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My conversation with Sam was more insightful and educational than I could have ever imagined. Despite being a relative “newbie” in the industry, with Ultra X only formed in 2018, he spoke with the kind of authority and confidence one would expect from an organiser with decades of experience. Not only did he, with his co-founder, manage to successfully launch and grow a series of 19 races in 14 locations with a team of just 5 people, but they also did it through Covid, in a format that largely depends on foreign travel!

Intentional, self-conscious and humble, Sam lives and breathes his mission, making multi-stage ultra-marathons accessible to everyday people. An inspiring conversation with plenty of educational gems for organisers of any sport type, size and location.

Alexander Tanti: Sam, fantastic to have you as part of the series. Looking through your site, it’s amazing to see how much you guys have grown over the past couple of years. How about we start by giving me a little bit of background? How did you come about organising races?

Sam Heward: I t’s a long story, but it can be summarised into a short story. The essence, really, is that I stumbled into multi-stage racing completely by accident when I was quite young (22) and was not previously a runner. I never participated in a marathon or anything like that. And I signed down for a multi-stage event in the desert, thinking that it would be a kind of a one-off tick off the bucket list and move on; what I found was that it was the most incredible experience, but also a little bit frustrating that I was one of very few younger participants and I would constantly sit down next to people in a pub or at a dinner party, and they would say, “ah no It’s not for me, I couldn’t do that. That’s impossible”.

I was always entrepreneurial in nature. I wanted to do my own thing, I wanted to set up a business, and I think it took probably a couple of years before I realized that what I wanted to do was try and encourage more people to get into this space and to make it more accessible and to put on these events. And so, that’s kind of why Ultra X was born, it was essentially to try and put on these experiences. These multi-stage events encourage more and more people to get into them and make them more accessible.

And I had a friend, a guy called Jamie Sparks. He’s now the co-founder of Ultra X and at the same time that I was having these thoughts, he was organizing an event in Jordan, which was called the Wadi Rum Ultra, which I actually ran. After that, we sat down together, and I was essentially like, “You’ve got quite a good gig mate. I would like to do that, and I think there’s a big opportunity in the trail and ultra space. I think Marathon is not enough anymore. I think people are wanting to go longer and further and I think there’s something we can do.”

It took about a year, but eventually, we came together. We have different skill sets and different backgrounds. I was in finance before, and we rebranded the event as The Ultra X Jordan, and that was our first event, 250 kilometres split over five stages. Ultra X was set up at the back end of 2018, and we then had one year where it was just Jamie and I doing everything and managing the events we put on.

The idea was always to have a series, as we thought it was very important to create a brand. Creating a series meant that you could have an amazing experience in Jordan and then you could go and have an amazing experience in Sri Lanka or Mexico or wherever. 2020 and 2021 were obviously quite interesting times which forced us to adapt quite a bit and hold back on some of the growth that we would have liked to have. But coming out of the pandemic, we just returned to the initial idea which was to put on a load of events all over the world, encouraging more people to try Multi-stage racing and to create a cool and fun brand in the trail and ultra space.

We’re now feeling more confident about the industry, feeling more confident about the space and the growth of the number of runners, and we’re really optimistic about the future.

Alexander Tanti: That initial race in Jordan that was rebranded. What were the biggest differences before and after the rebranding,

Sam Heward: Nothing significant, as it wasn’t us taking over a different event. Jamie ran the event with someone else, and essentially, that someone else then became me, and we set up a new company. So, it was very much the same template. This particular event initially started as an expedition. It’s a long story, but around 2011 someone ran across Jordan raising money for charity by himself and organized a team of locals to support him. Jamie met this person and said that sounds amazing. He wanted to organize it as an expedition rather than a race, and so in 2015–2016, the Jordan Ultra was born, which was essentially five people trying to cover 300 kilometres over six days, and it was savage, unsurprisingly.

Since then, it took on more of a traditional multi-stage race format. And then, since joining forces, we did make some small tweaks which were the result of us sitting down and saying, “Okay, we want to do this seriously; how can we make little changes that differentiate us from a typical Multi-stage Ultra Marathon and how can we improve on that? How do we make it more accessible?”

For example, traditional multi-stage events require you to be completely self-sufficient. This requires a competitor to turn up with all their kit, sleeping bag, food and carry all that for the duration of the event. We thought that offering support could potentially change the dynamic of the events massively, and it did not seem like a massive operational change.

