know, in terms of what you what you're achieving, and what you actually do know, it's your modesty coming through, I think, but everyone has that kind of sense of, I'm kind of just figuring this out as I as I go along, and it seems to be working. But, you know,

Paul Marshall (: 23:52

Yeah.

Paul Marshall (: 24:08

Yeah.

Chris Whyte (: 24:11

I've had this in my business recently. No, year one was about figuring out how do I do this alone without the support of a big team behind me and and I'm proud of what I did in year one. But then year two came along. It's like, OK, I don't want to now figure out how do I grow this thing and what does that look like and what processes and what people do I need around me. And it's that I don't know that answer either. We're kind of figuring that out as we go along. So but it's

Paul Marshall (: 24:37

Yeah.

Chris Whyte (: 24:40

Really interesting. Would you say you got trade shows as a source of kind of, guess it all comes down to conversations really. You drive in these things to be in a conversation, uncover problems, know, do have a discovery call to then be able to propose a solution, which I'm guessing nine times out of 10 is let's design a manufacturer this rapid fluidics solution for you. But would you say, so trade shows?

is a big part of your marketing content and reaching out through social media. Is there anything else that you're doing proactively on the sales and marketing side?

Paul Marshall (: 25:19

I think site visits, actually meeting people in person. We've found that works well. It's something we've looked into the various options of what can we do with a limited marketing budget? Do you spend £5,000 on Google AdWords or LinkedIn promotions or do you spend £5,000 to go into a trade show? I think it's the combination. LinkedIn's great because you can get content out there effectively for free.

There is a notable difference with me taking a photo on my phone and uploading it saying, look, we made a cool thing, isn't this great? Compared to somebody actually setting up a photo, a video, writing a proper explanation as to the application of that thing. And we've been very lucky this last year, since the summer, with a wonderful student intern who's helping us out on the marketing, being able to create that content. that's helped push the social media side of things up. And then we're pushing Instagram, we're pushing YouTube.

as well as LinkedIn, our website is going to get a revamp in the very near future. And that really helps because that means you can broad brush it, you can send it out to as many people as you possibly can. You follow that up with the trade shows and the experts, whether we're exhibiting or visiting a trade show. And certainly if I visit a trade show now, the great thing is if I walk in.

nine times out of 10, I'll see someone I know straight away and be approached and you can set things up. But if I can set up in meetings or whatever else with either existing or prospective clients, I'll fill up my time doing that and being able to just jam them all into an eight hour session of every half hour you're seeing somebody different is exhausting. But you can do it. I went to ADLM in Chicago a month or so ago and I've managed to fit in 27 meetings in two days.

which is bonkers when you think about it, but every single one of them was positive. Not all sales related, some to do with further networking and growth and so on, but all of them were well worthwhile. But then the other side of it is say that you go to the next level and say, well, I'm in town for this trade show. Can I come and see you? So I was in Chicago. So I hopped up to Minneapolis because it's not that far away, relatively speaking. We've got some great customers up there. So I had three.

Chris Whyte (: 27:11

Yeah.

Paul Marshall (: 27:32

amazing on-site meetings in Minneapolis, which has led to enough deals that's justified the trip. Then I've kind of, well, if I'm in the States anyway, domestic flights are cheap, I'll hop over to California because, well, California, and then followed it up with further meetings in Southern California, San Diego and Irvine. And that just led to it. We go in to see one person, they drag in their team and they drag in their team and all of a sudden you've got 10, 12 people.

in a meeting room looking at the kind of parts that we make saying that's interesting and what's that and how does that work and can you do that and we need something like that and it just drives it so fast you know you cannot beat that feeling of sitting there just showing the people showing people what we can do and you see their eyes open you see the light bulb moment think well if you can do that can you do this this is what we need can you do this and if we haven't we'll give it a try so that

That side of it, that approach to sales and marketing is definitely the one that we've realized works well for us. I think with a bit more of a marketing budget, we will still do the more traditional marketing stuff as well. I don't think we'll ever go down the route of cold calling. We don't need to do that. The service that we offer, the custom base we're supplying to is relatively small. If you don't know what microfluidics are,

you don't know what microfluidics are. Simple as that. If you don't need it, you don't need it. My dad looked at my website and said, it's very shiny, but what is it? So we will never need to know, so it doesn't matter. And you can't convert people into the microfluidic sector if that's not where they are. We can convert people to working, to utilizing our technologies and our techniques and see the advantages there. And so we do compete with other companies in this field.

