How to survive redundancy and pitch mindfully with Julian Douglas

This week’s NABS Podcast guest is Julian Douglas, global CEO at VCCP and a vocal advocate for mental wellness in the advertising industry. Instigator of the Pitch Positive Pledge during his tenure as IPA president, Julian is a changemaker with a down-to-earth approach to mental wellness, as well as a huge enthusiasm for the ad industry. Julian also loves to learn and might inspire you to enrol on a free NABS course.

Hosted by Louise Scodie

Louise Scodie:

This week, our guest is Julian Douglas. Dougie, as he’s called by everyone except his parents, is global CEO at VCCP. He’s been in the industry for more than 25 years, working for big names including BBH and Gray, before his illustrious career at VCCP. What’s more, he is an outspoken supporter of mental wellness in our industry.

Dougie is a former IPA president. During his tenure, he launched the Pitch Positive Pledge to help improve the pitching process as a way to better support the mental health of all involved. Dougie is also co -founder of karaoke company Lucky Voice. Welcome, Dougie, welcome to the NABS Podcast. How are you?

Julian Douglas:

Really good, thanks for having me.

Louise Scodie:

It’s our absolute pleasure and first things first, what’s your karaoke song?

Julian Douglas:

A lot of people ask me that and it does change over time. I tend to go through different phases and I’ve just, I had a sort of a rock opera phase where I was doing a bit of Meatloaf and Celine Dion sort of ones. I’m probably more in a Bill Withers phase at the moment. So Grandma’s Hands is my current go -to.

Louise

That’s classic. You won’t disappoint an audience with that. Hopefully one day we’ll get to hear your karaoke renditions. But today’s all about mental wellness and you are a massive activist. Everything that you do to champion mental wellness in our industry has had a real change and a dynamic effect on how we operate as an industry. And before we get onto all of that great work.

Julian Douglas:

Well, I will, I would, I can assure you it would definitely disappoint.

Louise Scodie:

Can you tell us about a mental wellness challenge that you’ve overcome?

Julian Douglas:

Yeah, definitely. I think I started work in 1997. So over 25 years ago, which is mildly terrifying. I think it didn’t used to be something that people talked about. It sort of just wasn’t in discourse in society as a whole, alone in our industry. And thankfully in recent years, there’s just greater awareness around it. So when I look back over those years, there’s been lots of times when I’ve had mental health challenges.

You know, from a junior starting out moving to London from Manchester I lost my job. I got laid off when I said TWA about seven, eight years in and you know being made redundant was a huge challenge and throughout my career as you get more senior running pictures has been a big big part of those challenges and I’m sure we’ll talk about that in a bit, but one that’s more recent would be the pandemic.

You know, it’s remarkable to think, you know, anyone living, working today has survived a pandemic. And we almost lose sight of that. Just a few years. You know, if you look back to remember what was happening four years ago, you know, we were all trapped in our houses. We weren’t allowed to leave the house. Your kids couldn’t go to school. You couldn’t see your workmates.

I think the mental health impacts of that are significant for many. There were negative outcomes for many. Many people are still struggling with it beyond, you know, the obvious loss of life and the physical impacts on people. I think the mental health challenges people have faced are significant. I guess one positive is at least it happened at a time when there’s an increasing awareness around mental health issues.

I think for me, for myself, and also we’ve got a lot of people at VCCP, we’re about a thousand people in the UK, so seeing the impact that had right across the workforce here, you know, was eye -opening really, and I guess we tried to work through it with people.

 

Louise Scodie:

Actually, it blows my mind when I sit back and reflect on what we all went through, and then what my personal challenges were. I had a kid, I had a dying father, couldn’t leave the house. It blows my mind that I’m still upright. And I think so many of us must think that, like you say, we had the kids at home, you had a thousand people to manage as well as your own mental health and your family and whatever else. What were some of the tangible challenges that you were having during that time and how have they had a lasting effect on you?

 

Julian Douglas:

It was interesting because I think… it was it was so intense on an individual basis that each person dealt with it slightly differently for me and my wife, Jane and our daughter, Maya, who’s who was seven, eight at the time. You had to deal with you sort of want to try and keep everything steady and stable at home and especially for my daughter. I mean, everyone thought I was Victorian dad because I kept my daughter wearing a school uniform Monday to Friday.

Louise

Did you?

