Podcast: ACE Training: Rob Gaunt

From SMEVentures, it’s The Search Fund Podcast, a show about hungry entrepreneurs who, instead of starting a business, decide to buy one. These are their stories of success, failure, and the lessons they’ve learned.

In this compelling episode, we delve into the extraordinary journey of Rob Gaunt, the dynamic CEO of ACE Training and MultiSkills Training. Hailing from the picturesque landscapes of Cape Town, South Africa, Rob's story unfolds from his early years in Perth, Australia, where he made the transformative move at the age of eight. A vivacious and sports-loving teenager, Rob's formative years set the stage for a remarkable career marked by passion, resilience, and a commitment to excellence.

As we explore his path from a fun-loving youngster to the helm of a thriving organization, join us in unraveling the unique narrative of Rob Gaunt—a testament to ambition, dedication, and the pursuit of success in the world of ACE Training and MultiSkills Training.

Rob Gaunt 0:00

If I don't have to put thought into things that I used to and not only that there are people better to do that job and that's a level of comfort that I think any business owner that is looking to grow their company has to have, it means that you're happy to push things out as opposed to worrying about keeping everything in keeping control.

Jake Nicholson 0:22

From SMEVentures, it's the search fund podcast, a show about hungry entrepreneurs who instead of starting a business, decide to buy one. These are their stories of success, failure, and the lessons they've learned. Welcome to the search fund podcast the podcast spotlighting the personal journeys behind search fund entrepreneurship. Today, I'm excited to introduce Rob Gaunt, whose story is a masterclass in adaptability and strategic thinking, from his initial steps in a family business to leading a straining. Rob's journey is marked by resilience and insightful decision making recorded in December 2022. This episode captures a pivotal moment in Rob's search fund journey, when there were several exciting developments on the horizon for Rob. So as we dive into this conversation, let's keep an ear out for those seeds of growth and even ambition that define Rob's path of search fund entrepreneurship. Rob, thank you so much for joining today. On the show, I have to admit, I've been pretty excited about getting to this episode, you and I have been working together closely for a little over two years, speaking almost every day throughout that period. And first and foremost, just want to make sure our listeners know how awesome it's been to work with you in this relationship. SP ventures and I are supposed to be the ones delivering value to you. But I've honestly gotten at least as much value from you. So it's been awesome to work with you. And I'm really lucky to have found you as my first partner in this venture.

Rob Gaunt 2:01

Yeah, thanks for having me. And likewise, it's been a lot of fun so far, I've definitely learned a lot. I'm really excited about the road ahead.

Jake Nicholson 2:10

Awesome. Let's get into it. Since you listen to the podcasts, we generally start from the beginning. Where did you grow up?

Rob Gaunt 2:18

I know it's a bit surprising for some, I had a great upbringing, but we didn't move a lot. So I'm originally from South Africa, born in Cape Town and my dad Zimbabwean and have a very African family, we moved to Perth when I was eight year old. And the driver of that was was really my parents seeing the landscape of where Africa was going and looking at future prospects of the family. So they made the move, and I think around 98 or 99. And to get into Australia back then was a really difficult thing. My dad effectively quit his job there, sold the house and had to get sponsored here. So he was a photocopier salesman and came over and talked his way into getting sponsorship with a couple of different companies and ended up going with one move to Perth then. And then after a year of doing that, realize that he he absolutely hated it. And effectively the only other way to stay in Australia once you've been sponsored is to start a business and employ a certain number of Australians and him and another English guy who was in a similar position did that and their business grew really quickly. And with that, we tended to move where the business needed us to go. So we're in Perth for a year and then ended up in Sydney and from there kind of stayed in the northern beaches of Sydney. So that's where I went to school. That's where I went to university and lived there until I moved to the UK in my in my early 20s.

Jake Nicholson 3:35

What were you like as a kid?

Rob Gaunt 3:37

I guess that depends on who you ask. I think I went through a couple of stages I suppose kids do up until my teenage years I was a pretty good kid or is active and enjoyed reading and fun and love life. And then I went to boarding school from the age of 13 to 18. And I think that was my parents way of saying that I needed some peers to level me a little bit. So through my through my teenage years less focused on schoolwork more focused on having fun and playing sport and enjoying life, which caused a bit of friction in the family. But I think it's pretty normal. And then after school, I still wasn't quite too serious, something I started working as a photocopier salesman, I think in my early 20s, just as I was turning 20 and did a finance degree and that's really where things started to click for me.

Jake Nicholson 4:28

Yeah, let's get to that in just a minute. You have a pretty interesting career to talk about. But let's stick with Rob as a child for a couple of moments. What fueled your childhood dream of sports music lemonade stand. When you thought about your future? What did it look like?