Chris Whyte (: 28:58

Hehehehe

Yeah.

Paul Marshall (: 29:21

but it's very much a case we've got strengths and weaknesses and we're aware of them. There's a lot of stuff we can do that's amazing, but there's stuff we simply can't do, in which case you need to go and talk to this company and this company and this company. And it's, I would say for the most part, it's a very friendly competitiveness with the rest of the sector. I'm very aware of our limitations, but I know our advantages. So I'll always talk about the advantages. I'll be honest about the limitations.

advertise them as such. And likewise, I wouldn't criticize anybody else's, but I'll just say showcase the things we can do. And if you need stuff we can't, we'll talk to other people and we'll find a solution.

Chris Whyte (: 30:02

Yeah, that's it. It's about at the end of the day. The world is especially your world is a very small place, so you don't want to be faking that part of it and over promising because you want to delight your customers and you're not going to do that by kind of not delivering. So really, really interesting. It sounds like you've got a super well defined and small niche and ICP. So when they say.

Paul Marshall (: 30:10

Mm-hmm.

Paul Marshall (: 30:18

Yeah.

Chris Whyte (: 30:31

you don't need your website to explain what you do or be overly flashy to anyone outside of fluid dynamics. It's sorry, microfluidics. It sells to the people you need it to sell to, which is absolutely spot on. So diving into the content side of things, know, is it, you know, what kind of posts do you feel kind of perform best for you?

Paul Marshall (: 31:00

It depends. You've seen we've got the ultimately we've got two LinkedIn channels. We have the business channel and we have my channel. The business side we keep more technical and we try and we want to give the

information out there. We want to showcase what we can do. Ideally, customer case studies are absolutely brilliant. Anytime you can name somebody or name a business, name an organization that we've worked with, that just gives us credibility. So it's always good to do that. The challenge is most of our customer work is under NDA, so we can't talk about it. But whenever anybody gives us permission, that's all over. And that just helps. In terms of the content, yes, we make some

very cool little bits of plastic, they are ultimately they're bits of plastic and not always that exciting unless you really understand the application. You can't beat video of just showing stuff moving, especially when you get into the more creative geometry. So we've worked out that that kind of thing works more. We're in the process, as I say, of promoting and boosting our Instagram and YouTube channels. We want to get more content, especially on YouTube, more interview style content. we're, you know,

Charlotte, our Marketing Interns run an Ask an Engineer series where we're talking to our engineers here about what we're doing and why we're doing it and how things are progressing there. We did a whole bunch of outtakes of little interviews with people we met at the MedTech show, for instance, just little sound bites of just getting their opinions on what we're doing. And that's gone down really well. on that side of things, we've kind of worked out what's good. And we've got a strategy of

Chris Whyte (: 32:18

Okay.

Paul Marshall (: 32:44

content will be putting out month by month now, which we were getting more organized rather than just blunder bus of look, here's a thing and there's another thing. We go in there, we get more focused on that. But then on the other side is obviously my own channel, which I didn't really, much like running a business, I didn't set out to do anything like an influence or any of that rubbish. But I like telling the story. It's something I've always enjoyed doing, telling the story of what's going on.

And the platform gives me that opportunity to do that. So I will tell the story of it. And I've kind of come up with a system almost of content that I post. And you'll start to see this sort of behaving regularly that I do try and post two or three times a week. And that's become a thing of actually trying to post. They say the algorithm means you should post two or three times a week. And that's not why I'm doing it, but it equally is why I'm doing it.

