Lottie, I'm really excited about this episode.
Me and Rory always get together and we're always thinking about
who we can we bring in so that we can show the world how they
think slightly differently to the norm and how you're building
some phenomenal stuff. And one of the first people on
top of the list was yourself. Obviously we've.
Worked. Say that to all the.
Guests. Oh, no, you can watch the
previous episodes. This is the first time I've said
it, but I really wanted to speak to you about longevity, right?
We talk about everybody is now thinking about being healthier.
Everyone's thinking about what they need to do to be able to
live a long, longer, happier life, right?
And with my own master, you guys seem to be focusing in that
space. So I wanted everybody to hear
what you've been up to. But before we get into all of
that, it'll be great for you to give a bit of an introduction of
yourself or anybody that doesn't know who you are or my own
master. It'll be great to give you the
floor to let our audience know about what you've got going on.
Sure. So I'm Lottie White.
I'm the founder of Myer Master. I am ex agency, I was MNC
Saatchi for before I started my company.
And my master is kind of the home of recovery tech.
And our whole mission is how do we take all these incredible
technologies that are emerging, you know, ice baths, saunas,
hyperbaric chambers, and make them something that the everyday
person can have in their home at a price that they can actually
afford. And you know, the overall
mission is to help people become 1% better every day.
We've been working on that concept and how we roll it out.
And it's really exciting to wake up every day and put something
out into the world which is genuinely helping people feel
better. And we're here, you know, from
customers who are overcoming chemo through to Carlos Alcaraz,
who was using our stuff at Wimbledon, through to the
everyday person who's really focused on how do I live a
longer, happier life. And so it's really exciting.
We're scaling pretty fast. We're the 30th fastest growing
company in the country right now.
And I'm, I'm excited about the mission.
Yeah. So, so how did the journey
start? So I think a lot of the times
people kind of like drop into a brand scale story and they don't
know how it started. You just like keep going.
It's almost like a Christopher Nolan film.
Right. It always starts in the middle
of the action, right? But then the only time you hear
about the early days is years later.
You guys are currently building, you're currently scaling, you're
active within the business. It'll be great to hear about the
origin story and how it is running my O Master today.
What does it feel like to be in the middle of the tornado?
Yeah, tiring and stressful. That's what it's like to be in
the middle of the tornado. But I think two things.
I heard this thing the other day, which was, you know, a lot
of people are like, want to start companies and they're
sitting there with this question like, what's my passion?
Like what's the you get told? Like, you should just know your
passion. And I, I had somebody the other
day say, think about what you were obsessed with between the
ages of 14 and 16 and do something to do with that.
And for me, all I did was play sports.
Like that's what I did all day long.
And then I went on to marry my husband Joe, who's a
professional rugby player. He played for Harlequins and he
played for England and he was out with an injury.
He tore his Achilles a couple of years ago and he was with his
time off. He was meant to be fit in my
kitchen and instead what he was doing was he put a stuck a
literal different end onto the end of his B&Q drill and he
started using it as a massager on his calf.
He took it into the Harlequin's changing room, which is
obviously a professional sports environment where they have, you
know, elite physiotherapists and people to treat their bodies.
He's using this B&Q drill in the changing room.
All the lads are taking the absolute Mickey out of him.
He goes off to get treatment, comes back up the corridor and
all he's can hear is this coming from the changing room and he
walks back in. Kyle Sinkler, Chris Robshaw, you
know, some big rugby names are using it and they're offering
cash out of their wallets. And they said to him, Kyle
Sinkler said, Joe, I need this in my life for my back.
I'll give you £500 right now if you if you let me have it.
What? Yeah.
So he buys the. They clearly rugby players don't
know much about how much drills cost well.
Exactly. But oh, he was just earning too
much money. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. But yeah, so we go back to BB
and Q and we buy like 20 more of these drills and Joe sits in the
spare room and like hacks the end off re puts another end on
and start selling them to all the rugby players.
It spreads to all the other teams in the league, it spreads
to England. And we start just selling them
like via messages to different people and sending them out.
And and then we take 2 grand out of our savings and go to the
national cycling show at the XL and we're like, let's give it a
go and see if we can sell it to the general public.
And like, I hope no one who bought them is listening because
we haven't been sued today. And I really hope that that
doesn't happen. But yeah, that's that is the
origin story. So I think when they say like an
idea can come from anywhere, that's really true.
So the principal use was it that the rugby players were using it,
they had a particular what back pain or they?
All have something right? Like of course, have some
niggle. Inside cyclists going to have
this be the same I imagine. Have the same, you know, all
either in their shoulders or they've got something wrong with
their knees or like, and you know, this was like at the very
when kind of massage guns weren't a thing right now
they're, you know, universal and yeah, every that this was kind
of our core customer insight was that everybody has a niggle,
right? Everyone has something that is
bothering them somehow now, and yeah, that's how we started.
Obviously there's some professional athletes and you
said that they have professional doctors and medical staff over
there. Why didn't they have the right
equipment for these niggles? Well, I think what's interesting
and you know, has been very obvious in the rise of the
Wellness space like we was we started kind of playing around
with this stuff in 2018, two 1019 and a lot of the stuff
that's very accessible now just wasn't then.
It was the the reserve of they might have had it in the club
but they couldn't. Have afforded.
It at home, you know, they couldn't, they didn't have
something to treat themselves every night when they were
sitting on the sofa or Joe had this injury and he was being
sent for this treatment, this shock treatment.
He was being sent twice a week because it was costing the club
4 grand every time he went. He could only go twice a week
and he wanted to be doing something every day.
So it was kind of like this accessibility point, which is
the other core pillar of what we're doing, right?
It's like, how do we bring this into the home so everyone can
feel better every day? That's really interesting
because a lot of other times people have an idea of the
business they want to start, right?
And they put this plan together and then they try to force it so
that people buy it. It seems that the blueprint we
obviously had Ben Francis here, you kind of know the audience
you want to serve, but you don't really know the product until
people start paying, right? And it seems like you kind of.
Fell. Into the space.
But I also think we had already been discussing the fact that we
wanted to start a business, right?
So like we had planted the seed in our minds and we were open to
looking at problems. And then when you set that kind
of frame in your mind, you're, you're literally thinking I'm
suffering with this problem or this person I'm speaking to is
having this issue and it's about solving problems, right?
A. Surprising number of businesses
start actually almost by luck that you stumble into something
actually maybe it's not surprising.
I mean, it's a sort of, you know, someone simply notices
effectively. Roger L Martin's very good on
this. He always thinks that the three
things that kind of give you inspiration for a new strategy
or strategic direction are anomaly, analogy and resolve, a
contradiction of his three things.
And actually when I, you know, I thought this is quite
interesting and when I looked at it, nearly all the businesses
you see that are successful have basically happened on one of
those three things. And it also seems that something
goes wrong that you may think is the worst thing to ever happen.
And within that, you're able to flip it into something positive,
right? Because obviously there was an
injury. And then by trying to figure out
a solution to that problem, you're able to figure out a gap
in the market that other people didn't see.
And then it started this flywheel.
At what point did you start to acknowledge that you're an
actual business and you're not just solving people's niggles?
Yeah, not for good. We were the noble solvers for
quite a while and both had big other jobs.
He was off playing for England. I was really into my AD career
and we just did trade shows like we did or we went to the end of
races every single weekend. We just like show up and try and
sell the thing. And although we probably took
too long doing that, it's actually like what better
customer insight than being at the end of a triathlon or a
cycle race and literally spending the entire weekend
talking face to face to your customer.
Like it's informed everything that we've gone on to do, right?
But if you said to someone go and spend 2 years, you know,
every weekend talking to your customer in the cold, you might
not be out for doing that. That's really interesting.
So you knew the space you wanted to go into and then you found
the problem to solve and then you started to spend more
FaceTime with the consumers, which probably gave you some
insight in terms of the kind of business that you need to be
creating. Roy talks a lot about the fact
that a lot of senior business leaders don't spend time with
the consumer. They spend more time in the
boardroom and actually the best ideas, the best inspiration
comes from actually meeting your customers at face value.
