What is the most money you've made in a year?

What is the most money you've made in a year? It must have been the year when I sold HomeServe for 4.1 billion pounds. Can you take me back to a day or a moment in your life where you thought the business was going to crumble and you were going to lose everything? There was one big doubter. This was when we'd nearly run out of money for a second time. We were down to our last 10,000 pounds. My business partner, he said, Richard, you've got to face it. Your life's dream of becoming a successful entrepreneur is over. You better go back and work for Procter and Gamble. And I had a little bit of luck. Somebody called me and said, there's this water company in Surrey. They've developed a plumbing insurance model. I copied the model, sent out a thousand mail shots with the last 10,000 pounds in the business, and this was copying their plumbing insurance model, making it a bit better. 38 customers sent in a check for 50 quid. 3.8% take up from direct mail. I remember getting on my office desk in front of the 23 people that were about to be made redundant and said, yes, we've made it. If you lost everything and you had to start all over again, what steps would you take to build a multi-billion pound business? Copy somebody else's idea. How many entrepreneurs do we hear, I came up with a business idea, but somebody else had done it, so I'm not going to do it. I would say, ticking the box, that's fantastic. It proves the model works. Copy an idea, make it a bit better, and then go bigger and quicker. But don't go big until you've properly proved out the model. Bootstrap your business, get an investor when you need to go big. There's loads of people that are scared of copying other people's business because they're scared of being called copycats. What do you say to those? Forget about what you learned at school, which is copying homework is bad. In business, copying and improving is really good thing to do. What's one quote you live by? Persistence pays. Whatever the problem out there, and this country and the world are facing multitude of problems, from Brexit, Covid, Ukraine war, Trump tariffs, Iran war, whatever the problem, there's a bigger opportunity and you just need to persist. And if you do, you can make it happen. Persistence pays.