David B. Horne, creative accountant and author of the award-winning Add Then Multiply: How small businesses can think like big businesses and achieve exponential growth, has a multidimensional perspective on the Business Book Awards as entrant, finalist, winner and now judge. He also knows a thing or two about the power of books for business growth.
In this week’s episode, we discuss how books serve as a permanent record of knowledge, helping businesses learn, grow, and establish credibility. As well as attracting the right clients, they can also help you ‘consciously uncouple’ from clients that no longer align with your goals.
And did you realise that writing a book – a journey of personal and professional development – can also count towards your CPD hours?
A classic EBBC blend of practical tips and inspiration. Get the kettle on.
David’s site: https://addthenmultiply.com/
David on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-b-horne/
Alison on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/the-alison-jones/
The 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge: http://proposalchallenge.com/
The Extraordinary Business Book Club on Substack: https://extraordinarybusinessbooks.substack.com/
The Extraordinary Business Book Club on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1447064765612358/
Alison Jones: I’m here today with David B. Horne, who is a right-brained creative accountant. He spent the first half of his career with big corporates, training as a chartered accountant with PwC, then holding senior finance roles with AT&T and the BBC. In 1999 he moved to the entrepreneurial world, beginning a 10-year stint of being CFO with some very fast-growing companies, raising over £100 million, buying or selling more than 20 businesses, and setting up his own wine business along the way.
Today, he works with founders, helping them raise money and invest in their businesses, achieving exponential growth rates. And he’s the author of Add Then Multiply: How small businesses can think like big businesses – there it is, look, if you’re looking at this on YouTube – and achieve exponential growth, which won the Business Self Development Book of the Year at the Business Book Awards in 2020.
So first of all, welcome, David. Great to have you here.
David B. Horne: Thank you, Alison, it’s a pleasure to be here.
Alison Jones: Great to have you. And secondly, congratulations. I mean, I know it was a little while ago now, but congratulations on winning in the COVID year.
David B. Horne: Yes.
Alison Jones: Did you celebrate on your own?
David B. Horne: We did. Yes, yes. My wife and I sat at home. I had my DJ on and when we watched it online and saw that I won, I cracked open a bottle of champagne and we drank that.
Alison Jones: I mean, it may not be quite the same, but at least you don’t have to pay for the taxi home. So, you know, there are the swings and roundabouts.
And so, I know that you obviously have been an entrant to the Business Book Awards. You have been a shortlisted author in the Business Book Awards, you’ve been a winner in the Business Book Awards, and you are now a judge at the Business Book Awards.
So tell us what that multi dimensional perspective feels like.
David B. Horne: Well, it’s, I mean, it’s been fascinating to, you know, whenever you get an opportunity to see something from multiple sides, it gives you a much greater degree of understanding and knowledge of what goes into it. And, you know, having been a judge now, I mean, the rigor with which the judging is applied is really quite something.
I mean, I always knew it was going to be serious, but I mean, we had the short listing where we had a bunch of books that we whittled down to a list of, I think, eight, and then we had eight weeks to read them all. And then literally yesterday I had the call with the judges where we decided who our winner was.
And I guess I’m not allowed to say anything more.
Alison Jones: Absolutely not allowed to say anything. No, no, no, they’d have to kill us both. No.
So we’re recording this on 31st of July. The award ceremony is going to be in September. And so we’re in that sort of difficult period of time where you just, you kind of almost don’t want to speak to anybody as a judge, do you, in case you sort of inadvertently let something slip?
It’s really terrifying.
David B. Horne: Exactly.
Alison Jones: Yes, fantastic. And I mean, the Business Book Awards is brilliant for all sorts of reasons. But I think one of the wonderful things about it is that it does provide anybody who’s interested in really good business books with a kind of go-to reading list, doesn’t it?
David B. Horne: Oh yes, definitely. Absolutely and it’s got such a wide range of categories so you can just kind of go onto the website and look at the winners page. You know, this year, last year, if you want to go back to 2020 and you’ll find my book on there. And yes, it’s really clearly set out.
And I think if anybody had a particular, you know, I wanted to know about sales and marketing, or I wanted to know about diversity, equality, and inclusion, or I wanted to know about, you know, whatever category, just go in and look at the books that won.
Alison Jones: Yes, and you can’t go wrong.
David B. Horne: Definitely.
Alison Jones: And I mean, I guess I’ve got a sort of fairly self selecting audience here. The people who are listening to us speaking care about business books. So in a sense, we are preaching to the choir here, but just in case somebody stumbled in thinking it was a different podcast, tell us why books matter for business, for you particularly, but also just business in general.
David B. Horne: Sure, sure. Well, I mean, books matter because, I mean, books are a permanent record.