But I do try and spread it out. I like to talk about the technical stuff to a point, but without being too over-promotional. It's not rapid fluidics, there's this rapid fluidics, there's this rapid fluidics, there's this. It's a bit more blatant of it. If we have a technical explanation on the rapid fluidics page, I'll say, look at this, isn't it brilliant? We've made a really cool thing and it's a superb application. We're working with brilliant customers. So I will talk about what we're doing. But then there is the whole telling the business story, much like I'm talking to you.

Chris Whyte (: 34:10

Mm-hmm.

Paul Marshall (: 34:11

you know, the whole entrepreneurship side of things, which one of things I've learned overall with entrepreneurship is that anyone who's done it is happy to talk to me. And there's a real pay it back kind of mentality of once you're in this boat, you appreciate what other people are doing and what other people have done and the knowledge just flows. knowing that I can reach out to a whole network of people to get advice.

Chris Whyte (: 34:15

Mm-hmm.

Chris Whyte (: 34:21

Yeah.

Chris Whyte (: 34:32

Yeah.

Paul Marshall (: 34:38

I'm now starting to be approached by people asking me for advice, which is, that's interesting. You like what I'm doing? Great, yeah, I'll help. So I enjoy telling that story and pushing the idea that you can do whatever you need to do, whatever you want to do, whilst not going over the top with all the nonsense that you can see on social media. and, I keep it open and honest. I do talk about the limitations. I go a little bit personal, but not too much. think...

Especially on LinkedIn, you can be a bit much. But I think that's toning down a little bit now, which is quite good. yes, if you aren't aware that I like cycling when you've been looking at my LinkedIn, then you're missing out on the wrong post. But I'll mention that just in passing. It's what I enjoy doing. That is who I am. And the fact that when I travel around for work, if I can, I'll go for a bike ride. If I can't go for a bike ride, I'll go for a run.

and I enjoy doing that in places all around the world. It's bonus of the lifestyle I've now got.

Chris Whyte (: 35:41

It's for me, it's about, you know, the social media side of things is kind of sharing credible, authentic, valuable content interwoven with your personality and stuff as well. So that, yeah, you don't want to be ramming kind of your business down everyone's throat, but you also want to show how proud you are and what an awesome job you do for your customers. But those little kind of personal bits like kind of I post about kind of the music.

Paul Marshall (: 36:04

.

Chris Whyte (: 36:11

like playing in the band or going to concerts or taking holidays. You do that of intermittently and people start building a picture about who you are, what your personality is and what it might be like to work with you or work for you. And I'm sure you've seen it at trade shows or client meetings. It makes it so much easier to connect on a personal level. It's like, did you get, did you, did you

Paul Marshall (: 36:37

Yeah.

Chris Whyte (: 36:39

it out in your bikeway out in Chicago you know it's that kind of thing where yeah.

Paul Marshall (: 36:43

It really helps. think a way of looking at it would be if you view your connections over LinkedIn as professional connections, if you were working with them in the office, then majority of your time, seven and a half, eight hours a day, you're talking about work. But you'll have a chat when you walk in the door in the morning. You'll have a chat while you're standing by the microwave warming up your lunch about, you know, I did the gardening last night. What are you doing this weekend? Where you going on holiday? So you'll have those little interpersonal and you do.

over the years you develop some good friendships with the people you're working with. And if you view it that way as a proportion of that's what the content should, you know, I think it should reflect of this is a working relationship. We're talking about work here, but we are people, you know, we have lives outside of this. And the fact that it crosses over can be really beneficial because I mean, you know, there have been people I've met through work and I've gone for bike rides with them.

Chris Whyte (: 37:32

Mm-hmm.

Paul Marshall (: 37:39

bizarrely I've gone for a bike ride with people I didn't know until I've ridden with them then realised we had a connection through work and we've built a relationship there through social media through LinkedIn. And it works, you can share knowledge about travels and just share bit of information without being, without oversharing.

Chris Whyte (: 37:56

Yeah, wonderful. And in terms of the, know, I know we're taking a bit of a dive here on business development, would you say or do you analyze kind of where the where the business comes from in terms of, know, are people approaching you because they've seen your your posts or the business posts or you find that it's more you're engaging with, you know, people who are engaging with your content if they've liked or commented, are you then practically reaching out?

