Acquisition can be the ideal way to experience fast growth as a company. But there’s no need to stay within your home country when looking at potential target companies.
Jacob Whitish is the San Francisco-based vice consul for financial services for the U.K.’s Department for International Trade. And he doesn’t just work with U.K. companies looking into the U.S. but also American companies looking to expand in the other direction.
We chat about the unique challenges – and benefits – of these sorts of cross border acquisitions, including…
- Why Silicon Valley is an attractive market (and why Boise or Boston could be a better fit for certain companies)
- The most attractive U.S. acquisition targets for companies looking to accelerate into new markets quickly
- What win-win deals in multinational expansion look like
- Matching resources and business goals to a geographic region
- And more
Listen now…
Mentioned in This Episode: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacobwhitish/ and www.trade.gov.uk.
Episode Transcript:
Patrick Stroth: Hello there. I’m Patrick Stroth. Welcome to M&A Masters, where I speak with the leading experts in mergers and acquisitions, and we’re all about one thing here. That’s a clean exit for owners, founders, and their investors. Today I’m joined by Jacob Whitish from the United Kingdom’s Department for International Trade. Jacob serves as vice council for financial, professional, and business services.
The Department for International Trade helps UK businesses export and grow into global markets. They also help overseas companies locate and grow in the United Kingdom. Now, when I think about business growth, business expansion, I see two ways to get there. Either slowly through organic growth, or instantly through acquisition. And since we focus on M&A here, we’re a bit more biased in favor of the instant growth approach to doing things.
That’s why I asked Jacob to speak with me this afternoon to talk about opportunities for M&A. Not just with UK companies coming here, but also for US companies seeking targets in the United Kingdom. Good afternoon Jacob, welcome to M&A Masters.
Jacob Whitish: Thank you so much, Patrick. Great to be here and thanks for having me on.
Patrick Stroth: And I promise today, Jacob, this will be a Brexit-free zone. And before we get into all the fun stuff for the Department for International Trade, let’s get a little context for our listeners here. Tell us what brought you to this point in your career.
Jacob Whitish: Sure. It’s been a little bit of a winding route, but in all of the kind of weird different paths that I’ve taken, it all somehow added up perfectly to get me exactly where I needed to be. After college I worked in the state of Washington for the state level government, so got used to what it was like to be in these massive behemoth bureaucracies that is national politics and state level politics.
And from there I saw a lot of friends that were jumping into the tech sector. They were having a great time with different startups. A lot of fun. And I was looking a little envious, decided that I wanted to go over and figure out what was going on on that side of the fence, so to speak. And so taught myself some different tech skills. Ended up as a kind of country lead for a Canadian startup that was trying to get into the US market.
So ran all of the US operations, did all of our marketing campaign, and effectively was kind of the in-country CEO. From there went to another small FinTech startup as the very first employee after the founder, handling everything on the business side. And then after a little time there, went out on my own. Started my own company doing marketing strategy and advertising. Ran that for a while. Ton of fun. Ran it entirely distributed online. I was able to travel around the world with my then girlfriend at the time, now fiancé.
And that was a lot of fun, but eventually was starting to get a little bit burned out on the just kind of endless cycle of finding more and more clients, doing everything myself, and wanted to find something little bit different, something more interesting. And just kind of stumbled upon this job with the Department for International Trade. And it was the right weird mix of background of government service, startups, self-employed, to be able to do my job here very well.
I work for a government, but at the end of the day I’m out there interacting with companies, founders, executives, all day long. So it’s kind of an interesting mix of both public and private sector.
Patrick Stroth: Well, when we think about international activity, cross-border M&A and so forth, we always initially think about it as it being instigated by a company A, usually a multinational or what could it be a multinational targeting company B. And it all stems from there.
It was interesting and refreshing to see that you’ve got a government controlled entity that is doing what they can to accelerate the process or assist there in domestic companies in that kind of expansion. That’s a great set of services that are available. Tell me about the mission for the Department for International Trade for the UK.
Jacob Whitish: Sure, absolutely. At the end of the day, my role is really to I guess primarily add economic value to the UK taxpayer. We’re entirely funded by taxpayers. We are a part of the actual government, so at the end of the day we have to be able to draw some line back to having provided value to the UK. Now, how we do that is a little bit more reform in terms of we can help companies expand internationally from the US to the UK, and thereby adding jobs into the UK. We can help UK companies grow into the US, and then therefore hopefully helping add more tax revenue back to the UK entity.