Do you still do that today? All the time.
In fact, one of the things that I do really regularly is answer
the we have a phone line, right Customer phone line is answer
the phone line like a couple of days a month and it's like it
feels like a total waste of time because you shouldn't be doing
more. No, no.
It's free market research and also it's it's it's feedback.
It's fantastic. And you're like, Oh my God, do
not realise that was an issue or they literally say to you like,
I'd really love it if you did this though, because that would
help me do X. And you're like, right, well,
that's the new product. You've got to go and.
I can't remember which business it is, but there's one business
where they devote Monday morning, you know, this is a
senior leadership team to analysing the complaints from
the previous week. And the argument is, you know,
some complaints are always going to be, you know, complete
outliers. But of course what they do by
doing that is they notice the recurring complaints and they
go, OK, if you've got a one off complaint, you know, maybe
there's nothing you can do. It's daft to try and legislate
for that because some complaints will always be of that nature.
But once you get a recurrence, then you've got to do something.
Exactly that. It's weird I.
Remember which business it is because it struck me as it might
be, I don't know if it's AO, but it's it's a pretty large
business and I was kind of astonished, but very, very
impressed by it as well. I think, I think too many people
lose touch, you know, with that. I don't think there's a better
thing you can be spending your time on than with the people who
are buying, using your product. Or the thing it gave us going to
the shows was we were on the ground trying to sell the
product and you hear the objections, you're like, no, I
wouldn't buy that because it's too loud or I wouldn't do that
because it would just sit in the cupboard and I don't understand
how to use it. OK, well, they're the things
we've got to fix, or they're the things we've got to address on
our landing page, right? Like to help people overcome
them, you understand? Someone said to me, I think on
Twitter, one of the best market research questions I've ever
heard, and it was they just bought something.
I can't remember what it was they bought.
And with it arrived one question, which was what almost
stopped you from buying this today?
Now the argument is, of course you don't have any data on the
people who didn't buy. Yeah.
But from the people who did buy, getting data on what the kind of
sticking point might have been, EG it wouldn't derive in on time
or whatever it may be. Such a quick fix, it's such.
A quick fix. Literally you come in there.
Do you know I've worked on this for that?
That question never occurred to me before, but it's a brilliant
question. In other words, what what what
was your near sticking point or what was your near deal breaker?
Yeah, because what's a near deal breaker for someone who buys is
probably a deal breaker for three people who didn't.
Exactly same thing with the phone, by the way.
It's so crazy how everybody's so obsessed with like quantitative
data, right? The numbers.
And usually they base their decisions on people that are
already by, but then nobody looks at qualitative data.
And a lot of the times people make that decision in a dark
room and they force into the world and they don't actually
take the time to pay attention to whether people received it in
the way that they initially that initial intention.
They don't realize why people don't buy.
They don't realize actually they don't even read their own
comment section. There's certain brands that turn
off the comment section. I find that insane because it
assumes that the whole value proposition that's provided by
social is merely to shout. But I actually think that the
the people that have been able to benefit the most in the
modern day era are those that listen the best.
But we're still the data presented as an average, yeah.
Which in a way is completely misleading because it's the
variance that matters. If you think about the whole
existence of McDonald's was because Ray Kroc was selling
milkshake or thick shake machines and suddenly notices
this order from what was the first McDonald's run by the
McDonald's brothers for something like 16 of these
things, which is completely bizarre because you know, a
typical restaurant by one or possibly 2.
And his instinct absolutely perfectly was I have to find out
what the hell is going on here because no one's done this
before. And of course, the outlier in
that case, the anomaly, as Roger Martin would call it, eventually
was the whole decisive factor. You know, we've got something
here which is really unusual. Now what an average does is it
disguises it in the mass. Because an average.
It's just an average. And so, you know, of the
thousand orders that come in, one weird order for 16 doesn't
really affect the average. It's it's, it's buried.
But of course, he noticed this one completely freakish order
and the entire thing, effectively the entire story of
McDonald's, arose from what, Someone noticing one data point?
Yeah. By the time by the time it
starts influencing the wide average, it's too late.
It means that. It's been more adopted, right?
Yeah. So you're too late to the party
now. Obviously we talked about
listening to the audience and being speaking to the audience
at face value allowed you to get all these great insights.
What is the biggest insight that you got that you still think
about today from those early days being there, giving people
products and getting their feedback.
Is there anything that still leaves lives with you today?
That the wife makes every decision in the house, even if
it is the man is completely buying it for himself.
This is interesting, isn't it? Because that was no one's ever
been able to test this, but even when go you go back to the 1950s
where typically the man might earn 100% or at least you know,
75% of household income, it was always stated that the majority
of consumer decisions were made made by the wife.
It is, it was insane to me to watch it.
So we would be on our stand, you know, trying to sell our stuff
and people would come by the stand.
And if it was a woman and they fell in love with the thing,
they just handed me the money and they bought it.
And if it was a man and he was there by himself without his
wife, 99% of the time he said, I'm sorry, I've just just got to
go call my wife. I'll come back every like
literally every single time he had to go and get permission
from his wife to spend money on this thing.
I I'm not joking. You it was always a joke about
northerners, wasn't it? That they gave their entire wage
back into their wife who would then give them like 2 shillings
for beer money to spend. But in a weird way, I mean there
aren't. I mean, I always wonder about
this because one of the things I noticed about the United States
is there's a, what you might call, there's also a bloke
economy of things like gas barbecues, leaf blowing
machines, speed boats, you know what I mean?
Bass fishing boats. This may be a European thing
that you know that it's a consumer matriarchy to some
extent it. Really is and I mean, you know,
about 70% of our customer base is male and they're the people
who are really passionate about it and they're looking at the,
you know, technology and they're getting into it and they.
Love it. I mean man up British consumers,
you know, exercise a little bit of autonomy every now and then,
you know what I mean? It's going in their garden and
it's going to take up space in the garden.
She's got to be OK with that. You know, it's a pretty big
purchase. She's got to be OK with that.
And then it's like, can I persuade her to spend?
Don't we start on the space thing?
Kitchen implements, You know, I mean, Ninja make an ice cream
maker that actually makes soft serve ice cream.
Yeah. Now the reason I can't buy it
isn't because I can't afford it is my wife would go bonkers
about bloody kitchen surface. So you.
Burn up. Seriously, my life wouldn't be
if I came home with a bloody kitchen with an ice cream, my
life wouldn't be worth living. Yeah, there it is.
Yeah. And then how did you use that
insight to make the right like to transform the business?
Like what? What changes did you make to be
able to accommodate for that? Well, I think just understanding
that we also had to talk to women.
You know, we really had to talk to women, even they, if they
weren't the person who was going to buy or if they weren't the
person who you know, was going to use the product necessarily,
certainly at the start was that they had to understand and they
had to kind of fall in love with it to a degree as well.
Otherwise it just wasn't going to get over the line.
This is why you need company cars, by the way, because then
you can have a really bling ass car and say I didn't want all
this stuff. The company's OK.
You could. You'd never be allowed to buy
adaptive cruise control with your own money.
But no, I mean Sky, the sky marketing department in a less
politically correct age. I'm not attributing it to the
present Sky marketing department back in the 90s used to call
this the female handbrake. In other words, every bloke on
the planet would have a full Sky package and the obstacle to them
reaching 100% penetration. Sports we don't.
Use sports. Yeah, yeah.
But by the way, the reason why I end up getting Sky when I was
younger was because my mom was hooked on Prison Break.
Oh. I see.
So, so we it was first on Channel 5 course and then we
watched it. The reason why I remember it is
because. Brilliant series.
Oh, it's amazing. Sensational.
Season 1, it ended on the biggest cliffhanger ever.
And then my mom said we have to watch.
The rest of it? But if she didn't say yes, we're
not getting it. Exactly.
