Ep 149 – David Wain-Heapy, Prodigi – Remote-Ready Agencies Win: Systems Before Scale
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Featuring: David Wain-Heapy, Prodigi
In episode 149, I sit down with David Wain-Heapy, founder of Prodigy, a company that helps agencies and digital businesses build flexible, scalable remote teams through global talent sourcing.
David spent 14 years building and running a Magento-focused e-commerce agency out of central London before selling it to Brave Bison PLC. We talk through what that exit process actually looked like, why the right acquirer matters as much as the right offer, and how building systems independent of the founders made the transition possible.
From there, we get into the real substance of what David does now: helping agencies shift from an outsourcing mindset to an offshore hiring mindset. There's a difference, and it matters. Agency owners will come away with a clearer framework for when and how to integrate global talent, how to think about time zones, which roles translate well offshore, and what AI is actually doing — and not yet doing — to development teams in agencies right now.
Key Bytes
• Outsourcing and offshore hiring are not the same thing — one is a handoff, the other is a hire.
• The fix for a failed first attempt wasn't better talent, it was better integration — sprints, tools, and cadence.
• Building a business that runs independently of you isn't just good leadership, it's what makes you acquirable.
• The right acquirer matters as much as the right offer — alignment on team and culture is what made a six-month handoff possible.
• East Coast agencies fit well with Eastern European talent; West Coast agencies are better served by South and Central America.
• AI handles contained tasks well, but it still can't hold the context of an enterprise-scale project.
• The people who will thrive in an AI-augmented world are the ones who bring real creativity — the architects and problem-solvers, not just the executors.Chapters
00:00 Why this conversation matters for agency owners right now
01:45 David's 14-year agency journey and building in a competitive London market
05:10 The first attempt at offshore talent and why it failed
08:30 Selling to Brave Bison: what the exit process actually looked like
13:15 Choosing the right acquirer and making a clean handoff
17:00 Outsourcing vs. offshore hiring: why the mindset shift changes everything
21:30 How to think about time zones when sourcing global talent
24:45 What systems agencies need before hiring offshore
28:00 Where AI is actually helping agency dev teams right now
33:20 Which roles work well offshore and which don't
37:50 Rapid fire: surfing in Bristol, letting go of control, and a risky bet that paid off
David Wain-Heapy is an experienced founder currently focused on building remote teams for digital businesses with Prodigi.
Having sold my digital agency to Brave Bison PLC, I am now working to provide a flexible and scalable solution that enables companies to take control of hiring by looking at a global talent pool.
I have many years experience building globally distributed teams of digital professionals and leading them to help great businesses win in the race for attention and accelerate their digital growth.
Contact David on LinkedIn or the Prodigi website.
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Steve Guberman (00:02.318)
Welcome to Agency Bites. I'm your host, Steve Guberman from Agency Outsite, where I help agency owners build the business of their dreams. This week on Agency Bites, I'm joined by David Wayne Hebe. David's a founder who's been deep in the agency and digital world for years. He's built and sold his digital agency to Brave Bison PLC, and today he's focused on helping agencies and digital businesses solve one of their biggest challenges, building great teams without being limited by geography.
He's a founder of Prodigy where he helps companies tap into global talent pool to build flexible, scalable remote teams that actually work. David has spent years leading distributed teams and helping ambitious businesses grow in an increasingly noisy competitive digital landscape. Dave, great to have you on the show today.
David Wain-Heapy (00:48.018)
Hi Steve, thanks for having me.
Steve Guberman (00:50.252)
Yeah, absolutely. let's start, man. Talk about kind of your, your character arc of running your agency and ultimately exiting. Cause that's super exciting and inspiring. And I think, you know, we, got a lot to talk about there.
David Wain-Heapy (01:03.977)
Yeah, thank you. So myself, me and my business partner, we set up our agency, which we ran for about 14 years. The agency, was an e-commerce agency. So we did big e-commerce builds on a platform that was then known as Magento. Now it's known as Adobe Commerce. So we started our agency in central London and it was incredibly competitive for talent.
it was expensive, even if you could afford the rates, you were competing with a lot of other bigger, bigger agencies to get them. So pretty early on into our agency journey, we realized we've got a problem. If we want to grow, if we want to survive, we need to find, another way of attracting high quality talent. So we started looking offshore. first time we tried it, we, didn't go as well. I think our first big mistake was we viewed it as.
we, without realizing it, we viewed it as outsourcing rather than offshore hiring. So we thought, right, we found this developer, we're gonna give them a project. We'll check in a little bit, but ultimately we'll expect them to come back in three months with the finished product and it's gonna be great and everyone's gonna be happy. And it didn't work out like that at all because we didn't have them plugged into our system. We didn't have them plugged into our sprints. They hadn't broken down the task, they hadn't estimated things.