A lot of kind of playing matchmaker, introducing different people, doing some kind of upfront market research to help companies even understand if this is the right decision for them. One of the biggest things that I don’t ever want to see is a company that’s gung-ho on coming out here, spend all of the overall CAPEX and operational expenses and time, and just all of this energy to try and get into a new market, only to find out that it wasn’t the right market for them.
So hopefully upfront we can do a lot of things like helping out these companies just to figure out if this is even the right decision for them. And then if they decide it is, hopefully make that process a little bit easier through our networks, our connections, our just experience of watching companies do it over and over again.
Patrick Stroth: Almost like being a liaison. It’s an extension of the ambassadorship where they’re coming into an unfamiliar territory, you’ve got a presence here, and you can guide them and mentor them through the process that are unique to that geographic location.
Jacob Whitish: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, you could think of the ambassador as being the political side of what we do on the commercial side. And in fact the Department of International Trade operates out of several different consulates and offices all around the US under the purview of the ambassador. But then our kind of specific remit is the commercial side, whereas the actual consul’s general and the ambassador are a lot more about the political and policy side.
Patrick Stroth: And it’s interesting too because you’ve got a much more favorable or positive view of overseas expansion, where in America we keep thinking about it as expansion means, oh, we’re outsourcing jobs, we’re outsourcing activities that we should be keeping here. Conversely, you’re looking at, well, if we can expand internationally then our UK domicile businesses can grow, and that’s how it will benefit the home country or the headquartered company there in the UK, is through growth in revenues.
Jacob Whitish: Yeah, absolutely. We don’t see it as a win or lose scenario. There’s absolutely win-wins here. We can provide jobs for the home country, we can provide jobs in the new country that they’re expanding to. At the end of the day, we don’t care that much as to exactly what this line looks like from point A to point B, as long as somewhere along the way we can say, “Hey, we’ve helped out the UK taxpayers.”
Patrick Stroth: So then when you’re describing what you do with providing information and mentoring services and informational resource, so what specific services do you provide to UK companies looking to come here? They’re coming on over here, they look to you for assistance. Specifically, what can you do for them?
Jacob Whitish: Sure. I think I can also kind of give it a little bit bigger picture of an approach at the same time. So probing a little bit more context in my specific role, which is I specialize in all things financial services. So anything from a traditional bank asset manager, insurance, all the way up to these brand new cutting edge FinTech, InsureTech, RegTech, you name it. If it touches money or the compliance of money in some way, shape, or form that’s kind of my industry.
Geographically I represent the entire Western US, so the 11 Western states. And then I have several colleagues across the US who cover different geographic regions. Now within all of those different regions, each of us kind of have our own specialties of things that we’re particularly just good at as individuals. The kind of standard sort of things would be like providing access to reports on the cost of real estate, or the cost of talents, or even the availability of talent and how it might be distributed throughout a particular region.
So that would fall under that heading of helping companies figure out if it’s the right decision for them and where they should go. So a lot of times companies will come out, I’m located in San Francisco. Everybody wants to come out to San Francisco just because it’s the tech capital and people want to be out here and see the VC money and hopefully magic will happen.
But it’s not always the right decision for everyone. For some companies Denver, or Seattle, or Phoenix, or LA might be better choices, just depending on where they are as a company, what industry they’re in, and really the resources that they have available. It’s pretty darn expensive living out here. So not always is it the right decision for a company to come here. So that’s kind of the advice and sort of research portion.
In terms of just kind of like more softer sort of resources, I have my own personal network out here that I’ve built up. I’ve got different organizations that we’ve worked with to build out this community that we can help introduce these different founders and companies into to try and help make their transition a little bit softer. And then of course just a very extensive network of different service providers and experts that we’re able to connect people with for whatever their particular situation may be.
Maybe it’s immigration attorneys, maybe it’s someone helps them set up their US entity, or insurance, or and M&A specialist, private equity, VC. You name it, we probably have somebody in our network somewhere that will be a good fit for connecting up those people and hopefully making all that happen.
Patrick Stroth: So you’re not just providing services to startups or super huge company. You’re available for a variety of companies through whatever stage in their life cycle they’re in.
