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could you do me a quick favor if you're listening to this please hit the follow or subscribe button it helps more than you know and we invite subscribers in
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every month to watch the show in person i grew from nothing to 12 000 employees 2.4 billion turnover john caldwell the
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billionaire founder of phones for you as it relates to his wealth he has it all but it's come
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at a real cost i was sitting on the edge of my seat nearly every day for 20 years facing threat after threat after threat
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after threat it did nearly finish me i think anybody's would you know because you can't work 22 hours a day under
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immense pressure it's a monster deal the biggest ever been done in the marketplace by anybody you know i don't
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mind fair competition but it was very unethical if i didn't find a solution it was instantly terminal you know my turnover
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was going to drop immediately my stores were empty nothing i'd have been bankrupt and i
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wouldn't be here talking to you today without further ado i'm stephen bartlett and this is the diver ceo i hope
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nobody's listening but if you are then please keep this to yourself
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[Music]
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i suppose if i'd had a little bit more love i would have been happier
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do you remember saying that i don't actually but i can understand why i might have said it why do you
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think you might have said that um it's yeah it would certainly be to do with my childhood
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um because my father was uh not the kindest to me uh not abusive but
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not in a way well in a way maybe he was abusive but not abusive in the way normal sense of it he just wasn't very
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fair with me and certainly not very affectionate and i think my mother was struggling through all those early
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childhood years so i understand completely why i might say if i'd had a bit more love i might have
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been happier uh so it's quite a true point when you say your father wasn't so kind
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to you was that because he was he was suffering with something or he was
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did you ever diagnose why he wasn't kind to you not at the time but in more recent years probably came to understand
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it i think um i think certainly one of the points was that i was quite a rebellious child uh
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we were brought up in the back streets of stoke-on-trent in the terraced houses and uh
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you know it was football in the streets and your mother coming down the road shouting for you and i'd go hiding and
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all my mates would say when when she asked where i was oh we don't know we haven't seen him and i'd behind me
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behind somebody's front courtyard wall so i was a nuisance and uh
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you know i was difficult uh as a child and uh very adventurous wanted
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excitement all the time and that for parents is very very difficult so i think that was probably one of the things but i think also he'd been
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brought up with certain strange values really that didn't really
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work very well he hadn't made a transition to yet a different generation
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so he put me on an old army and navy shoes from the army and navy store
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uh which crippled me and so i was out in the streets you know playing football and so on and expected to keep these
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shoes perfectly like you might be in the army and when i came back with them scuffed i was in serious trouble and i
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couldn't stop them from being scuffed at the same time my feet were crippled it just got some strange values i mean i
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suppose in today's age you would say that was child abuse but um
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um it was just the way he was and and i think when i've spoken to some of his
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friends um over the last 30 40 years they think that he came back with ptsd
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from the war and of course it was never diagnosed in those days um and he he came back and he got a lot of
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wonderful qualities he would never see anybody in trouble he was almost the first day without it being paid for
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because he was an engineer very capable very ingenious and any car broken down
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on the roadside where people were in trouble he'd just stop and help them out i'd be quite grateful for that on one
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one count uh uh i'd have to wait in the car for an hour while he fixed the car but i knew
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a you know a couple of shillings or half a crown was going to come my way as a result so you know it was a sort of this this
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childhood of uh where i'd got a lot of respect for my father in some ways but
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in other ways the way he treated me was very unfair and uh and
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not in a kind way on many occasions and um i realized that you you lost your mother
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recently so i wanted to first say i'm sorry for your loss and i know that um it can't be easy coming and doing this
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so soon after so i also want to thank you for you know coming and doing this because i know that
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well i can't imagine you know the difficulty of all of that um i when i was doing the research on your
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story i was reading about your relationship with her and your father um and and that dynamic and there was a lot
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of things within your relationship that really resonated with me um so i wanted to ask about that relationship and those
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dynamics because i know that's really really really formative in your story as well so what was the relationship
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like with your mother and your father and you as a three um well in the early days we lived with
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my grandmother my grandmother didn't like my mother um i think she was a very jealous person
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she adored me so my relationship with my grandmother was amazing she you know she would do anything for
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me but at the same time she treated my mother very very badly um and there was lots of rows in the
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household so it was not a happy place to be really it was a place full of um for me fears and
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almost at time no terrors is too strong a word but certainly fears and insecurities because i never really
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knew whether my mother and father were going to survive the experience so it was it was very very tough days
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and very formative days um but you know and you can look back and say i
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wish you'd been different and you and your listeners might expect that i would say that but i absolutely
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don't i would never have changed it because it taught me a lot and failure or difficulties teach you a
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lot more than success because if you're analytical and you look at what went wrong or what the situation was
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you can learn so much from it and what i learned from my father was that
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i would never ever be unfair to another human being if i could possibly avoid it especially to my
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children and i also learned to make sure that all the people in my life that mata
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felt extremely loved by me and i told them that on a daily basis because they can come a point when it's
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too late when you come to understand in hindsight why your father might have
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been the way he was um or when i sit here with their guests and they kind of they talk about their parents a lot of the time you see these
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kind of generational cycles where their parents treated them in a certain way so they kind of inherited those values or
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that way of behaving and then they've kind of they've treated their children in the same way
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i sometimes worry especially as i've got a little bit older
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i see certain patterns in my behavior that i didn't love from my parents
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um small things it might be my temper sometimes or it might be you know other other things do you ever when you've
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gone through an experience like that in a home where there it was a little bit heated and you as you said your father had a little bit of a temper do you ever
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worry or catch glimpses of um your childhood reoccurring today and
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think i need to not i need to not pass that on i need to not repeat that cycle
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it's a very good question um i'm a long long way off perfect so i do
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recognize characteristics of myself very regularly that i don't admire
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but i've learned a huge amount from my parents mistakes and