 

Julian Douglas:

Because I thought it would be good to have some structure and routine. And well, I think so, though all my mates were like, you’re doing what? Well, it was also interesting, the workplace. I mean, the way I personally dealt with it, I still ironed a shirt each morning on the weekdays to try and have some structure Monday to Friday to separate the weekend. But it’s just remarkable to look back and think, you know, it almost feels like a film, doesn’t it, from the prime minister being on television telling you you can’t go out for two weeks. I think as a company, what was really important was to try and keep people together, make sure no one was left out. I think there were huge issues around isolation. You either had people who were all cramped together in a flat share, so they had no private space.

Everyone locked in their own bedrooms to do work, but you also had other people who were totally isolated. And I think if anything, you know, a rare positive coming out of it was that increased awareness of the importance of mental health issues and that everyone’s experience is different, whether that’s because of your home life, your domestic situation, or just how you react to the increased pressure or the challenge. And I think, hopefully the fact that people within our company and across all companies were far more open talking about these issues, I do feel it’s actually move things forward collectively and seeing that importance of looking after people’s mental well -being. If you don’t have that, you’ve got no foundation to do anything else. All the brilliant, wonderful creative things we do, you need that foundation and that bedrock.

Louise Scodie:

What did you learn about your own mental wellness during that time?

 

Julian Douglas:

I think what I found was… I don’t know, I was pleased to find that I had resilience because I had to, because I think there’s a responsibility as a leader to hold it together for your team. But I think you also realise there are limits and the importance of switching off. I think a challenge I always face is constantly keeping going, constantly keeping going. I do find it hard to switch off.

 

Especially I do a lot of international business. So in the morning, when I wake up, I’ll be speaking with Singapore and Shanghai, then you do the UK day and then the evening you speak with the US and North America and it can be exciting and exhilarating and you can feel I’m busy. That’s good. But equally, you can’t be at your best working nonstop. You know that that leads, it leads to burnout. It certainly leads to lower quality output. So I think trying to set better boundaries and sticking to them is something that I’m constantly trying to work on.

 

Louise Scodie:

I love boundaries. It’s my favourite thing. It’s my favourite topic that comes and I think more responsibility, more problems in a way, right? So you have this amazing day, but it could last for 23 hours and you need to be able to protect yourself within that. But you’ve been a vocal advocate for mental wellness at work for a while. So, you know, before you got to the level of seniority that you’ve got to, what made you realize how important was it the experience of going through redundancy and realising how earth shattering that can be. Was it a combination of factors?

Julian Douglas:

Yeah, I think you often learn and develop from when you face adversity in your life. Because when everything’s going well and swimmingly and home life good, work life good, it’s great and you enjoy it quite rightly. I think it’s often when you hit a bump in the road, it forces you to take stock. So I think when I got laid off at WA. I just got the investment for Lucky Voice and set the bar up. And at that time, which was the mid-2000s, having a side hustle was seen as a distraction. Rather than now, if you don’t have a side hustle, you’re almost seen not as a complete human being, which is equally ridiculous. But I got laid off because this was seen to be a distraction.

And then suddenly, when you find yourself out of work without the security of an income is terrifying. I suddenly felt I’ve got no family in London. You know, we just set the bar up. I wasn’t really taking a salary out of it. You said it’s like you’re like your feet have been yanked from beneath you that you suddenly don’t know where to go. I mean, NABS is a fantastic organisation and one I’ve always supported beforehand. And you can really see the importance of it at times like that. And I think having support networks and structures and people you can talk to. And you suddenly realise actually lots of people have been through a similar experience because you can feel you feel so isolated. You feel like you don’t know what to turn. And I remember having an overwhelming feeling of shame when I lost my job at the time.

 

 

When I was made redundant at TWA, it was a massive shock to my system. I’d been there a year and I got made redundant because I’d set up Lucky Voice. The MD at the time saw it as a distraction from doing my core job of being an account director, which is quite ironic because today if you don’t have a side hustle, you’re not seen as a complete person, which is equally ridiculous for sure.

But at the time, you go through a myriad of emotions, all of which are negative, which was shock, to panic of how am I going to survive, how am I going to pay my rent, because I actually didn’t take a salary at Lucky Voice at the start. But the overwhelming feeling I felt was shame. I felt embarrassed by it. I guess so much of my identity is wrapped up in my job, or I found it was.