Jacob Whitish: Yes, absolutely. It goes the whole gamut, and those different services change a fair bit as you go across that different spectrum. So we’ve got people from maybe 5 or 10 just random folks in a small little one-room office. They’ve got one round of funding under their belts and they’re eager to get into the market, all the way up to some of the biggest household brand multinational names that anybody would have heard of.
At that earlier business stage, so the smaller companies all the way up to kind of the middle-sized companies or so, a lot of that tends to be more around that advice, resources, networks, things like that. That’s where it’s providing a lot more value to those companies. As companies get larger they have the financial resources, they have their own in-house specialists and experts. They don’t necessarily need us to tell them what the cost of a new developer is going to be in San Francisco versus Seattle.
At that stage what tends to be a lot more valuable is having a voice in policy discussions. So it’s not to say that we go and stick these people right in the room with the ministers back in London, though it has happened. But a lot of times we’ll bring experts out here or we’ll bring different members of the government out here to do kind of a tour of different businesses.
And they want to hear usually what are the current concerns, what are companies seeing, what are they liking, what are they not liking, what do they wish was different. And from having those different kind of open channels of communication, then they’re able to go back to the policy makers and the government officials. They’re able to then go back to London, and as they’re working on new policies or reviewing old policies, they’ve got these different connections to the larger institutions and have those kind of in-market points of view to pull from as they’re trying to determine what kinds of things are or aren’t important or what directions.
So right now actually is a great example where we have just in about two weeks’ time a senior trade policy official coming out from the East Coast to do a tour of the West Coast, just talk with different institutions and see what kinds of things would be important to them in a future US UK financial services trade agreement. Now, of course they’re not going to be making this agreement in the room. They’re not going to be pulling these people in and saying, “We promise that we’re going to do this thing for you.”
But they want those voices, and the companies like having their voice at that table also because these are massive decisions that are going to affect them pretty drastically. So having that opportunity is a really great resource that we’re able to provide a lot of these larger companies.
Patrick Stroth: That’s absolutely a channel that can’t be found elsewhere. So that’s one huge benefit. As I think about, you mentioned with the expensive of San Francisco particularly, but the Bay Area in general, I keep wondering why companies overseas would look to come to the US, just because it’s prohibitively expensive. Less of a concern with regard to culture or language. But just the cost of doing business here, I can imagine the regulatory is pretty steep compared to other places. But what drives the demand or drives UK companies to look to the United States for expansion?
Jacob Whitish: You kind of nailed part of it all already in the question. Just in terms of language and ease of doing business to a certain extent are translatable from, especially in this case, from the UK. But really from a lot of different countries around the world. If you don’t have to change the language that you’re working in, that’s already a big benefit.
On top of that, the US is a massive market. Most companies will eventually find their way to either doing business with someone in the US or full-on opening a new office or trying to get access into this market. It’s just such a great opportunity. And then likewise for US companies looking at the UK, business laws are very friendly, corporate tax rate is pretty darn low and falling. It’s one of the largest economies in total investments behind the US and China. So there’s just tons of great opportunities around the markets themselves.
But then on top of that, when you’re looking at especially UK company coming back to the US, access to capital is a massive driver. Most tech startups, I think, at least the ones that are going to be larger names eventually, always find their way to Silicon Valley or New York, or for some other sectors. Like life sciences going up to Boston, or the payments industry out to Atlanta. These companies will make their way out to the US to just try and get that growth capital to really fuel their overall growth as a company.
I think one of the kind of gaps in the market for the UK that’s also a great opportunity is that there is a pretty good amount of early stage capital around, but not as much later stage capital. In terms of like the CDE plus rounds, these massive rounds that take a lot more kind of institutional capital and knowledge to really be able to drive those sorts of deals.
There’s also a really good component, it ties into that in terms of talent. Tons and tons and tons of talent that have been through the entire life cycle of a company out here. They’ve gone from two folks in a room all the way up through IPO, exited, and started over again. The UK has a great tech scene and still growing. But they don’t have just as much of that sort of multigenerational founder and institutional knowledge of how do you go from this small company in one room all the way up to something like an IPO.
They have a great amount of talent that is kind of going up through mid-stage, and then going through different mergers, acquisitions, or other sorts of liquidity events or exit. Not as many that have taken it from that sort of mid cap to massive company. So, yeah, a lot of companies.