It was like we had our internal function, which was working well. And then we just took this external person and didn't incorporate them in any of it. So it failed horribly. but what we did learn then we realized is that there there's a huge talent pool out there. There was really good people out there, but we need to grow up a little bit about how we engage with these offshore people. need to treat them the same way as if they're part of the business, not, not outsourced. So.
Quickly we pivoted our thinking and then we were able to actually start hiring people, incorporating them into our systems, incorporating them into the sprints and delivering work well and effectively. And that really helped us grow because all of a sudden we're winning new work, but instead of just looking at our postcode or neighboring postcode to finding people, we're looking at...
David Wain-Heapy (03:29.769)
We were looking across like 15 different countries to find the talent. And that worked really well. we, yeah, we run that agency for 14 years and then we eventually sold about three and a half years ago to Brave Bison.
Steve Guberman (03:45.994)
So we dig into the offshore resourcing, the mindset, the systems, all the things you had to shift to make that successful. I want to dig into kind of what was the driving force behind the, the exit for you and your partner. Uh, what was that process like for you guys? Was that, you know, something you had?
planned for or was that like somebody knocked on your door and you were like, yeah, this is a good time.
David Wain-Heapy (04:06.97)
I think, mean, everyone who sets up an agency or even a business, there's always the thought of, I'd love to be able to sell it one day. But I mean, in terms of planning for it, I think the best way for planning for it is to try and build a good business. The more positive things you do that impact the successful growth of the business makes it more likely that one day there might be someone that's actually interested in acquiring you.
So, you know, looking at how you can make your project delivery really strong, make your marketing, you know, really effective, all of these different verticals, how can you get them working really well and also independently of you. And by the way, we didn't get everything independently of us. Thankfully we were able to, from the project delivery side and the marketing side, but from a sales side, was still very much mainly Bashir, my business partner was kind of leading on that.
but actually the right kind of acquirer. In our case, they already had a sales function, so we were able to hand over the business and the project delivery was able to run on its own and then they have a sales team that can fit. essentially, reached a probably a couple of years before we sold, when we realized we have this business within a business, which is Prodigy, we thought, well, we've really solved this problem for us and it's going to be a problem for other agencies and other businesses as well.
So we set up Prodigy in January, 2020, and then obviously COVID happened. But what actually that meant for us was that because we were doing e-commerce projects, we got incredibly busy because e-commerce just absolutely exploded then. But after a couple of years, when the dust settled a little bit on that, Bashir and I had been running the agency for a long time. felt that we'd always felt that we'd like to exit the business, but we felt this was a really good time because
we'd be doing it for a while, but also that Prodigy we had a bigger opportunity for more longevity and potentially bigger scaling. So we went to market, we found an &A partner who helped us navigate the whole process. And then that process actually only took 10 weeks from start to finish, which was remarkably fast. And then it enabled us to focus more on Prodigy moving forward.
Steve Guberman (06:31.817)
You and Bashir, that is your partner's name, yeah? Bashir? Did you guys stick around after the exit for any sort of transition or earn out or was it, here's the agency we're out?
David Wain-Heapy (06:34.587)
Yeah. No, no, I mean, it wasn't, I mean, you've got to, we obviously wanted the thing to succeed in new hands. but part of our sort of part of the process was that we, we want to be able to go off and do our next venture, but we obviously want to make sure that we're here long enough for a smooth transition. We want to make sure that the talent stick around and the clients and the
and the partners. So those are the kind of the three focuses. So we were there for six months to kind of intense at the start and then gradually reducing that, reducing our input. But it was, it was a really successful process that we were able to just smooth, smooth that hand over and slowly walk away. But part of that was selecting the right acquirer. We felt as much as you can in these things, we felt that they would be a good fit. They were much bigger than us. are bigger clients.
And there was a gap in their offering when it came to Magento and Adobe commerce. So for the team standpoint, it's a, it's a really good opportunity to level up in their career. and yeah, so we thought it would be somewhere where, where they'd be able to flourish, but equally where they, they aren't going to require us to hang around for another three years to make it a success.