I mean, I have a published book that will always be out there even long after I’m gone and that’s kind of, you know, that’s an element of legacy, which is very cool. But more importantly, books are a great way for people to learn. Books are a great way for people to share their knowledge.
And I know when I was starting out building my business, it was all around, you know, talking to people about what books they’d read and what were the things that they were learning and what, you know, I remember one time being at a dinner and there were six or seven of us, we were on a training weekend with a different entrepreneurial group that I’m no longer involved with, but we were out for dinner and just talking about what books had we read and sharing books. And some of the books that I read were, you know, really had a significant impact, you read the book and then you meet the author and then one thing leads to another.
And yes, it’s remarkable.
And, I still get that today. I mean, I was a guest on a podcast recently and someone that I’ve never heard of downloaded, my book read it, reached out to me and tomorrow I’m going to pitch with them for a new business opportunity.
So…
Alison Jones: It’s a brilliant way to get to know people, isn’t it? So if you are reading somebody’s book, by the end of it, you really know them as a person. Like, of course, as the author, you have no idea who they are.
David B. Horne: It settles, you know, if there were ever a credibility and authority piece, it’s completely settled.
Alison Jones: And it also develops you as the author, doesn’t it? Because to get to that point, you have to have really articulated what it is you want to say in a way that maybe you don’t in the normal run of business.
David B. Horne: Very much so. And for me, I mean, I wrote my first book in 2019. And I had been building up my practice over a period of seven years and I had accumulated a wide range of clients, some of whom fit with where I wanted to go and some of whom didn’t. And the fact that I had published a book and was able to say, you know, here’s my book, this is what I do, all of this is what I don’t do, meant that I could go back to clients where I felt a sense of loyalty to them, but they weren’t going where I wanted to go.
And I was able to sit down and have a conversation with them and say, look, this is where I’m going, you don’t need this, what you need is this. I’m happy to help find you the right person for you. And let’s part ways amicably and hopefully stay in touch.
Alison Jones: That’s so funny because we’ve talked a lot about the book as a way of attracting clients, but it’s also a way of consciously uncoupling from the clients that aren’t going to be serving you and vice versa.
David B. Horne: Very much so, yes.
Alison Jones: How interesting. And I know that you are on the journey towards a new edition of Add Then Multiply.
So, so many questions there. First of all, why? Secondly, how do you know when it’s time? Thirdly, how are you going about it? Let’s start with those.
David B. Horne: Okay, so why? So my business has, I won’t say my business has taken a pivot. My business has kind of evolved in a way that might not have been what I originally set out to do, and all of the content that’s in Add Then Multiply is still valid to what I do, but there’s a whole other side of the business that hasn’t been set out in the book. So the second edition is going to pick up and cover both aspects of the business.
Why else? I had been thinking of writing another book that was just going to be the other aspect of the business. And I just thought, why do I need to write another book? Why not just take this one, it’s now five years old, by the time the second edition comes out, Add Then Multiply will be six years old. I spoke with my publisher about it. We had a long conversation around what the changes would be, et cetera. And she said, no, it makes more sense to do a second edition. And I’m comfortable with that.
Alison Jones: And just so people are, because people might not know what a second edition, if you make a few corrections to a book, it’s just a corrected reprint. You know, that’s not a new edition. A new edition has to have a significant amount of new or updated material in it. But as you say, it’s still fundamentally the same purpose, content, target market, you know, idea. It’s just updated.
David B. Horne: Updated and if anything more niched in a way.
Alison Jones: Oh, interesting. Tell me what you mean by that.
David B. Horne: So, I mean, am I allowed to promote my business?
Alison Jones: Well, I’m not going to stop you. Go on.
David B. Horne: Okay, wonderful. So, Add Then Multiply is all about my FACE methodology, which is scaling up companies through raising capital, buying other companies, putting them together, selling. FACE, Fund, Acquire, Consolidate, Exit. The other aspect of my business is working with entrepreneurs and basically providing a finance team for them.
So, a lot of entrepreneurs that I know don’t have very good finance functions, don’t often understand it themselves. And so they end up outsourcing it to an accounting firm or to a bookkeeper or someone, and these aren’t people who’ve really worked inside businesses running finance functions before.
I mean, I’ve worked in, I mean, the last listed company I was with, we had operations in 23 countries around the world. I had finance staff in not all 23 countries, but probably about 18 of them. I know how to build teams, manage teams, run teams, run global organizations, deal with fast growth, deal with all the compliance and all of that.
And I’ve always done it as part of the team of the company. But now that I’m doing what I’m doing, I’m not looking to go and work full time for any one person, but I’m looking to provide that as a service to entrepreneurial businesses because when they scale, oftentimes the accounting firms that they’re dealing with struggle to manage the scaling up.