Or is it more you put out and waiting for stuff to come in?

Paul Marshall (: 38:31

Like with everything, I'm doing everything. And we do, yeah, obviously we keep track. It's interesting when you look back through our CRM as to where leads have come from. There's a proportion of people who, of customers we've got, who've literally used Google. Microfluidic supply, maybe microfluidic supply UK.

Chris Whyte (: 38:32

Mixed mix, yeah.

Paul Marshall (: 38:51

And we've picked up some amazing customers that way. And the speed we've been able to turn things around. We have a wonderful customer in Bristol. We think Google, they'd never heard of us, put Microfluidics into Google on a Wednesday. We had a meeting with them on Thursday. By Friday, I think we had a purchase order, and the parts were in the post on the Monday. And we've continued to work with them. So people do find us through Google, through the website.

Chris Whyte (: 39:08

Amazing.

Paul Marshall (: 39:14

There's a lot who obviously find us through LinkedIn, whether it's following me on LinkedIn or finding the company page on LinkedIn. That definitely works. they see the kind of thing we're making and they have that realization that we can definitely pick up. so yeah, that way of finding leads in the first place, they are kind of coming from all sorts. And likewise, I will actively watch who's following the company page.

Every, every, I'd like to say every few days, it's probably every day, realistically, I'll look at the company analytics, see who's following. And I'll look at the list of new followers. And if there's somebody that kind of grabs my eye of, that's the head of R &D from a big pharma company or whatever. I will then, if I'm not connected to them, I'll connect and say, look, I saw you following our page. What's, what's interesting. Or if they comment on a post, you know, I'll reply either directly or on the person and say, know, why is this relevant to you? What can we do for you?

And again, that just starts a conversation going on. There's no guarantee anything will actually happen straight away. But you then start following them. And then six months later, 12 months later, they're ready to go. And we pick up inquiries that way.

Chris Whyte (: 40:28

And you might not know the answer to this question. Well, I guess you probably might actually. Do know what your conversion ratio is from kind of that message that you've sent follow up on a lead to a actual conversation or a discovery call?

Paul Marshall (: 40:43

It's probably lower than I think it is. As an eternal optimist in my mind, it's probably about 10%. But in reality, it's probably less than that. It could be more. It's hard to say. The quality of leads, and this is a way that the business has definitely changed over the last year or two, is that the quality of leads these days is better. And the quantity and the size is better as well, which is great.

Chris Whyte (: 40:45

Okay.

Paul Marshall (: 41:10

it's the quality of it. So by the time people are talking to us they know what we can do, they know that it's relevant, so they're very interested in taking forward. Now inevitably you know if an inquiry comes in, oh we've got this great thing we'd love to work with you, can you make me this 10 micron microfluidic channel? Well you've got the wrong end of the stick there, we can't make things that small, you need to go and talk to these guys. But there's a fair chance that you know they're aware of it, so that has definitely improved the conversion rate.

which is only a good thing. yeah, you've prompted me there. I should probably go back through the CRM and actually look at the numbers and scare myself with what the reality actually is.

Chris Whyte (: 41:50

It's an interesting one to every now and again, just take stock and just have a little kind of review moment of what are our ratios across these different channels and LinkedIn, I think is a fantastic source because you're literally told where the person works, what they're doing. And with the tools available, you can probably get a phone number or get an email address through different databases.

Paul Marshall (: 42:11

Hmm.

Paul Marshall (: 42:15

There are tools available that will do that that I couldn't possibly talk about.

Chris Whyte (: 42:20

No, but it's yeah, the data available at your fingertips is incredible. Do you send voice notes or video messages to people?

Paul Marshall (: 42:32

No, it's something we've been talking about a little bit recently. We're actually going through a process at the moment of improving our sales process. We got a small admin grant, business development grant through one of the Northeast development agencies recently. The 50 % of that we're using to cover improving our sales and marketing. So we've got this fantastic consultant, John Marshall, who's coming in. No relation.

