CraigB

20 years of business and M&A experience | Buying and building #education, #healthcare and #childcare businesses. 18 acquisitions to date 🧱📈

[Daniel Priestley @DanielPriestley]

About 250 years ago a quirky moral philosopher named Adam Smith discovered a chain of logic whereby the selfish desires of man would result in widespread prosperity. It’s one of the greatest discoveries of all time.

Here’s how it goes…

1.Selfish desire seeks wealth, status, security. No virtue required. This is the raw material, as unpromising as it sounds.

2. In a market with property rights, you can’t take, you must trade. Theft and fraud are policed, so the only legal route to someone else’s money is offering them something they want more. Self-interest is channelled through voluntary exchange. This is the crucial valve: the baker serves your bread not from benevolence, but because it’s how he gets paid.

3.Every voluntary trade creates value for both sides. Nobody trades unless they prefer what they’re getting to what they’re giving. So each transaction is positive-sum by construction. Wealth isn’t moved; it’s made.

4.Competition forces the selfish to serve better. You’re not the only one chasing that customer’s money. To win, you must offer more value, lower prices, or something new. Greed disciplined by rivalry becomes, functionally, service. The customer becomes the boss of every capitalist.

5.Prices emerge as signals of what people actually want. Millions of trades compress dispersed knowledge - scarcity, preference, urgency - into a single number. No planner needed. High prices shout “make more of this” and falling prices say “stop making this.” The cure for high prices IS high prices.

6.Profit directs capital toward unmet needs. Profit is the reward for spotting something people want but can’t get, and losses are the punishment for guessing wrong. Capital flows automatically toward solving problems and away from waste - a self-correcting search algorithm running on selfishness. The profit motive pulls the greedy person towards genuine service and efficiency.

7.The pursuit of advantage drives innovation. The only durable way to out-earn competitors is to do something new - create a better product, a cheaper process. Each entrepreneur trying to get rich makes the previous solution obsolete and the average person’s life better.

8.Specialisation and scale compound productivity. Competition pushes everyone toward what they do best; trade lets them exchange it. Output per person rises.

9.Rising productivity spreads as falling prices and rising wages. Competition doesn’t let producers keep the gains forever - they’re competed away to consumers. The luxuries of one generation (cars, flights, antibiotics, computing) become the staples of the next. The rich get richer, but the poor get richer too.

10. Prosperity becomes self-reinforcing and civilising. Wealth funds education, health, science, and even the welfare state that redistributes it. Commerce rewards trust, reliability, and cooperation with strangers (doux commerce).

A system built on self-interest ends up producing the most extensive cooperation network in human history: millions of strangers coordinating to put breakfast on your table.

The hockey stick after 1800: from ~$3/day for all of human history to a 30-fold rise in living standards wherever this system took hold is pure magic.

[CraigB @CraigB_LSC]

@DanielPriestley @basedgnostic My take on this is, we have an agreement with Gary. Try Wealth Tax for 2 years, if it fails, he goes to prison for 5 years. See if he sticks to his guns. 👀

He must know it’s a non starter, surely an “Economist” can’t be that daft!

All an act for exposure I think

[Daniel Priestley @DanielPriestley]

Socialists imagine a class struggle. In their made-up fantasy the CEO is in competition with low level workers, the wealthy entrepreneur is stealing from the underpaid nurse.

In reality, workers do not compete vertically they compete horizontally.

Entrepreneurs compete with entrepreneurs. Investors outbid each other. CEOs are benchmarked against other CEOs. Nurses are hired from a pool of nurses. Etc.

The CEOs pay has no correlation to the entry level workers. The Football star on £300K a week isn’t linked to the person selling drinks in the stadium. A biotech entrepreneur raising VC capital isn’t paid relative to a cleaner.

What is linked is the demand and supply dynamic of each role.

If a company places an ad for a qualified truck driver and 150 people apply for the role, then the company knows it does not need to increase wages for that role. If the company has an open role for months, it is forced to look at the compensation package.