So we said we would go ahead and try that along with a few other similar things which we thought would enhance the runner experience while not affecting the overall feel of the event.

We’ve always received great feedback from our events, so every year, we make minor tweaks. We debrief really critically on every detail of the event, and we always get better, and the more events we have now, the better we’re getting because of this constant feedback loop. So they’re always going to be minor changes, but I think the overall format and feel of the event has been set on from day one and that ties in with who we want to be as a company. The kind of values that we hold and I think is expressed through all of our events and operations.

Alexander Tanti: You said earlier that making the sport more accessible was probably one of the biggest motivators for you. Does that mean easing the administrative and logistical burden of participating in these events rather than making the run itself “easier”?

Sam Heward: Our hypothesis when we started was that this type of event is too expensive, and it’s too hard, and that’s why people aren’t doing them. And what we discovered is yes, those are certainly factors, but the biggest piece is education. It is a fact that the average Joe does not know what a multi-stage race is, and in their minds, they anchor their expectation on a well-known challenge such as the London Marathon. You see people doing the London Marathon, which is 42k, and compare it with what you hear is a 220k five-stage event, you say, “How is that even possible? How could I do that five times in the heat of the desert and up and down mountains?”

But obviously, in reality, it’s very different because the intensity is so much lower. It’s much more of a hike, an expedition and an adventure rather than a high-intensity race. The people that participate in it and complete it are not full-time athletes. They’ve got families, they’ve got jobs, they smoke occasionally, and still, they finish. So, actually, the biggest shift in our theory around this is how we can give people the resources and education to get them to believe that they can do it, because they can; but it’s a difficult step to make.

I think the biggest thing is trying to showcase that people who finish and do our events are people they can associate with. It’s all very well showing the elite athletes running impressive times, but who can really relate to that person?

So we put a lot of effort into actually saying, “This is Sarah, and Sarah is an NHS nurse, and Sarah works 45 hours a week but still gets in her full runs. She finished Jordan and had a great experience.” It’s a constant learning, and we’re always making tweaks and changes, but I think for me, that’s the most important thing is how can we make the sport more accessible.

Alexander Tanti: I guess that even people who have heard of these multi-stage events before, it’s usually the more well-known legacy challenges such as the Marathon de Sables, which are portrayed as these insanely brutal events that will challenge every ounce of you physically and mentally. I guess the effects of those marketing efforts are not doing you any favours.

Sam Heward: Yeah, and I actually think part of the problem, and I’m not necessarily blaming the organizers because it’s been a specific tactic, but a lot of these events like to have a tagline as the toughest race in the world and that you have to be super tough to do them. I don’t think that’s true. I really don’t. It’s a difficult balancing act because these events obviously require preparation, planning, and to be taken seriously, but that’s not to say they are only for the very few. I think getting that messaging right, that gives people the confidence to believe they can do it if they put their mind to it is really important rather than portraying the event as elitist and exclusive only to some.

Alexander Tanti: So you organised your first event, do you remember any specific moment after the finish of that first event which gave you that confidence to go all-in and start planning for the next one and the next one?

Sam Heward: I think firstly, I was very adamant with the idea that there was something there which could be done better. That’s not a critique of any organizers because there are so many amazing events out there. But I thought I could put on a good event. And from the very first experience I had as a race director, we got amazing feedback. However, and partly it’s through ignorance, you don’t necessarily realize many of the difficulties you will encounter when you start a business. When I got involved, Jordan had been going for four years, so most of it was already straightforward. It gave me an exaggerated sense of confidence that we’ve got this format. So, we’ll just pick up this model and move it to Sri Lanka and Mexico. Obviously, what you don’t realize is that every event is incredibly unique and requires completely different logistics.

So I think it was maybe a little bit naive, but I think that the key thing was that we got great feedback from our first event and that made me believe that with the right people onboard, we could put on great events.

Alexander Tanti: A lot of us, as participants, know the feeling of finishing a really tough event. We understand the sense of achievement and that feeling of gratification you get from finishing such a difficult event. What I’m interested to know is how did it feel as an organiser, seeing your first finishers cross the line?

Sam Heward: It was amazing; there’s nothing like it. I remember the first, maybe even three years of events were terrifying. You’d panic about all these things that could go wrong in the week and in the build-up. You are so concerned about messing something up. Whereas, now, I get so much more enjoyment out of them and very much see them as “this is your stage, an opportunity to do something great”. You have 300 days in the office every year and just 30 days when we are out there, so you may as well enjoy it.