But he's coming in and he's basically helping us go through our sales process so that we can develop a sales playbook. So working out how I sell, how Michael, our applications engineer, sells, how Rob, our US biz dev guy, know, streamlining everything together. So we have a process, which means as the company grows and we can bring in more salespeople, we can then document that. But one of the things that we are looking to is other ways of generating leads and following up on leads.

There has been that conversation about voice notes, video notes and so on. I find it a little hard to deal with. It's not me. In the same way that with the content I put out there, videos always work well, videos of people talking work well. I cannot do the selfie video. I simply cannot talk to my own phone, my own camera about what I'm doing. Whereas if somebody's holding a camera looking at me like this, I'm quite happy to talk.

Chris Whyte (: 43:55

Yeah.

Paul Marshall (: 43:55

I can't do it by myself. I think that's just maybe it's an age thing.

Chris Whyte (: 43:59

I think it's a, you got to put yourself out of your comfort zone. So for me, you know, our processes are fairly similar in terms of you put content out, you follow up with kind of people who engage with it. But I found that if I send a voice note, I get kind of 50 to 60 % response rate. And most of those end up in a meeting, like a video call, not all of them will turn into kind of business, but there's a level of interest in the discovery call. I mean, I've got

Paul Marshall (: 44:23

Yeah.

Chris Whyte (: 44:29

I've got here like about five pages of different scripts that I've written and I'm playing with in terms of voice notes for different purposes. know, if it's a someone who looks like they could be a decent candidate for a role, I've got one script for that. If it's someone that I just want to network with, I've got a script for that, you know, but you'll see me, my partner will see me pacing with my with my phone like this, talking to it and redoing the thing kind of four or five times until I'm happy with it. But it would love it. You know, generally speaking, there's a

Paul Marshall (: 44:36

Mm-hmm.

Paul Marshall (: 44:45

Okay.

Paul Marshall (: 44:54

Yeah.

Chris Whyte (: 44:58

It's so easy to automate kind of LinkedIn messages and stuff now. think seeing a video or seeing a little blue bar of a voice note, it's like, there's an actual person behind that, probably, you know. So but it is uncomfortable when you first start doing it, because it's like, I'm just leaving a really awkward note. it's like a muscle. You practice and you train and you get stronger. So give it a go. There you go. If you get nothing else from our discussion.

Paul Marshall (: 45:08

That's a good point.

Yeah.

Paul Marshall (: 45:21

Yeah, yeah.

Paul Marshall (: 45:26

I yeah, I think I almost certainly will. I say, yeah, pushing yourself out of the comfort zone. I guess that's what I've been doing year on year on year. maybe that's the next step of trying something like that. And yeah, I completely get your point about all these, the automated messages that get sent out and I'm on the receiving end of dozens of them a day. And I very politely just ignore them. I will look at them. will, if anyone cold calls me,

Chris Whyte (: 45:28

That's about it.

Chris Whyte (: 45:50

Yeah.

Paul Marshall (: 45:55

I will listen. I've been on the other end of that. I've genuinely done door-to-door encyclopedia selling. And you cannot get much worse cold calling than that. Knocking on 100 doors a day and having 99 of them slammed in your face, literally. So from that, I will appreciate what these people are doing. I will listen. I will respond. Well, react, at least.

Chris Whyte (: 46:05

Wow.

Paul Marshall (: 46:23

And as long as they're professional about it, that's great. If somebody cold calls me, but then doesn't actually talk once it's connected, then not bothered. You put the effort in. You've got to put the effort in for a sale. That's just my attitude.

Chris Whyte (: 46:35

I'm exactly the same. Like if someone's making, taking the effort to pick up the phone and call me, even if it's a complete cold call, like go do it kind of, and I'll give you extra time to get your pitch across. But what frustrates me is when they don't tell you what they're trying to sell, or they try and pretend like they're not selling. So I don't, I don't mind being sold to like if it's relevant, you know, I'm happy to spend money. If it's, if it's got benefit, just tell me what you're selling.

Paul Marshall (: 47:02

Yeah.

Yeah.