Rob Gaunt 4:44

In my teenage years? I was pretty lazy because I was kind of growing up as my dad's business was doing well. I always knew I would be business oriented. I love listening to him telling me his stories of even when he was a photocopier sale. has been and all the romantic side of startup business and the different challenges that he had. So that always captured me. I didn't know how, or what would push me in that direction. And I certainly knew it was where I was heading at school but wasn't particularly focused on how long or how I got there. So during school, I was I was mainly focused on playing sports. I loved playing cricket, I got into motocross when we moved to Perth, and then started racing that a little bit more seriously in my early teen years. And very soon when I think I ran it, when I hit around 16, the sporting side started taking up too much time it was cutting into the kind of going out and socializing side. So that kind of got put on the backburner a little bit and started pulling out of that and just really enjoying being with a really good group of friends. And I guess it was the first time that I'd been in a single school for longer than a year or two. So boarding schools are a really good thing for those who have the right personality type for it. And I had a great group of friends, we grew up really close, and a lot of them were country borders, and I was a weekly border. So they would come home with us almost every weekend, my parents became the surrogate parents for probably 10 Different boys. So weekends for us involved, mainly going out and surfing and playing around and motorbikes and all the kind of best bits of life, but it was really circulated around that that core group of friends.

Jake Nicholson 6:26

So I'm hearing that academics were not a strong suit for you in the early years.

Rob Gaunt 6:30

It wasn't a focus. Let's put it that way.

Jake Nicholson 6:35

What were you really good at before becoming an adult? Where did you excel looking back?

Rob Gaunt 6:40

I was really good at thinking out of the box. And partly that's due to my laziness. I'm thinking how I could get out of things. But I was always pretty resourceful. And I was pretty quick witted. I enjoyed a good debate or heated discussion with friends. And I think that's part of growing up at boarding school as well. You've got to learn to defend yourself really quickly. And no matter what success or failure you have, your friends will always find a way to make fun of you. So I love that side of kind of human interaction. I always enjoyed it. Looking back at it now. It seems to be like conditioning for sales. But I love that side. I you know, the subjects that I enjoyed at school were mainly maths and Business Studies and Economics, you know that that always kind of captured my attention. But yeah, that kind of the stuff that I was good at, I was pretty decent at at some of the sports that we did. I got pretty good at motorbiking. And in my younger years as a as a good cricket until I stopped doing that.

Jake Nicholson 7:35

You were in the unique position of having a front row seat to your dad's entrepreneurial story. And you know, when I asked about your upbringing, you've pretty quickly went to your dad's entrepreneurial story, because that shaped quite a bit of where you live, and what you did and how you spent your time. How much visibility, how much access? Did you actually get to that business story that he lives? How much and what did you take away from that access?

Rob Gaunt 8:06

At the time, I was a bit young, I didn't quite appreciate what he was doing. It's only now that I'm trying to do it myself. I realized, wow, the old man was actually pretty good at something. And I've managed to do something pretty special. So at the time, it was normal. I didn't understand the magnitude of exactly what he was achieving. But the way that I had been brought up was always with an impossibly this is a thing because my dad was in sales and always looking for the angle and always looking to close deals. So we were making a lot of bets and deals as kids and I learned from a very early age to make sure that you cross all the t's and dot all the i's. I mean, it was very seldom that I want to bet but if I did, you know and I didn't clarify the currency that I would get paid in. It would be Zimbabwean dollars, not US Dollars or not Australian dollars. So in that sense, you know, I feel like everyone has been conditioned for a lot of these things throughout my life. But that's more of a reflection on who my dad is as a person and the fund that we had growing up rather than the proximity to the business side of it, though it obviously overlaps to growing up he exited the business that he built when, right about when when I left school, and even then, as I mentioned before, I was weekly boarding so I was only on home on weekends. I would obviously speak to him and understand a lot about it. But it wasn't until I started getting into my career that I really started tapping into that knowledge base. So for me growing up whilst I knew he was doing well, I didn't appreciate the magnitude and it was just kind of normal. He did expose me to as much as I wanted to, he never pushed me in that direction. We always just ended up telling funny stories and listening to some of the things that he was going on to whether it was intense negotiations or almost losing a company here or there or whatever it was. For some reason, it always just captured me. So, you know, a lot of it was storytelling.

Jake Nicholson 10:04

Yeah. And your dad will, will pop up a couple more times as we continue your story. I've gotten to know your dad a little bit. And you know, I can attest to the fact that he's a very magnetic and interesting and inspiring personality. And you and he have a pretty unique relationship. He didn't take it easy on you, you know, he told me a story about when you thought I remember it correctly, you borrowed his TESPA without permission.