Steve Guberman (07:54.852)
I love that. there's so many different reasons why acquisitions happen, but truly successful integration start with the right partnerships. And sounds like there was a really good alignment on your part and the acquiring agency's part.
on what that plugin was going to look like and what your transition out. So you're not tied to it for years afterwards. And so, you know, building that really well run agency, like you talked about upfront also ensures that when it is time to exit, like there's a smooth process integration, there's a smooth transfer of clients and team and talent and all that. So it sounds like it was a winner all around.
David Wain-Heapy (08:28.153)
Definitely. I think it, yeah, I think it just comes down to personal preference and what you want as well. Cause I've also, I've come across people that have sold their agencies and they've been brought into a larger group and they're still there.
because they, for them, they were able to take a bit of money off the table, but then also be part of this bigger thing with potentially bigger payoff in the future, but also with something to fill their time. mean, you you sell your business and then what are you going to do next if you don't have a plan B? Because if you've made enough money, they don't have to work again. You could still get quite bored and unfulfilled with your time, or if you haven't, then you might need to, you might need to carry on working, but
Either way, I think it's really important. Like we were lucky that we just had this other business that we didn't even think about like, well, making sure we've got something else to do because we, we did have it. but in some cases there'll be people though. And again, I've met them as well. They've sold the business. They didn't have another plan. They were out of the, acquisition quite quickly. And then they go through this period of, well, I don't know what to do now. Yeah.
Steve Guberman (09:34.254)
Get a standing around staring at the walls like i don't know what to do yeah i was fortunate that i stuck around with my my exit was to your now and i stuck around for another three years like we were just doing good work i enjoyed it was lucrative for all of us. I don't know that i would have known what to do if i didn't stick around like yeah i probably would just start the walls also like sure there's enough fishing and snowboarding to do but only so much of that you can do.
David Wain-Heapy (09:59.113)
.
Steve Guberman (10:02.094)
so yeah, you guys had built this venture. knew this was the parallel path you wanted to go in. And so transition out of that six month integration, all efforts and focus was on building out prodigy and taking that to market and making that successful. love when agencies find a need in the market and they build a thing, whether it's software, you know, look at base camp and 20 years ago, they built that, you know, that kind of thing, that story for you guys, it wasn't.
David Wain-Heapy (10:21.033)
Yeah.
Steve Guberman (10:31.79)
A platform, was more of a service that you saw a need for based on your own needs. So you talked about that, that first time that you did that, the thing, the learnings that you pulled from the first time you did the offshore integration. And one thing that you said that really jumped out to me was your mindset needed to shift on how you saw offshore talent integrating with, with your team. I think that's a big, I don't know if it's as much of like a stigma or an issue as it used to be, you know, five, 10 years ago.
But are you still seeing agencies that you're talking to and telling them about the benefits of offshore talent that there's this kind of mindset blockage that they have?
David Wain-Heapy (11:11.003)
Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. There's definitely less of a stigma in general than there was people are people are really open to it. But there's often a people still even just using the term they they talk about it being outsourcing. And lots of them still talk about it being outsourcing. And we explained to them this is not this isn't outsourcing. outsourcing is going to another business which could be offshore, it could be domestic, and your wholesale giving them your your inputs.
and telling them to come back with the output and you don't get involved. That is very much in our view, kicking the can down the road because the same issues that you have in an agency of just balancing that supply and demand. And typically you have that pyramid structure where you have your one or two absolute brilliant people at the top and then your mid levels and then your juniors below.
And generally you've got tons of juniors and not enough of the seniors to do the work. So you've got this balancing act. So if you just take your projects and go to another agency and say, can you deliver this for me? They're going to have the same problem. Whereas offshore hiring is just hiring someone. They just happen to be in a different country, but they they're plugged into you. They're plugged into your system. They're part of the business.
and you've got their time dedicated to the work. It could be fractional. In cases, we have clients where they'll take on someone for maybe 20 hours a week or even more random than that, but they know that it's that person that is engaging with them that they're delivering the work. So they're getting that continuity and they're very much in the business. They're not outside of it, even if they are physically.
Steve Guberman (12:45.859)
Are you guys training the talent that you're pulling into kind of align with agencies or and vetting them or like what's the talent development process on your end?
David Wain-Heapy (12:58.247)
So it's more about how we source the talent. we have this massive network that we had from our agency days and that's really been the foundation of it. And obviously that's grown in recent years. But it's down to our resources, making sure what we do is matchmaking. We have to be really, really good at it. We do quite a simple thing, but we have to do that simple thing really well. And it's for both parties, it's for the talent as much as it's for the client.