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in many respects um gone to do the opposite and
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by and large i do achieve the opposite i do have my father's temper
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i do have characteristics of my father but by and large i'm very comfortable with
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who i am because i do a huge amount of positive things in
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life for everybody in my life and it's it's actually the biggest sense of
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satisfaction to me so yes i make lots of mistakes i made one yesterday you know i was
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irritated with my partner because she interrupted a meeting and then got a bit off with me because i couldn't take the
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call and i got angry with her you know and then i rang up later and said that you were wrong to take that attitude with me
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but uh but uh you know let's just forget it now yeah we all we all
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make mistakes i think i think if you've got spirit and character and drive and passion you're always going to be uh
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full of human failings and the the trick is to minimize those human failings and
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to maximize what a human being should be with acts of kindness and
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and uh looking after people and and i what i taught my children was there was two things that were very very important
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in their lives or important to me for what they became and it wasn't success not in the normal
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measures of success it was just two things be happy and leave the world a better place than
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you found it and if you can do that i as a father i'm going to be just the happiest man alive
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and and your happiness might mean that you have to be successful it might mean they have to be a hugely successful
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business person or whatever but that doesn't matter to me what matters is that you're happy and leave the world a
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better place as you've gone on that um journey of like self-awareness and understanding who you are and striving to be better in
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various areas um was there something that helped your journey to self-awareness um
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more than more than anything else what was it was it feedback from others is it journaling what allowed you to kind of
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look yourself in the mirror or from a bird's-eye view and say this is not good and i want to improve
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on that thing do you know i think there's been no epiphany i think the epiphany was when i
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was young learning that lesson about fairness that fairness is crucial and and i think it's the number one quality
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people need i mean there's lots of other important ones ones like loyalty and faithfulness and so on and so forth
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and morality there's a huge amount of important qualities but i think it starts with fairness
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and that that that was sort of traumatically imposed upon my psyche as a youngster after that it was
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all developmental recognizing the mistakes i was making one after another feedback from and understanding those
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mistakes understanding that what i'd done might have been hurtful or damaging to another human being realizing that i
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didn't want to be that person that caused difficulty um you know and running the business it was
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a very very very tough environment i grew from nothing to 12 000 employees from zero
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to uh 2.4 billion turnover and uh and i was a hard taskmaster and i've
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never regretted that but at times my hardness turned into unfairness and
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that i was upset by and i'd usually recognize it afterwards maybe not always maybe there's a people
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out there that say oh no you were you're a terrible boss a lot of people say i was a great boss but i'm sure there's
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going to be people out there that were um damaged in some way by me being too
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harsh and possibly unfair at times but it was always something i was striving to avoid
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but i am only human you know we all as humans make mistakes especially when you're growing an empire
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at the speed that i was growing it in one of the toughest and most aggressive environments there's ever been
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so do because i can i can relate to that sometimes i feel like i'm a little bit hard and it's usually after the fact
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when i leave the situation or spend some time alone or i go to the gym at night and i think you know i i think i should handle
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that situation with with maybe a little bit more empathy or my reaction probably didn't get the
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best out of the people in that situation was it those reflective moments on your own where you look back on it or was it
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years later you know i think almost immediately afterwards really if if i was angry
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about something um i've always been one to level out very quickly no matter how angry and
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frustrated i am five minutes later i can be calm
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and reflective and maybe regret my actions so i'm very very quick to be
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self-admonishing and and then sometimes i'd say well i think
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to myself well you know i didn't behave correctly there but the end result's still the right
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result so i can't really do anything to put it right because it just has to be that way
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but i'd still be self-critical i mean you know i think i think criticism especially self-criticism is one of the
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most powerful things in life you know every aspect of my business
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i was criticizing all the time looking for better ways of doing it looking for how we could be bigger
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better higher quality how we could capture more market share and for that you've got to be different
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you've got to do things differently i very much believe that don't do anything the way anybody else does it you know
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always be contentious not necessarily contentious in the way you
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approach people but contentious in the way you approach situations
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and systems or methodologies so i i
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one of my absolute edicts in life was try and do something very different to everybody else now
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we've all seen the chief executives who've come into a business and they need to do something different than the predecessor and they make change for
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changes sake and that's destructive so when i say something do something different it has to be different but so
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intelligently different that what you do is make a quantum leap forward so one of my rules for every employee i
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used to say never never change it's the destruction of business
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but i'd immediately follow on by saying but if you don't change
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you will fail now that's a mixed message i know but then i would explain it and say look if
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the change is going to make a massive quantum leap forward make the change if you're uncertain
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about it it's not worth the risk because the change will be detrimental because
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you've got to retrain all of those people and what's the point of making small changes for the sake of them don't
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do it because you think you've got to achieve something do it because it's going to make a big difference to the
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business model and i could get that message through to some people but it is a difficult one to understand and and of course also
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judgment comes into it because you've got a impeccable judgment to try and see through what the end result might be
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um to whatever you're trying to change and that drive that you're talking about
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to be bigger and to be better and to change as you reflect um because in the moment
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i am i'm imagining that especially when you're younger in business and i mean you started you know the car dealership
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and you were selling toys and books the drive you had at that moment
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i i imagine it's almost a little bit subconscious you just wake up in the morning and you just want to change your life and you just feel driven but as you
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reflect on your life and that drive and hunger you had does it feel to you like it was probably
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in fact insecurity life's complicated isn't it when you analyze yourself it's a complicated mix
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of lots of component parts but i think first of all i was born to be an entrepreneur
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stroke salesman i was born to be that there is no doubt about that whatsoever