Same for a CEO. A board representing shareholders would like to hire a CEO for a lot less if they could. Their dream scenario would be to hire a CEO who brings in institutional investors, attracts top executives, drives innovation and growth, keeps margins steady and is a good public face for the business even under pressure. It turns out there aren’t a lot of these people looking for work and if you want one you have to pay more than other companies are offering.

The class struggle isn’t vertical it’s horizontal. CEOs are in competition with CEOs. Retail workers are in competition with retail workers. Demand and supply dynamics set the price.

Sure you can say that a CEO want’s profitability and would like wages to be lower BUT it’s not up to the CEO - demand and supply tension sets the price of workers. An Airline like RyanAir would like free pilots if they could get them but they can’t… so they pay the market rate.

The reason incomes are rising at the top and falling at the bottom is not class warfare. It’s technology and globalisation.

Technology makes basic jobs simple, remote or fully automated. At the same time tech makes executive roles more leveraged, more important and more valuable.

A CEO used to run a smaller organisation. Today a CEO who’s 2% better on a $5B company is generating $100M more. Seems sensible to try and pay a few million to get $100M.

Globalisation has put workers from all over the world in completion with each other - downward pressure on wages. Globalisation has given CEOs more market opportunities to explore - upside opportunity to unlock.

The rich are not very interested in buying houses that poor people own. The poor are not buying up the homes the rich want. They are separate groups living separate lives. Try finding the genuinely rich people whose strategy is to hoard normal residential homes - it barely exists as a thing. About 85% of landlords are people who own 1-4 properties. Super-landlords (100+ properties) are 0.2% of landlords and own a tiny fraction of the 30M homes in the UK… and they’re heavily taxed.

Class warfare isn’t real. It’s an imagined war in the minds of socialists.

Demand and supply dynamics are real. To the degree it is measured in class, it’s a horizontal competition not a vertical one.

[CraigB @CraigB_LSC]

@DanielPriestley @garyseconomics Dan for PM!

[Anton Liubich @antonliubich]

For most of my professional life, I have been connected to agriculture. First I farmed. Then I financed farming — including building what became Europe's largest milk producer. Here is how I see it.

A company produces milk and lists its shares on an exchange.

Someone buys those shares, believing people drink milk and will drink more of it. Someone else buys the milk itself. If milk becomes unaffordable, sales collapse and the company goes bankrupt. So the company prices its milk above cost — but low enough that people can still buy it.

Meanwhile, trading happens on the exchange. Small parcels of shares change hands. The price of the very last trade — even if it involved a single share — becomes the quote you see. And through speculation, that quote rises fivefold.

Does this mean I, as a co-founder, could sell 5% of the company at that price without crashing it? No. Does it mean milk got five times more expensive and less affordable? Also no.

So what does it mean? Three things.

First: someone made modest money speculating with a small block of shares.

Second: I acquired "wealth" that exists only on paper. It bought me nothing. I hold the same shares, sold none of them, and received nothing to spend.

Third: a monetary bubble keeps inflating. The money printed by the Fed and the Bank of England — and multiplied by commercial banks through fractional-reserve lending (the Fed cut reserve requirements to zero in 2020; the Bank of England never had binding ones at all) — hangs over the economy like a giant sack. If a large share of this empty money, backed by no goods — no milk, no grain, no circuit boards, no wrenches — were not absorbed by stock speculation and real estate, it would instantly turn into consumer inflation.

The economy's problems are not the mythical "rich getting richer." They are two things: we produce fewer goods than we could, thanks to a pile of absurd regulations. And fiat money is printed in enormous quantities, warping every market it touches.

But that is too complicated, or too unpleasant, to accept. Blaming the rich is easier.

[Michael Dell 🇺🇸 @MichaelDell]

Focus on what you can control.

Build something. Anything.

A product. Yourself. A family. Your community. A team. Relationships.

Or help someone else build theirs.

Don’t complain. Don’t play the victim.

Ever.

What are you building?

#PlayNiceButWin

[Daniel Priestley @DanielPriestley]

The UK tax system is broken and it’s breaking the economy.

We now have 90 separate taxes and 1,180 tax reliefs; 815 of which HMRC can’t even cost.