If you go, if you misrepresent either of them, then you're not going to have that long-term fruitful relationship. So if we're dealing with an agency client and they specify nine times out of 10, they want people, they want talent that have got agency experience. So you could come across really good people that say, I don't know, you want a senior product designer, but they've only ever worked directly embedded in the client side and you can.
try and talk them into going like, yeah, you should go and work with an agency. But you might even talk the client into taking them. But that relationship has got a bigger chance of failure because as you well know, agency life is quite different to working client side. So, you know, can, there's lots of real fundamental mistakes that we could make, but ultimately we like to make the pleasure we get from the making these successful.
connections is great because you're just making people happy. The workers are super happy that they're getting to work on the kinds of projects and the kind of businesses they want. And then the agency clients are super happy because they're getting good people to deliver the work. So yeah, it's very much about making sure you're representing the two people. We do work with direct client as well. So, you know, we will have a client that is a direct brand, direct digital product company, whatever it is. And in that case, equally, they probably don't
hate people that are used to working in agencies unless they've reached the point of burnout, if it's the ones that like the variety, they like the pace, we're not going to try and push them into the client side because again, it's a very different way of working.
Steve Guberman (15:02.144)
So the mindset is everything. What countries are you finding like better success than other countries or does it vary based on what the delivery is like? whatever Argentina deliver better PMs, but Brazil delivers or Philippines delivers better programmers or like do you find different kind of nuances like that?
David Wain-Heapy (15:21.689)
Not really, no. We find that there's just really quality talent is out there across the board. It's more just down to population. You get countries with smaller populations, there's going to be a smaller pool of talent. Bigger populations, there's a bigger pool of talent. ultimately, don't, there isn't like, we wouldn't rank countries by quality because the quality we're finding is equal is across the board, certainly the countries that we source from.
Steve Guberman (15:49.846)
So what are some of those criteria that agencies should consider? If it is geography, how do they consider that? If it's not geography, what are some of other things that they should consider in how to align with offshore talent?
David Wain-Heapy (16:03.163)
Yeah, well, certainly with I mean, because obviously your audience is predominantly the states. So we work with quite a lot of businesses over in the US as well. We find that anyone on the East Coast, sort of up to maybe Central, they can be provided for very well with Eastern Europe talent.
So there's, there's normally there's a good crossover in time zone. So they're available there for meetings and what have you, but they get the benefit of effectively a longer working day. So by the time the U S come in the next day, there's a load of stuff that's already.
happened from the day before. But obviously, as soon as you move over to the West Coast, that time zone is quite further apart. So then you're better off looking more at South and Central America. But ultimately, it depends what the role is. If it's a role where you really feel like you're not going to need to speak to them.
more than maybe like a once a day stand up or whatever, then time zone is less important. But if it's something where you feel it's going to be a little bit more communication intensive, potentially dealing with clients as well, then you want to probably narrow those windows a little bit.
Steve Guberman (17:14.216)
Yeah, what about you know things that you guys learned at your agency as far as systems that an agency needs to have in place before they expand into offshore town verse like nearshore or like in their own town or you know, whatever like that
David Wain-Heapy (17:29.681)
Yeah, well, I would say obviously post COVID now, I mean, every agency has an element of remote like baked into their business.
And I think really it comes down to if you've got remote workers in your business, even if they're within the same town, then you can take remote workers like from wherever, obviously not withstanding time zone points that we just spoke about. It's more important that you've got those systems in place to be able to deliver work, you know, a good project management system, a good project delivery methodology. You if you're a dev house, you're working in sprints, even if you're
more of a digital marketing or an SEO or a paid search business, you still need a methodology for tracking and delivering work and that needs to be digital. So as long as you've got those things in place, you've got a cadence to how you...
scope out work, how you get more opportunities from clients, how you estimate for tasks, how you deliver that work, then you can plug in people, doesn't matter whether they're in Macedonia or Massachusetts, they should be able to all sing from the same hymn sheet.
Steve Guberman (18:34.99)
Interesting. What are you thinking about how AI is impacting workforce and how, know, so the trend was, all right, we're all in house, COVID hits, so much of the workforce is now either remote or even outsourced. I think outsourcing has been a model, but now AI is impacting.
Everything like how are you seeing that play in for the talent development that you guys are doing?