Firstly, the adulation of just seeing people across the line is amazing. The whole time, being behind the scenes, whether you’re a race director, whether you’re the owner, whether you’re a volunteer, you go through a unique experience. It’s not the same, but it’s a similar experience as the runners in that there are moments where you think, “Why am I doing this? Why am I giving up my weekend to put up gazebos at six in the morning? Why am I out here without food for 12 hours? Why am I up late?” But then you get to the end of the week, and you have that sense of satisfaction and reward which comes from supporting these incredible people. So, I had that kind of feeling, and I still get that, and it’s the best thing in the world. At the same time, you feel the elation of “We did it, it worked out, everything came good, I think we put on a good experience. I think these people are happy..” which is amazing.

Seeing something you’ve created come to life, and I think particularly when we started to launch new events. You’d go through the process of literally throwing darts at a map and then going to a place, meeting people, choosing the course and then, a year or two years later, coming back to that place and delivering an event is just awesome.

Alexander Tanti: What was your second event after Jordan?

Sam Heward: Sri Lanka, which was one of the most stressful weeks of my life, definitely. But we got through it, and then we had Jordan again in 2019.

Alexander Tanti: Why did you pick Sri Lanka?

Sam Heward: There are probably four or five main factors that go into our location planning. Probably the main one is it’s got to be somewhere that really excites people as a destination. This comes in even before looking at the quality of trails, before the logistics etc. We want somewhere that, you’re gonna turn to the person sitting next to you and say, I’m going here to do an Ultra Marathon, and they’re like, “Wow, that is awesome.” So we thought Sri Lanka had that X factor, and at the time, it was fairly stable. Unfortunately, given the current situation, I don’t think we’re gonna be doing that again for a while, if ever again. It’s a bit of a tricky country. But yeah, at the time it was stable, with very good connections from Europe and the Middle East where we had a bit of an audience. As Sri Lanka is so used to tourism, they had very good partner contacts that we could use and work within the country.

Alexander Tanti: Okay, so you choose Sri Lanka. Then I guess you go out there to scout out the place. Do you reach out to the local runners to help you discover some great routes? What was the next step?

Sam Heward: Typically, once we’ve decided on a country usually what happens is we have a handful of countries that we’re having discussions with at any one time. And that process initially is just outreach to anyone you think will be useful in that country, whether it’s the tourism board, whether it’s local race organizers, travel agents etc.

Some locations will fall behind because you’ll realize there are complications, while some locations will naturally arise as a better fit. You will, of course, reach out to runners and people that are doing trail running to get a feel for where would be a good location to organize the event and what’s the weather like, and then ideally, we would get to a point where we have a lot of confidence over a location. We then go about looking for a partner. So for all our international events, we have a local partner on the ground. Their role, depending on the location and their expertise, ideally would be our long-term partner over the next three to five years.

We’d get to a point where we have three or four people having discussions about that, and we then choose the one which we thought put together the best proposal. This is all done remotely, and it’s only really at this stage where once we get confident over the location, then the partner and finally of the operational plan that we would say okay, yeah, this sounds good, we’ll organize a recce and come out meet. We see the course as much as we can, drive as much as we can and get a real feel for it, and it’s not until we’ve done all those steps that we would then consider whether we can really launch it.

Alexander Tanti: You said that the week of the event was incredibly stressful, so I suspect there’s a good story there.

Sam Heward: Yeah, I think there is an education piece there. Basically around what the local operators were expected to do, what they had promised, and what they were actually capable of doing. In the end, it was fine, and it wasn’t a huge event, just 30 runners. It just meant that our crew, which was comprised of five core staff and about 20 volunteers, had to work bloody hard setting up the camps, marking the route setting the checkpoints. The local operator, apart from setting up permissions, hadn’t really done enough. And it was a really good learning curve in hindsight because as a result of that, our planning and approvals checks have massively changed. Most importantly, we also learned that in the face of battle, we can still put on an event and make it work. It’s amazing how you can solve problems when you can stay calm and work as a team and communicate.

But yeah, I remember we were driving around in a Land Rover at two in the morning every day to check the route was drivable because while our local partners would say it was drivable, we wouldn’t trust them until we’d actually done it. So yeah, there were some challenges, and we had to reroute a day because we had an elephant on course. That was fun.

