So Patrick, tell me about your vision.
Well, my vision is to continue in entrepreneurship.
I started a long time ago as a kid when I was looking at being, I was a little bit bored
in school and I was saying to the teacher, you know, how do I get out and start a business?
And I was like eight or nine years old.
And he looked at me and he said, why?
And I said, like, can we not just cram this like school into four hours and then we can
go and start a business?
So my vision started for entrepreneurship a long, long, long time ago.
But I want to make myself sound old now, but it was a good few years ago to get into that.
And my vision is to continue entrepreneurship.
And ultimately, I'd love to contribute or create a situation where people see entrepreneurship
as a profession, not just a side hustle.
So a doctor, scientist, engineer, entrepreneur.
So my vision is to make that a profession, recognize standalone profession.
And I hope to do that very soon because I want to start entrepreneurship academies to
let people be absorbed into the world of entrepreneurship and become an entrepreneur.
That vision.
I want to say it's a very tough path you don't want to go down on.
So tell me about where, how did you all get to, you said you were, sorry, excuse me.
You were very young and you wanted to go build a business.
So what was that like?
What?
Tell me more about that story.
Yeah, I was around business at home because my parents had a small business and we would
sit around our dinner table in the evening and talk about entrepreneur, about business
and the wins, the losses, the challenges.
And from a very young age, like from six years old up, I was listening to this every day
and I was just absorbed in it.
When I got to 14 years old, my parents said, we're going to get a food van and we're going
to, you're going to have, you guys are on, myself and my brothers and sisters, and they
said, you're on your school holidays.
You can help out if you want.
You know, so I jumped into that and I was selling burgers and fries for two months in
the summer.
And I love the idea of taking something and making, taking essentially just an ingredient
or ingredients and making them into a product and a profit.
And also dealing with people, you know, kind of engaging with people and getting the satisfaction
of concluding, concluding the exercise of going from nothing to something.
I think that's probably the headline over all of my entrepreneurship journey so far.
Taking an idea just purely as a seed and convert it into something valuable.
So where are you currently at with your vision?
I've kind of from an executive perspective, I've taken the foot off the gas for the last
couple of years.
I've licensed out my technologies.
So that gives me time to look at other things.
And the other things that I've looked at and that I'm looking at are about a year and a
half ago, I started writing for the first time and I wrote a business book for startups
and entrepreneurs, a kind of a guide book.
And that went well and it's like a pocket manual for entrepreneurs.
And then about a year ago, I said, okay, I remember being in school as a kid and thinking
I'd love to start a business and I was like eight or nine years old.
And I said, if I could take my experience now and weave it into a children's story style
approach to encourage the youngest of our society, i.e. kids in school, to think problem
solving, think creatively and to think on, you know, it's kind of an entrepreneurship
focus, but it's in the problem solving thought pattern.
So I've just launched my second children's book, which is focused on creativity, creative
thinking, energy around ideas, creating ideas and turning them into reality.
That's fascinating.
Thank you for sharing that, Patrick.
What would you say that is your why of what you do?
The way is to have the greatest effect possible while I'm in this lifetime, you know, and
it's not just about the financial gain, it's about the achievement factor.
You know, we're here for the old, the thing is we're here for a good time, not for a long
time or something like those words, you know, so we just need to make an impact while we
are on this planet, while we are in this lifetime.
And we get opportunities that sometimes we overlook because life takes over.
But if we grasp the opportunities and if we have the ability and the vision and the help
and support and the advice and mentoring to make those opportunities into reality, that
can be a very rewarding lifestyle and it can be a very rewarding life.
So my way is really about utilizing and using time to achieve in order to be happy and to
create a happiness and a happiness environment or a happy environment for our loved ones
and the people around us.
You mentioned earlier entrepreneurship and I think you see it as the path to happiness
for most people if they're able to succeed.
What is a fine line between self-employed or a glorified self-employed CEO and an entrepreneur?
What do you think about that?
That's a great question in the sense that I've seen the title entrepreneur slash CEO.
Sometimes they're different people, you know, or you can see founder, CEO, sometimes they're
very different people because the CEO is very much operational, you know, get the job done,
execute the plan.
A founder and an entrepreneur is this typically the creative type who wants to just create
an idea and has the massive energy and drive.
I'm not saying CEOs don't have that, but you rarely find that a founder is a good CEO.
We each have our roles and by doing that and by taking that approach, it gives a more open
view on the plan.
When I look at a business or a new idea, I kind of look at it and say, so what, who do
I need to make this happen?
If I look at it and say this business is outside my comfort zone, so I don't know the operational
factors, but I do know what I need to do to make it happen, I'll hire a CEO, you know,
or I'll bring on a CEO as a co-founder or a partner.
So all that.
Patrick, so your phone is buzzing and it's disturbing with the mic, I couldn't hear half
the things you were saying.
Yeah, that's a pity.
Okay, let me just turn that off.
Okay, do you want to ask me the question again?
Yeah, that's awesome.
So Patrick, there's a fine line between entrepreneurship and being self-employed.
What are your thoughts on that?
Yeah, the entrepreneur part and the CEO or self-employed part are sometimes different
baskets and different people.