Some of them are okay, but a lot of them, they’re just focused on compliance, not on how do we make the business grow and become more profitable.
Alison Jones: Operational rather than strategic.
So how are you going about this new edition.
David B. Horne: Slowly it’s been stewing in my brain for probably three or four months now, and now that I have the clarity that it is going to be a new addition, that stewing is starting to take a bit more shape. And I would imagine that I’ll be ready to start writing in the autumn. I’ve got a couple of big family things coming up.
My daughter’s getting married in Greece in August. And I want to be fully present for that.
Alison Jones: Yes.
David B. Horne: My wife and I go back to Canada where we’re originally from. Well, I’m originally from, she was born here in the UK, but her family emigrated to Canada when she was small. But we have a lot of family back there and we go back every year for a, I call it the annual pilgrimage.
Alison Jones: I love the idea of you sort of sitting at your daughter’s wedding covertly scribbling notes, don’t do that, please don’t do that.
David B. Horne: No.
Alison Jones: But when you do get to it, after all the traveling and the joyfulness and all that, what does writing look like for you?
David B. Horne: Well, if I think back to the previous two books, my first book was literally a brain dump and then editing and testing and re-editing and then moving forward. And that process took, I guess the writing process took about three months and the editing and repurposing took another three months until we had a product that we were happy with.
My second book was a huge research project. It took 18 months to research it, which was fascinating, but hard work. The second edition of the first book will be much more a brain dump. But updated, adding the new element of the business, rejigging things a bit. Probably taking some bits out that are less relevant now that I’m five years down the line.
But in terms of that, I will put together a careful plan of what the book has to look like. And then the way I tend to write and different people have different routes, but the way I tend to write is when I’ve got some spare time, I’ll just sit down and start writing. And I might struggle to write a hundred words in an hour, and I might write 5, 000 words in a day. And it’s, you know, it’s almost a touched by the muse kind of thing. It really depends. Because I’ve sat literally at my desk and just the words do not come out and I’ve sat there and the words just flow.
Alison Jones: and I think a lot has to do with the amount of caffeine in your system…
David B. Horne: yes.
Alison Jones: …that’s my theory. I love that you’ve done in a sense both kinds of books though, because I think that’s, it’s quite insightful that there’s the kind of book where you know exactly what it is you need to write. You’re basically just encoding your methodology. You’ve worked through it, you know exactly what it is you need to just get it on paper, shape it into something that can work when you’re not in the room with people and works well. And, that’s one kind of writing.
And then that second book you’re talking about is much more the, I’ve got an interest, I’ve got an idea, I’ve got an itch to scratch. I don’t actually know what it is that I need to write, so I need to start right upstream with the research.
David B. Horne: Yes.
Alison Jones: They both have their place and they’re both really enjoyable in some ways. But was that second one, a bit of a shock to the system?
David B. Horne: Yes, it was and it was really interesting because I started out writing it similar to the first one, even though I knew that there were bits and pieces I had to go out and research. But then I managed to find the person who I wanted to write the foreword to the book.
I managed to get an introduction to them and we had a call and she said to me, point blank, you’re not thinking big enough. You need to go away and rethink this whole thing. Come back to me when you think you’re ready. And that just kind of… and it probably took me a year before I was ready to go back to her and I reached out to her and said, okay, this is what I’ve done, you know, this is the research I’ve done.
And, I mean, it was, well, here’s the book it’s called Funded Female Founders. It’s all about the challenges that female entrepreneurs face when raising capital beause it’s a very uneven playing field. And I went out and researched a lot of stuff on, you know, what was happening around the world, I read Emmeline Pankhurst’s autobiography, which was a fantastic piece of literature. And I interviewed probably two or three dozen female founders about their journeys and what they’d experienced and all of that. And so it was just, it was this huge, huge research project and then collation of the research into a distilled set of findings.
Alison Jones: It’s brilliant. So, I mean, the book is obviously a business development tool in some ways, but it’s also a real personal and professional development project, isn’t it?
David B. Horne: Yes, definitely, definitely, yes.
Alison Jones: So if…
David B. Horne: … So as as you mentioned, I’m a chartered accountant. I was able to, writing the book counted towards my CPD hours,
Alison Jones: Oh, nice.
David B. Horne: development. So yes.
Alison Jones: That’s brilliant. Yes, hadn’t even thought… how do you do that? Because obviously you haven’t got formal CPD accreditation.
David B. Horne: I have published a book. I am the author of that book. This is how long it took me to write it. And my requirement is to have 35 hours per annum and I had a lot more than 35 hours of writing and it was accepted without any questions.
Alison Jones: That is such a hot tip. If you’re a professional, if you care about your CPD, writing a book can get you there. That’s really cool. Who knew? Brilliant.