It’s really important in those low moments to have support and structure around you in a place where you can go and speak to about it that’s in a sort of judgment free place. It’s why NABS is such an important organisation. And you also then realise, the realisation for me was that you’re not on your own or you’re not the only person that this has happened to. Because you can feel so, you feel so isolated in these moments and it’s, it helps me a lot to understand that other people have been there. And ultimately, you know, we did get through it. And ultimately, Lucky Voice worked really well because it’s still going strong today. But I think it gave me a new level of appreciation of the difficulties that you can face in work. And I think, you know, to this day, I have situations where I’ve had to make people redundant.

Louise Scodie:

I was just about to ask you about that. What’s the empathy and insight it’s given you when you have to make people redundant?

Julian Douglas:

Well, it doesn’t make it any easier, that’s for sure, because in a way you actually feel it. So I think for me, having empathy is hopefully can allow me to deliver the news in a more considerate way, but it’s still news that you don’t want to hear. I think it’s, you know, we haven’t had to… it’s not something I have to do very often, but it’s just part of the nature of business, especially coming through the pandemic, that people lost their jobs. And I think having some care and consideration of the impact it’s going to have on the other person is really important if you’re going to be a responsible employer or just a decent person.

Because at any level, whether you’re the most senior person where you fear you might not get another job at that level, or the most junior, where you’re worried about how you’re going to pay that next month rent and bills and the cost of living crisis. It’s a terrifying ordeal. It’s a painful ordeal to lose your job in that way. So I think I’d like to think it’s made me a better boss having lived through it. I mean, I wouldn’t recommend living through it, but perhaps I’ve gleaned some insight having experienced it, because when I lost that job, I remember having to go home to my girlfriend at the time, I lost my job, I could barely do it. You know, to tell your parents, it’s an official thing. It’s not easy.

 

Louise Scodie:

How long were you out of work for?

 

Julian Douglas:

Well, I just went and started working full -time at the karaoke box at Lucky Voice at the karaoke bar. I had a fallback but I was out of the industry for about a year. Full -time karaoke.

 

Louise Scodie:

Can there be any better type of karaoke? My song, by the way, is the Fresh Prince of Bel Air. I should have said that at the top. I would say that NABS’ support advisors are amazing at dealing with redundancy inquiries. What they don’t know about the process isn’t worth knowing. And they’ve also got the emotional understanding around the issues as well. Because you have that two -pronged approach you’ve got to take. You have to understand what’s happening through the process as you’re going through it.

 

Julian Douglas:

Oh, impressive, Louise. Now that, that I need to hear. That I need to hear.

 

Louise Scodie:

Then you’ve also got to deal with all of the emotions that you’ve mentioned, the shame and the worry and the financial impact. So if you’re going through redundancy, give our support to you because they are amazing. Now, to add to your amazing list of accolades, you were the president of the IPA. So if you just explain a little bit about what got you into that role, what you had to do and your key takeaway from that, which I think is the Pitch Positive Pledge, what the thinking was behind that. We were really interested in that because of the impact that pitching can have on mental wellness. It can be so exciting, but also really, really stressful at the same time. So talk to us a bit about the connection between pitching, mental wellness and the pledge and the impact that that pledge has had. From what I can see, that really opens up the conversation. Whereas before people were just supposed to get on with it, just at work till two o ‘clock in the morning.

Julian Douglas:

Yes, yeah, like a badge of honour, wasn’t it? OK, so the IPA is the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, which is quite hard to say. It’s the trade body for the advertising industry. It’s about 110 years old. I was really surprised and honoured when I was asked to be the president. You get a phone call asking you if you want to do it once you’re on the council.

 

I’d sat on IPA council, which is like lots of the top people in advertising, because over the years I’d got involved with the talent pillar, which is got lots of initiatives around inclusion, about getting people from different parts of the country and different socioeconomic backgrounds into the industry. So I’d come up with advertising unlocked and help come up with the I -list previously. And I guess having two initiatives had a lot of success. So off the back of that, I guess they asked me to be the president following Nigel Vowes. Now the time, so it’s a huge honour. The time I started my presidency was in lockdown. So I took over when nobody could get together at all and everything was on Zooms, which was a bit of a shame because you think if you ever gonna get a good luncheon gig in advertising, it’d be present at the IPA. And I got it when all the restaurants were closed.

Louise Scodie:

That is such a shame.