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and and these early attributes showed themselves when i was four or five
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but i do think uh to your point of insecurity the having that insecurity does drive you
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on a lot further you know i hate failure and love success and do is that born out of insecurity
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well i think to a point but it's also borne out of pride you know it's the pride of wanting to succeed the pride of
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wanting to change things for the better whether it's my charitable interests or whether it's business i
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feel the same about everything in life in fact people find me very difficult to live
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with because my attention to detail is immense and i pick up on the tiniest things one of my one of my directors once said to
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me in in frustration i might add it wasn't complimentary he uh because i'd picked up on something
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he said you know he said i could build you the best house in the world and one of the tiles might be missing on
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off the roof and that's all you'd focus on and we can all focus on our successes
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but it's not our successes that make us successful it's their failures and what we get wrong and putting them right but
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that's sometimes very difficult for the recipient to live with it's not difficult for me to live with for my failures because i take it on the chin
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and i put it right and move on but for the recipients that might be being criticized at the time as much as
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i might do it try and do it in a constructive way it's still a criticism and uh and i think that can be very
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difficult for people when i pick up on every last detail where they've not actually got it quite right i was just
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saying to my manager yesterday i i was saying i think the balance that i need to be better at
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striking is i spend too much time focused on possible improvements and not at enough
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time celebrating current progress so i'm always trying to find you know
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how we can be better and dwelling on that as opposed to dwelling on the progress that's been made and sometimes
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i think for some people that can make it feel like you're not giving them enough recognition or you're not praising as
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much as you're criticizing right have you found that there needs to be a healthy balance between the two or is
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that okay i've always been criticized for not praising people enough right always being criticized for that
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um but what i know in life is that if you're in a very very
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aggressive competitive environment where you need every last ounce out of a person
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you do need to give them incentives and motivation and they do need to feel good about themselves to an extent
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but if they feel too good about themselves then their ego goes up and ego is always
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a source of destruction ego is never a good thing and it's this balance between
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making them feel valued but not letting their ego get out of check and this was a huge problem for me in
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the mobile phone world because because we were the leaders in the uk
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and i was reputed to be a hard task master and drive people to achieve the very best
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all of my people were poached by the competitors they all wanted them you know so i had this really difficult
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balance to drive between not giving them too much feeling of self-worth because
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that would make them more likely to accept a job somewhere else i mean this sounds a bit negative but it was reality
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it would give them too much for feeling self-worth and make them too likely to jump ship but then the contra to that
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was making them feel part of an enormous winning organization that they could never get that satisfaction anywhere
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else and putting wealth creation schemes in that rewarded them for long-term loyalty and long-term performance
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and i did lots and lots of innovative schemes like that to make people feel
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valued i'd run competitions i'd do all sorts of things but one of the smartest things i probably did
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i've never told anybody this before really i mean my employees know it so they come to me like every managing
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director does with the budget and this is the business plan for next year and what do they always do they always try
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and sell you on the lowest achievement possible because a that makes them look a success when they bust when they bust
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the numbers and b they get the full bonus so one of my classic styles would be to say
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i was not really ambitious enough for me i said but if
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that's all you think you can achieve and you're lacking the ambition to do any better
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then fine i'll accept it but you certainly won't be getting a pay rise on your basic
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now these guys might be on 250k basic and 250k bonus say so the bonus was
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really important to them but so was the basic you know and so i played
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basic versus bonus and versus ambition so they knew if they came back came in
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and tried to blag me with low numbers so they got the full bonus they wouldn't get a basic pay rise so the basic pay
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rise was linked to their uh to their ambition but it's a really difficult thing in
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a market as volatile as the mobile phone business was because it was colossally colossally volatile and it was really
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difficult if you if you made five million pounds this year on one particular business it was very
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difficult to say with that we can achieve this growth and we can get to six million next year because there'd be
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things coming at you from left base that could decimate your business one of my businesses and mobile phone
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distribution i had 20 businesses within mobile phones the distribution business which we were
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selling handsets all throughout the uk and just the handsets motorola dropped the price on me
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overnight having delivered a huge amount of stock into my warehouse and dropped the price
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overnight in the marketplace by 50 pounds it wrote off 15 million pounds off my p
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l when i'd only expected to make six so there was all of those issues all the
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time i mean it was really a fight to the bitter end here to grow my business so
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it was a very very tough environment i really want to go on to the to that
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which is how tough it was scaling that business to you know the tremendous valuation it reached and
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the exit you had um i was just thinking then as you were speaking um you know you were talking then about
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kind of your your ability to understand people and get the best out of them which was so evident there
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and it made me ask myself the question in my head like what were the skills you had in business that you were really good at and the skills you had in
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business where you weren't good at like i can look at myself and say okay i'm like you very uniquely good at this stuff but i know i'm terrible at x y and
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z and i ask that question in part because entrepreneurs sometimes fall into the trap of believing that they
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need to be good at everything to succeed but when you look at the greats like sir you know richard branson
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and so on i'm not actually good at that many things according to a lot of people but very very good at what he was good at so
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what was your sort of um well i think first of all one of my unique points was opposite of
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what you just said it was that i was good at everything but not great at everything right so i was good at
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everything i was usually the best at any one of the areas of my employees
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and what my goal was always was to have somebody in a discipline that was not better than me that i could admire it
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was difficult to find but of course i did find those people i had to do because i wasn't good enough at all of those disciplines to grow the business
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to where i did so i had to find those people but initially the the the reason for success was that i
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was good at everything but everything but i wasn't great at everything now if you then look at when
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i then later on as the business group identified my weaknesses and strengths
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my commercial intellect was the real the real massive attribute