We're not getting it, but so. If you think about it, this is a
bit mischievous, but an awful I, I was joking to someone in
Belgium saying that if you had an all male planet, most blokes
actually live in a Travelodge. You have an amazing car, OK,
Travelodge, no tidying, right? You get a free really good
breakfast, you've got a big TV and there's a bar in the
evenings. OK, absolutely what we do.
OK. And then we'd have a sort of
like a Dodge Viper parked outside, right?
That's it, basically. Done, all done.
Okay, yeah, totally happy. No, no further requirements of
life. That means forget all that and
we probably wouldn't last very. Long.
That's what would happen. But but then when you think
about it though, there's a lot of industries where women do
drive the purchase decisions within the household and just,
they probably like in most industries, right?
Because a lot of the times the reason why we wear nice things
or we do stuff. And, and I guess the selling
factor for the women in the household for this is longevity,
right? Because you're talking about
prolonging your life and therefore living a healthier,
longer life, which therefore improves the quality of the
household. That's how I would sell it
anyway. But did you think that that
messaging or that focus on longevity had an influence on
the female audience or on the consumer?
Did they understand the wider world that you're building as
opposed to just the products? Well, I think what's been
interesting is the way that the Wellness industry has rapidly
evolved and become part of kind of mainstream conversation.
No one was really talking about longevity five years ago, you
know, and when we started, we were selling to athletes or
people who would go out and cycle 60 miles at the.
Yeah. And, and like these kind of
hardcore amateurs, I would call them.
And but the narrative, the conversation and the passion for
Wellness and the data points we watches and everything else have
made us, you know, Wellness obsessed as, as, you know, a
consumer. So now the narrative has
changed. Now if you say longevity to
people, they're like, oh, yeah, if you said that to people kind
of 5-6 years ago, it wasn't a kind of understood term in the
way that it is now. And I don't think people were
thinking about it as they are now.
And I think that a lot of people are very rigid in the health
goals. It was all this obsession about
being hyper productive and time management and all these
different things. And I watched the a podcast with
Daniel Eck. It was the Founders podcast and
he talked about his obsession with energy management, not
necessarily with time management and productivity management.
It seems that people are now starting to realize that it's
not about how you use. It's not about what time you
allocate to things. It's more about how do you make
sure that the time that you use influences your energy levels in
the positive way. And obviously there's a, there's
a, there's a biological way to do that, right?
So, and your products are the ones that focus on how you
actually physically feel healthier.
And are there any particular products that you think that
people are flocking for over others when from your consumer
base? Yeah, I think that is so
interesting. And I'm smiling because I was
literally writing about this on the way here.
I was writing about energy management for like an e-mail to
go out to our database and how Joe and I manage our energy.
And it's everything from like the relationships you hold,
yeah, where you spend time with people, what you prioritise.
Everything is about your energy, right?
In terms of the products, what's been really surprising is, as I
said, we launched this as a as an athlete recovery business.
And so many people get in touch with us now to talk about this
as their moment of mental clarity in the day and how the
products we're we sell are helping them from a mental
health perspective. Like an insane number of our
customers are not really using them for physical recovery, but
they're actually using them for mental health reasons basically.
And so I guess that comes back to you.
Which products in particular in terms?
Yeah, sorry, Karen. Which which products in
particular do people find massively beneficial and.
Particularly the ice baths. So how a lot of people use those
is it's 5 minutes in the morning where a they're doing something
difficult so they're proving to themselves at the start of the
day, you know, eat the frog kind of thing basically.
And and the second thing is, you know, there are a lot of
benefits. They say it's like literally
having six coffees when you get out of the ice bath, right?
That you. Also have some effect on
anxiety, doesn't it? Exactly.
Yeah, it helps to reduce anxiety.
There's so many mental benefits to it.
And so that one, and then the second piece around the sauna, I
mean, there's actual data around how it improves your bait brain
health. But also for a lot of people,
it's people's 20 minutes to shut the door, have complete
tranquility at the end of the day.
So you know those two products in particular I think.
It's really interesting because when I everyone talks about
habits, right and consistency, etcetera, but you realize that a
lot of people optimize for them at the most motivated state, not
for them when everything is just like going to shit, right?
And I, I, I've, I've found in my own personal journeys that I now
have habits that because I have to control the downward spiral,
right? The reason why a lot of people
going to continue with whatever it is that they, they, they set
out to do is because you'll put a goal to say that I need to do
this seven days a week. And the week that you do it 6
times, you're like, Oh my God, I'm a failure.
And then off, you're off, right. And one thing that's really
interesting about the energy management side is if you now
optimize for energy management and not just productivity
management, you start to look at context.
What am I doing that day? When do I need energy?
And how does my day need to be laid out to ensure that for that
moment in time at that most energy possible.
For example, before, when we did the first couple episodes of the
podcast, I would treat it like a normal day, but I forgot that I
needed an A different part of energy to be able to be present,
have a conversation. What I ate mattered.
How much sleep I got mattered. I get destroyed by Rory in the
podcast because like, if you're, you're not switched on, you
don't have enough sleep, you don't have enough food and
you're you're you almost like structured your day to be ready
for that optimal moment. It has a cartographic, A
cartographical effect on the quality of the time that you
spend during that period. So actually are most people
utilizing the the the the ice bath in the morning so that in
the evenings that the usual cycle or do some people flip it?
Are different people utilizing it differently?
Is that just like the standard way?
I think obviously, as as you pointed out, the thing about
energy management is it's so personal and this is the problem
with kind of like broad brush pieces of advice is that
everybody operates totally differently.
They're kind of early morning, early riser versus late night.
Owl is a classic example. It's right.
Some people are just more productive at 11:00 PM at night.
I'm most productive at 5:00 AM. So like I'm getting my ass
Saturday at. 5:00 PM No, no. I mean, being a bit of an
introvert, I my problem is that you stay, I stay up insanely
late. I mean, if I go on holiday, I
effectively end up going to bed, going to sleep at 4:00 in the
morning, partly because I like that nighttime quiet so much
that, in other words, you know, the phone doesn't ring.
There are no interruptions. And the problem is it's fine if
I can work from home the next day pretty much.
You know, You know, I'm not saying stay up till 4:00 in the
morning. Stay up till 2:00 in the morning
is fine or 1:00 in the morning is fine if you, you know, you
get out of bed at 8:39. But if you've got to get into
London, I find an absolute pain in the arse.
Yeah, but it's very difficult. And, and my father was exactly
the same. I mean, he, he he was
self-employed. He got up at about 10:00 and
11:00 in the morning every day and would work, but he'd be
working typically at sort of 11:00 at night.
And it's partly just the peace, you see, because there are no
distractions. Mercifully.
Yeah, but no. But equally, funnily enough, I
mean, one of my arguments I was making the other day is I don't
mind. I don't mind getting into London
at 7:00 in the morning because, yeah, it's effing early, but you
get a really early ride in and you end up with two bonus hours.
Yeah, the really dumb time to get into work is 9:00.
Yes, it is. Because it's it, you know, like
basically either get in at 7 or get in at 11.
Everything else you're just battling with everybody else.
Everything goes wrong with the tube at that time because.
It's from an energy management point of view.
It's really stressful. It's really bloody stressful.
It's completely right. Yeah.
Yeah.
So you're basically coming into the office or wherever you're
going stressed out. You're you've been frustrated
because the tube has been delayed.
All these things happen. And I really think that it's
really important to make sure that clutter right is a, is a
big. So I'm, I used to be one of
those people that would just expect people to accept me for
just being a bit of a mess right all over.
I'm just being creative, etcetera, etcetera.
There's nothing worse than one of those creatives.
Yes. OK.
But I, I started to realize and, and that really the clearer my
space, the clearer the mind and the more I'm doing things in
themes. So my Monday to Wednesday is
completely different to my Thursdays and Fridays, right?
That's clever if you can partition that, yeah.
If you can start to almost say, OK, I basically say it between
Monday and Wednesday, I'm in mercenary.
Yeah, yeah, I'm in like go mode. Like I do it this way and then
on Thursdays and Fridays, the types of meetings that I have is
completely different, right? So I wake up early now not by
choice. It's because I had to do it to
able to make sure that I have the right energy at the right
time. If I want to be creative, I need
quiet. So I actually solved the most
creative problems between around 5:00 to 9:00 in the morning.