Alexander Tanti: Because I guess you can’t just run around it.

Sam Heward: You might be able to. It could be risky, though.

Alexander Tanti: So, from the sounds of it, you have this very core team who presumably are based in the UK. But you then have to outsource a lot of the local operational stuff to local teams, and your experience in Sri Lanka gave you a bit of material to work on going forward in terms of how you go about choosing partners etc. Do you now have a checklist to ensure that the partner will be reliable?

Sam Heward: Kind of, it’s not actually a checklist, but we have prepared four key documents which are required for every event. One of them’s circulated with our entire crew, a couple of them are internal, and most of them are prepared in the last few weeks before the event. It’s essentially what we call a battle plan. It is a thorough plan for the entire week, and we also require quite a lot of information and documentation well in advance of the event. This does solve a lot of problems, and now we also only pay people fully after the event.

Alexander Tanti: And I guess finding volunteers, you leave that to the local partner as well?

Sam Heward: No, we organise all our volunteers. We’ve got a very good community, and they travel worldwide with us to get involved in our events.

Alexander Tanti: Interesting, so it’s not necessarily locals.

Alexander Tanti: Okay, that’s very interesting. Why do you think people are willing to travel halfway around the world just to volunteer for an event?

Sam Heward: I think because it’s a genuinely amazing experience. There’s nothing quite like it, and it is incredibly rewarding. I think there are probably maybe three different types of people that do it. Someone that doesn’t necessarily know that they want to do an event but want to experience it. Then, you get a lot of people that are looking to get an experience of how the organizing of an event like that happens, and finally, you get a lot of runners who want race credit, or they might think about doing it next year. It’s a hard week, but it’s an incredibly rewarding thing to be a part of and it’s an expenses paid holiday. So, for some people, it’s well worth it.

Alexander Tanti: I’d like to go back to the “changing the perception of multi-stage events” piece. So you are trying to change the perception of this particular segment within running; I can imagine it must have been tough. And, I’m just trying to think as a new organiser who’s decided to start organising a uniquely different type of events within a very well-established sport type like swimming or running, or triathlons, whatever. How could they go about it? Marketing that new concept or trying to change established perceptions.

Sam Heward: Unfortunately, there’s no one single thing that we’ve done or are doing, and if it were as simple as that, that’d be amazing. It’s really just a matter of having a clear message and drip-feeding that over a load of different platforms and mechanisms, whether it’s the conversations we have with our competitors or the way we talk to them in race briefings and post-event and communications.

Also, the way we do all of our social media and email marketing, we’ve always been very conscious about our tone of voice and coming across as human and real. Then also, really focusing on telling competitors’ stories, as much as possible, showcasing the people doing it. And I think the final thing we’ve done, which I guess potentially is a little bit different from some organizers, is we’ve always had a community focus. We’ve always focused on community events, and that would be an event which actually really has very little to do with running or ultra running or educating about ultra running. It is an event where we get people who have done our events in a social environment with people who might be interested to find out more or thinking about taking part. Or, it could be something very different whether it’s a camping weekend or whether it’s a film screening, in a bar, or anything along those lines. So it’s just, trying to encourage the connection of our runners with people who haven’t done them. it’s a slow and gradual process because I think the most important factor of getting a message across in this space is still word of mouth. And I think working out how to encourage that Is always a challenge, and it’s something which is very difficult to track.

Alexander Tanti: Do you have a dedicated marketing team?

Sam Heward: We’re a pretty small team. There are four of us, full-time. And then one who comes in three days a week. So, Jamie kind of manages sales and marketing at the moment. And then, we have another person that manages marketing and partnerships as well. But we all chip in, and I’m quite involved as well, I think. Yeah, it (a dedicated marketing position) would be something we might look to create, but at the moment, we’re small and lean.

Alexander Tanti: Speaking about Jamie, your co-founder, earlier and that your skills are complementary. I’m interested to hear what are those complementary skills. And also, what do you think creates a successful partnership between Co-founders?