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along with resilience if you look at my six critical success fit factors ambition drive resilience passion
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commercial intellect and leadership of all of those um commercial intellect was probably the
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number one quality but with huge resilience and uh and it's that resilience that
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enabled me to fight when everything was collapsing around me and to still fight
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through the depths of despair and just keep going and my health mental health and physical health to hold up and to
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keep going so it was definitely though those two if you look at my weaknesses i managed to
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plug those because whilst i was a great innovator and i'd say right that's what we're going to do now go away and do it
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i was dreadful at following up and i would never follow up properly but i plugged that by
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by having somebody that was really in to the follow-up detail so he would hold
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the people to account he was my right-hand man he would hold the people to account where i'd set the task and the challenge
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and maybe innovated a whole new way of doing something he would then follow up
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and make sure that they did i was very poor at that for whatever reason i don't know i think i was just
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on to the next brainwave you know and on to the next creation whilst i've got an amazing attention to
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detail spontaneous detail i'm not very good at just going back week in week out
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to look at something and check it's being done properly so i did need somebody to do that for me
00:25:59
quick one for many years people have been asking for a coffee flavoured heel
00:26:05
and quite recently he'll release the iced coffee caramel flavor of their ready to drink heels and i've just
00:26:11
become hooked on it over the last couple of weeks i've been on a really interesting journey with huel which i've described and talked about a little bit
00:26:17
on this podcast i started with the berry ready to drink then i moved over to the protein salted caramel because it's 100
00:26:23
calories and it gives you all of your essential vitamins and minerals but also gives you the 20 odd grams of protein you need and now i'm balanced between
00:26:30
them both i drink mostly the banana flavor ready to drink i've got really into the iced coffee caramel flavor of
00:26:37
heels ready to drink and now i'm drinking that as well as the protein make sure you try the new ready to drink
00:26:42
flavors that the caramel flavor is amazing the new banana flavor as well is amazing and obviously as i said the iced
00:26:49
coffee caramel flavor has been a real smash hit so check it out let me know what you think on social media i see all
00:26:55
of your tags and instagram posts and tweets about you back to the podcast one of the things you described earlier
00:27:01
is um one of your sort of strength factors or success factors was this this word resilience
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now as you look at your life before we go into the the key moments where it was important for you to be
00:27:13
resilient and all of the turmoil you went through across your business career where did that resilience come from in
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you and where do you think it comes from in people generally because i know there's an argument to say you know i was born with it but for me when i look
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at your story i think you know it was like you know you went through a bit of a tumultuous um childhood and
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there was a lot of stress put on you which you learned how to deal with which you know
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having sat here with a lot of people and people that had a certain resilience to them it tends to be the case that they've been through quite a tough
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moulding to build that is that accurate um well i absolutely think i was born
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with it it's a characteristic that you're born with um
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you're born with a you can see all around the world you're born with a degree of physical
00:28:02
resilience and mental resilience and no matter how much you train somebody you're not going to put the level of
00:28:07
resilience in that somebody might need whether the upbringing adds to that resilience or
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detract so i wouldn't really know and some people it will detract there's an old expression isn't there what doesn't
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kill you makes you stronger clearly it's not true you know but in some cases it is now in my case i would say i was born
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with that resilience and that's a real look of birth you know if you've got these characteristics that are positive
00:28:34
that that's just pure luck of birth but then you can do with them what you wish and of course the external
00:28:40
environment or in this case my upbringing probably added to that resilience and uh strengthened me even
00:28:47
more but another person it might have weakened and left them scarred so it's a it's a tricky one really but um
00:28:54
but i i would never want to see anybody have the challenges that i had and hope that
00:29:01
they would survive because they might not you know and i wouldn't want to gamble
00:29:07
that that would make them stronger because it might not make them stronger and in a lot of cases i know it wouldn't
00:29:12
you know i've seen it amongst my 12 000 employees i always remember the day when one of my guys who was under
00:29:18
immense pressure um rang me up from the car sobbing it was about seven o'clock in the
00:29:24
morning said i can't come in today um and i won't mention his name because he might be embarrassed by it but i said
00:29:30
what where what's happened where are you he said i don't know he said i'm in the car halfway to work and i just can't
00:29:38
can't move can't drive can't do anything i just can't come in and i instantly thought god you know
00:29:44
something very serious is going wrong here so i said i said to look just sit in the car where are you just send me a
00:29:51
send me give me your address and i'll come to you and i went to him and it was clear that he was having a bit of a
00:29:57
nervous breakdown now that didn't make him stronger
00:30:03
well fortunately i gave him about two or three months off work and he did recover and when he came back to work i took a
00:30:09
load of responsibilities off him put those into other areas and let him have an easy entry back into his role and he
00:30:17
did become a very valuable employee again and uh it was one of my success stories
00:30:23
under multiple level uh a success story you've rescued somebody but um
00:30:28
but those sorts of pressures i was under every day and i never cracked now why
00:30:34
was it because of my upbringing you know was i just gifted at birth and i think it's this birthright that
00:30:39
you know you just so lucky if you're born with those qualities and then you can try and make them the
00:30:44
best that you can do after that i i resonate with what you've said there in terms of i i
00:30:51
and i think the science is also supports the idea that many people are predisposed with a certain level of
00:30:57
resilience and the way they process information is a little bit more um
00:31:02
protects them a little bit more from the external world um i think one of the flaws in that when
00:31:09
you're one of those people tends to be that it becomes harder to empathize with those that are um suffering and i've i
00:31:16
struggled with that because because i do feel like you know i went through fairly stressful my company went public and i
00:31:21
grew up from my bedroom when i was 20 years old um and i struggled for a while
00:31:26
with understanding why people didn't think the way that i thought and couldn't deal with the things that i could deal with
00:31:32
and that was a and i came to maybe an understanding at 23 that was a real risk if i couldn't emphasize with the fact
00:31:38
that people's brains weren't the same as mine and they didn't have the same level of driving you know do you relate to that oh absolutely i'm still struggling
00:31:45
with it now yeah i'm pragmatic about it because you know
00:31:50
the way i look at that and i did learn that in my 30s i guess but
00:31:56
didn't really ever accept it i couldn't understand why somebody bright who had been to oxbridge didn't get it
00:32:02
and there's me you know giving up a-levels abandoned you know and not caught considering myself to be an
00:32:08
intellectual at all could see it crystal clear and why couldn't this person see it and you're right it does cause a lot
00:32:14
lack of empathy a lack of thrust and increases frustration but pragmatically
00:32:21
it it had to be that way because if everybody could see it the way i'd see it i'd just be one of the crowd i would
00:32:28
never have had the success that i had so the qualities that i was born with and
00:32:33
that helped me to succeed if everybody was the same well i'd just be one of
00:32:38
seven billion people on the same path you know so you then look at it in a
00:32:44
different way that uh you just feel very lucky that you've got those qualities and rather than criticizing other people
00:32:50
that haven't got them try and look at it that you're very lucky to have them
00:32:55
and to look after those people and get the best out of them that you can in their particular area and try and limit
00:33:02
the i guess trying to limit the downsides of having those qualities because for me like the obsessiveness
00:33:07
the drive the lack of empathy for why people couldn't see the world and this didn't see the world the same way i saw
00:33:13
it not saying that i saw it in a better way because as i say there's lots of costs to seeing the world in a certain
00:33:19
in any way no matter how you see the world as a cost whether that's you become incredibly lonely
00:33:25
or you you know abandon romantic relationships whatever um on that point of resilience then
00:33:31
can you take me to the first time in your business professional career where you genuinely the first hard moment the first moment
00:33:38
where you thought this is it gosh i mean i've had thousands but and they were all a different level of
00:33:44
crisis i'll deal with the first that
00:33:50
that really worried me um i i i was a michelin tyre company engineer was a
00:33:58
foreman um in the tie making department on the engineering
00:34:03
side and uh during that time i started selling cars and i sold them to all my michelin people
00:34:10
um but i was trading from home and the neighbors complained because they saw all these cars coming and going
00:34:16
i kept it as discreet as i could of course but they saw them and they complained and the planners came down
00:34:21
and told me i'd got to to cease so suddenly i panicked because this is
00:34:26