So that's when I get into like the real core of a problem.
Then I go to the gym. Yeah.
Then I do all my like, quick jobs like e-mail responses.
And then from the afternoon, basically you can just have my
time. I'm ready to connect, I'm ready
to speak. But it took me a while to be
able to understand myself. One of the.
Greatest tricks is just only doing e-mail for certain
proportions today. Yeah, I.
Mean actually slowing down what it is frequently it polls the
server so that you only get new emails every two hours.
The the problem is then people use bloody e-mail to tell you
the meeting's been cancelled. You know, I mean, actually,
actually the whole system of, of, of messaging is a mess.
Yeah, because everybody egotistically thinks that if
they use WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, you do too.
Yeah. And that arrogant assumption
that you will obviously use. So it's like, you know, I'm at
the church, but there doesn't seem to be a a wedding
happening. Did you not get my message on
Wank chat? Yeah, you know what I mean?
They're kind of the fun thing. I'm 60 years old, you know, for
crying out loud, I'm not going to be on your dumb platform.
And this, this business is unbelievably irritating.
I mean, it's just so stupid. And actually I think we should
go back to telegrams and things like that, where or where the
postman comes once a day. Yeah.
And you deal with it and that. That's it.
That's about to get. Wagcha T-shirts.
Actually I'm deep in a conversation with about, I'm not
joking, 50 other founders who are all saying WhatsApp is the
most stressful thing in their life.
It's awful. Just groups upon groups upon
constantly being bombarded also. You can't delegate by the way.
Hang on. Because if you forward a
WhatsApp message, it doesn't explain who you forwarded it
from. Yeah, exactly.
So I've then forward something about my wife would say, can you
contact this person and they get one?
I have no idea who this is from. It's just a so it's more work
and and e-mail is appalling to begin with.
And WhatsApp is worse than e-mail.
So it was just quite an achievement really.
And instantly, and Paul Graham makes this point.
No one has attempted to improve e-mail significantly.
I mean, it doesn't nest well, it doesn't.
Now, theoretically we should expect AI to solve this problem
for us in some shape or form, but I'm not sure it will.
I'm, I'm, I'm genuine. Some people, there's this thing
called superhuman is that? Right, Sorry, sorry, helping
this plug, there's a, there's a tool called Fixer, Yeah.
Yeah. Fixer, I'm going to say not It's
not sponsor. It's not a sponsor of the
podcast or anything. But not yet.
Not yet. Where's the camera?
Yeah, yeah. But it allows me to have drafts
written. But like, so when I come to
respond to emails, it's understood how I respond to
things. It's also plug in to our other
chats across the business, so it knows how to respond and gives
it context. So now I'm only like editing
like 10% of the time, but really like, yeah, it makes because a
lot of the e-mail responses are not like they don't need your
thinking. It just needs you to to sign
something off or move things on, right?
And you realize actually how many other times or how much
time you spend thinking about a response because you've just
come out of a different mindset. You come into this e-mail and
like, wait, hold on a second. What was that again?
What meeting did we have? What, what happened in that
session? And then you end up spending
time to able to respond to a very quick e-mail.
But if that context is already put together and you just have
to basically approve and sign it up, it's just saves you so much
time. I've got a question about your
habits, right? So you talked about you've
understood your energy and how best to optimize your.
Positioning of the week is really interesting by the way.
Yes, but what about when you're leading A-Team?
And what? Because you can't.
Everybody has different ways of doing this, right?
So how do you juggle right? You might not want to talk to me
in the morning, but my best time to talk to you is in the
morning. Like how are you creating
boundaries that work for everybody else as well?
So I know that between 10:50, there's a slot there where I
anybody can hijack it if it's important.
But I'm also, if something is important, you can just call me,
right? So if I know that if I get a
call, it's important and vetoes the whole system, you can't be
very rigid. There's almost a process or
system that works for like 60 to 80% of the time, which is
enough. But then when there's an
emergency and you need me, just call me.
I think that we forget that that's an option, right?
So a lot of the time when we work with our partners, somebody
will be like, oh, I emailed them last week.
But I'm like, if this is important, that's why.
Sorry. To add to the stress, we're on
WhatsApp, right? And sometimes when there's
certain things that's really, really important, just call the
person. A lot of people hide behind
text, right? And actually, we, we, when you
think about how we've structured our business, it's really about
building trust. With the people.
Working with and you, you have to understand how they work.
They have to understand how you work.
And you obviously have a system for the majority of the time to
limit everything being in chaos. But they sometimes when you have
to go like outside and say, do you know what the inquisitive
thing is to talk to this person at this time?
I know Alf, you're doing this, but actually this is really
important. And I know when I get a slack or
a message or something around that time, it's important for me
to, to, to, to pick that up. And I couldn't have done it two
years ago, two years ago. You just had to be in it.
But then if you're fortunate at. The stage of where you're on the
journey, yeah. I think a lot of the times
people give you advice on businesses not in the right
season for your. Business 100% right.
And I think that instead of having like sweeping statements
of we should do this. And we actually spoke about
this. And this is nicely comes into
like this next topic of the conversation, which is you've
gone from being like you found the problem, you speak to the
consumers, you're now a business.
How do you build the team? How do you set structure?
What is the journey beyond that point that like raw idea, we're
just shifting numbers and run our business.
What is that transition that you guys made and how is the
business right now? Yeah, OK, really quick potted
history, because I think it's really important for people
listening. You know, you listen to those
podcasts of people and you're like, oh, they got from here to
here. What about all the shit happened
in between? So 2021, quit my job to start
the business, hired one employee, got to like, I don't
know, 250K of revenue or something. 2022 raised a little
bit of capital, not much Angel investment.
Maybe like 300K of Angel investment thought Oh my God,
this is loads of money. Hired like 8 people try to like
launch on Amazon, do B to B, you know, do E com be events, do all
the things like anyone who went launched in Selfridges, anyone
who came to us with an opportunity.
We took it because I thought that's just how you scale the
business, right? More opportunity, more sales
better. Obviously that didn't work
because you cannot do all of those things with 250K and eight
people or you can't do them well anyway, failed, spent all the
cash basically was going. Which of those things succeeded?
Or would you say that none of them did because you spread it
too thin? Spread it way too thin.
Which would you have focused on if you'd have the time again?
Well, then we had to focus on something because we were this
close to going bust. And so we restructured the team.
I had one guy, it was me and one guy in the world's most awful
box office with no windows, no heating, nothing.
And we just said, I said, look, we've got to either break
£1,000,000 this year or let's just call it a team.
And me and him sat there and decided we're just going to go
all in on E com and we're going to go all in on meta ads,
website meta ads. That's it.
And we're going to become as good as we possibly can at those
two things. So it was us 2.
And then in about April, we hired A videographer basically
to make the ads. So we didn't have to outsource
that anymore. And we broke like 1.2 million by
the end of the year. Yeah.
And then 2024 we went on Dragons Den in February, ended up doing
like 5 million, but kept the team super lean.
There was three or four of us, 5 million, Yeah.
And then on track to do like 8 figures pretty much now and have
still a pretty lean team, like 8 or 9 people.
But I think probably the core lessons are, and I say this to
founders all the time, I'm like, just stop trying to do so many
things. Like just do one thing and do it
really, really well. Like pick a channel, you know,
pick one to two skews. You don't have to have a million
things. It's so distracting.
Unless you've gone and raised, you know, a huge amount of
money, then it's a different process.
But if you're building something from scratch and you're
effectively bootstrapped, I think you stay focused and you
can do a lot with a few talented people.
How do you maintain that discipline because now that
you're obviously on the momentum of growth, it is it because you
remember? I'm deeply Scott, you've got
post right stress from that period of like, oh God, this
whole thing is. And also, you know, when you
take money from people, you know, I know in the grand scheme
of things, it wasn't a huge amount of money, but I still
took money from Angel investors, real people who signed me 25
grand or £10,000 or real money out of their bank accounts.