Patrick Stroth: The pool of … Yeah, I think the pool of serial entrepreneurs every year it gets deeper and deeper. And one thing that’s unique about being out here in Silicon Valley is that I keep seeing these people become enormously successful, enormously wealthy, and think to myself, “Well, they’re going to get their clean exit, which we try to do with the insuring their M&A transaction, and think they would ride off into the sunset. Buy an island, go shopping for yachts, and all that fun stuff.”
And what do they do? They get bored. They turn right around and open up another firm and start participating in that. And that’s been going on now for the past 20 plus years. And so, yeah, there is definitely that talent pool has gotten much, much deeper.
Jacob Whitish: Definitely. Definitely. So you get a lot of people that will bring their companies out here just to try and tap into those kinds of networks and resources that come along with all of that. They’re getting better. They’re starting to very slowly move in that direction. I’m seeing a lot more founders in the UK network go back and start to do that next generation of businesses. Not as mature as say West Coast US, but it’s getting there.
In the meantime, you’re still going to see a ton of these companies coming out here to the US for either that access to capital, access to talent, or just access to market overall.
Patrick Stroth: What about the talent on the entry level, and I’m thinking about this just from your opinion, slightly off topic. But if a US company were looking to expand into the UK, and there would be a need for entry level tech talent there, I’d imagine that talent pool in the UK is broadening and deepening as well.
Jacob Whitish: Oh, absolutely. It’s actually some of the best minds in their industries are coming out of the UK. Things like DeepMind and some of these great artificial intelligence and deep learning companies, they’re coming straight out of that Oxford, Cambridge areas, right out of the universities. Overall, the UK definitely has pretty much anything that you’re going to be looking for. If you want the financial talent, London has it, as well as just kind of a nice mix of a little bit of everything.
The Manchester Midlands area has some great kind of back-end, back-office talent. Scotland has the financial and asset management experience. Northern Ireland is starting to become this really interesting tech sort of little paradise. In fact, they’ve got some really great programs out there where they’ll … Actually, the government will go out to … Or I guess lack of government, sorry. Will go out to universities to work with them and create custom programs to train individuals specifically for companies, if a company is willing to put a large enough investment into their local economy.
And so there’s some really interesting little sub sectors. And you look at it, Wales, or you get this awesome hardware talent in the semiconductor space. And so there’s a little bit of everything all over. And you can find pretty much whatever talent you want somewhere within the UK.
Patrick Stroth: Well, on the US side we’ve got this huge market. It’s not only large, it’s wealthy. And it’s deeply wealthy, which attracts a lot of suitors here. But it can’t be all great. What are some of the challenges that companies face coming here? And don’t just list the challenges for me, but support that with what can you do to help companies overcome these challenges?
Jacob Whitish: Sure. I mean, I can kind of actually play a little bit off of that last question even and say that talent is a double-edged sword. Out here you have a ton of great talent, but it’s also really expensive and in very high demand. So for a smaller company coming in, especially if they’ve maybe only got a couple rounds of funding under their belts and not terribly deep pockets, might be shocked at what the total comp packages are for, especially like really hardcore development talent.
But really anybody out here in the Bay Area is going to be a lot more expensive than somewhere else. Which is kind of also then why a lot of times I’ll be working with these companies and kind of pushing back a little bit to say, “Is this the right place for you? Maybe you should look at Phoenix and go check out Arizona’s new FinTech sandbox and see what you can do with that. Or go up to Seattle and-
Patrick Stroth: Idaho-
Jacob Whitish: … find out what’s going on up there.”
Idaho. Yeah, there’s tons of great kind of second-tier cities that have lots of opportunities, lots of great talent. Maybe not quite Bay Area level talent, but still great talent. And even that’s changing. People are getting sick of living here in the Bay Area and they’re moving out. So those people are still looking for jobs, and they’re still great talent. So that’s definitely one of the bigger challenges.
Within the financial services sector specifically, I would say one of the biggest things is just the regulatory environment. It is absolutely insane for companies coming out here that are used to having one overarching regulatory regime for the entire country, and then they get out here to the US and see that there’s 50 different states, which are basically 50 different countries, even though it’s all one massive country.
And all of a sudden they just kind of get paralyzed and don’t know what to do. How do you handle 50 different regulatory regimes? And not to mention just the paperwork involved in all of those sort of applications and compliance measures that are required for all of that. So that’s definitely the number one thing that I hear from anyone within the financial industry, is just trying to figure out that sort of environment.