this was the start of what i saw of my future to try and create some wealth and
00:34:32
some success and so i panicked into this uh car sales site
00:34:38
and opened up this car sales site but i hadn't really got enough money to stock it properly so i went to my mother
00:34:45
and i said could we mortgage your house mom and that'll allow us to buy
00:34:51
um another 20 cars i think it was from the from the mortgage that would uh we'd be
00:34:57
able to get and uh don't worry about it because i will never ever fail you you'll never lose
00:35:03
your house and furthermore when i make money i'll relocate you to where you want to be on the side of the mallvan
00:35:09
hills by your lovely house there and so you'll do well i'll tell you she didn't even hesitate
00:35:14
which is remarkable really because you know i've got no real proper success
00:35:20
um history there for her to judge from um she just did desire to love and uh
00:35:27
did it instantly so coming to the answer of the question of the trauma all went well during the summer
00:35:34
but as november came sales dropped off a cliff and we started losing money hand over
00:35:42
fist because there was just no sales it was a very very grim november uh and december and all the cars were
00:35:48
frozen up you know it was one of those winters that were just horrendous back
00:35:53
almost before you were probably was before you were born actually so 92. no it was before then it was
00:35:59
about 80 1982 perhaps um but but they dropped off a cliff
00:36:07
now we weren't in financial difficulty but the trajectory
00:36:13
would have put us on it and i started really really really panicking
00:36:18
and there was not much i could do about it because every time i went to a car you couldn't even open the door it was frozen solid the batteries were always
00:36:25
flat there was no customers anyway we couldn't clear the frost off or with
00:36:30
the great difficulty if you hosed it down with water the water would freeze i mean it was a nightmare a complete
00:36:38
nightmare and i started having visions of letting my mother down and failing her in a bad way
00:36:44
and uh it really drove me uh at the time i was still working at mitchell entire
00:36:49
company i was doing 50 hours a week there i was doing probably
00:36:55
70 or 80 hours a week at the car sales site as well and going out and doing all the buying
00:37:01
i remember for a period of six months i worked 22 hours a day one week and
00:37:07
three because i was on night shift at michelin that week and on that night shift i'd get home at 7 00 a.m
00:37:13
i'd have two hours with my well one and a half two hours with my wife uh enough i'd be going to the auctions buying cars
00:37:20
during the day running the car sales site at night until i went to work it's 11 o'clock on the
00:37:25
night shift again and i did that one week and three for about six months it didn't nearly finish me i was on
00:37:31
tranquilizers because it was i was wretching and i was so uh disturbed you know i was in a real
00:37:38
mess but i was able to function when you say tranquilizers you mean like anti-anxiety yes i think there were
00:37:45
if i remember rightly i think they were librium just a car a acidity that the doctor had
00:37:50
given me i wasn't feeling anxious um my nervous system was just shot
00:37:56
i just got so much stress and pressure to save my mother's house even though it wasn't under immediate threat but i've
00:38:02
always done that i've always seen the threat a long way in advance which is what keeps you safe because then you
00:38:07
react but it didn't keep me safe physically because you know it put me under enormous pressure to try and make
00:38:14
certain that day never came have you seen throughout your career how your body ends up holding the score there's
00:38:19
the book written about how our body even if our mind hasn't acknowledged the threat um hasn't acknowledged the fear
00:38:26
consciously our body will quickly tell us through symptoms like the one you've described
00:38:31
there that we are under threat because i noticed in my business whenever we had payroll issues or whenever cash got
00:38:38
tight i would get sick like i would the only time in the seven years that i ran the business where i
00:38:44
would get a cold or a flu was like 48 hours um around the time that i'd found out
00:38:50
that we had a cash issue and although i thought i was this like tough guy that who could just he was
00:38:56
dealing with everything clearly my body had its own you know mind
00:39:01
yeah i've sort of been quite lucky mostly because that's the only time i can
00:39:07
remember my body rebellion but i think anybody's would you know because you can't work 22 hours
00:39:13
a day under immense pressure you just cannot do it i get an hour and a half sleep you know and doing that for seven nights
00:39:20
seven days you just you just i don't think anybody could probably do it and it's probably the only time that my
00:39:27
system started to fail but then with the odd tranquilizer i was able to keep going you know so
00:39:32
uh it calm you know calmness whatever with this wretching was it calmed it down i was okay and then i had no other
00:39:39
symptoms and this is just pure look of life you know it's just the look of life that uh
00:39:45
nothing's been able to cave me in and uh you know there was a i was thinking when
00:39:50
i answered that question do i tell you about my mother well i told you that because it's very topical for me at the
00:39:56
moment having lost my mother and feeling very emotional about that but uh but
00:40:01
that was a very emotional occasion to make certain that i that i didn't let it out but
00:40:09
uh in the early years of uh cellular we had probably 90 percent of our
00:40:14
business was through motorola motorola were world leaders by a long way
00:40:19
and uh the the other 10 was a bit here and a bit there the odd panasonic the odd
00:40:26
nokia but really almost inconsequential because motorola had the entire market
00:40:32
share and the relationship with motorola was always very tenuous because although we
00:40:38
we came to sell vast volumes it was a bit of a well they they always referred it as the
00:40:44
tail wagging the dog you know when the tail wags the dog they don't like it so
00:40:49
when they're encouraging you to do huge volumes for them that's wonderful as you gain volume you're getting power as you
00:40:56
gain power they feel vulnerable and as they feel vulnerable they want to cut your power i mean this was with every
00:41:02
manufacturer with everything in my life i grew these people and then they wanted to chop me down because i grew too
00:41:09
powerful and they didn't like that situation anyway this uh motorola had been
00:41:14
threatening me for a couple of years it was very weird because on the one hand they they would
00:41:20
encourage me to do something then they might get a plate because i'd exported to china perfectly legitimately but
00:41:26
exported to china they didn't like that so then they get a complaint from the chinese you know the people that were in
00:41:33
those territories the english guys were very happy because i'd done the volume
00:41:38
the chinese guys were complaining to head office the complaint came back to the uk and the uk
00:41:45
they're not to come and say well you mustn't do that again but then they'd still
00:41:50
encourage me to take big volumes which they knew i couldn't do without exporting around the world
00:41:56
so it was this very tenuous relationship anyway eventually a new manager took
00:42:01
over and he came to see me took me out to lunch which was a very rare occasion but we went out to lunch and stoked on
00:42:06
trent and we talked about the business model and so on and he said
00:42:12
you know we don't really like this distribution model of yours and
00:42:17
we really hate the fact that you're undercutting hate the fact that you're competitive
00:42:22
and it's doing us a lot of damage around the world and in the uk and if anybody was going to do that i'd
00:42:29
be doing it i naively at the time took that to mean
00:42:34
motorola wanted to take my distribution off me a month later he terminated my
00:42:39
distribution agreement don't forget this is 90 of my business by then i got 60 or 70
00:42:45
employees huge overheads and motorola was 90 percent of my business
00:42:51
he terminated my agreement and one month later resigned from motorola
00:42:56
and set up his own distribution business on the south coast of england
00:43:02
with motorola as his supplier so he went from general manager to my
00:43:07
competitor by having stripped me of all of my turnover
00:43:13
how would you deal with that you tell me well the way i dealt with it
00:43:18
was every every challenge in life whether it's business personal or anything is just that it's a challenge and there's
00:43:24
always a solution and you've just got to put your intellect towards what the solution is
00:43:29
um well so what was the solution here well i just looked at the marketplace
00:43:36
and there was lots of service providers who are the people that sold the air time on behalf of vodafone cellnet and
00:43:41
so on and these service providers were were distributing motorola of course
00:43:47
because that was 90 of their business and they were getting discounts according to the volume they took
00:43:53
so i went and had confident confidential conversations with a couple of them and said look why don't i buy from you
00:44:00
and what i can do is i can add my massive volume onto your volume and
00:44:05
you'll get a huge retrospective discount a much better buying price we'll have to keep it secret from motorola because
00:44:12
otherwise they might cut your supply off but we'll just do it very very secretively you supply me and i can go
00:44:18
to the market and continue doing what i'm doing and i managed to get two suppliers who
00:44:23
bought into that and supplied me with a kit cheaper than i'd been buying it before because
00:44:29
motorola had always manipulated me and given me a price that was far worse than
00:44:34
i should have had for the volume that i was doing so i managed to keep going immediately on that but that wasn't the answer
00:44:40
because i didn't want to help motorola so another uh another situation occurred
00:44:46
where i asked nokia to come in to see me they were they were actually quite reticent to do so um the guy chris jones
00:44:54
who was their sales director eventually did come and see me we got on like a house on fire in spite of his reputation
00:45:00
for being a real you know a bit of a hard nut uh we did just get on very very
00:45:06
well nokia had only got one percent market share and i said to chris look
00:45:11
we can build this business you'll have my heart and soul and passion because i want to kill motorola i want to destroy
00:45:19
them in the same way that they've tried to destroy me and we did a deal with one of their
00:45:25
old stock items that they'd failed with completely and i bought 3000 units which doesn't sound much now i mean i bought
00:45:32
that every second almost in the later days of cordwell but uh at that time it's a monster deal the
00:45:39
biggest ever been done in the marketplace by anybody and i bought these 3 000 units at a phenomenally low
00:45:45
price and i was able to put nokia on the face of the map with these units and
00:45:50
that wouldn't have saved the day for me had it not been for a bit of a stroke of luck as well which which was the
00:45:58
nokia decided to get aggressive they decided that they didn't want to be a nobody at the mobile phone business
00:46:04
they'd got a new phone coming out the 101 and they really wanted to capture market share that's music to my ears