David Wain-Heapy (19:05.621)
Yeah, that's really interesting. I think there's a couple of things. So there's certainly opportunities. We've got more clients that are coming to us for AI.
experts for want of a better word, who can come and clean up some of their back office stuff, setting up a combinations of automations with AI integration for, you know, client onboarding processes or a whole host of just like seemingly non-exciting tasks that will save them like hours and hours and hours of time. And we've got some really good people that can come in and do that kind of stuff. But then equally they want, you know, if it's development, they want
developers that have experience working on AI LLM based projects. But the flip side, we've actually just completed the report that we're to be putting out in a month or so where we've interviewed dozens of agencies about how they're actually using AI in delivering client work. And the reality is seemingly quite different from the hype because the reason we wanted to do it is because we were like, well, look.
We get, I get about 10 AI newsletters a day where it's talking about how all these huge corporations are, second developers using AI to generate code and blah, blah. So we were like, well, what's, what's the reality in the, in the agency world is quite different. Most agencies that we spoke to for the report, they are using it in certain respects. So apparently for SQL, it's amazing because SQL so old hasn't changed a lot. It's really straightforward. It's great. But for deploying.
Steve Guberman (20:21.158)
Yep.
David Wain-Heapy (20:36.547)
large scale code on large, huge scale projects, it's just not, it's not there yet at all, apparently, because it doesn't have the context. If you feed it in this one little function to do it, it can't store the context of a whole enterprise level project in its memory and it just doesn't, it doesn't work. So maybe for like generating tests, it's good or for sequel or for other little bits and bobs, it's
Yeah, it has a benefit, but most of the people that we spoke to are not there still. And they're reviewing it as well constantly, but it's still just not there yet. What's impossible, I mean, it's a bit of a finger in the air to say, when's it going to be ready? Some people, know, most people have speculated it's going to be two to five years. But obviously they are updating these platforms at a rate of knots. But from what I see,
there's some fundamental issues with the way that they work that need to be fixed before you're seeing armies of agent coders that are delivering this enterprise work at scale.
Steve Guberman (21:44.738)
Yeah, I'm seeing the same thing. So the idea is can we build something cool? it, know, an MVP? Yeah. Is it proof of concept? Yeah. But is it production ready? Probably not. Can it pressure test under, you know, true requirements? Not, you know, not not yet. So there's a lot of still holes in it. But it's great for building small proof of concepts. It's great for certain aspects. Like you said, can I do some front end coding with it? Sure.
David Wain-Heapy (21:54.694)
Yeah.
David Wain-Heapy (22:10.218)
yeah, yeah.
Steve Guberman (22:14.37)
You know, Claude code is brilliant. You know, I've got a client who literally just on a whim built a new CRM with a project management aspect to it and a time tracker. And it's like, you know, it's pretty sweet, but it's not production ready and he can't bring his team into it yet. So yeah, there's a lot of interesting things that can be done, but I don't think it's going to, like you said, kill the production team or kill the dev team this year, at least.
David Wain-Heapy (22:28.453)
Yeah. I think there's still no, and I still think that the winners are going to be the creatives, whether that's creative, creative visual creatives or creative technical architects or creative project managers. If you're, if you're able to solve problems in a really unique way.
then you're safe because it is still a tool. It still requires an input. And I don't regard myself as traditionally creative. So if you give me the best image generation tools and video generation tools and say, right, we want you to do this campaign for this brand and here's all this information, I'm still going to come out of rubbish compared to an experienced creative who's just applying it in a new tool or a technical architect.
to design this CRM, we could probably do a good job on like creating a fairly functional front end, but the back end will be a total disaster because there'll be loads of scenarios that we haven't thought about because we've not experienced in that area. Now that gap could close a little bit, but I think true, I think we're decades away from true autonomous creativity on machines. And I think that when we reach that point, we've got bigger things to worry about.
Steve Guberman (23:54.638)
Man, I hope it is decades, but I hope we don't have those bigger things to worry about. You know what mean? So seeing some of the robots at CES from Boston, like it's mind blowing. But yeah, I don't want any of those people, those robots walking around my house doing chores for me anytime soon.
David Wain-Heapy (23:58.587)
Yeah.
Yeah.
David Wain-Heapy (24:08.809)
No, well, no, I did computer science 26 years ago. And I remember I did a robotics module then. then we were talking, the lecturers were talking about the fundamental problems back, it was all about like 1999, 2000, how they didn't have this bipedal walking ability, the joints, the flexibility, it was, and they were like, we're just
decades away, and they technically were right because now that stuff is happening and it's, yeah, I think to let some of these things into your home, they're gonna have super strength and all this crazy stuff with a direct connection to the mother break, that's Terminator 2 stuff, which is concerning.