Sam Heward: Yeah, I’ll start with why I think we work well, and I’m always cautious about offering this kind of advice because I think, particularly with relationships and partnerships, it’s so personal, and what works for some people may not work for others. You can read a hundred management books, and they’ll tell you a hundred different things. I think I’m a big advocate of having an open mind and learning from others. And then working out what works for you and what feels right. I think what I’d say works incredibly well is Jamie and I share this vision that we are creating an amazing experience. These events are life-changing; these events should be for everyone. And our end goal is completely aligned and always has been. We see the world completely differently in almost everything else, and the result of that is, we have a lot of discussions about a lot of things business related. Still, generally, we get the right answer because we do discuss things and we do see the world in different ways. So I think often, co-founders or people that organise things together do it with someone very similar to them, and that’s great. And that can be really easy at times. But I often wonder whether that’s ideal.

Jamie’s very much brand and sales focus. He’ll always be the one to say that that design is not right, that the text font needs to be that etc. I’m terrible at that, and I simply wouldn’t notice.

So, that works well. I’m much more operational events management focussed, and he’s very much brand, marketing and sales. I generally take care of finance and, I guess, more long-term strategy and planning.

Alexander Tanti: Got it. I think you hit the nail on the head there about making sure that you both have a very common goal and being exactly on the same page in terms of what you want to achieve. I think the peripherals about how you will achieve that can be up for discussion.

Sam Heward: Yeah, I think there’s strategy and there’s tactics, isn’t there? I think as a startup business, you’ve got to have a strategy, you’ve got to have an overall direction, and that’s got to be consistent throughout. But then, if you go more granular, the tactics can change at any one moment, and I think you need to be receptive and open to that. It may sound obvious, but communication is just everything. Talking to each other the whole time with honesty. And I think, having now managed various team sizes, it’s amazing how treating people with respect and honesty, giving them space and responsibility, but asking them for care, communication, and honesty has become our formula for creating a good team.

Alexander Tanti: You mentioned that your background is in finance, right?

Alexander Tanti: One thing that I think was very insightful from my conversation with Mark was how much focus he puts on ensuring that the organisation is fiscally responsible so that they’re in it for the long term.

You started in 2018 and went through a very difficult time with covid that speaks volumes about how well you navigated the financial aspect of that challenge, ensuring that you’re there for the long term. Do you have any advice for new organisers about approaching the topic or financing events, of when to take a risk vs being conservative?

Sam Heward: I read Mark’s interview with a lot of interest and think he put it nicely. Since we started, we’ve probably over-focused on price, and we always wanted to be accessible. We wanted to keep our prices low and ensure that we could encourage more people to get involved. We never intended for the price to be a stumbling block, and as a result, we’ve tried to make operations as lean as possible. I think that particularly over the last few years where we’ve had a few disruptions, we’ve been tighter on finances than we would have liked, and as a result, next year we’re playing catch up, and we have to increase everything, I think.

Firstly, I’d say organisers shouldn’t be afraid of charging higher prices for a quality service, providing that they’re not wasting money and feel like they’re acting responsibly etc.

We’ve definitely fallen into the trap of over-emphasizing low prices. As a co-founder, I know that increasing prices is the right thing to do from a business perspective because it’s the way that we can ensure that we’ll put on great events in three, five, or ten years. But there’s still this thing in the back of my head, as a runner and as a member of our community, that I don’t want to increase prices. And I’ve got to shut out that voice. I think a lot of people that are small business owners and care a lot about their customers are eventually going to have that dilemma. But making the business survive has to be the key thing because you’ve got to remember that you can’t put on these events otherwise.

Linking into that, I think profit has almost become a dirty word for many people, but profit is the only way that reinvestment can be made, and growth can be made. So, take us for an example, if we never made a profit, we would never be able to put on another event. It would be as simple as that. We might be able to put on Ultra X Jordan every year, but we wouldn’t be able to invest in further resources etc. So I think maybe moving away from that mentality and ensuring you’re more than covering your cost is incredibly important as an organiser. Particularly in the event space, I thought the way Mark put it was incredibly sensible in that we’ve got a see the future. Essentially, we set prices maybe 14 months out for an event so that we pay out most of our costs on the day of the event. So you’ve got to create a bit of a buffer there and be sensible. To what extent, I guess, depends on your perception of risk and what reserves you have, but all those things are useful.

Alexander Tanti: I share your thoughts around profit almost being stigmatised in this industry. From the participant’s perspective, when they have no visibility on the cost and resources required to deliver a great experience, the standards for what makes a ticket expensive or not are purely subjective. I know people are bashing organisations like Ironman, saying they’re all about the profit, but at the same time, they’re a company with employees and costs, delivering great experiences, and they have to survive somehow for them to continue to offer great experiences for more people and more locations. They need to back that up financially.