Now, on that side of things there’s all kinds of different opportunities like working with private equity groups to find things like reverse merger opportunities, or even just straight-out purchase opportunities to basically find a company in the US that is maybe not doing so hot financially but already has those licenses in place. So that’s a great opportunity for companies coming into the US to be able to, I won’t say circumvents the rules, because it’s not circumventing it. It’s all perfectly legal. But sort of accelerate the process of getting into market quickly.
There’s also different strategies like just saying target New York and California, go after the biggest economies, or find local partners that you can just partner up with on deals. All of these are different things that we would bring in a lot of the experts from our network to help identify these opportunities, or to just try and figure out what opportunities are available for a particular situation.
Patrick Stroth: Great. So you’ve got not only the network of service providers that you probably, just in addition to the service providers you’ve got the law firms, you’ve got other advisors. And then you’ve got relations with private equity firms and other organizations such as that.
Jacob Whitish: Absolutely, absolutely. If you are a service provider out there or any sort of firm that works with other companies, frankly, we want to have you in our network. We want to know who you are, what you’re doing, where you’re at, and what kinds of companies are you looking for. And we may or may not have a lot of referrals for you, but maybe we will.
That’s just kind of part of our game is knowing who’s out there, who’s doing what, how we can be of help, so that when a company approaches us or gets referred into us and they say, :Hey, I have a problem with X,” hopefully we’re going to know someone who can fix X. So that’s at the end of the day the biggest value that we can provide.
Patrick Stroth: Yeah. I mean, the analogy I have with that and the importance of having a good network like that and the value you add there, it’s no simpler analogy than if you were to leave your home or your work and move across the state or to another country. You just want to find somebody who says, “Well, where’s a good pizza place? Where do I go shopping, and where can I get my hair done?
Jacob Whitish: Yeah. Exactly
Patrick Stroth: And they’re really mundane things, but everybody needs them. So I think that’s a great source. And you’re a trusted advisor in this because your objective is to help out the taxpayers and add value for the UK companies. And so you’re a real credible resource because you’re looking out for their best interests.
The idea on the reverse mergers is real interesting, just because it’s nothing more than a workaround. But it’s also, if you’ve got owners and founders or investors that have a company that is maybe not doing well financially, they can leverage an asset that they didn’t realize they had, which are their licenses, that maybe they did not have as great value in them. Now suddenly there’s some great added value in the licenses and so forth to facilitate a reverse merger.
So with that in mind, who’s an ideal candidate for UK companies to partner with? On the reverse merger in that scope?
Jacob Whitish: You know, it really depends a lot on the company that is … So like the UK side company that’s coming in and what sort of services that they’re doing. It wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense for an insurance company to try and partner up with a bank because they’re not going to have the same licenses. So a lot of times it’s going to be kind of the smaller to midsize regional institutions. Perhaps they’ve been around for a while and maybe it’s a generational shift sort of thing.
There’s this great opportunity right now where there’s this massive shift from one generation to the next of assets and businesses. And sometimes the younger generations don’t necessarily want to step into the family business. So you have this older generation of maybe the founder who they want some liquidity to be able to go off and fund their retirement, and they just don’t really want to operate it anymore as the day-to-day person.
So maybe this is a great opportunity for a company to come in and partner with them, reverse merger with them. All kinds of different creative arrangements that you could find. But in the end of the day, then you have this UK company coming in being able to relatively easily get access to these licenses. Perhaps even to built-in clients. And then for the merging company, then they have a liquidity event. They have the ability to, maybe if it’s this kind of generational issue, walk away to a nicely funded retirement and not have to worry about it anymore.
Or there’s a lot of kind of fun, creative ways that companies can approach this and find different partners that maybe they wouldn’t have even expected. Maybe it’s a card issuer looking to partner up with a small regional bank and be able to cross promote each other’s products into each other’s clients. The opportunities are really just very wide open.
Patrick Stroth: I was thinking just that the small regional banks as being one of those ideas or candidates out there, because there are fewer and fewer of those out here. But they don’t want to get rolled up by the major banks. They’d prefer to have something else happen. But what’s usually the situation is one regional bank is acquiring another regional bank.
So I think that would be an ideal opportunity for a UK-based financial institution who wants to get a foothold where they don’t have to be in New York, where they can be in a couple of other regions. I think that would be an ideal place, particularly in the South, and in some parts of California.
The other idea I was just saying off the top of my head, accounting firms.