Rob Gaunt 10:30

Yeah, we common did his best. But one night to light up a skatepark and, through lack of better judgment, I thought I could take it for a quick burn around the park, and ended up crashing it and forgetting that we had done it and left it there. And I got a call a couple of weeks later saying what's happened. And I denied obviously, my natural defenses to deny with him, but it quickly became apparent that that was us. And instead of just getting the one little panel spray painted, he claimed the paint wasn't going to be the same age, even though it was perfectly color matched. And when he had lent me the best way, it was all the same age paints, I had to pay a couple of $1,000 Extra to spray paint a perfectly good Vesper, which is more of a testament to how I grew up, I guess, and my dad's pretty, pretty firm view on some things.

Jake Nicholson 11:18

And according to you, Dad, you had to walk the Vesper a few miles to get it to the repair shop?

Rob Gaunt 11:23

Yeah, yeah, that's right. A couple of days down the road could have distributed that it wasn't like it was broken. But no.

Jake Nicholson 11:29

All right, you went to university, Australian Catholic University. Tell me about that school, would you study? And was that any more academic, or were you more looking to the next stage of your life,

Rob Gaunt 11:40

the decision to go to university, so I took a year off after school and traveled, which was great, and then came back. And I knew I wanted to do something business related, and the Bachelor of Commerce and finance just just seemed to fit. So I did that to ACU predominantly because it was closer to home and easier for traffic in Sydney than some of the other universities which again, probably show the level that I was putting into the thought of my education at that stage. But I thought, hey, they're all kind of comparable. And I loved it. Look, I didn't put a lot of effort in I was more concerned with passing than doing well. So I wouldn't say I maximized my potential or opportunity there. But I did love it. And I felt like I extracted what I needed to. It was at the same time that I was working as well. And I was working as a commissioner, new salesman. And what I found then I started doing quite well in that in that job and became this Where are you selling? Well, I was selling the most exciting thing, which is photocopiers. All right. So what I found towards the end of my degree was that the time in the classroom was time that I wasn't able to sell. And my time and I was working so hard, and I was doing quite well by time in my mind was very valuable. So if I could find a way to achieve the same outcome in university with putting as little effort in as possible, then that was a pretty good return on my time. And $1 eyes, it probably was knowledge wise, maybe not so much. But I guess it was learning other skills. So I flipped the mentality of thinking that I'm a student to thinking actually, I'm a paying customer of this university, and then also decided to outsource some assignments and things as well. So all of this to say obviously, my parents horror and my dad's absolute disappointment in yet again, me not putting full potential into something. But yeah, I learned a lot going through that degree, that's for sure.

Jake Nicholson 13:37

But you were as a full time student also selling photo copiers, you said you were doing quite well. Are you able to provide some color?

Rob Gaunt 13:45

Yeah. So as I as I kind of mentioned, my dad was a photocopier salesman before he started the business. I really didn't know what I wanted to do longer term and kind of spoke to him about and he said, Look, what you need to do. So you've got a natural skill for for selling and dealing with people go and sell photo copiers and learn how to direct sell, learn how to sell something to people that don't want to talk to you that no one cares about. So if you get good at you can make some pretty good money and kind of growing up on his war stories as a salesman, I thought, okay, like that. That kind of makes sense. You know, it certainly wasn't a career move. It was more just, hey, why not? What have I got to lose? I'll learn some good things. So again, I didn't put too much forth forethought into it. I thought okay, let's go try this out and see what happens. And I started off on a base salary working under someone who's who's now a close friend of mine. And he was a really experienced salesman, and he had us doing all of the things that you would expect people to do into a direct sales role doing doing all the cold calling, going, engaging with people who hadn't heard of the business in a long time and doing a lot of the grunt work and after my sixth week of doing that, and seeing that, actually some of the contacts that I was making So this person that I was working under was going in closing deals and making pretty good commission. I spoke to the managing director and I said, Hey, listen, like I know you guys putting me on a pretty an okay starting salary, but I don't want that anymore. I'd prefer just to go and do commission only and try and do it. And he kind of looked at me and laughed and said, you know, you've got no experience in your what do you think I was doing? I was like, Yeah, but if I close one deal, it'll be way more than what you're paying me now. Plus, I'm seeing what I'm getting for this other guy. And whilst I know he's got 20 years experience on me, he's actually a really good salesman, I think I'd be right at it. So I transition I think, in my in my second or third month to commission only sales. And that was really the tipping point for me. And I set myself a couple of like goal hurdles that I wanted to do making a certain amount in a month. And there it really is, live by the sword die by the sword, you you kind of eat what you kill. And if you don't kill anything, you go hungry. So I learned the value of time management, and I learned how to be productive. And I learned that sales comes down to understanding your numbers, I went through all of that. And at the same time, I was listening to all of the audio books and sales that everyone has kind of grown up with the Brian Tracy's and all of the books that you know, you get recommended to so whilst I was going a little bit late to my university, at the same time, I was actually doing a lot of other personal development. And then I started doing quite well. And that you know, after a couple of months, I had a few quite big months and even though they were still fairly patchy in terms of the consistency of what I was earning, yeah, I started seeing the road lighting up and and the other sounds when they and the managing director said to me said, you know, if you can achieve this one, you can do it consistently, like, you've now seen that you're able to, let's see what you can do. And then I guess the unique thing there that I didn't realize at the time is we were doing all new business, which is very rare in a direct commission only role, you know, usually you get a pretty decent customer base that you can turn through and rewrite contract. So I was learning a lot. And it was at this time that my dad had bought and was running a company over in England and I was speaking to him. And it was kind of his nights my days. And I was fitting to him on different closing techniques and really just absorbed in the whole direct sales thing. And for me, that was the change of everything that I learned like I learned how to sell financial contracts I learned that I was speaking with decision makers I learned when not to waste my time to that even though I only did that I think for what ended up being a year I got so much out of that role and that played such a big part in shaping the way that I think now and giving me the confidence and understanding to then translate that on a bigger level.