The burden is heading to 39% of GDP, the highest since WW2.

As Dan Neidle puts it, the system isn’t a designed object. It’s a random set of ingredients thrown into a mixing bowl. Each successive chancellor has thrown in their random thing but no one has stood back and come up with a recipe.

We need to design from first principles not try to fix the existing system.

A tax system should be simple to understand. It should incentivise economic growth and prosperity for those who work and take risks. It should have economic safety nets (not hammocks) for those at the bottom.

The problem we face is complexity. We have a stupid game no one feels they can play and win. Until that changes the cost of this complexity will continue to drag the whole UK economy down.

[FA Women's National League @FAWNL]

March Manager of the Month - Division One Nominees ✨

Steve Appleton - @CheadleStingers
@Steve_Jaye_ - @FulhamFCWomen
Steve Perkins - @BridgwaterUtdW
@JakePoole - @theposhwomen

The vote will open at 3pm today, click here to vote then: https://t.co/OsGav7PIJA

#FAWNL | #MOTM

[Handre @Handre]

In 1959, Fidel Castro promised to redistribute Cuba's wealth and create equality for all. Within a decade, the island that once exported sugar and cigars to the world couldn't even keep its own lights on. The wealthy fled, but instead of their riches trickling down to the poor, everyone just became equally poor together.

The revolucionarios had calculated that seizing the means of production would mean seizing prosperity itself. What they discovered instead was that prosperity isn't sitting in some vault waiting to be redistributed—it's created daily by millions of voluntary exchanges, investments, and entrepreneurial risks. When you abolish those mechanisms, you don't redistribute wealth; you redistribute poverty.

Today's politicians make the same mathematical error Castro did: they see inequality and assume it represents a fixed pie that just needs better slicing. They never ask why some pies grow while others shrink, or why the countries promising equality most loudly seem to deliver scarcity most efficiently.

The cruel irony is that the only truly "equal" outcome socialism reliably produces is making everyone equally worse off than they started.

[CraigB @CraigB_LSC]

@emirates I hope you don’t build your planes like you do your apps and websites! Awful experience🤮

[CraigB @CraigB_LSC]

@killergorton11 Surviving Bro ❤️

[CraigB @CraigB_LSC]

RT @CheadleStingers: Stingers 🐝 are all set for another season in the @FAWNL as they face @RoversWFC in their season opener. 🔴⚪️ https://t.…

[Cheadle Town FC @CheadleTownFC]

This week, we visited Bramhall High School and The Kingsway School. It was great to speak to students about our Academy programme, which allows 16-19-year-olds to combine their studies with full time football.

Visit our website for more information and apply now!

https://t.co/BxuVGXypW0

[Cheadle Town Stingers @CheadleStingers]

82’| Paris 🗼 replaces Liz

[Paul Marshall @paulmarshall89]

@WD_CFC @CheadleTownFC @CraigB_LSC

[Cheadle Town Stingers @CheadleStingers]

This weekend we play Leeds United away ⚽️

Come and join us in supporting the team!

Address: Bannister Prentice Community Stadium, Cedar Ridge, Garforth LS25 2PF

[Cheadle Town FC @CheadleTownFC]

90+3’ GOALLLLLLLLLL

Connor Martin wins the ball back on the halfway line who then plays through George Lewis who finds the bottom corner from just outside the box!

🔴 Cheadle Town 3-1 Longridge Town 🔵

#WeAreCheadle #nwcfl

[Cheadle Town FC @CheadleTownFC]

Behind The Greens I 👨🏼‍💻

Read episode 1 of our new fortnightly series where we will be delving into the players lives off the pitch. 🗞️

Kicking things off with Liam Delaney, tap the picture to readBehind The Greens I 👨🏼‍💻

Read episode 1 of our new fortnightly series where we will be delving into the players lives off the pitch. 🗞️

Kicking things off with Liam Delaney, tap the picture to read.

[CraigB @CraigB_LSC]

@thePhilRivers He didn’t build it £200m. He and his business partner exited (I believe) at £8m (with a share swap, so no cash) and the company they sold too then made further acquisitions and grew the group to £200m.