And so, you know, when you're about to let people down because
you made all the wrong decisions, I think that kind of
sharpens your focus, right? And you're like, I'm, I'm not
going to let this happen. Yeah.
I found it really interesting how in today's culture within
business, people celebrate when they are able to raise money
right, which is really that's the start of a journey, but
people celebrating like it's the end of a journey.
Well, it's a bit like when you get married, right?
And like the biggest celebration of your marriage, of your
relationship is the day you get married.
But really like the big celebration should be we we got
through 10 years. Through 20 years.
Interesting point that's. Way, way tougher than going and
having a great celebration. I've always been very fascinated
by happily ever after. Yeah, right.
So you get to this moment and then it's happily ever after.
No one tells us. What do you do beyond this
moment? Yeah, and you're about to get
the trenches right? I've always said that if I was
ever a film person, I would start a film that starts at the
wedding. Yeah.
And then it says and happily ever after.
Then the film starts, right? I think that if more people knew
what happens at Happily Ever After, then we'll be more, we'll
have more happiness. After Four Weddings and a
Funeral. Not for the funeral, honestly,
but you could. But no, there's a very
interesting point. Yeah.
That that is the resolution point for so many films that
it's, you know, it's a beginning, not an end.
Yeah. Yeah.
And so one of the daily constants that you know, are the
important things they need to focus on.
Because I, I remember when I heard about focus intelligence,
right? So everybody tells you about IQ,
a few people know about EQ, so emotional intelligence.
Now there's this whole concept about focus intelligence, which
is doing less things, but doing it better.
Yeah. So how do you do that?
Speaking my language. How do you do that?
Well, I think the reality is it is a daily battle for everybody
because at the end of the day, like there's just so many or
there are opportunities everywhere.
Also, if you're an entrepreneur, you get excited by opportunities
because that is the reason you're an entrepreneur to start
with, right? That's why you're doing the
thing you're doing. But I am really bullish on being
very clear like next year we're just doing two things, like the
whole team is focused on two things.
And if you are not working on one of those two things, don't
be working on it. Like you shouldn't be touching
it. And I think as a leader, you
have to be that clear with your team.
They need that level of direction.
I appreciate, you know, it maybe gets a little bit more complex
as you get bigger. But you know, I was speaking to
the CMO of Jones Rd. Beauty and he Cody, and he was
saying the exact same thing. He's like, I don't know, they're
£200 million business or something.
He's like, we're doing three things next year.
That's it. Like, these are the three things
that make us better, that will make us win everything else.
Forget about it. Did you go back to the trade
fair business at all? What have you?
Have you abandoned that? Well, we haven't completely
abandoned it. It's not there in our coats
every single weekend. Got it.
Got it there. Fair enough.
No, no. But try to make a habit of doing
it like a couple of times a year to be on the ground, yeah.
Because that is the one problem with putting it in matter, which
is you learn a lot less about your customers.
Well, I mean, you do, but you don't.
Don't OK, people. Are vocal on those comments
section exactly as you mentioned?
Interesting they are. Really talking to you.
And the other thing is we're a very founder LED business, you
know, because we went on Dragons Den and the story and we're in
our, all of our ads and we're out there.
I mean, people every day write to me on LinkedIn and they say,
I just want you to know I've had a, you know, this is rare.
Just to be clear, anyone who's thinking about buying a sauna
from my monster, but they say, you know, I've had a terrible
experience and this is what happened.
Let me send you the e-mail chains of how this went down.
And they're actually like, I just wanted you to know because
like, I'm a fan of the business and I want you to get better.
Was that an installation? That installation experience
principally isn't. It that could be, it could be
that or it could be like, you know, they had an objection to
buying something and they didn't get a quick enough response or,
you know, whatever. It could be anything.
But I think people are really vocal on social, arguably too
vocal, right? They're very quick to be like in
a way. They well, there's negativity,
there's massive negativity pass because no one has a pretty good
experience ever bothers common. Never say anything, no.
No, but that's really interesting because when we've
spoke before, you mentioned the fact that Amazon is a massive
competitor, right? So the role of brand, right?
What? What role has brand played in
terms of setting my master apart from the competitors that are
currently in the same market as you?
Do you think that that's played a massive role?
Your personal brands, your story, Dragon's Den?
It'll be great to know what is the the thing that made you
different to the masses. Yeah, I think this, I think
storytelling is everything, right?
I, I think we play in a world now where nobody's product is
really different. You know, really, I mean, we
make improvements to our product, we listen to our
customers, we try to bring a great quality product to market
and there are tweaks and things to it.
But really who is coming out with a something that's totally
radically different? Nobody is doing that.
And what people want is they want to feel something.
You know, they want to feel something beyond buying a
product and having the founder story, especially when you're at
the beginning of the journey and you maybe don't have massive
marketing budgets, it gives people a reason to believe in
you over others. And if you take the state of
players, OK, everybody's got a great product in this space.
Just say, I mean, of course there are some tweaks and
advantages, but it's like, then what am I getting behind?
I'm getting behind their mission.
I'm getting behind their story. I'm getting behind who they are
as people. I want to be aligned with those
people. And I think that is something
that everybody can leverage. That's why the barriers to entry
are so much lower now, right to start a business, because
everyone has a story and actually everybody has an
audience, whether it's 100 people or were obviously in the
creative. Space before right, you're in
the creative industry. What role did that play in terms
of knowing the importance of storytelling, the importance of
branding? Did that play a role or was it
just a necessity and it just instincts clicked in because you
recognize that you couldn't go cash for cash against the
competitors and just like leaned into what worked.
I think it would be great to understand whether that was
premeditated or was that just like instincts for survival?
Yeah, Well, I. I worked at agency, but my role
was always like people, business development, acquisitions.
So it's actually much more commercial than it was created.
And so I would say I have been not as bullish as I should,
could have been uncreative, and I've been not as bullish as I
should have been on storytelling.
I think we could have done way, way more of it, actually.
Yeah. But do you have a lot more of
your journey to come? Right.
Yeah. Well, that's why we're working
together, right, Because. It's like that's what we wanted
to really think about as we enter the next stage.
On the flip side, though, can I just add something?
There isn't a single person who we were competitive with four
years ago in the UK that still exists, is not a single brand.
Wow. Yeah, all of them have died in
the time that we've been going. And I think it's almost because
they were too bullish on brand. You know, they were too bullish
on a lot of them were bootstrapped, right.
There wasn't anyone who raised a lot of money and going out and
doing, you know, little pop ups with 100 people and, you know,
doing these, sending out free products to anyone who, you
know, would ask for it with any influence status.
And they just died because commercially it wasn't viable
and it wasn't scalable. And so actually we've probably
helped of some of the brand activities you would talk about
and we've been more British on performance.
And I think that was the right decision to this point.
I always say that. And here is almost I, I would
say that this is a, a warning to people within the creative
industry as well. I always say this that people
focus on the nice to haves a little bit too early sometimes.
Exactly. Really, if the goal is for a
business to be around for a very long time, you first need to get
past the survival stage. Exactly.
You need the basics to be able to run as an organization.
So exactly when you are coming up with a strategy, you should
be very are intentional about whether this is something that
helps the Business Today, tomorrow or in the long term.
Often than not when you look at something like paid media
performance marketing, I often describe it as it feels like a
salary, although it's very predictable.
You know what you're going to get, you know it's going to come
in a in a very consistent manner.
And then when you go with community, which I think is your
insurance policy, that's to get out of jail free card when
things go shit, right? Whereas I will criticize a lot
of businesses. Becoming, you know, where
effectively conversion becomes a kind of fentanyl to which they
become completely addicted as the only metric that matters.
I'll happily criticize some businesses for that.
I wouldn't criticize any small business for focusing at the
bottom of the funnel to begin with because, you know,
ultimately, if you can't make that work, you can't make
anything work at scale. Yeah, I think the Black Friday
thing's a really good. Example because there's a lot of
small brands that are like we're not participating because you
know, we don't want to be seen as a brand that ever takes money
off or the quality. And I get the stance from like a
brand point of view, but the end of the day, it's the biggest
shopping moment of the entire year.