00:46:11
because it was a lovely little phone it was once again before your time really but but it was a a lot of listeners will
00:46:17
remember especially the older ones because it was a really famous phone in its day and i managed to do a deal with nokia
00:46:24
for huge quantities a phenomenally advantageous price and the my goal was to take motorola's
00:46:31
market share off them to the nth degree not just as a vendetta
00:46:36
but because that was good for my business and i was really really upset
00:46:41
with motorola because they tried to kill me you know and if i hadn't been able to find
00:46:47
solutions i would have i would have been bankrupt i wouldn't have survived so we got this nokia 101
00:46:53
and we absolutely blasted it out through our retail premises through our airtime
00:46:59
retailer services and through just pure wholesale and we built nokia up to 20 market share
00:47:06
in a year wow and commensurate at the same time motorola's market share started dropping
00:47:13
they were world leader until iphone and apple came out so we helped motor we helped nokia get to
00:47:19
worldly well we could help them to get to uk leader and helped motorola's massive decline
00:47:26
and um listeners might think oh that's you know a bit bit harsh but it was not harsh because
00:47:32
you know what what do you do if somebody wants to destroy you like that in an unethical way as well you know i don't
00:47:39
mind fair competition but it was very unethical they'd help me build up to what i was i had helped build their
00:47:45
market share then it didn't suit them but it was mostly on an unethical general manager who just wanted to kill
00:47:52
my distribution and re remove my distributorship so he could set up on
00:47:57
his own on that day where you get that email whatever it was i don't know i
00:48:03
didn't really know how people were communicating back then because i wasn't alive but you get that message that um
00:48:09
motorola are terminating your contract what is the and you've got 70 employees you've got
00:48:16
this great business that's growing quickly and it's probably you know really taking you out of
00:48:21
um it's giving you a new life potentially right and you get that message that they
00:48:26
are terminating your contract on the day when you read the message how does it
00:48:31
feel emotionally take me through the range utter despair
00:48:37
utter despair um on the one hand and
00:48:43
fires up the lion in me on the other and i have got a lion in me you know and
00:48:49
uh my brother once wrote a poem about that that i could be the kindest and best friend but don't make me an enemy
00:48:56
i i but but just for clarity for your list i don't i don't hold grudges against anybody ever you know but if
00:49:02
somebody really really goes at me um they'd better beware
00:49:08
and so it was a combination of these two aspects sleepless nights nights oh
00:49:13
absolutely i don't have sleepless nights but i did on that because it was terminal if i didn't find a
00:49:19
solution it was instantly terminal you know my turnover was going to drop immediately my stores were empty
00:49:26
nothing no future and all those employees would have been able to work i'd have been bankrupt and
00:49:32
i wouldn't be here talking to you today i had to find a solution and i did it with with ferocity
00:49:40
and passion drive you know and i would not sweep a moment until i found
00:49:46
enough solutions not just one solution enough solutions that gave me insulation
00:49:52
and what i always say to people going into business follow my 10 rule about everything
00:49:59
never have more than 10 percent of your supplies with any one supplier never have 10 of your sales with any one
00:50:06
customer and never have 10 of the responsibility with any one employee now
00:50:12
we can't all achieve that i certainly couldn't achieve it and i've never been able to achieve it since but it's a goal
00:50:17
to have in mind because that insulates you from any catastrophe whatsoever
00:50:23
so you know if if people in business have got any business that was similar to mine where you're relying on
00:50:28
customers and suppliers and so on the 10 rule um that i
00:50:34
sort of innovated as a consequence of my uh experiences is an absolute golden
00:50:41
rule to try and emulate i love that and the reason i i really dwell on the point of like having those
00:50:47
moments of like existential terminal risk is because on i feel pretty much all entrepreneurs
00:50:53
especially if they they go on for long enough we'll encounter a moment like that and i did in my life many of them
00:50:59
and in hindsight you realize how your response in those moments ends up being really really defining and also i view
00:51:05
those moments as inevitable regardless of what you do and thirdly the risk is that entrepreneurs will
00:51:11
think those moments are a are evidence of their own inadequacy
00:51:17
and that this is a sign that they should give up whereas you know having read through your story you go through
00:51:22
moments of kind of like existential risk and crisis over and over again
00:51:27
um and you know it was just the nature of the business yeah you know it was
00:51:33
it was a horrible business it really was a horrible business i mean i'm
00:51:38
it's created all my wealth yeah and i'm very grateful to the business but it was a horrible business that was
00:51:45
i was sitting on the edge of my seat nearly every day for 20 years facing threat after threat after threat after
00:51:52
threat there was never a day went by there i didn't face a fairly significant threat
00:51:58
um not of the significance that i've just talked about but there were just endless
00:52:04
threats and you know it was really really actually very tiring and not
00:52:10
enjoyable at all a lot of people that i know have said oh this is so enjoyable
00:52:15
well not for me it wasn't i mean i enjoyed the success and i enjoyed some moments and some victories
00:52:22
but it was almost like um i can't imagine really how a heroine had
00:52:28
it feels but uh i think i think i was a heroin addict you know i'd get my shot of heroin
00:52:33
and everything would be wonderful for an hour or two and then the rest of it was despair isn't that so bizarre that you
00:52:40
would choose that you would choose the pain and chaos versus just you could
00:52:46
have gone and done something else john you could have gone and just worked a nice nine-to-five job and been comfortable why are you choosing
00:52:53
struggle and pain just in my dna you know i i visualized when i
00:53:01
was seven or eight years old um and it was an immensely strong vision
00:53:07
visualization of being in a chauffeur driven rolls royce and a show for driven rolls-royce
00:53:12
because my father admired them and said they were the best koi in the world and only rich people
00:53:18
had them blah blah blah so i'm in a chauffeur driven rolls royce driving around the streets of shelton
00:53:25
which is the back streets of stokentran and handing five-pound pound notes out to poor people
00:53:31
that became i don't know why but it became my destiny that that destiny sat over me like a
00:53:37
damocles sword you know you've got to achieve that destiny else you've just failed completely in life you have to do
00:53:43
it you have to do the wealth and then you have to give that wealth away to make people's lives better
00:53:49
so i didn't have any choice i know it sounds bizarre but i had no choice it's like now
00:53:56
a lot of my life is stressful on the charity work but i don't have any choice
00:54:01
you know i give up and sacrifice lots of personal things to do the things that i'm doing from a charitable perspective
00:54:08
i mean don't get me wrong i have a great lifestyle i don't want any sympathy on that but i'm just saying i do and it's
00:54:14
my destiny and i can't give it up you know people say well why did you do this why did you why'd you miss out on things
00:54:19
that you could be doing why don't you just take it easy why don't you earn that i said well i've got no choice it's just written into my dna i must do it
00:54:27
and uh and so i do you know it's just who i am i can't explain it really it's just who
00:54:33
i am being dragged by that sense of mission towards that north star of the
00:54:39
rolls royce giving out the five pound notes or even now with all the charitable work you do you describe it as not being a choice
00:54:44
which kind of means that it's just like you're being pulled in that direction the cost again which i always like to
00:54:50
shine a light on as well as you've described as you you said at the time you didn't have any friends throughout that period and you described
00:54:57
you know those 20 years as 20 years of grief talk to me about the loneliness point i heard you say i think it was on desert
00:55:03
island discs your interview there that you didn't have friends no but i wasn't lonely i mean i had a
00:55:09
wonderful wife um eventually went on to have uh two children during that time or three
00:55:15
eventually um and i wasn't lonely at all um
00:55:21
i lived for the business and i'd got some great relationships within the business with people who
00:55:27
you know i was really close to craig benny who was my finance director as they want but monitored i felt with him
00:55:34
i felt like he was my brother but my brother was in the business as well so there were these close relationships
00:55:40
within the business not very many but enough to to not feel lonely and then i got my wife and children at home
00:55:47
so the loneliness never never came to fruition i wouldn't ever want to go back to that because i've now
00:55:52
got a huge number of friends and uh some very special friends
00:55:58
and and a lot of loving relationships so i would never want to give that up
00:56:03
but actually the charity is part of that because some of the children that we've helped in cordwell children
00:56:09
are immensely successful in their own right i was telling somebody only yesterday that one of the children we
00:56:14
helped when she was three years old was tilly until he has type 2 muscular atrophy which stops all the muscles working
00:56:22
she actually won of her own absolute brilliance and effort a
00:56:28
scholarship at stanford university i mean it's unbelievable
00:56:34
now i'm not responsible for that i helped because we supplied her with a
00:56:39
wheelchair that she could not have probably succeeded without it but her
00:56:44
and her parents and other support groups around her we all as a team but her
00:56:49
mainly more than anybody made this happen and i visited her at stanford university
00:56:55
we went for a coffee together and uh she's in a wheelchair the one that we
00:57:00
supplied you know with a little joystick buzzing along the pavement i'm there on my bike i'd cycle down from her son's
00:57:06
house and they're cycling along she's in a wheelchair we get to starbucks i go
00:57:11
and buy her coffee and she's got this starbucks coffee on a tray in front of her wheelchair
00:57:17
and she's got a support mechanism on her arm that gives her gives a little bit extra
00:57:22
stiffness and this coffee's quite a big coffee and she lifts it up but i'm thinking
00:57:27
i didn't really know understand how she was doing that which clearly didn't understand his wheelchair worked and i said
00:57:33
tilly i thought your arm was too weak to lift a weight like that she said it is i said well how are you doing that she
00:57:40
said oh i've got two foot pedals there and one of them well the foot pedals motorize right this this this bracket
00:57:47
that lifts her arm so she got power assisted on and she's drinking this coffee and i'm