You know, being an entrepreneur is very multifaceted.
You know, you have multiple things going on at any one time.
The CEO has the same function, but the CEO is very operational focused, execute the plan,
achieve the results, get the sales, get the profits, etc.
Build a team.
I find that the entrepreneur slash founder are sometimes different people.
Actually, in many cases, different people to the operational CEO.
In my situation, if I look at a business and if I don't know enough about the business
on the operational front, then I need a partner or I need somebody to come in as a co-founder.
I need to hire a CEO who will do a much better execution operation job than I could have
or would have.
So different hats for different people.
I think in the startup world, sometimes we confuse founder and CEO as being melded into
one role.
Sometimes they're in probably, I would say, my experiences in seven out of 10 cases, the
founder and CEO are different people.
Wow.
That insight you just gave us.
I think everyone needs to hear that.
Too many of us miss assume in a way that, oh, just because I started a company, I'll
be a great CEO.
And that controlling factor that we have is in a way a detriment to our growth where we
get in our own way of bigger success.
And in the earlier days of any entrepreneurship journey, it's hard because you're wearing
multiple hats at the same time and trying to make the best decisions for your business.
But in the reality, in the future, the goal is to be away from those roles, to get your
time back and make your business performance without you, that your vision is surviving,
your entrepreneurship journey is going.
But you don't have to be part of it, essentially.
You can, if you want to be, you can take the role that you love.
But that will be the goal.
So thank you for sharing that, Patrick.
Pleasure.
I would also say that the founder or the entrepreneurial creative engine at the beginning, if they
assume that they are the CEO, then that can be detrimental to the business because they
could be in a continuous loop of innovation, idea generation and creativity and forget
about the operational part, which is achieving sales and profits in the business.
So being able to segregate and allocate the role properly.
Now, sometimes, as I said, probably three out of 10 cases in my experience, the founder
and CEO are the same person.
And that's great.
If you can be that person, looking for you and have, you know, that's a happy place to
be.
But I think that analysis at least needs to take place at the beginning.
What skills does each person have and matching those skills?
Because in my businesses, I've done three startups myself.
And when I would allocate, I'd look at it critically from the outside at the beginning.
I try and take myself away from the kind of emotional core of the business and look at
and say, well, who do I need and what type of people and what type of skills do I need
to match my skill set to make this happen?
And when you put that people puzzle together, that should work like a very smooth machine
with maximum impact.
Yeah, thank you for saying that, Patrick.
That's very well said.
Thank you.
So how did you get started on all this on your journey about all this?
And what was your first experience like having your own company?
And what lessons did you learn?
I started first when I was working in a mainstream job in a factory back in Northern Ireland,
where I was born and raised.
And I was in the job for about a month and I was saying, OK, this is a pretty much ABC
style job.
I was working a machine and it was nothing magical.
I was like a young guy and I was making my weekly income.
And then I thought, OK, I was sitting one Saturday and I was looking at ways to buy
a car.
And I said, I need to buy a car.
And then I was flicking through.
This is when search engines really didn't, they were just about to hit the frontier,
hit the front line.
But for example, it was just about a year before Google started.
So I was looking at all of these newspapers, car magazines, and I'm saying, this is hard
work.
I'm sitting here for two hours trying to decipher how I buy this.
So I thought, if I could take all of this data, make it available in a search and find
program, I called it at the time.
And I asked a friend of mine who was studying computer science, I said, can you take all
of this data?
And if I punch in, you know, can be any brand Ford, Chevrolet, whatever, Blue, and my budget
is five thousand dollars, ten thousand dollars, whatever it is.
And I get a short list and he said, that's really innovative move.
I can write it.
I can write you a program.
Long story short, I started AutoLink and AutoLink went on for about a year.
I built it from a bedroom.
You know, we put in system, we put in I went out and I sold the system, got everything
started.
It went really, really well.
And the lesson that I took at the end of AutoLink was I had an option.
I had a choice to make.
I was working by day as a product manager.
So that was my let's call it nine to five in two or three hours between that and college
in the evening.
I was going around selling AutoLink.
So I had like from six a.m., seven a.m. until eleven o'clock at night days for a year.
And I said, man, I got to give up one.
So what am I going to give up?
And I said, I need my education because I was delayed and going back into college and
I was working, I was studying by night.
I was studying marketing, law, business and so on.
And then I was working by day and I said, that's my kind of bread and butter income.
So I don't really take the chance on that.
So I gave up AutoLink.
I made nice money for a year when I was building it.
And then a year later, Google came out.
So I should have kept AutoLink.
And I probably would be I probably would have a lot more zeros at the end of my bank balance
right now if I had kept AutoLink.
But it's it's a decision that I made and we make decisions in life.
I don't ever regret decisions like that.
I look at them and say, I made that decision then.
I firmly believe that in the next couple of years, something will come that will replicate
that opportunity or mirror that opportunity or be like that opportunity.
And I'll probably take it.
So it's a question of decisions at certain times in your life.
You come to crossroads.
My my analysis on that is when you come to your crossroads in life, you go forward, you
go left or you go right.
You never go back.
You go one of the three directions.
And and usually I try to go forward if I can.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is going to get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show.
And thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.