Steve Guberman (24:38.914)
we are.
Steve Guberman (24:55.918)
But from a dev shop standpoint, design shop standpoint, there's ways to use these tools in conjunction with in-house teams, offshore teams, remote teams, et cetera. And you've got a great symphony of delivery using all of that built in. Are there, kind of last question before we wrap up with some rapid fires, are there roles that you think are more or less successful being offshore for an agency versus in-house?
David Wain-Heapy (25:25.033)
No, think, I I'd say in our experience, all the roles we cover are roles that can work really well. So whether it's like, you know, the various flavors of development, design, digital marketing, project management, I think there's areas that we don't cover like
There's areas you don't cover like traditional, the traditional sort of advertising creative type role. That traditional advertising creative type role where you've got the creative and the copywriter and they sit in a room and come up with that idea. That's going to be harder if you can't really get into a room and around the desk together. That's an area that we don't really get involved in. certainly when it comes to
The vast majority of agents, PR for example, PR relies on local relationships and understanding of that local market with journalists. You can't really do PR on a global basis without having those boots on the ground in those countries. Again, it's not an area that we work in. But certainly all these other areas, it goes back to what I said about being sort of remote offshore ready.
If you've got an agency that's got the right kind of systems for delivery and you will have teams that are not physically in the office, expanding that geographical location will have no difference on the quality of the output.
Steve Guberman (26:57.32)
Yeah, love to understand that. That's great. Thank you for clarifying. All right, a random rapid fires for you. So the first is, what is a totally non-work hobby or interest that people would be surprised to learn about you?
David Wain-Heapy (27:10.537)
Maybe surfing. Especially probably from my American cousins that wonder if there's anywhere in the UK we could actually go surfing. I live in Bristol down in the southwest of England. We're actually not far from some really good surfing in Devon and Cornwall in South Wales. But I live 20 minutes away from a man-made surfing lake called The Wave. So you can go there, it powers up.
Steve Guberman (27:39.32)
Cool.
David Wain-Heapy (27:40.317)
the waves from a machine and you can get a good hour of surfing in there. Yeah. Yeah. that's good question.
Steve Guberman (27:45.846)
Very cool. Yeah, I know there's one here in the States. I think Kelly Slater's tunnel or something, whatever they call it. Yeah, that's very cool. Yeah, I was wondering what kind of brick you've got outside in the UK there. Awesome. All right. What's a belief about success or leadership that you used to hold strongly, but recently maybe have kind of shifted your mindset about?
David Wain-Heapy (28:10.621)
I would probably turn the question around and say that something that I didn't use to give enough credit for, I'm naturally quite a control freak, which is great in some ways, because I get things done, but it's also terrible in other ways because I might have a tendency to smother people in an activity. So I think it's a belief that I now hold that I didn't use to that I should have done sooner is just like,
If you've got good people working for you, give them space and have confidence that they're going to be able to do that job well without you smothering them.
Steve Guberman (28:49.891)
Yeah, that's a really good leadership tip. Like hire people that are really good at what they do and then trust them to do it. Yeah, love it. And then finally, what's one decision that you made that felt risky at the time but ended up having like a disproportionate positive impact on your business?
David Wain-Heapy (28:55.59)
Yep.
David Wain-Heapy (29:06.886)
I'd say probably, probably. So when we had our, our agency, we had an office in, in central London and there was, there was a point where we, our, our landlord was changing. The landlords were what it's didn't want to operate the building anymore. So the person that actually owned the freehold needed a new, needed a new lease holder.
We didn't want to take on the whole lease, but essentially to cut a long story short, we managed to negotiate. We got someone to take the building. They sublet us the floor at really good rate, but it was very, we were still operating in there and there was a massive risk that if that didn't come off, we would, this is when we still had like fair few people in London. We would have been homeless and this was pre COVID. it wasn't, yeah, it was not normal to not have an office and people working from it.
it somehow managed to pay off and it paid off really well because we ended up having like the whole floor, which is about 4,000 square foot, right opposite Kings Cross Station in central London. And it, yeah, really, especially through COVID, it meant we didn't have this huge overhead of lease that we would have had if we had to go and move somewhere else. So that's probably the one thing I'd say.
Steve Guberman (30:30.351)
Awesome, good risk, paid off, love it. David, appreciate you joining me. David Wayne Heapy from Prodigy Offshore Talent Sourcing for Agencies. David, thank you very much for sharing your experiences today. I appreciate you.
David Wain-Heapy (30:43.033)
Thanks Steve, thanks for having me.