Jake Nicholson 17:41

Sales man doesn't get enough credit. MBA programs don't talk much about sales.

Rob Gaunt 17:48

Yeah, and I guess this is why when we were looking at at the search fund then and I started prepping myself for that I went back to prospecting books and I knew that it was just a reminder on like, you're gonna get no said you almost every time you know this is search warrants closing much bigger sale. But to that that's really been my upbringing. I feel like I've grown up in a household and had to start a career that that was all about selling even though I didn't quite realize it at the time.

Jake Nicholson 18:14

So you continue to do sales career, but no longer selling photocopiers. He decided to hop over to the UK and join a company called Marine Rescue technologies MRT and a town called Beverly, how did that job come about? And why why moved to the UK to run sales for a small business.

Rob Gaunt 18:35

Again, a weird career move not not really thinking too far ahead. So at the time, as I mentioned, I was probably eight months into selling photo copiers and my dad had been a big passive shareholder in a company that that had listed and had bought this business over in the UK but wasn't really doing too well. And him and a couple of other shareholders. You know, they've done a couple of CAP raisings where they've just been diluted and diluted and, and he said, Well, kind of what's going on here and him and a few other shareholders went and rolled the board. And he took over as CEO of that of that public company. And they had just closed on buying the business in the UK. And he went over there to see what they'd bought because he literally had no idea and it was in a tiny little town on the east coast of England, about three hours northeast of London, called Beverly, which is quite a beautiful town if you're driving through it quite quickly. So he went over there to see what they bought. And they initially thought, hey, he's just going to try and sell this asset, recapitalize the public company, and then go find something else to do. And I was speaking to him about all the stuff that I was doing in sales. We were kind of speaking daily about what he was going through about what I was going through. And I don't know why but what he was doing just sounded cool to me. I didn't really know what it was and I don't know why looking at it now, but I was hounding him to say, you know, let me come over there and help you and you're saying look, there's there's not really a role. He, I'm just trying to sell this thing. And he end up spending a couple of months there and realize that he actually had to build the business up a bit before he sold it. So he looked at what they were doing there. And they were a manufacturer and distributor of safety equipment and offshore commercial market. And they were selling directly and indirectly. And he said to me, after enough nagging, he said, you know, why don't you come over here and look at doing the sales that you've been doing similar there, we're going to change up to renting these units, we're going to cut some distribution things. And he said, Come over. And so it was literally, I think, like, he told me that one day, we ended up selling a couple of our vehicles the next week, and then two weeks later was on a flight over to the UK. And what started off as a one or two year plan for us to build the business quite quickly and sell it ended up taking five years. And I went through the rapes there. And you know, that ended up being a pretty pivotal part in my career so far. But that was how we, it all came about was me nagging him to come and do something. And I guess the the fact that I had never been there or knew anything about the industry, or knew nothing about the business never really occurred to me, I just thought, hey, why not? It's fun adventure.

Jake Nicholson 21:21

He started out as a sales manager with a mandate to sell, obviously, then you eventually became the CFO and CEO and got it to a point where it was actually ready to sell and did sell. You mentioned that that journey was pivotal in your career. I imagine you're referring to development of yourself as a, as a business leader and people manager, talk me through that what happened over those five years, not just to the business, but to you.