00:57:53
thinking the the absolute trauma that she's gone through in life and yet she's
00:57:58
done everything with grace with spirit with enthusiasm even ending up at
00:58:04
stanford university you know six thousand five thousand miles from home
00:58:10
i mean it's amazing and joint like that can never be replaced by anything i can
00:58:17
have all the boats in the world all the helicopters all the trappings that i do have which are lovely and wonderful
00:58:22
but without that they wouldn't mean much to me and it's that sense of spiritual satisfaction
00:58:28
from changing a person's life especially a child's that you'll never get from restaurant meals or boats or holidays
00:58:35
you just never get it yeah you enjoy it and i take all my friends and i have a lovely time really enjoy it but does it
00:58:41
really go down into my heart like the 60 000 children we've helped and the
00:58:48
tillies of this world no can't even begin to compete quick one this is maybe a good segue to
00:58:54
talk about a little bit of an announcement i have to make which is we have a brand new sponsor for the podcast
00:59:00
and some of you if you've seen my social media posts will know that i often wear a lot of jewelry and the brand that i'm
00:59:05
wearing is a brand called crafted as you can see on the table in front of me if you're watching this on youtube crafted
00:59:11
are brands that sell really meaningful affordable men's jewelry so i reached
00:59:17
out to the founders of crafted alex and danny and asked them if they wanted to sponsor the podcast and they said they
00:59:22
did they listen to the podcast they like what we do here the podcast is a place of meaning and their journey is all about meaning and so we forged a new
00:59:29
partnership the piece of jewelry i wear the most i want to introduce you to the pieces and why i wear them is this sand
00:59:35
timer unsurprisingly and the thing for me about sand timer is it's probably the most clear reminder that our time here
00:59:41
on earth is finite so as the episodes go on i'll introduce a piece of jewelry and i'll tell you the meaning it has for me
00:59:46
and why i wear it we get to the end of your story at phones for you and um
00:59:52
and you've you've had this tremendous you know exit which makes you a
00:59:57
billionaire what was there a pivotal moment where you did the penny drop for you that you would your next sort of source of
01:00:04
meaning would be setting up coldwell children and doing so much sort of philanthropy and the pledge you made to
01:00:10
the melinda gates foundation to give away your your worth and the initiatives you've launched with the great british
01:00:15
entrepreneur was to support young people into into their their career paths was there a pivotal moment where you decided that
01:00:22
this was now your new meaning there was absolutely i mean everything that you've described there was evolutionary but
01:00:28
there was an absolute pivotal point because during the the years of growing the business and i've already tried to
01:00:35
describe the difficulties and challenges i faced in that i was all consumed
01:00:40
and charity was the last thing on my mind but the destiny was still written in stone somewhere in my dna it was just
01:00:48
buried by the need to maintain the success and keep the success and not lose it and there were
01:00:56
so many threats that i had to be a 100 focus one day the uh
01:01:01
uh the nspcc came to me and said there's a lord taverner's cricket i don't know why
01:01:07
i held this meeting but i did it was a charity meeting and they said there's a lord taverner's cricket match in stone
01:01:13
would you sponsor it and they gave me the details and i thought
01:01:18
well it's not going to raise a lot of money and and somehow i evolved in that uh meeting
01:01:26
to taking over it and being largely responsible for running it and making it successful and it was celebrities that
01:01:34
were playing cricket against um other celebrities you know and uh just a fundraiser that was in the local cricket
01:01:40
room it didn't make a massive sum of money but that was the moment that that really got me
01:01:46
involved but then the nspcc realizing i could be a useful asset
01:01:52
got me and got me to come down to a centre and have a uh have a uh an understanding of the work they did
01:01:58
which i didn't really understand i knew it was to help children but i didn't really understand
01:02:05
and when they showed me videos and talked me through it was young children sometimes as young
01:02:11
as three and four or five sexually abused often by a relative maybe the father
01:02:17
maybe the mother or an uncle or a friend and they were sexually abused
01:02:23
and i'm looking at this in horror but what was even more horrible if
01:02:28
anything could be was that the child then couldn't do anything about it because daddy would
01:02:34
say you don't want daddy to get in trouble do you for showing his love um daddy will go to jail and you don't
01:02:40
want that do you so this sexual abuse would just continue and continue and continue
01:02:47
and the older the child would get the more the child would think this is horrible horrible and feel
01:02:54
guilty and dreadful about it but the same threat that the father would go to jail was sitting over them
01:03:01
i thought just how horrendous is that how horrendous so i got really bought
01:03:06
into the nspcc then i immediately fired into action um ended up
01:03:12
as president of the north staffs branch for a short period of time what happened next was i mean that was
01:03:18
the pivotal moment really but what happened next was the nspcc is a fantastic charity but i
01:03:26
wasn't getting enough satisfaction out of hands-on seen the difference i'd made and i knew i could do a lot more
01:03:33
and so i decided to found my own charity which was called all children and with the objective of helping every
01:03:40
child in the uk that needed help and the only qualifier wouldn't be anything to do with what illness or what
01:03:46
the only qualifier is that the parents couldn't get the help anywhere else so any child with any illness
01:03:54
serious illness we would be there to help and that's what we've done and up to yet help 60
01:03:59
000 and still growing it enormously now and to avoid the criticisms the nspcc
01:04:05
had which was that the overheads were high and i'm not criticizing that because i'd have to really understand
01:04:11
the nuts and bolts of everything um so i'm certainly not implying any criticism of that but they
01:04:16
were criticized for the overheads being too high like a lot of charities are i decided that uh the cordwell group would
01:04:22
pay every single running cost of the charity so all the wages all the cars all the telephones everything and not
01:04:29
only that but every single employee would be involved in the charity in some
01:04:34
way either by donating themselves or by fundraising to try and uh raise money
01:04:41
for these kids that's what we did it's it's just deeply tremendously inspiring and um
01:04:48
as i read through your story there's a bit of a almost a cruel irony to the fact that then your own child was in
01:04:54
need of the services that you were and the support that you were giving to so many other children your son rufus got sick with lyme
01:05:00
disease yeah yeah it was a huge irony really because all of my kids were very very healthy and i felt hugely
01:05:07
privileged and even more privileged when i got involved at the nspcc and saw these tragic cases of abuse
01:05:15
and then when i set up cordwell children's for all these children that so desperately needed help and who'd
01:05:20
been born with nothing you know in a traumatic situation and uh i felt unbelievably lucky and
01:05:29
that look lasted for i suppose six years
01:05:34
i think rufus fell ill no seven or eight years and then rufus fell ill with lyme disease and
01:05:41
panspandus and uh we didn't know any of this at the time because none of the doctors knew
01:05:46
anything about it uh he just fell in with anxiety i think with anxiety he collapsed on me
01:05:52
i was taking him back to school on a sunday night he was at boarding school which was all my children that went to
01:05:58
boarding school but as their request was never something i wanted them to do particularly but they wanted to do it so
01:06:03
rufus went to boarding school he was home for an exia and on the sunday night he said dad i don't want to go to school
01:06:10
well i'd had that with all my children because as much as they wanted to go to boarding school after the weekend at home with the
01:06:17
family you know they'd feel emotional about it and wouldn't really want to leave the family home
01:06:22
and i knew i had to be quite hard and firm and cold about it you know and say no of course you do rufus you know it's
01:06:30
always like this you get this pain in the pit of your stomach that you're leaving the family home and you're going to school but it's fine you
01:06:36
know you'll be fine once we get in the car we just go i said no dad this is different
01:06:41
and i said what do you mean so don't be silly and i tried everything in my power to be
01:06:48
persuasive inspirational hard i tried every emotion to get him in that
01:06:56
car almost to the point of physically dragging him not that i did but i was feeling like come on rufus please get in
01:07:03
the car you know you you know you'll be fine once we get on the road because i had it with my other children i knew
01:07:09
exactly what was going on or so i thought
01:07:14
anyway i never did that didn't get him to school and i actually never got him to school again
01:07:20
not properly and the next day he's still in a dreadful state it wasn't really anxiety
01:07:26
it's just they couldn't leave the home well it must have been anxiety but i couldn't explain it
01:07:32
and we took him to a therapist the therapist started doing all the you know the retro
01:07:39
retrograde looking at his life and blah blah blah blah was there any traumatic events and there wasn't and just going
01:07:46
through everything nobody over the next few years could find anything that was causing this
01:07:51
illness nothing and eventually and this was only about seven or eight
01:07:57
years ago after he'd been suffering already for about uh uh probably the best part of bay nine
01:08:03
years already um we found out that it got lyme disease
01:08:09
and we didn't know about panzer pandestan now lyme disease can show as a set of physical and neuro conditions but
01:08:16
also neurological it can attack the brain and cause neurological situations
01:08:21
where your brain is unable to respond appropriately and normally because of this bacterial infection
01:08:28
um we treated him for that but he didn't he never really he just deteriorated carried on
01:08:35
deteriorating to the point where he was utterly suicidal
01:08:41
he'd lie on the bed rocking all day pulling his hair out screaming
01:08:46
screaming he just wanted to die and he's since told us that the only reason he
01:08:52
didn't kill himself was because we were there fighting every second of the day to keep him alive and fighting with the
01:08:59
authorities and the medical people to try and find a solution and he was like my mother really surrounded by love and
01:09:06
if you surround somebody by love it makes it more difficult for them to
01:09:11
to do something not that would stop everybody but you know he rufus said that's what kept him alive and we
01:09:18
kept him alive we had to have 24 supervision in the bedroom in case he jumped out the window
01:09:24
um i don't know whether he ever would have done that but that's the way it was and it was a very traumatic period of my
