Nick Bradley – Buying a Business Based Purely on Emotions Rarely Works

Nick Bradley is a business scale up specialist helping entrepreneurs grow their businesses to create freedom, build wealth, achieve their mission, and live life more on their terms. He is the founder of the Fielding Group, a growth accelerator that helps companies improve business performance. He works with private equity firms across the UK and the US, leading business turnarounds, mergers, acquisitions, and scale-ups. Over the last decade, he has bought, built, and sold multiple businesses creating significant value for shareholders. Nick is also the host of UK’s number one business podcast on iTunes, Scale Up Your Business. His mission is to help bring an entrepreneurial skillset and mindset to people all over the world as a driving force of progression and prosperity. Originally from Australia, Nick is a dedicated family man who has a strong background in physical fitness, having completed 67 marathons and 24 ultramarathons worldwide. He's also a qualified personal trainer and performance coach.   “The worst time to make an investment decision is when it's based purely on emotions because you're not seeing the bigger picture, and you're not being objective.” Nick Bradley   Worst investment ever Starting his entrepreneurial journey Nick’s entrepreneurial journey started when he was 18 years old when he started a gym. Personal training back in the late 80s was still a new idea, so in some ways, he was innovating, but he felt the need to get out of the environment. So he sold that business to a friend for a little bit of cash, packed up all his belongings, and left the little town of Adelaide, South Australia. He ended up in Sydney with about a month's worth of cash. Jumping into the corporate world Left with barely any money to survive on and about to move back to Adelaide, he was lucky enough to bag a job as marketing manager of Men's Health magazine. His new job earned him some good money. He loved his job and did everything he could to get ahead in his career as quickly as possible. Sometimes he had to step on people to get to where he needed to get. Board member before he was 30 Nick’s drive to succeed saw him become a board director of a company in the UK before he was 30. So he left Sydney and moved to the UK after he got transferred there by one of the media companies he was working for. Grinding his teeth, literally All this corporate work was stressing him up. One night he was quite stressed and wasn't feeling great. He was taking some of that stress out on his young family as well. So this night, he had a whole heap of stuff going on with the company he was working in. The stress had him grinding his teeth in his sleep. He woke up and realized that he had cracked all his back teeth on the right side. He had ground his teeth right down to the point where the pressure of the clinch broke his teeth.