Chris Whyte (: 47:04

But yeah, it's an interesting time. I get messages all the time on LinkedIn and in my inbox, like my email, that are clearly written by AI. They've tried to do that personalization, which says, your expertise in recruiting physical product development, hashtag no apps, really makes you stand out. it's so

Paul Marshall (: 47:27

Thanks

Chris Whyte (: 47:34

Relatantly automated. Let's put the end dashes to one side. It's frustrating. But I've had it recently where someone actually used an automated message like that. But I was actually interested in what they're saying. I looked at the profiles. OK, they'd look like they're saying something interesting. And I messaged them back saying, I'm interested in what you've got to say. I'm not particularly enamored by the automated AI message. But I do want to speak to you.

Paul Marshall (: 48:02

Mm-hmm.

Chris Whyte (: 48:03

let me know when you're free. Didn't hear a thing back from them. And I don't know whether it's because I was being maybe a bit too kind of honest, but if there's a hot lead there, I don't know what else it is, you know.

Paul Marshall (: 48:07

Yes, yeah.

Paul Marshall (: 48:15

Yeah, I had one last week, I think it was, an email came through and it wasn't too badly written, except you couldn't work out what they were trying to get out of me. And it was only because I checked the name and the company, the domain name, and went back into LinkedIn and work out, no, this is a real person, this is a real company. They were an &A advisor. And then when you kind of read the email with that in mind, you could see what they were getting at.

Chris Whyte (: 48:27

the

Chris Whyte (: 48:35

Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Marshall (: 48:44

So I went back and said, okay, I did say it took me three attempts to read your email, but I am interested in having a chat just to see what you've got to talk about. And he came back and said, oh, you're outside of our criteria. We're not interested. Well, sort yourself out then. That's not my problem.

Chris Whyte (: 48:45

Right.

Chris Whyte (: 48:49

Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Whyte (: 48:56

Yeah. Well, yeah. Well done on defining your target market and making sure your list is okay. Okay, we've had a rant about sales. let's look at what's next then. Obviously, you've kind of gone from kind of solo consultant to small consortium to kind of a small kind of business, very focused business now.

Paul Marshall (: 49:05

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I have to do it right.

Paul Marshall (: 49:11

You

Chris Whyte (: 49:26

And you've told me that you're quite transparent with your team, even around cash flow. was that an active decision to be kind of heart in your sleep kind of thing?

Paul Marshall (: 49:40

Yeah, I think it's just easier. There's no point hiding stuff. I want everybody to know what's going on. There have been some tough months, there have been some better months. On average, it's probably more tough than better, as we've been growing. As an optimist, things are always going to look better, so that's fine. But yeah, it's just the way I like to work. If I look at my...

Chris Whyte (: 49:43

Yeah.

Paul Marshall (: 50:06

my management style, if I want to put it a word, it's based on the experience I've had from different managers I've worked with over the years. I've taken what I consider to be the good characteristics and put that all together. And equally, the less good characteristics are the ones I've put to the side. And that's how I want to manage the team. So yeah, we're growing. We're six full time at the moment.

in, let's say we're based in in Centenary Castle, we're about to move office, we move into a nicer office which is good, one with insulation so it doesn't cost a fortune to heat it in the winter. And that's that the new place will give us an opportunity to expand as we as we can grow further. But I'm keen to keep the business here in the North East, there's a growing biotech hub here, you know I've been up here

Chris Whyte (: 50:42

You

Paul Marshall (: 51:03

I if you consider from when I started my undergrad degree, it's getting on for 30 years with a few years in Cambridge and Auckland as well in between. It's not the center of the biotech world by any means, but it does the job. It's a nice place to live. And I like it a bit as well. We're staying up here, but we are expanding worldwide. We've got customers around the world. The US market is particularly important to me. Ultimately,

customers over there have bigger budgets and a quicker attitude to spending those budgets. So it's important to supply to them. To improve things, we are looking into certain remote manufacturing in the States. So we're in talks with a number of companies over there about how we can partner with them to use their facilities and how they can help promote us as a business. And it goes both ways. We can help promote them in Europe. So we're finding ways.

