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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