It’s also an uphill battle for us at Racecheck, with some organisers continuing to think that promoting participant feedback and reviews can only attract a handful of extra entries at the current price rather than seeing the use of social proof as a powerful tool that could help them take their business to a whole different level and be able to justify 20–50% price increases. There are always people willing to pay a premium price for a premium experience.

Sam Heward: Yeah, and I think it requires responsible leaders. I think a lot of people, and probably rightly so, don’t trust big business and don’t like corporations because there have been irresponsible people leading them. There’s been bad use of money and assets etc. So, I’m a trail runner, and I love this space. So I’d like to think that we can grow Ultra X in a responsible way, prioritising good events prioritising keeping prices as low as we can. But at the same time, making sure that we’re also doing that in a fiscally responsible way. And I just hope that other people within the sport and in the events space are doing the same thing, and I genuinely think they are because, actually, you wouldn’t come into this space if you wanted to be a billionaire. There are many other things you could do to achieve that. People like to criticise when they’re sitting at home on their couch, but actually, we’re not in this game because we want to make a load of money. We’re in this because we want to put on good experiences, and that is rewarding in itself.

Alexander Tanti: How many events do you put on right now, and in how many locations?

Sam Heward: We’ll have 14 event locations next year, and that’s 19 races because a few of them have different formats. We’ve always focused on becoming an international multi-stage race series. Covid meant that we became more national and focused more on the UK. We did a few shorter stage events because it was quicker to organise, and we could turn them around fairly fast. Now, we’re on more of a push to get back to the brand we’ve always wanted to be. We’ve now launched Madeira, Morocco and Finland this year. And we’re looking at a couple of new international locations for next year. Then we’re going to take a bit of a pause, have a little review and see where we go for 2025 and 26 as we’re reaching the capacity of what this team can deliver in terms of events.

Alexander Tanti: Not bad for a team of five.. That’s amazing. But it’s also a testament to how this format can be scalable. The system can scale as long as you have the mindset and the checklists and know exactly what to expect from and how to look for the right partners.

Sam Heward: The more we have opportunities to put on events, the more we learn from each of them, and then setting up new events becomes easier. Every single time we do it now, it gets better every single time. So having a series is incredibly useful from that perspective. as it means that if we had someone join our team yesterday, he’s got an event this weekend. He’s got an event next weekend, and that’s such a good learning experience. But if you don’t have that (a series), you need to wait a year to experience an event; that’s your one opportunity to get to grips with understanding how everything works.

Alexander Tanti: Where do you guys see yourselves longer term? Do you have any plans for maybe adding more sports?

Sam Heward: No, no other sports. I can’t see that happening for a long time. I think the key thing for me to create a really strong brand is being recognised for something quite specific. And we really want to be known as the multi-stage, five and two-day trail running events in beautiful parts of the world. Never say never, but I don’t think that’s even in the back of my head now. We’re really focused on creating a global series of amazing, multi-stage events, creating a brand which is well known and getting to the place where you come back from a weekend having done one of our events, and rather than saying I’ve done an ultra marathon over the weekend, to say I’ve done an Ultra X and everyone knows what that means. That’s the dream.

Sam Heward: On a personal level, I just love to get more people into this space and particularly women, particularly minority ethnic groups, which are at the moment quite disproportionately outnumbered. I think we’re going in the right direction, but there’s a lot more to do.

Alexander Tanti: We’re out of time which is a shame as we could probably spend another two hours here, but I think it’s been incredibly insightful. Before closing, f you were to advise somebody looking to start organising races right now, what would be the one thing you would advise?

Sam Heward: I’d tell them that the more you think over it, the more reasons you’ll find not to do it, so don’t dwell over it too much, start, and you’ll make it work. The second thing I’d say is to speak to people. Most organisers are incredibly generous with their time, and if you ask in the right way, there are so many good people in this space, and there are so many experienced people who will give great advice. You can avoid so many potential problems because someone will have been there before a hundred per cent.

Every injury, every whatever has happened at some point in history before and most likely in the last few years and most likely by someone you have a second or third party connection with. So I would say don’t be afraid to ask for advice, don’t be afraid to share your thinking and planning, but yeah, definitely go for it. It’s great to have more people in the space, and if anyone is thinking about it, hit me up.

Alexander Tanti: Perfect.Thank you so much, Sam. Best of luck with everything, and thanks for your time!