Chris Whyte (: 51:47

Okay.

Paul Marshall (: 52:00

of how that might work out, is again, it's a whole massive, massive diversion in a way or something else to consider about how would you run a business in the States compared to running a small business here in the UK. It's so very, very different, but you know, we've got to grow to survive. That's how a business survives is risk by growth. And it will just make life, it'll make aspects of life a lot easier. You know, having a supply chain.

Chris Whyte (: 52:18

Yeah.

Paul Marshall (: 52:28

directly geographically located near to customers. And it just makes life interesting as well. I like the excitement of the journey as well.

Chris Whyte (: 52:35

Absolutely,

Yeah, massively, you and me both. What kind of culture are you building then at Rapid Fluidics? You know, obviously it's quite transparent from your management style, but in terms of the overall culture of the team, to be able to describe that.

Paul Marshall (: 52:49

Mm-hmm.

Paul Marshall (: 52:56

I think we've got a really good team. I think everybody gets on. Everybody has their own character. And it's something I've wanted to grow. As a company of three people, it's really hard to kind of, you've got to be focused. You've got to keep going. Everybody's doing everything. It gets very stressful. Once you're four or five people, it's getting a little bit better, but all it takes is one person on holiday, another person gets sick and you're back down to a company of three people. So I would like to grow as a business.

Chris Whyte (: 53:19

Yeah.

Paul Marshall (: 53:25

I think once we can get to sort of the 10, 12 people mark, things will stabilize and actually we can have a proper company culture. I think we need to get to that size. Obviously we can only get to that size if we can justify being that size. I'm not just going to go out there and employ four more people just as ballast to fill the space up, to fill the desks up. It's got to be a worthwhile role and we're looking into what roles do we fill first? Because obviously you can only take people on if you can afford to pay them.

Chris Whyte (: 53:41

Yeah.

Paul Marshall (: 53:53

You can only afford to pay them if you've got the work, you can only do the work if you've got the people. It becomes chicken and egg of how we grow. So I think the next step is potentially expanding the sales team a little more. That allows us to get more sales, that allows us to recruit more technical staff, and then we can kind of gain momentum that way.

Chris Whyte (: 53:58

Hehehehe

Chris Whyte (: 54:05

Mm-hmm.

Chris Whyte (: 54:12

Really, really exciting. What kind of personality traits or attributes, you know, would put people in the right place, you know, what kind of really stands out to you when you're interviewing or would fit in well.

Paul Marshall (: 54:26

Paul Marshall (54:30.139)

gotta be someone who can appreciate that this is a very flexible environment which has advantages but you know there's disadvantages but challenges in terms of you know the way we operate I assume everybody can just get on with it you know I'm not gonna hold anyone's hand I'm not gonna micromanage you know it's a case of we've got jobs to do we've got customers to keep happy I can't be responsible for everything you know I'm you know we delegate that down and make sure everybody knows

what we can do. And I think that independence goes a long way. It's interesting with the grads who are working with us, we've got two fantastic graduate engineers who started last September having both done summer internships. I'm fairly aware that this isn't like any other company you're ever going to work for. If you're going to base your career on working here, it's going to be an interesting career trajectory, but it the opportunities of what you can

what I'd like to give you here of where we can go. We work with some amazing customers. When you look at the breadth of customers we're dealing with from university research groups and very early startups and spin-outs all the way up to giant global pharma companies, the names that we've got on our books these days, it blows me away that we've got those companies kind of come to us and actually our team have exposure to them at all levels.

Chris Whyte (: 55:50

Yeah.

Paul Marshall (: 55:57

The more I can pass over that responsibility to be the point of contact with a particular company, the better. And that's how we can grow, which means they can get that relationship going and they can take charge of the projects we're getting in. And I want people to do that. And as I say, the team are very, very good at providing exactly that for me.