Rob Gaunt 21:53

Absolutely, it played a massive role. And I learned to a lot of really valuable lessons. And some of them on the positive side, some of them on on how not to do things and some of the negative side, I went over there to try and change the revenue model, we wanted to copy the rental type model that we had been doing in photo copiers, and that my dad had done his other business. So the first I would say two years was myself, my dad, the CFO, and the existing sales team, which was a couple of people in that business, really changing the way that we did things. So you know, we cut our distributor list from I think like 200, which was virtually anyone who had sold one of our products before down to 30, we put a pretty tight distributor agreement in place that a lot a lot of these distributors had seen before we developed a rental model of selling with directly to our customers. And all of that was me going out and figuring how to do some of the stuff. So there was a lot of guidance on strategy. I mean, I didn't come up with the strategy. In fact, I was pretty limited my experience back then. But but we were the gophers that essentially, essentially went out and did it. So I learned to lock down about taking the relationship building that I'd done in my photocopiers to another level, learning how to invest in the right relationships, a lot of the sales techniques that we did with the same thing, but there was no infrastructure around and actually how to do it. So I was selling these rental type contracts that are over five years with fleet replacement and all this stuff to some pretty big customers in the in the offshore oil and gas market. And then we had to come back to the the office and actually figure out what I had sold and how to implement it and what to do. And there was learning how to ship lithium batteries all over the world. And like all these just little different things that I'd never had to deal with. So the first two years was really focused on setting the sales foundation of that and in that was building the team, you know, bringing people in to sell the way that we wanted to changing the mindset of the people who are already there. You know, some of those people had been there for 10 years and never been exposed to bigger business. And while we were operationally doing all that the CFO and my dad as CEO of the public company, were also trying to raise money. So I was exposed to coming in and giving the kind of operational side pictures in those discussions. We were all actually living in the same house over in England, so it was almost like boarding school again. And there were obviously, you know, that comes with its pros and cons we were working 24/7 For the first few years we were working very closely. There were a lot of heated discussions and being the junior it very rarely went my way. But that was a really big step for me and actually going out and doing something and building a team of my own. Once that had settled down over the first two years. Then I switched to the operational side I have manufacturing and distribution and servicing. So we had gone and created this system where, before you bought a product of ours, and maybe five years later, we didn't get out who you were, and you came and bought another one, we introduced mandatory annual recertification. So now we had all of these units globally coming back. So we had to set up the service network internationally, we had to figure out with how are we now going to service 10,000 units that come back when traditionally We'd only been pushing things out. So there were weekends, when we would come in and go like, Okay, let's take all the furniture out, let's figure out from a product flow point, how are we going to do this, and this is all pre MBA. So I look back on some of the stuff that we did now and think, wow, I really could have done that a bit smarter, but we did get a lot of it right as well. So there was a big learning period there. You know, we had contract manufacturers in China that we had to go and negotiate with, we had all of the kind of war stories that weren't good to deal with, like employees, stealing our IP and negotiating backhand deals with some of our manufacturers and suing people in different countries. So there was a lot going on, although in the thick of it, you don't realize the learning until you reflect later. But there was a lot of exposure there. And that was just on the kind of private side on the public side, there were difficult shareholders there were takeover attempts, there were, you know, we weren't getting support from the shareholder base or cap raisings to go and do some acquisitions with the other business. So there was that was a really big learning time for me. And this is where my dad did a lot of mentoring for me, he BCC me into every email that he ever sent. And I think part of that was because he was lazy and filing emails and could never find documents, and I was his go to person, but I and the expectation was that I read everything. And you know, he'd say, What do you think of that, and I would have to get my opinion. And, and we'd go, we'd look at how we worded emails and how we wrote contracts. And that is absolutely one of his skill sets. Having done in his whole life and having sold finance contracts in the highest level, you learn that wording matters. And if you're going to do things you need to strategically lay the traps so that in a year's time when someone comes in question, something, you can say, hey, I did this, this and this, and I've let you know, in these places. So you know, a lot of the things that you can't learn at business school, but that takes that kind of living and breathing it and operating. I got out of that experience. And that was largely the thing that made me realize, like, hey, I can actually do this. You know, I effectively ran that business for the last two years while he was off sorting out some of the public stuff. And then he moved back to Australia for a year as well. So yeah, it was it was a great experience. What was the product? So they manufactured location devices, which are similar to an Ieper. But sit on a go on a lifejacket? So when someone falls overboard on a going out to a wind turbine, or oil or gas platform or commercial fishing, it allows the captain of the boat to be notified that someone's going overboard, and then to locate them.

Jake Nicholson 28:10

Oh, wow. And did you ever actually get out on the water?

Rob Gaunt 28:14

I was the test dummy in the North Sea in England because no one else wanted to do it. So I was the first person thrown overboard and left in the sea for three or four hours while we were doing product range

Jake Nicholson 28:27

testing three or four hours in the North Sea.

Rob Gaunt 28:31

I mean, we did have insulation certs. But my dad thought it was funny that they would just drive away for a couple of hours and do some range testing. So yeah, I mean, I was in the water a lot. We did some of the testing at the Boshier offshore course that you have to do where they simulate a helicopter ditch and they flip that which was fun, but that's in the pool. So yeah, I spent a bit of time in the ocean out of Grimsby, in the middle of nowhere.

Jake Nicholson 28:56

During this time in the UK, something else important happened. You met Patricia who would eventually become your wife. And I'm going to embarrass you a little bit here. You've fell head over heels for Patricia who is from Poland and even though she spoke English you worked tirelessly to learn Polish, which I think is kind of amazing. How did you have the time and energy to do that while running a business and and from Beverly?