So, I’m going to ask you for your best tip, David. If somebody’s listening, if they are inspired by this, if they want to write a book, or if they’re writing a book and they’re feeling a bit stuck, what would you tell them?
David B. Horne: Sit down with a pen and a piece of paper, or sit down with your laptop open, or your desktop open, or whatever, and just start writing. It doesn’t matter what comes out. I read a number of books about writing when I was writing my first book and I got stuck and I read Stephen King’s on writing and I read Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and a couple of others and one of them talked about the shitty first draft.
No one is ever going to see your shitty first draft but just get it out of your head and onto paper or onto the screen, get it onto whatever medium that has captured it and then go back and revisit it later.
Alison Jones: Because then you’ve got something to work with.
David B. Horne: The secret to writing a book is to start writing.
Alison Jones: And it’s funny sometimes people think, oh well I don’t know what it is I want to say, so there’s no point in starting writing. But actually it’s the process of writing that sort of reveals what it is you want to say.
David B. Horne: Yes. And then the other key thing, when you’ve got something that you think is reasonable, share it with one or two close but critical friends and ask them for honest feedback. Because I did that, and as a result of doing that, I rewrote the entire front end of the first book.
Alison Jones: You see I can imagine somebody listening going, well that sounds like a really bad idea, I don’t want to do that. Why is that a good thing?
David B. Horne: This book would not have won with the front end that it had originally.
Alison Jones: It makes for a better book.
It does, it’s very, you’re inviting more work for yourself and it feels, it makes you very vulnerable doesn’t it? Putting your baby out to people who are going to rip it apart. How do you get over
that?
David B. Horne: Well it does, it does you know, you’ve got to put on your big boy or big girl underpants and just get out there and do it. The alternative is to go to market with a substandard product. But like I said earlier, once the book is published, it’s out there and it’s going to be out there after I’m gone.
Do you want to have a good book out there or do you want to have a shitty book out there?
Alison Jones: Yes, I mean, there’s no answer to that, so that’s absolutely it. Thank you.
And I’m going to ask you to recommend a book as well. You’re not allowed to recommend either of yours, as you know. I think we’ve done that. But what would you recommend if somebody hasn’t read that they should give a try?
David B. Horne: A book that is, well, so, it’s more a book for people who are at an early stage or are thinking about setting up on their own, as opposed to someone who’s a really experienced business leader. And the book is called Entrepreneur Revolution by Daniel Priestley. It’s a book that’s had a significant impact on my life in many ways that I couldn’t possibly imagine when I first read it.
Alison Jones: And he’s got something,
David B. Horne: yes.
Alison Jones: You and I know Daniel Priestly, we’ve heard him talk, and it’s like listening to the guy, isn’t it? He’s got a very direct way of speaking on the page.
David B. Horne: Yes
Alison Jones: did you find that was inspiring?
David B. Horne: No, absolutely and helpful and great content and you know, kind of keeps you guessing. Particularly with that book
Alison Jones: What do you mean by that?
David B. Horne: Well, he talks about a thread that runs through the book that’s
Alison Jones: Oh yes. I remember
David B. Horne: yes
Alison Jones: I was baffled by that. I got a bit annoyed about that. Did you work that out?
David B. Horne: No, I think it’s a marketing gimmick, but it worked.
Alison Jones: …review about that book actually. I was like, I’m just really annoyed by this secret thread that runs through the book. But yes, because it makes you feel stupid and I hate that. Which is really smart of him. Brilliant.
So David, if people want to find out more about you, more about your books, where should they go?
David B. Horne: Easiest place to find me is on LinkedIn, David B Horne, B as in Bravo and Horn with an E at the end. Or they can go to my website, addthenmultiply.com, just like the book.
And I’m also on Twitter or X David_B_Horne. And I’m on Instagram, but I don’t use it very much, but my team puts posts out.
And that’s also, I think, David-B-Horne.
Alison Jones: Brilliant. I will put all those links up on the show notes at extraordinarybusinessbook.com along with the transcript and you can hear the conversation there on your podcast platform of choice or you can see it on YouTube.
Actually, I don’t know why I’m saying that because you’re clearly, if you’re hearing this, you’ve found a way to look at it. So anyway, if you haven’t seen it though, you might want to have a look at the Extraordinary Business Book Club playlist on YouTube and then you get the front cover in its full glory. Marvellous.
So good to talk to you today, David. I will be seeing you in September for the Business Book Awards.
David B. Horne: No, I’ll be in Canada at the time.
Alison Jones: Ah, shame.
Okay. Well, I’ll be seeing our fellow judges at the Business Book Awards in September and hopefully see you next shortlisting day.
David B. Horne: Yes, hopefully they’ll invite me back next year.
Alison Jones: Great to see you. Thanks so
David B. Horne: much.
Thank you so much. Cheerio.