And it's like, you know, at a small point, who are you to take
a stand to opt out of that? No one's going to know.
It's so like. You said to me it's.
Like almost during that period, you feel the coffers to
essentially have the budgets to do amazing brand things for the
rest of the year, right. And so I think that's a really
good example of sometimes brands kind of prioritizing brand over
keeping the business alive and healthy from a commercial
standpoint, which allows you to do all of the other cool things
you wanna do from a brand point of view.
A lot of some people live in echo chambers.
Don't realise that the world is much bigger than what's I used
to say, that the world's bigger than Blythe Valley, which is
where Gym Shark was based. When you get outside, you
realize that there's more people doing different things.
So you can't all kid yourself to believe that you're at the
center of everything. And I think that's what a lot of
people do is that they think that they're at the center of
everything. Decisions revolves around them.
But really the world doesn't really care, right?
And if you're not involved in the conversation, it just moves
along, yes, right, without you, which is really interesting.
So. Obviously Mar Masters going, you
are now a leader. Describe your leadership style.
How do you get the team bought into the brand?
How do you get the team bought into the mission?
It'll be great to know how you rally the troops to go on this
journey that you're going on right now.
High levels of integrity is. My number one thing, and I just
think it's so missing often in leadership and I experienced it
a lot when I was in agency. You know, you often learn the
most from the worst bosses that you have.
But for me, it's like I am all about transparency.
I don't hide anything from the team.
I mean, they know every number, they know everything.
We're very authentic with what we're trying to do and very
honest about what we're trying to do.
And also, you know, we're genuinely excited about what
we're trying to build. You know, this for us is, isn't
about like how can we get exit and take cash off the table as
quickly as possible. It's like we're passionate about
the mission. We love what we're building.
Of course it has to be commercially successful, but I
think people buy into authenticity and they buy into
integrity and when you have trust tested relationship,
that's amazing. And and also I think they're
excited about it's, it's easier when you have momentum like we
have right now. We're growing really fast.
Of course you can get really excited about that.
It's like the wheels are turning.
There's so much. We just had the best month ever.
It blew all of our targets. Everyone's like, oh wow, we did
that together and just giving people their flowers.
You know, I think the, The thing is none of the success is mine.
When you have a success, you give it to the team.
You're always shouting people out and when you have a failure
you it's always your fault and I think that's a good philosophy
to live by. How many employees do you have
now? Maybe 12?
Do you think it's problematic that when you reach?
A certain size or there's a way to go, yet it gets harder and
harder to have that complete openness and integrity and also,
you know, of necessity. I always wonder about this, you
know, what size it because, you know, there's always a number,
the Dunbar number around 150, where everybody knows everybody
else and they also know how everybody relates to everybody
else. And you reach a certain size of
business where effectively you have to compartmentalize it.
But at that point you do lose something.
Yeah. Is that definitely true?
Do you always have to do that fundamentally?
It's in. I mean, the whole question of
team design is very interesting. So Shopify, for example, I think
this may be also true of Octopus Energy.
Their customer service teams tend to be 10 people.
Yeah, with, you know. They're charged with a.
Particular group of customers so there's continuity, but the
argument is that when you have a team of 10 for instance, people
feel bad free riding. In other words, no one bunks off
I'll because they are actually pained by the idea of letting
the other nine people down. It's close enough.
The model that I think it was Chap called Toby Shannon used at
Shopify was, he said there aren't, you know, there are
sport, there are sports where you have teams of five and there
are sports where you have teams of 15, but there aren't any
sports where you get a team of 55 or 60.
And he argued that you can achieve a kind of cohesion and
mutuality at that size, which doesn't necessarily scale up as
you get bigger. It's complicated because
obviously you need central specialisms and all that kind of
thing as you get larger. And if you think about probably
the biggest. Bowling squad is American
football. They get to 4555, but they
operate as different teams. Yeah, so the defence, the
subteams, the subteams, the defence.
Are completely different. The offence completely different
and also the special teams are completely different.
So they are still part of the same team, but they operate as
micro teams. How I see it, especially with
modern day technology, the eye and everything that's happening.
I, I do think that a lot of the reasons why people were just
hiring a lot of people was because of empire building,
right. I think that if clarity across
the business is prioritized and honesty and and systems are
prioritized to ensure that you make the most of what you've
got. I, I think that the team at
Telegram only have 50 people and they're like a 12 billion or
plus. I don't know the numbers like
company and apparently the the founder still you have no HR
department. Yeah, he does it all directly.
It's because they set the business upfront like that in
the first public because Energy has no HR department.
Yeah. I'm bothered by HR because I
think it, it it creates an intermediation between one
employee and another, which is there a lot, there was an awful,
an awful lot, for example, between a a more experienced and
less experienced employee. You had that kind of master
apprentice relationship, which was, you know, very tacit.
It was very reciprocal, but you now have a world where no one
can actually fire anybody. Nobody can hire anybody, nobody
can promote anybody that the people you deal with day-to-day
have less and less control over your your future.
And consequently, it's that actually in a sense that breaks
down the nature of a team because effectively you have
this sort of weird third party outside force which is
responsible for all those decisions.
And so things that used to be within your gift or which you
could earn those decisions which used to be taken by the people
immediately around you who knew who you were day-to-day, and now
being taken formulaically by someone based on some, you know,
algorithm or principle, it's not the same thing.
You basically don't want to have roles.
So I have this weird thing about the word management, right?
I, I, I don't like roles that just obviously if you're a
system lead, I, I prefer black belts, right?
So I prefer what I found, especially what happens if a lot
of startups they, they have a core team of people that help
them build that momentum. But now, because the corporation
will says that you now have to become a manager in order to
earn more, you now have a very great executor that you're
turning into and not so great manager because that's not their
skill, that their skill is not working through people.
Their skill is I'm the best at doing this thing.
But because life gets in the way, I have bills to pay, I want
to get married, I want to do all that kind of stuff.
I now have to change that and give that away because the
organization does not deem that to be a valuable skill.
Whereas I think that if people and it's never an an all
conversation. It's always an and conversation.
If you have a path of people that become the black belt of
the thing, going from white belt to yellow belt to blue belt of
the thing, and they're getting compensated for the execution
skills. And then you have people that
are great at coordinating and bringing people together.
Well, like project leaders as opposed to managers, right?
They're, they're getting the most out of people.
They're there to report the performance of things, are there
to make sure that the, the, the, the, there's no friction between
the team and leadership. And that's a much better
position. Otherwise you'll just have
people that are there trying to make themselves useful or trying
to prove the value that they have.
And it actually ends up creating bureaucracy.
Really what you want is clarity, right?
And directness. And I feel like a lot of
businesses just do it because that's how we've always done it.
It's exactly that. That's just the structure.
You start here and then you get promoted and then you become a
manager. And so many people, A, don't
enjoy it and B, are not good at it, but they're amazing at their
jobs. And I think why can't you create
a structure where if that's your thing and you want to do that
and you want to learn about that, great.
But if you're just really great at doing the thing that you're
great at, you should be allowed to progress and be rewarded
equally. See that in the tech world?
It's also strange because in many cases.
What you developed on the way up as a practitioner is a very,
very unique skill. And then you effectively.
Put someone in. A managerial role which turns
the whole thing generic there's and there's no particular
correlation between someone's technical ability and a
specialist job and their managerial ability and it's a
fundamental flaw actually. Yeah the idea that I mean in a
really really well run business where people knew what people
were worth it should be perfectly possible to earn 6
figures in a call centre yeah because the very best
practitioners there are that good.
Exactly. I come very now and then you
know I make quite a lot of calls every now and then I.
You know, to customer service and every now and then you come
across something which is like a 10X yeah, OK, this person is
genuinely 10 times better than I expected yeah.
And the effect it then has on your loyalty and subsequent, you
know, attitude towards that brand, yes, can be absolutely
transformative. Yeah.