Rob Gaunt 29:28

So I don't know who told you all of that, but but we're gonna have some words after the podcast about that intro. Yes, I did meet. While I was over there. I was in the last kind of year of me being there. You know why the desire to learn Polish? I still don't know. I think it's because I saw whether a relationship was going and purchase his parents only speak. I speak Polish and I thought well, if I'm going to communicate with with the other half of my family or at least with their parents, I better learn how to do this now. It also coincide With the fact that the business was in a pretty stable place, so for the last kind of year or so, we were really gearing it to sale we weren't a lot of the growth initiatives were kind of just taking hold, and there was a good team in place. So I did have a bit more time, which was part of the reason why I decided to come back to Australia and leave that business when it sold. But it made the last year a lot more enjoyable. We traveled a fair bit we got to explore. And I learned to polish though my my now four year old son is fluent in Polish, and I don't understand the conversations that they're having. So I think it shows the extent that I will have to to, but I did learn a bit of

Jake Nicholson 30:35

so at some point, the MRT story and the your your time in the UK come to an end, you have found Patricia and you decide to come back to Australia, what was your next step?

Rob Gaunt 30:50

About six months before we left, I decided that I wanted to do an MBA, I didn't know what I wanted to do post being in England, I knew that I wanted to leave England, I was done. We were kind of waiting for the sale of MRT to wrap up. And I started thinking about business schools internationally. And where would be fun. And I looked at a couple of schools in the US. And you know, whilst that would have been great, we just didn't have the financial ability for me to do that. I knew that I didn't want to work while I was doing business school, which again, I don't know why I thought that. But I knew that that's what I wanted to do. I needed a bit of a break. And I needed to recharge and the thought of coming back home to Australia and surfing was pretty alluring to me. Patricia was pregnant with with Ollie son. So I said to her, you know, why don't we finish up in England hopefully go surf in Indonesia for three months, and then I'll start business school and as life as it that timing didn't work out and the surfing got bypassed. But I came back and started the MBA at Macquarie.

Jake Nicholson 31:51

And is that where you learned about search funds?

Rob Gaunt 31:55

Yeah, in fact, it was pretty early on so so I had no idea what I wanted to do. I knew that I had two years to find the next thing. I knew that I didn't want to be in big corporate, I knew that I wanted to play in the SME space. And my thought at the time was how am I going to go and find a business that I can fix up. So look at kind of similar to what we did with MIT, we took an old family run business, we put a lot of time and energy into it, and we transformed it. And it we sold it for a pretty good return for the public company that owned it. And because that's all I'd ever been exposed to, I thought you know, like that, that makes sense to me. I'm comfortable in that environment. So I was thinking of turnarounds of companies that were underperforming, possibly that were that were held by a high net worth individual or a major shareholder that didn't have the time or the desire to go and fix it up. But I thought, if my pitch would be, hey, let me come and run this thing. I'll get paid a normal salary, I won't buy in an equity. But if I can sell it for a certain amount above whatever it's doing now, let's do a profit share. And that was kind of my loose thinking around like I was trying to explore that. And I was speaking to a friend who went to INSEAD and was was working for BCG at the time. And I was describing this to him. And he said, Yeah, that that kind of sounds like a search fund. And he said minus the business doing badly. But why don't you just take a business that's doing well and do that even better? And then you know, my initial reaction, like I think everyone is is more what's a search on? And then I just started researching. And I thought like, Okay, well, this looks really good. Is it possible? I know it's got a big history, but do people actually do it? So I started exploring that. And I think one night with some late Googling, I saw SME ventures and there was a shedule a call thing here and I thought, Okay, well, I'll just shedule a call. And I think that's how we had our first meet.

Jake Nicholson 33:51

And as a testament to your natural sales ability and your lack of inhibition. You're one of the few people who has actually used that button. Most people will send an email and cautiously ask if we can talk. You scheduled a call.

Rob Gaunt 34:08

Yeah, I think it was schedule a call and my first words maybe so what is your Trent I think I want to do this. Something.

Jake Nicholson 34:17

It wasn't really new thing at the time. And in Australia at the time there was there was one other guy a good friend of ours, Alex Simmons who had raised us a search fund in Australia, but it was really new to Australia. And what gave you the confidence that this was real and something worth dedicating the next check your life to?