Jacob Whitish: Accounting firms, wealth management, anything that has some sort of licensure or governmental oversight, great opportunities.
Patrick Stroth: Okay. I can see that both in the insurance agency and brokerage business and in the accounting space you have a lot of independent small regional organizations. They are going through this very specific generational change, and you’re not having the next generation coming in, stepping in in the shoes of the predecessor. So those opportunities are going to be around for the next several years. What trends do you see in UK expansion to the US going forward?
Jacob Whitish: You know, kind of overall, I’ve seen companies coming out a lot earlier in their life cycle. Used to be waiting a little bit longer, getting a little bit more mature in their home market. More and more it’s been a lot of companies coming out earlier and earlier wanting to not quite necessarily shun their own market, but they want a piece of the US pie earlier and earlier in their life cycles.
So a lot of times they’ll be coming out, maybe even too early at times. And I’ve had that conversation with companies before of saying, “Do you really think that right now is the right opportunity for you to come out?” Of course earlier and earlier for funding, as the overall funding climate is changing. And I know we said we weren’t going to go there, but I think this fall the political situation in the UK is going to probably decide a lot of what the future direction of those different trends are going to be looking like.
Patrick Stroth: Is there also just a byproduct, not to pump you guys up too much with you guys, but I mean is there a growing awareness of the services that you’re providing in the Department for International Trade, where your resources are clearly providing some benefits. And there’s got to be more awareness. So if you’ve got somebody who’s going to help you out, I mean that could probably speed up the decision process too.
Jacob Whitish: I mean, that would definitely be … I wish I could say that. I’m not sure what the kind of overall volumes are. But based on just kind of our own internal metrics, there’s definitely been a growth in the number of companies that have started to figure out that we’re out here and we exist. I know we’ve, as the Department for International Trade specifically, only been around for a few years. There have been some other incarnations in the past. But as far a name recognition goes, it’s definitely a growing trend. But I think we’re on the right track.
We’ve got some really great leadership in place that’s not tied to politics, so they’re going to be around for a little while. And it’s definitely a great resource. I wish that more companies knew that we were out here. Almost everything that we do is absolutely free. And we are all sworn to secrecy. We take actual, have to get our actual security clearances and everything to be here, and everything that we do is considered commercially confidential.
So unless the company tells us that we can talk about them publicly, or they have said something publicly themselves, we keep tight-lipped on it, everybody’s plans.
Patrick Stroth: Well, I’m new to the knowing about what the Department for International Trade does, and it’s a shame that you are one of the best kept secrets out there in the UK government. And the more we can advocate for you, and the more people learn about the services you have, both here and abroad, I think the better it’s going to be for a lot of organizations and a lot of people. Because one of the thing is just really unique and the reason why Silicon Valley is the epicenter for all this great tech innovation and growth and so forth, is unlike generations past where in order to succeed you had to literally do it yourself. If you couldn’t steal it from somebody else, you did it yourself, and you grew bigger and bigger and you did it on your own for yourself. And you wouldn’t because of competitive reasons or envy or fear, you wouldn’t share the secret sauce with anybody else.
That’s how what happens here. This is probably one of the most a collaborative environments out here where there are always people looking to provide some kind of support, some kind of assistance, mentorship, whatever. Sometimes for obvious profit motives, others for altruistic because they have the vision that you know the rising tide lifts all boats.
So from accelerators, to incubators, to mentors, to angels, sources of funding and everything. There are so many resources out here getting founders from zero to one, and then from one to two, and then from two to Google. You know, this is just another great resource out there, and it’s been an absolute pleasure learning about this. And Jacob, if there are people out here that would like to just benefit from all the things you have, how can they get ahold of you?
Jacob Whitish: Sure. I am on LinkedIn is probably the easiest place to find me under my name, Jacob Whitish. W-H-I-T-I-S-H. Likewise anybody can feel free to email me directly at jacob.whitish@mobile.trade.gov.uk. You can probably put that in the show notes or something.
Patrick Stroth: We’ll make sure we have that whole mouthful in the show notes and so forth. And I would also say, unlike me from time to time, I may not be on my LinkedIn on a daily basis. Jacob is on it hourly. So if you put a connect request out there you’re going to get a response almost in real time. So I can personally vouch for that. Jacob, thank you. It’s been a pleasure speaking with you and we will speak again.
Jacob Whitish: Absolutely. Thank you so much, Patrick.