 

Julian Douglas:

But I guess in line with what we’ve been talking about, taking ever a position, a leadership position for the industry during that time in the middle of a pandemic is a really rare thing. It’s a once, hopefully once in a century or less frequent thing. And I was very aware around me of a number of things that the need for the industry to prove its worth, because there were lots of job cuts in all industries because, you know, wheels weren’t turning, planes weren’t taking off, restaurants were closed. There’s a lot of really depressed economy, so lots of jobs were going. Half of people’s focus was on how do we prove our worth to keep getting paid. The other half was this increased concern and awareness of the impact it was having on our people.

It was the first time you suddenly looked through, you looked into the houses of your work colleagues and your clients and your clients looked into their agencies home lives and we saw each other as people. And so I guess my whole initiative while I was, my agenda was called 10X, Accelerate Opportunity and it was called 10X because a lot of people at the time said they’d seen 10 years technology advancement in one year, in one month because you had to everyone learned to, you know, my mum and dad started paying for things with Google Pay on the phone, stuff that would have taken forever happened really quick.

So I tried to bring some optimism to this and said, well, said, well, OK, if we could bottle some of this energy and positivity and acceleration and then take on some of the biggest challenges we face, we can we could put a big dent in them. And a big one was mental health challenges. I think, as we said, people have started to appreciate the pressure that work and cause. And a lot of client agency relationships have that master servant, you know, lack of it, lack of equity in the relationship. So I wanted to get after that, which is a hard thing to do. And so working with, so I started working with ISBA, because I thought it was important not just to be an agent, an agency initiative, it needs to be an advertiser and agency initiative. So I met with ISBA and there’s a fantastic guy there called Andrew Loudon who looked after the agency relationship from the ISBA side. So ISBA is the equivalent of the IPA but for advertisers. So British advertisers. So you’ve basically got the client’s side is ISBA and the agency side is the IPA. And I thought to make meaningful change, we have to reach across and do this collectively to get an industry level change. Otherwise, if his agency is trying to make a change on their own.

It’s sort of like Crimea River. There’s a lot of organizations that seem to be more deserving than a bunch of agencies. So we started working together to go, how could we improve mental health awareness and outcomes within client agency relationships? That’s where it started. And where we got to was saying, actually, the best chance of having a good relationship is starting it in the right way. So it’s very hard to correct something that’s been going on for years.

If you get to a 20-year relationship, it’ll be difficult to change that much. But if you can start on the right footing, then you’ve got a chance. So that’s why we picked pitches or the agency selection process as the moment to focus on to lead to better mental health outcomes. Now, obviously, the pitch itself is so pitches are real double edged moments. So on the one hand, they’re brilliant.

And I said, VCCP, that’s very, very good at pitching. We’ve been top of the new biz table nine out of the last 10 years. So people said, how can someone from VCCP be talking about pitching? My counter to that was always, well, that’s why I can talk about pitching, because we do it a lot and do it well. If we were bottom of the new biz table and I tried to change the rules of the game, then you’d probably spell a rat.

 

So it was very much to say, pitching can be fantastic. It can help you grow your business. Number one, it’s the easiest way for businesses to grow, to take on new clients. We all have a competitive spirit in our industry. We like to go out and showcase our talents to be the best we can be. And individually, it’s fantastic for people in agencies to accelerate their career.

 

Louise Scodie:

Yeah.

 

Julian Douglas:

Often you get promoted on a big pitch win. You push yourself and you learn new things. And for the advertiser, it’s great because the advertiser gets to get best advice, you know, new capabilities, business needs changes. Pitching is acceptable. Pitching can be a very good thing.

The problem with pitching is often it’s been done in a way that doesn’t consider the individuals involved. So, you know, we live in an age where lots of companies, lots of agencies and lots of advertisers, client organizations have got great ESG policies where they commit to having best behaviour in their supply chain, in how they look after the companies that they work with. If you stack those commitments against how they run pitches, they’re often at odds. On a pitch process, traditionally you’ll get a bunch of agencies work for intense period for free, all of whom come up with a load of work, only one of whom will win. And that’s a standard pitch. Often the pitch will be protracted. It often goes on for ages and ages and ages, longer than it’s supposed to go. Sometimes there’s no winner at the end. Sometimes the pitch is pulled off halfway through without an outcome. Often there’s no feedback.

It can be a very pressurised situation. That’s very hard on agencies because they’re having to pay people for whom their work is not being paid. And I guess we just end up with a very unequal situation that was having lots of negative outcomes for people. So together, we came up with the Pitch Positive Pledge, which was just a really simple commitment from both the agency and the advertiser to make sure that they run an intentional process that really takes into account the impact on the people both sides. And it’s about reducing wastage, just about reducing wastage in the pitch process.