Chris Whyte (: 56:18

Awesome. Well, it's been an absolute pleasure speaking to Paul. think we absolutely failed in my mission to keep this below 40 minutes. know, I think we both can. We're also talking about subjects that are quite close to my heart as well and my business. I think there's some really, hopefully people kind of find a lot of value in there. And, you know, as a final kind of just thought, you know, what

Paul Marshall (: 56:25

I did warn you that I can talk.

Yeah.

Chris Whyte (: 56:48

books or podcasts would you recommend to people that are listening that might be relevant to what we spoke about or completely different just that you're enjoying?

Paul Marshall (: 56:56

Um, well, that's tricky. And so in terms of podcasts that I regularly listen to, um, I kind of go through phases of when I'm, when the days when I drive to work rather than cycling to work, I'll listen to something. Um, and I go through phases of listening to podcasts and there are some business ones, um, that I

listen to and names I can't even remember now off top of my head. The problem is I've been distracted with a Stephen King audiobook for the last three months and that's kind of completely changed things. Having read all the Stephen King novels when I was a teenager, I've rediscovered him recently so I'm enjoying the dark tower at the moment. So that's kind of where I am on that side of things. I do try and, I guess that's my time to switch off so I don't want to overdo it on the business side of things.

Chris Whyte (: 57:26

Got ya.

Chris Whyte (: 57:35

Excellent.

Yeah.

Chris Whyte (: 57:43

Yeah.

Paul Marshall (: 57:46

There are, yeah, there's some, do I, who was I really listening to? Off the top of my head, I can't remember. The only person that name I remember is an Australian fellow called Mark Boris, who has a couple of great podcast series, one of which is business related, one of which is more, bit more Australian culture and so on. And I just find him, he's really easy to listen to. I really enjoy the interviews he gets and he gets a real wide range of people on there. So that's one of them.

Chris Whyte (: 57:51

So, so.

Chris Whyte (: 57:58

Okay.

Chris Whyte (: 58:02

Mm-hmm.

Paul Marshall (: 58:15

There was a northern business one called... Mine's gone blank. Mine's gone blank. I'll have to add some comments afterwards. Yeah, yeah.

Chris Whyte (: 58:22

Drop me note afterwards. Yeah, absolutely. Bro. And then just lastly, what's the best advice you've ever been given and that you'd be happy to pass on? If it's a short one, I suppose.

Paul Marshall (: 58:37

One of the best bits of advice I ever gave was, or I ever received, was probably when I started looking for another job and I was advised by a recruiter to just get your foot in the door. know, apply to everything, go to as many interviews as you possibly can physically fit in, just to actually see how other companies operate. When you're sitting in reception waiting, just listen to the conversations you can overhear to see what the characters are like.

when you walk through an office to the meeting room, just have a nosey around and see who's looking, who's paying attention, how busy is it? And that experience was really eye-opening for me because I then went to lots of different interviews, most of them, a of them, I didn't intend to go any further and a lot of them didn't go any further because I just wasn't suitable for it. But I got in there and I got to see, once you widen that assessment of professional life,

Chris Whyte (: 59:25

you

you

Paul Marshall (: 59:32

It really helps you refine, well if I don't want that and I don't want that, that's where I want to be. In my case, it was I don't want any of it, I'm going to do my own thing. That's the way it worked out.

Chris Whyte (: 59:32

Mm-hmm.

Chris Whyte (: 59:42

You don't know what you don't know, do you? So, yeah, go and find out. But awesome. Thank you for tying that back to my profession as well. That was just for anyone listening. That was not a paid advertisement, but I did appreciate it. It is sound advice. So, Paul, an absolute pleasure. Thank you for spending your time with me. I hope that least some of the background noise makes it into the final edit because whilst we were recording it's absolutely chucking it down here and it's sundering lightning. But yeah, it's been an absolute pleasure.

Paul Marshall (: 59:44

Peace out.

Paul Marshall (: 59:49

Hahaha.

Paul Marshall (: 01:00:05

Yeah.

Chris Whyte (: 01:00:11

I'm looking forward to following your journey and catching up soon.

Paul Marshall (: 01:00:15

Good stuff Chris, thanks for your time.

Chris Whyte (: 01:00:17

No problem at all.