Rob Gaunt 34:35

It wasn't too long after that, that you and Alex put on a talk at PwC in Sydney, and I heard about it last minute. I can't even remember if I like followed the registration or not. But I turned up it was just down the road from my university and I turned up and it was Alex talking about his journey in search funds. And that was one of the few times in my life where I saw the future lineup in front of me. And it felt like even though the room was was full, it felt like you and Alex were talking directly to me. And I was listening to what Alex had done. And I just knew instantly, like, this is the vehicle for me like this is it? I don't know how I don't know what's going to happen. But I knew that like, okay, so I'm now doing a search fund. And I think this is even before I'd done all the pre reading, I just knew like, this is up my alley. And I remember racing home after that, and got home and I said to my dad, I said, Dad, I found what I want to do, because my parents and Patricia had been listening to me going on about I've got to find something, I've got to find something and I came up, I said, I found it. He said, What can I sort of search for? And and of course, he said, What's that? And I said, there's this model where it takes an entrepreneur and you raise his search capital, and then you go and find a business and you raise the acquisition capital, and you run out and blah, blah, blah. And I'll never forget his response. I'll turn down the language for the podcast, but he said something to the effect of, he said, so let me get this straight, you're going to get people to give you money, to pay you to find a business to then give you more money to buy it and run it. And then you're gonna get a essentially a profit share. Now what yeah, how good is this? And he said, first of all, you're nobody. He said, That is ridiculous. He said, Rob, don't do it. It's a scam. I was like, What do you mean, it's a scam? He said, it's never gonna happen. And so that was my that was, you know, if I, if I was less resilient, the bubble would have been pretty quickly there. But But I knew that he was wrong. And I said to him, no, no, no, no, you just don't get this. There's people doing this thing. That was kind of the intro into search funds in the sense of what I wanted to do and how I was gonna go and do it.

Jake Nicholson 37:04

So fast forward to August of last year, you completed not only the first acquisition under the SME ventures umbrella, but also the very first search fund acquisition in Australia. What did you buy, tell us about ace training.

Rob Gaunt 37:22

I bought a great business that's been operational for over 20 years. So regional registered training organization, which provides training in the construction and heavy vehicle space. So essentially, anything that overlaps with civil construction, whether it be mining, agriculture, utilities, we provide training to, and we also provide heavy vehicle training. So to break that down a little bit more, we've got a pretty diverse range of customers, all the way from individuals who are looking to get particular licenses, whether it's sitting on an excavator, or riding a bulldozer or, you know, running a forklift, all the way through to people and organizations that are putting their employees through certain types of high risk licenses, whether it's big cranes or driving big trucks, or whatever it is. And then the other side of the training is really for government funded students. And these are typically people who are entering into the trades, they our general type of cohort is unemployed people that are looking to gain employment through going through our training. And look for me, you know, having come from sales in many different environments. Looking back to the photocopier days, it's great to be part of a company that's making a big impact on people. And we've had some really good success stories of people who've come through our funded surgery program, some of which have ended up employees of ours, which is fantastic and are doing really well, but others that that we see now in the community when we gauge with the employees that they've gone on to. So it really is a good business. And I feel very lucky to be part of ACE and to be able to provide the services we do to our different customers.

Jake Nicholson 39:19

Awesome, you're now a year in a little over a year, and I'm gonna give you an opportunity to reflect on that time, if you can take yourself out of the challenges and opportunities of today and sort of reflect on the whole of the last year. Has it been just as you expected it would be or have parts of the experience been surprising to you?

Rob Gaunt 39:46

Wow, that is a big question to reflect. It's been a big year, a little from Column A little from Column B. There have been bits of it which are absolutely in line with land expectation. There's been a lot of challenges. Something's positive, something's not as positive. But it's been a big year, I think that when you're stepping into a business that has a long history, and that you're coming with an outside perspective, there is always going to be an element of learning there that you need to go through. And that's industry and business Pacific. That was certainly the case. For me, I never been involved in in a training company like this, I don't come from a construction background I've been fortunate enough to go through have good education, but again, a different type. So there were a lot of learnings there. And then, you know, just looking at the conditions in which we bought coming into COVID, in Victoria itself, which is, I think the most lockdown city in the world has brought some challenges, but even little things, you know, like learning to work, we've got four branches, regionally learning to manage a workforce that's dispersed, you know, that's not something I'd done before. So there's been a lot of really good things that have happened in the business so far. And, you know, like any other business, I guess, in today's climate, there's been some challenges as well. But all in all, yeah, it's been a lot of fun so far.

Jake Nicholson 41:08

And if you look back again on the year, what parts of your job, give you energy and excite you, and what parts of your job make you want to curl up in a ball and hide?