There were three simple parts to the pledge, three commitments. The first one was the client being positive that a pitch is required. And ideally, they’d write a five line rationale for why there is a pitch. The second part is going, OK, yeah, we are sure we need to run a pitch. There’s no other way of making our agency selection. So we do need to run a pitch. The second one then is we’ll run a positive process. We won’t ask for things we don’t need. We won’t get you to do a whole lot of stuff that actually won’t impact the result. And then the third and final commitment was provide a positive resolution.

 

It doesn’t mean everybody wins. It means somebody wins and it means we’ll give feedback to everybody. And those three pledges, the positive pitch required, the run a positive process and provide a positive resolution are so simple that I’d have thought any reasonable advertiser would be able to sign it. It was fascinating how many people couldn’t sign that.

 

Louise Scodie:

What were their reasons, did they say, why they didn’t want to sign?

 

Julian Douglas:

It did make quite a few people uneasy because there is no reason, there’s no reason you can give that’s any good. A few people said it might, it could make them less competitive, which I would wholeheartedly disagree with, but I guess that was their point of view. Some advertisers said, well, we can’t sign that because it’s possible that people in our organisation won’t live up to those pledges.

I found out the worst I was going, oh my God. So, so you’ve got ESG commitments that you have in your annual report, but you’re telling me you, you know, you’re concerned people in your company went work this way. And I was like, well, that’s the whole point of the pledge is to, is to call it out and correct that bad behaviour. So there were, there were quite a few companies who didn’t sign it, but the good news is there were lots who did and we got significant advertisers, you know, Unilever, Nestle, Barclays, British Gas, huge, huge companies signing up to the pledge. And I think, I think perhaps the best outcome was it was trying to just capture a bit of that moment in time where people were seeing their colleagues and partners as people. And we knew that wouldn’t last for long.

And I guess sitting here three, four years on, you know, that moment has passed. I think there has been a shift and we did manage to just raise the bar or raise the floor a little bit with the Pitch Positive pledge that you see fewer pitches being called over Christmas or over Easter holiday and summer holidays. That’s definitely improved. We’re seeing pitches that are much shorter. They don’t go on as long.

 

So I think overall, from the feedback that we’ve had through the IPA that I’ve seen and through anecdotal feedback directly to me, there’s been agency and advertisement and improvement. It’s by no means fixed. It’s not something that’s been corrected. But I think as much as anything else, and this is really important for anybody in agency who’s listening, who’s not aware of it, the real beauty of the pledge and because it was created by ISBA and the IPA and because of the level of signatories we have, which includes pretty much every intermediary and every agency and a lot of the big advertisers, there’s over 360 signatories.

 

It means when you’re asked for something that you consider to be a bit unreasonable during a pitch, rather than feeling you’re jeopardizing your chances and by saying no, you can go, oh, are you aware of this thing? That trade industry body endorsed that says perhaps we shouldn’t be doing that. We’ve signed this. Have you heard of it? It’s almost like the gesture in the medieval court. It allows you to have a point of reference that takes away the one on one. It diffuses it. And that’s how we use it at VCP. And often you’ll find, you know, often the advertiser or procurement professional is involved. They’re not bad people. They’re just don’t, they’re not aware of the impact of or the consequence of their ask. You know, so I think it just brought a bit of empathy. But I was talking about being made redundant. It’s brought a bit of empathy and consideration into the process.

Louise Scodie:

So that sounds really positive and change takes a long time, right? So this is going to be an ongoing evolution. We will pop a link to the pledge in the show notes. So you can find out more about that and use it to manage expectations should you need to. And it also highlights something for me as well.

So we had our community consultation All Ears that we published at the end of 2023. And we had various key learnings from that we need to work on as an industry to better support mental wellness. And one of the findings was there is a gap between policies and practice. So you might have all of these beautiful DEI, mental wellness policies, but actually when push comes to shove, they’re not either known about or they’re not being activated. What you’ve highlighted to me is how you can use a policy to activate more awareness of practices to better support mental wellness.

 

The policies are there when they’re robust and they’re well thought out, they are there to be used. So it really illustrates to me, find out what your policies are, which ones can you use, which ones can you activate, which ones can you talk to your manager about.