And yet those jobs tend to be treated as if they're minimum
wage jobs, which is a nonsense. And there's a frontline with
your customer as well. Think.
About that, yeah. And, of course, salespeople.
Can sort of lay claim to the revenue they generate.
Yeah, because it's immediate, but a really good course percent
a person, you could measure it, but it'd be quite time consuming
because loyalty is obviously slower to measure than
acquisition is. And that seems to be a fairly
major distortion, which is we're rewarding people not on the
value they create, but on their ability to lay claim to it.
Exactly. And that's, you know.
And that's what's. Interesting.
If you have a small team, everybody knows how valuable
someone is, even if there's no metric attached to that person's
performance because they just go, I couldn't cope without X.
And then the whole thing becomes formalized.
You need formalized sort of, you know, bonus or reward
structures. And in in effect, it takes a
step back. It becomes stupider because you
then suddenly only value someone by what you can measure, which
in some cases of course leads people to game the system, or to
pursue one particular metric you know, to the point of insanity.
Or it can lead to all kinds of perverse outcomes, in fact.
Or to be selfish so you're not actually.
Putting the goal of the organization of your individual
goals right because you are rewarded on your individual
performance. So you will get people in
procurement who get a. Bonus for effectively choosing a
lower cost supplier who aren't then held responsible for the
loss in customer satisfaction results.
You talk about the whole concept.
For being. Micro rational, but macro
stupid. That's when you get those
decisions. So within your narrow sphere.
Of responsibility, you're being perfectly rational in what
you're doing. But if you look at it within the
wider interest of the business, it's it's actually daft.
I mean, the example I always give is, you know, a well known
retailers car park in Seven, It's very prestigious, extremely
good retail. It's Marks and Spencer.
And you know, don't. Get me wrong, I actually
venerate them as an organization.
I think they're absolutely brilliant, but they have, OK,
they have this car park underneath the shop and it
effectively finds people too readily because you drive in the
number plate recognition clocks your arrival.
You then pay 5 minutes later after you've sorted out the app
and it tells you've got an hour left.
But as far as the ANPR is concerned, you've already used 5
minutes of it between driving in and paying.
So people drive out, their app says you have 3 minutes left.
They then get fined because technically they they stayed for
an hour and 2 minutes. Now it occurred to me that the
person who got the contract to run the car park, almost
certainly that was awarded by procurement.
And of course the reason they can offer the best deal is
precisely because of their propensity to find people,
because it's part of their whole business model.
Now the person who appoints that person has no responsibility for
the fact that certain people are driven batshit insane and stop
shopping there because that doesn't come within customer
satisfaction, doesn't come in with come within your remit
purely paying now and then. Of course, what's fascinating is
in the lifts in the M&S, you then travel up and it says
please do not address any complaints about parking to
store staff. You must address them to the car
park operator, which is the classic example of an
accountability sink, which is we've palmed this off.
Now it's kind of, I don't know the legality as far as the
consumer is concerned, this is your car park.
You can't palm. It off by saying.
No, no, no. It's an independent operator
who's responsible because you chose the independent operator.
And so this kind of thing is insane, where effectively what
you do, it's rather like, you know, a a retailer.
This literally happened to me. Probably I I won't name them.
Yeah, go on. OK, OK.
Bought something, bought from Harvey Nichols and it arrived.
This wasn't me. It was my daughter Bought
something. It arrived without the belt.
And now we bought it from their. Website.
But it was delivered from the manufacturer and it arrived
without the belt. And see, we get in touch with
the retailer who sold us this thing and they said, no, no, you
have to take that up with the manufacturer, sorry.
Right now. Interestingly, the manufacturer,
luckily my wife speaks fluent French because that's what she
studied at university. She was able to do all the
Shamma down this year, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But I mean, 95% of customers, you're requiring them to deal
with a French company in French to sort out this problem.
And this question of an accountability sync seems to be
happening all over with larger organisations where effectively
it's a bit like Douglas Adams's conception of the someone else's
problem field. Remember that there's a
wonderful thing in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy, which is a somebody else's problem field which
renders things invisible because it's not my problem.
And the extent to which organisations are doing this in
a way that seems perfectly reasonable to them, but which is
literally deranged to the customer.
I mean, you know, absolutely, you know, you sold me this
thing, OK. And, and, you know, similarly,
you know, I, you know, I think kind of if you buy something
from a retailer, the retailer should take responsibility for
delivery. You shouldn't say, oh, it didn't
arrive. You need to take it up with DHL.
Let's not sorry. I mean, legally you may be in
the right there. I have no idea to be honest.
But fundamentally, no sane consumer will think that's a
reasonable way to behave. But somebody's done it
effectively to, you know, effectively create an
accountability sync. Again, you know, how can we, how
can we create things so that as soon as it leaves our hands, we
can wash our hands of the whole affair?
And that seems to be happening more and more.
And of course, don't even mention the public sector there
where, you know, which probably does the same thing but worse.
But that's not that's not to criticize.
You know, I'm sure the marketing people of both those brands I've
mentioned are absolutely admirable people doing the best
they possibly can and as far as I can see doing a very good job.
But then these decisions are taken with no reference to
marketing or to the customer. They're simply taken to optimize
some cost reduction approach. And effectively, these people
can get the credit for reducing the cost, but don't get the
blame for the destruction of long term customer value.
And that's that. That's micro, you know, micro
intelligent macro, dumb. Yeah.
But really it comes back to customer.
Experience and how you really need something that sits across
the entire organization. And so often it's just siloed,
right? And I guess the question as you
get bigger is how do you keep our little conversations that we
had, you know, understand, how do you stay as close to that as
possible and make sure that it's integrated or somebody's looking
at it across the entire thing? And it's not like, right, well,
we sell the product, we ship the product, we deal with the
customer. But then even when you talk
about breaking the business. Down to its core essence of I
remember a time when a gym shark, our names was the
department that we were looking after.
So I was called social and Craig was called e-mail and and you
could speak in a round table and you can ask somebody a question
or get the answer. I was watching a podcast or I
was listening to a podcast, but I was watching it about Oracle
and the fact that they talk about the fact that they would
ask three questions and it'll take months to to get the
answers to those three questions, right?
Because you have to go through these different departments and
everything wasn't joined up and it took them 10 years to fix
that, right? So it's almost like the game is
when we've got something going that works and we can get
information instantly, where we can have communication
instantly, when we can figure out problems instantly, How do
we keep that as we grow? So basically the output or the
input of that and the output has to stay the same as we grow to
keep us very simple to understand as a business and
keep it very frictionless to move and be able to attain
information and be able to make sure that decisions get made
faster. Whereas really, as businesses go
bigger, it's almost like making it more complicated is
supported. Yeah, which is weird.
Yeah, it's so weird. But also it's like.
To the point about clarity, if you are really clear as a
business about what your customer experience philosophy
is, what is you know, what's the stance on this?
Like how should our customer be treated?
What is the number one vision mission on this thing, then
everybody in the organization should be aligned to that thing.
It's like I think that survives in family owned companies and I
think it. Survives very well and found a
LED company. Companies keeping that alive in
APLC where the preoccupation of the people at the top is no
longer their customers. In other words, they've
effectively shifted focus towards the investor community.
And I've often argued, I don't think you can solve the problem,
but it'll nice. Though it would be just by
putting a marketing person on the board.
Good though that would be because they're still on their
own and they're still going to look like the weirdo if they
raise marketing questions. I, I personally think that large
organisations should have a customer board and I think it
should, you know, we obviously there should be shared
representation between the two boards, but effectively
reserving some time for people at the centre of an organization
who can resolve these conflicts between, you know, what
procurement want, what marketing want, for example.
And having time each month to focus on those questions would
be an enormous leap forward. Because, you know, fundamentally
board meetings have become ludicrously financialized.
They're about cost and as a result, they're about cost
reduction. First, value creation takes a
back seat, and then we wonder why there's any economic growth
in a way you know. In other words, it's about
minimizing risk and cost, not maximizing opportunity.
And it's also about remembering why we're doing.
