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Niraj was 30, healthy and getting ready for work when a stroke put him on the bathroom floor and eventually into the stroke unit at St Mary's Hospital in London.

Fifteen years on, he has built five businesses across property, meditation, sports tech and now M&A, all while carrying two convictions the health scare gave him: that a useful thought beats a true one, and that energy is a strategy in its own right. His latest venture, DKZ Equity, is out to fix what he sees as broken about how smaller entrepreneurs get sold.

In this episode:

• The stroke at 30 that came with no family history, no warning and no explanation, and the "car crash" analogy his doctors used when they discharged him
• The father he lost at 14 to a heart attack aged 47, and the two ambitions that shaped Niraj at 15: run his own business and see the world
• Why the plan he was already forming to leave employed life got accelerated the day he woke up in hospital
• The year he spent inside two tech startups just to learn how to build, and the mistake he was making that stopped anything getting off the ground
• The pivot into real estate out of "desperation and frustration", the London Plan document nobody in property was reading, and the co-living niche that replaced his salary
• Why he built video viewings, electronic signatures and fibre-optic broadband into his lettings in 2012, and why he still finds property "incredibly boring"
• Riding the London wellness wave in 2014 and 2015, building a meditation and mental wellbeing movement, and the "moderately successful" exit that taught him more than a bigger one might have
• The sports tech partnership with Mac Lackey that nearly delivered a seven-figure exit on something that fundamentally didn't work
• The three near-miss accountancy acquisitions that turned into the origin story of DKZ Equity in December 2024
• Why he thinks the sub-£50M M&A market is where things get "murky", and the incentive structures that push good advisers up-market
• The retainer-free M&A model he thinks founders should be wary of, the four-to-six percent fee range, and the tail provisions that have quietly wrecked good deals
• The 24-month tail clause that trapped one founder, cost them a £20M exit and forced them into another funding round
• Why he stacked his firm with two experienced partners from day one, and why he almost never takes equity when early-stage founders offer it
• Energy as a strategy: the physical, mental and social edge that shows up in every meeting whether you notice it or not
• His two-part definition of true wealth: winning the demographic lottery of a free-market Western economy, then having the bravery to define what you actually want rather than what social media tells you you should

A conversation about treating your own health as infrastructure, building businesses in markets other people have written off, and the questions every founder should be asking before they sign an M&A engagement letter.

Niraj’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/niraj5hah/

DKZ Equity Website: https://www.dkzequity.com

This podcast is produced by Tribunista

Sponsored by Capital Partners

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Sam Smith spent 24 years building FinCap from a single desk and a phone into a London-listed investment bank, becoming one of the few women to lead a public financial business in the UK. She bet on small caps when the big banks were running for the exit, kept hiring when her own team thought she was reckless, and walked away at her best year ever. Now she's putting everything she learned into Super Scalers, a community helping underrepresented founders scale past £50 million.

In this episode:

• The summer sandwich round at age 17 that doubled takings in two weeks, and the family bakery moment Sam only recognised as entrepreneurial 20 years later
• Why she walked away from the Schroders and Morgan Stanley route on the day she qualified as an accountant, against the advice of literally everyone she knew
• Building a corporate finance division at 24 with nothing but a desk, a phone and three books on company law
• The MBO signed on 1 August 2007 — two weeks before Northern Rock collapsed across the road from her office
• Why she kept hiring aggressively through the financial crisis while her team begged her to stop, and the four months in 2009 when fees stopped completely
• The first redundancies she ever made, the coach she had to bring in, and the moment she still describes as one of the hardest of her career
• The 48-hour ultimatum to raise £2.5 million for the secondary buyout, the chairman who underwrote her on the spot, and the team that delivered the money in 24
• Why she gave everyone the same allocation, from receptionist to senior partner, and what that single decision did to the culture
• The IPO timed against Theresa May losing her cabinet, and the "last man standing" mindset that got the deal over the line
• Why she prefers loaning staff money to buy shares over handing out free options, and what skin in the game actually changes
• The 10 days after stepping away that she calls the worst of her life, and why she still knew it was 110 percent the right call
• Super Scalers, Rosaleen Blair, and the 144 women in the UK who have built businesses past £50 million in revenue

A conversation about trusting your gut against every voice in the room, treating culture as the real point of difference, and ranking your own happiness out of ten every single day.

This podcast is produced by Tribunista

Sponsored by Capital Partners

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Martin Lightbody turned a fourth-generation Scottish bakery into the number one celebration-cake supplier to the UK supermarkets, scaling from 50 staff to 1,200 and £60 to 70 million in turnover. Then he sold up, took the whole idea to America, and won the Hershey licence for the entire country.

This is the full arc of a career built on one habit: seeing where the market was heading before anyone else, and betting big when the moment came.

In this episode:

• Why his father refused to let him work in the family bakery as a boy, and the unpaid training across Europe's best bakeries that replaced it
• The UK award he collected just as a new supermarket opened up the road and quietly started killing his trade
• The decision to sell every shop, take on millions in debt, and put the family home on the line before a single supermarket had said yes
• The point of difference no rival could match, and why speed to market beat the big factories every time
• The licensing deals that built an empire, and the three that went spectacularly wrong (one involves rival football fans and a lot of ruined cakes)
• How he finally landed Disney after three years of knocking, then closed an entire American licence with a pallet and a half of cake
• The naked sauna standoff that got him the finance director he had chased for a year, who then stayed for 28 of them
• Representing Scotland at a sport he had never played, on an animal he had never sat on
• What he means when he calls himself a fan of plagiarism
• His honest definition of true wealth, and the moment of relief he still remembers

A conversation about pivoting before you are forced to, hiring people you think you cannot afford, and knowing exactly when to walk away.

Helpful Resources mentioned in the episode:

Sam Walton: Made In America

Bulletproof Entrepreneur #78 Sir Tom Hunter

This podcast is produced by Tribunista

Sponsored by Capital Partners