 

Julian Douglas:

Exactly, and 100 % right, because I think it’s seeing those policies as useful tools. So often when we when we launched the pledge, a lot of people were like, that’s good, but it won’t change anything is anyone I speak with people go, this is how you use it, especially to the intermediary, because the intermediary, I guarantee you, will have signed it. And we did workshops, we didn’t just write this thing, we did workshops with clients with agencies and with intermediaries to create this thing. So you can remind them of it at the right moment. When a pitch comes in, go, is this a pitch positive? Is this in accordance with the pledge? It just affords a conversation that can save you pain down the line.

 

Louise Scodie:

Exactly. Now, you are such a positive person. You’ve done loads to lift the community up in our industry, but how does the advertising and marketing community lift you up?

 

Julian Douglas:

Well, I mean, I love this industry because I love what we do. I love what we do and I love the people in it. You know, it’s a real privilege. It’s a real privilege to work in an industry which has got such creative people who are all on a mission to change the world, really. I mean, you work in our industry because you want to have an impact on the world, whether it’s a really narrow one in your specialism or if it’s huge and vast and you want to go big.

I think a lot of people say they fell into advertising. I didn’t. I chose it very specifically. I was going to work in the city as a trader. Yeah, I had a job to be a derivatives trader in 1996. And I saw an advert on telly for Audi cars, which was a a city boy test driving a car in black and white, Frank Budgen shot it, called Number One. And I saw this ad and I was like, that’s the best thing I’ve ever seen. It is a city boy who takes a car back and goes, not my style. And I was like, wow. So I chose to join the industry off the back of that ad. Now go for it.

 

I often hear people say that they fell into the industry. It just wasn’t my experience. I actively chose it because I saw this ad that I thought was so good. And then I guess 10 years later, having been laid off from TWA and working at Lucky Voice, I went I was asked to go back in a day a week at Grey where I’d previously worked to make ads for Man City. I’m a massive Man City fan.

 

When I went back in, having been out of the industry for a while, I was like, wow, it is an agency I’d worked at, but I went back in and I couldn’t believe the environment was great, the people were fantastic, you had free coffee, the printers worked. But then beyond that, I started to, a day a week, we came two, we came three. It’s such a privilege what we do, which is to knock ideas around all day. .

When you compare that to a real job out in the world out there, it’s so different because the blank piece of paper. We work in an industry of possibilities. I mean, that’s phenomenal. So loads of motivated, brilliant people from all different backgrounds, from all over the world, work in our industry and we work around possibilities. So that lifts me up every day. And just seeing… we’re also so lucky in our industry because we get to impact the environment around us. Now, if I get on the tube with my daughter, she’s always just pointing at things going, did you do that? Do you do that? And I’m like, I didn’t do that. I didn’t do that. But my mate did that one. Imagine that. That’s phenomenal. I mean, unless you’re an architect, I don’t know how you can impact your environment as much as we do. So I’m constantly energized by the people I work with, the work that we do.

 

Louise Scodie:

What’s the best lesson you’ve learned about how to support yourself?

 

Julian Douglas:

The best lesson I’ve learned, I’ve got two and I’d say there’s one I’ve learned which actually is the importance of lifelong learning. I’m a voracious reader, I’m always doing a course on something, I don’t always finish them. But I think being open to ideas, learning how to do things properly, best practice, has really helped support me in sort of figuring out how things should work and how things should be done. I found that really, that personal development journey has been really important to supporting myself. The second one I’m still working on, and I guess that’s more the self-care side, and making the time and prioritising self-care, setting boundaries, keeping healthy. I’m still working on it. I’m still working on that.

 

Louise:

I think we’re all still working on that. But the first point is awareness. And you’re definitely aware of that both for yourself and for all of the people around you as well. So thank you so much for everything you do for our industry. If like Dougie, you’ve been inspired to take on some lifelong learning, by the way, NASB has loads of free courses from resilience to creating inclusive cultures at work. We’ve got loads of really good stuff there. And so I’ll pop a link in the show notes to all of that as well.

Dougie, you have been absolutely marvellous and I definitely feel uplifted by this conversation. And I hope Maya is now allowed to wear mufti on occasions. And I look forward to a rap battle or similar at your karaoke place very, very soon. Thank you so much for joining us.

 

Dougie:

Deal, deal, you’re on. Thanks very much, Louise. Thanks for having me.

 

Louise:

Thank you.