This in the 1st place, I think people lose the energy, the
drive. We were speaking about this
sweeping statement about the fact that the people that got
here will not be the people that take you to the next direction.
No, it just means they have to play a different role.
They're there to remind everybody coming in, why are we
here? Why do we do things this way,
why the customer matters to us. All those key founding team
members, they may no longer have the skill to be the best, the
CRM or whatever, but they are the extension of the founder and
they so Alex Ferguson. I'm not a Manchester United fan.
I'm I'm an artist. Because of that, I'm just
disassociating myself. About you, yeah.
But I wasn't born in the UK. OK, fair enough.
So yeah, I got my. Dad.
Honoree. I was like, I get it, I get it,
it's a whole thing, right? Yeah, but.
Effectively, there were certain players like the Neville
Brothers that were not necessarily in the team purely
because of that talent, but because there were his soldiers
on the pitch that set the culture right.
So this is the extension of him. Here's how we operate on the
field. And they he knows that they will
make sure the message is clear amongst the players and in
business, I think in business sometimes called the plant.
Which is by analogy with an office plant, which is someone
who effectively is, it's like a catalyst in chemistry.
They're, they're actually not for what they themselves do, but
for the effect they have on the behaviour of everybody around
them. Very interesting, very
interesting conception, especially when you have a
founder LED business or fast. Growing business when you have
people that have gone through the walls and seen the stories
now if they leave, then the founder has to be the one to
always vocalize this, which is impossible, right?
So you actually have to say, all right, these are the people that
we are building the foundation of this business in with.
Let's document that entire journey and let's make sure that
everybody beyond this point that comes in understands why we're
doing the way that we do it. This why we don't do certain
things or we're open to certain things that the thing that makes
you different because at the end of the day, when you think about
the definition of a company, it's a collective of people.
The collective of people that you have versus other people is
the thing that makes you different, which is why people
is a priority, not just externally of your business,
which is a consumer even internally is the priority of
leadership, right? Because that's the things that
make you different. And actually you should.
I mean Ogilvy always. Did this you over optimize for
staff retention really on the grounds that, you know, three
people doing a job for two years is not the same as one person
being there for six years? You know, I mean, the cynical
view is always that only 1/3 of people in any company do all the
work because a third of them have just arrived and don't know
what they're doing and a third of them are planning to leave.
So they don't care that that's probably a bit extreme, but I
would agree that actually, you know, umm, uh, length of tenure
matters. I mean, this is another thing
because what we try and do is we try and formalise everything.
We try and make it rule based and then you end up effectively
treating people as units of production and the the idea
being that they're fungible because all we need is someone
to perform this tightly defined function.
But nearly all people have. It's the doorman fallacy.
You may Remember Me talking about this.
Nearly everybody has a value and a function that goes way beyond
what their job description, you know, tributes to them as their
you know, you have a core responsibility, but you know,
anybody actually doing their job will spend a third of their time
devoted to things beyond their absolutely narrowly defined
role. Role Fred Fred about who worked
for Goldman Sachs. So he said the, the really
magical thing about it, what made it different was that he
said everywhere else, you know, if you got a request from the
Uruguay office, you'd kind of go, well, I mean, there's
nothing in it for us. Let's just get this off our
desk. Are they going to pay us?
Goldman Sachs? No one asked those questions.
If someone asked for help, you helped, and that admittedly.
Probably. The guy who heads the Uruguay
office of Goldman Sachs is going to be the Minister of Finance
six months later, so it pays to keep them sweet.
But nonetheless, there was this automatic culture that by
default you made yourself useful.
And so it was, you know, it's very interesting because we, we
don't think of those organizations, you know,
particularly not a large investment bank as being
socialistic because obviously as an entity they're deeply
capitalistic. But within the organization
they're actually surprisingly socialistic.
You know, there's an enormous amount of, you know, sacrificing
self-interest for collective good.
It pays to understand people because of the common.
Denominator in everything that we do, right?
And so, Lottie, we've come to time.
Obviously, I'm going to ask you to do the phenomenal task of
summarizing your biggest lesson throughout your journey right
now. And if there was a parting
message to send to entrepreneurs that want to do the same thing
or go on to their journey or solve a major problem, what
would be the number one advice that you give them?
I'm going to do the advice. Piece first, the number one
piece of advice is that the barriers to entry to start
something have never been lower and the cost of failure, I think
has never been less like it's OK to start to try and to fail and
to start again. And you should totally embrace
that philosophy and be totally unafraid of giving something a
go. Because I truly believe that
entrepreneurship is one of the most incredible things you can
do in your lifetime to create something you believe in, to
bring other people along with you on the journey.
So just start, give it a go, try and be totally open to failing
and starting again. And the second thing was what
was the second thing? The first thing That is my
second thing. Well, that's that's.
You basically answered both. All right.
Yeah, I think. You did, yeah.
I mean one of the things. That sort of rescuing, I think
the UK economy is this extraordinary change even in my
lifetime, which will be, by the way, even more important because
we've created 50% of the population become university
graduates and they're simply aren't the graduate entry level
jobs for them anymore. And there will probably be even
fewer of those. But the extent to which
entrepreneurialism in general, uh, has enjoyed this, you know,
reputational, well, I think it's probably a revival, you know,
but it, it was considered, you know, my father always said when
he went to university in the 1950s, you were expected to go.
It was, bear in mind, this is 1953.
It was sort of law, medicine, church.
There were, you know, civil service, military was acceptable
back then. But you went into one of these
sort of five socially approved activities.
And, you know, if you went and did something interesting, it
was kind of indulged, but you were thought to, you know,
slightly lost the plot. And that's completely,
completely changing. And I think it's really, really
important. And hopefully we'll also acquire
this it's OK to fail mentality, which the US has had for
probably quite a few more years. Yeah, there's more problems to
solve than those. 5. Professions.
Exactly. There's more problems to solve.
Nasim. Talib put it beautifully, he
said. That actually an entrepreneur
who fails in business is no more a failure than a soldier who
dies in battle. It's part of the overall
process. It's part of the process, which
more people. Were comfortable with that like
failing is totally part of the process yeah I'm so comfortable
with it now I'm like failing all the time 11 weird marketing how?
Much. Are you starting to gain
business through referral? Yeah, Yeah.
A lot of our businesses, a lot of it.
Through that's that's really interesting.
Have you got? Have you found ways to amplify
it? Yeah, but obviously I don't.
I wouldn't take ice baths in public.
But but people just you have got products which are highly
talkable. Yeah.
And it's very cult like, right? It's like it's a bit like they
say you. I think I heard this on a why
you not he just killed me with that.
You wouldn't. Take an ice bath in public.
Well, actually they do, but I mean.
They do a bit. Yeah, yeah.
You know, it's. One of those things that people
love to. Tell you about it's like, you
know, ice bath and I did it for this long and I did it at this
temperature and it's a bit of a like, you know, when summons are
vegan, don't. Worry they'll tell you soon
enough exactly yeah, they love to tell you and so you know
there's. Not a lot we need to do to
encourage people to talk about it and to share it.
And that's really exciting thing I think that we can tap much
weather into as well. That's fascinating.
Yeah. It's the longest you've lasted
an. Ice bath. 3 minutes.
Oh yeah, I. Can't compete with that, yeah.
So is that what? What?
What's? What's the target length of
time? Well, you don't wanna do any
less than 60 seconds, really. But you, I, you've gotta work up
to it as well. Got it, got it.
So don't be like hanging out. Too long if it's your first.
Time. You know what I'm saying?
Disclaimer yeah, you let you won't see me doing things but.
Lassie, thank you. You've been incredible.
Fantastic. Thank you.
And this is one of my favourite episodes.
Again, all the guests. Do you get the female handbrake
on ice? Baths and saunas as well.
Yeah, yeah, because there's one. Obstacle.
Do you convert a room into a sauna or is it just a
standalone? Or you can just put it in your
garden as a you just. Put it in the garden as a truck.
Yeah, there's. A fantastic.
Standalone thing. Interesting.
Yeah, OK. Episode done.