Rob Gaunt 41:22

There's a few of those. And they seem to constantly be changing. My role in the business has changed over the last year. And largely, that's due to us finding a good team that we now largely have in place, that's meant that I can put my focus merit more on to where we wanted it to be, which is looking to grow and optimize the business. So the bits that excite me at the moment come from a couple of things, first of all, as a business and as a new management team, and having new people in what are now the right roles, we can feel the momentum building and that teamwork that we had in the UK that took us so far on such a small team, we now have the right ownership structure in the right vehicle to maximize that type of team. So I feel very lucky to have the people that we have now I know that we've got the right platform, we've spent a year building it, we've still got a couple more key positions to bring into but but mostly, that team is starting to work really well together. So that's something that excites me, it means I don't have to put thought into things that I used to. And not only that there are people better to do that job. And that's a level of comfort that I think any business owner that is looking to grow their company has to have, it means that you're happy to push things out, as opposed to worrying about keeping everything and keeping control. So so I'm loving that side of it. The other thing that I'm obviously excited for is is growth, because what that means with the right people in the right roles is that I'm able to focus on where do we want to take that business. And although it's a business that's done well, over the last 20 years, this this company in this industry just has such a big runway ahead of it, we're only just starting touch on the things that are going to transform the company, you know, where we've got the size and the capability now to focus on different revenue streams and servicing different national customers, which I see as being transformational for the way that the business has operated before. And maybe it's me going back to my sales roots, but starting to look at things on a more macro or national level, as opposed to worrying about the individuals just doing their tickets. And of course, we will always do that. But now starting to look at some of the big industry players throughout Australia and saying, Okay, how can we design bespoke training solutions for these companies? How can we embed ourselves in their operations, we've got a really experienced management team that we've brought in that has done this before on a statewide level. So let's see how we can transcend that. And that's the thing that excites me now. And we're right at the cusp of of really starting to get rolling with that stuff.

Jake Nicholson 44:18

Fantastic. And presumably, your dad now believes that this is not a scam.

Rob Gaunt 44:24

I think he's still on the fence. I’m joking. Yes, he is a shareholder. He's continuing to support it. And he's seeing a lot of the things that that made him successful in what he does. And he's you know, you can just hear the way that we talk about it now is different. So yes, he is a firm believer.

Jake Nicholson 44:41

Such as around the world are listening to your story. And not just Australia but Europe, Latin America, us even other parts of Asia now, and many of them are brand new to search funds. What would you like to share with these aspiring entrepreneurs that Do you wish you had known when you were weighing the pros and cons of embarking on this path?

Rob Gaunt 45:07

For me, when I looked at doing a search fund, I guess, I was unemployed, I didn't know what I wanted to do, we had just spent all of the money we had saved in me getting my degree and having a child enjoying my life after working. So the way that I approached looking at a search fund is I said, Okay, let's look at the downside, you raise your search capital, you spend two years looking for a business in which you analyze 1000s of companies, you look at lots of different industries, you've had to raise money, manage shareholders, go through shareholder agreement, design and negotiations, you've probably failed to buy a couple of companies in that time. So you've gone through diligence a couple of times. And yes, the cost of that is a bit of time. And, you know, there's, there's a salary sacrifice element there. But for me, when I looked at it, like, those are all upside. So I looked at this as really a continuation of my MBA in real world. And I thought, if I can go through that process, and I don't buy a business, that is a phenomenal experience that I've been through, and I will be able to do anything I want to do after that. Again, if your fallback is getting a job, where you've got a job now you'll be able to get another job, you know, so I didn't really see the downside. And I think what I've learned after speaking with a lot of prospective searchers is that they're hesitant to pull the trigger on it, even though they feel like it's their calling. So my advice would be look at the downside is upside. And don't be afraid to take the leap, because everyone thinks it's unachievable. Initially, it always seems like it's someone else's success, or you know, you look at all the stories and you read all the articles, and you think like, that sounds so cool. And the truth is like, retrospectively, it is cool while you're going through it, it's pretty painful. But my advice would would be to if you feel like this is the right thing to do, then take the leap, because I didn't believe that I could go through this as well. And I, if I had listened to what some of the closest people in my life had said to me, I wouldn't have ended up doing it. But if you if you feel that calling and it's the right thing for you, then I think it's absolutely worth something that looking at something that you should do, and take the leap of faith.

Jake Nicholson 47:36

Rob, thank you so much for sharing your story with us and being so open and honest, I think we probably feel like we know you a little bit better now. And I think some people are gonna be able to relate to your story and hopefully get inspired. Thank you very much. I look forward to checking in with you on this show again in another couple of years. And I'm sure you'll have more stories to tell at that point.

Rob Gaunt 47:55

Thanks so much. I really enjoyed it.

Jake Nicholson 47:59

Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of the search fund podcast. My time working with Rob over the past few years has been a remarkable journey of entrepreneurship and strategic growth. Since our recording in December 2022, Rob has achieved another significant milestone in his search fund journey by acquiring multi skills training, which now together with ace training is the largest civil construction training organization in Victoria, Australia. This exciting development is another testament to Rob's visionary approach and his ability to seize opportunities as they present themselves. And as we close out this episode, we eagerly look forward to seeing what the future holds. For Rob, stay tuned to the search fund podcast from where compelling stories from the dynamic world of search fund entrepreneurship.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode. If you enjoyed it, you can find more at the searchfundblog.com or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Jake Nicholson of SMEventures and you're listening to the search fund podcast