01:09:32
life for many many years i'm lucky because my ex-wife was utterly devoted
01:09:37
to him and looked after him and when she was then no longer able to my eldest daughter took on the mantle and became
01:09:44
an amazing amazing carer for him and just looked after him to the to her own
01:09:51
self-sacrifice massive self-sacrifice actually because she lived rufus's life
01:09:56
even though she got a husband and a life in america she just lived rufus life with him
01:10:02
so we had a lot of amazing support and then we found out about panz pandas
01:10:08
and nobody knows about panzpander so it's one of my great big campaigns over the next few years
01:10:14
to not to to make sure all the medical authorities understand transpanders understand that it's a real illness
01:10:21
understand the symptoms and and start working out what the very best treatment is
01:10:26
anyway we found some experts and they've been treating pants pandas for a few years so we we took rufus over
01:10:33
and uh jenny frankovic this expert on uh panzpander started treating him
01:10:39
anyway he still didn't really get a lot better he had ups and downs but it got these horrible horrible
01:10:46
symptoms that transpanders people get they get a whole range of symptoms and
01:10:52
uh i hope your listeners will go on to the panzer pandas the website and look at these symptoms because some of your
01:10:58
listeners will have a young child who are suffering from transpanders and they won't be getting the help that they need
01:11:05
or the diagnosis so i really hope they go on and look at this because it might
01:11:10
transform their lives and the lives of their child but this is a big challenge i've got going forward to get this out
01:11:16
there this message out there and it's quite easily identifiable at first because it's the same thing it's a
01:11:22
collapse of somebody that's fairly sudden unexpected and for not really any
01:11:28
identifiable reason and there's a whole range of symptoms but some of those are absolutely anxiety
01:11:34
fear now in rufus case he went on to develop all sorts of symptoms like air hunger which is horrendous and air
01:11:42
hunger is best described i mean i can't describe it really very well because i've never don't i don't really
01:11:47
understand it but rufus has described it as like somebody puts a plastic bag over your head and seals it and you're
01:11:53
gasping like this for every last breath until it passes and that's one of the uh
01:12:00
symptoms and the things that happen as one of these anxieties agoraphobia hemetophobia a whole range of uh of
01:12:08
symptoms and lots of others as well anyway eventually we ended up moving
01:12:13
rufus down to um from stanford down to l.a where we'd found a whole psychiatric
01:12:19
team we wanted to put him in a clinic first of all but now bernie manny couldn't travel every time we moved him
01:12:24
even even five miles from the house was traumatic traumatic for him and
01:12:30
traumatic for us anyway we did manage to get him to i actually bought a two
01:12:35
hundred thousand pounds american motor home put wi-fi in it to try and make the
01:12:41
journey tolerable to him in concept and in reality uh but it was still traumatic taking him
01:12:48
down in this one winnebago and anyway we got him under this team of people i'm
01:12:53
not going to tell the story from there on because it was it's a bit long and also
01:12:58
there's a lot more trauma to come but he's now in really great shape he's not cured but
01:13:04
he's living a good life and a happy life and can liaise and relate to everything
01:13:10
and and he's inspiring other people so it's uh it's i hope
01:13:16
that the trauma that we've been through that he's been through more importantly
01:13:21
we can turn to making him the biggest ambassador for panz pandas and for using his
01:13:28
dreadful situation to help hundreds of thousands of other children around the world to avoid it or
01:13:35
understand it and deal with it better it's wonderfully um inspiring and it's
01:13:40
it's also really incredible to hear that he's he's living a life where he has found happiness and he's been able to
01:13:48
to create a life despite not being fully cured that is um you know has meaning to it so
01:13:54
and we hope we are hoping for a full cure you know we're hoping that he'll be able to travel
01:13:59
one day soon but for the moment he can just go down we got in this house especially right on
01:14:05
the side of beverly hills i mean also wealth comes into this you know we're so lucky to have the wealth because when
01:14:10
you get a child like that like our children with cordwell children you haven't got the resources to help
01:14:16
them it's devastating you've got the most devastating situation with your child
01:14:21
but you're unable to do anything financially to do what you need to do anyway yeah we bought him this house on
01:14:27
the side of hollywood hills and he's only five minutes away from um
01:14:32
sunset boulevard so he's got a life commuting between the two girlfriend
01:14:38
and a lovely life you know and all we need to do now is get him to the next level where he can travel and maybe um
01:14:46
find a meaningful um form of employment to give him proper satisfaction that might just be
01:14:52
spreading the word of panz pandas and i pay him a wage to do that you know but whatever it is
01:14:58
i i think he's definitely on the pathway to a fulfilling life and and that's
01:15:04
thanks to my daughter my ex-wife and all the effort my family have put in alongside jenny frankovich and in
01:15:11
stamford and the psychiatrists in uh in la so it's quite a happy result and uh
01:15:19
and i think that there's you know there's an old expression where there's life there's hope and there is
01:15:24
really hope for those plans pandas kids but we need to get the message out
01:15:29
when i hear that story and i reflect on another experience which we haven't talked about which was you getting
01:15:35
almost critically injured on your bike last year when you were cycling and you broke i don't know was it 12 12 bones
01:15:42
and i mean that was a near-death experience for you the loss of your mother
01:15:47
recently what have you learned about through these moments of grief and you know
01:15:53
new death experiences of your own and you know the situation with rufus what have you learned about what what
01:15:59
actually matters in life well i i i think i always really knew i
01:16:04
just wasn't very good at implementing it and that's [Music] just
01:16:10
i think loving people caring for society and making the world a better place and i think if you can do that
01:16:16
no matter who you are no matter how little money you've got if you can just contribute to society in a positive way
01:16:23
the feelings are immensely positive um but there's the obvious lessons that health is critical i mean i did nearly
01:16:31
die on that mountain road in italy i could have had a death from four or five different
01:16:37
reasons because the injuries were so severe um and health is
01:16:42
utterly utterly vital but uh but that's an obvious statement but i think when you've experienced as
01:16:49
much ill health as i have mainly with my family but also
01:16:55
these accidents i've had which have been an endless stream of accidents over the last 40 years which yourself impose you
01:17:01
know it's entirely my own fault it's the way i live my life i live my life for thrills you know as well as making the
01:17:08
world a better place i have my own world which is you know fairly adventurous and
01:17:14
risky and the last thing i wanted to ask you about is i guess it's a bit of advice i guess because i in running my businesses over the
01:17:20
years and being a very driven ambitious man have um sacrificed um and not been
01:17:26
very good historically at sustaining romantic relationships you've had you know you reference your former partner
01:17:32
there with such admiration and you have you know an amicable relationship with her but over the years what lessons have
01:17:37
you learned about how to strive and be driven whilst also trying to
01:17:43
maintain um a romantic relationship and also i'd say the sub question to that is are
01:17:48
romantic relationships important i am male yeah yeah
01:17:56
i think the first thing is that i wouldn't change anything uh on that and i was utterly focused
01:18:02
on business to the detriment of my wife and family but
01:18:07
i say detriment self critically because i'm not sure it's i'm not really sure that's true because
01:18:14
i know i was always as kind as possible always as loving as possible and always would put
01:18:20
important events forward so my children would probably say if they said did you get enough of dad and
01:18:25
they'd say well we didn't get that much of him but when he mattered when it mattered to us he was there
01:18:31
when we'd got a problem he was there and i would always if there was a significant problem like that employer
01:18:37
told you about it was broken down up when there was a when somebody really needs me
01:18:42
i'm absolutely there for anybody important in my life but i wasn't able to be a devoted doting person but it's
01:18:51
who i am and i don't you know i probably wouldn't change it but so this work-life balance i don't
01:18:57
believe it look if you want to run a business make sure that your wife's on board make sure that she understands the
01:19:04
potential sacrifices and make sure you do and make sure you've got the six critical success factors
01:19:11
and if all of those are ticks in the box go for it if there's a lack of ticks in the box be cautious because there's more
01:19:19
people damaged by going into business then there is those people that are pleased that they're dead it's not this
01:19:25
romantic notion oh i'll run my own list and we'll be wealthy we'll have a lovely house and a beautiful car it's not like
01:19:32
that at all it's hardship and graft for most people make sure you want it make sure your
01:19:39
wife and family want it and then if all those boxes it takes yeah fantastic go full steam ahead and
01:19:46
give everything you've got make it a success but just don't get yourself into a huge
01:19:51
mess that you never really thought that could happen to you
01:19:56
well that's a perfect note to end on and that's really why i started this podcast at the end of the day is to shine that much more realistic light on the pursuit
01:20:03
of business and being a ceo i want to thank you for for not just the inspiration but really also you know as
01:20:08
i got to really dig into the philanthropic work that you're doing now it really inspired me and as someone that has managed to have some relative
01:20:14
success in my life it got me thinking about the fact that i need to be doing more and your pledge to you know you
01:20:19
were one of the first britons to pledge to the linda gates foundation that you'd be giving away 70 of your wealth in your
01:20:25
life which again inspired me really really tremendously as a young entrepreneur and to hear that you found
01:20:30
such meaning in this philanthropic charitable work now in the same way that you did in your business venture again
01:20:36
is tremendously inspiring to me as a young businessman we have a closing tradition on the podcast which is the
01:20:41
previous guest asks the next guest a question um and i okay
01:20:46
i read it now so this is the first time i read it when you are older and looking back on the next chapter of your life
01:20:53
what would it need to include for you to look back and smile
01:20:58
well firstly i am older but when i'm older still it's more of
01:21:04
the same i need to love and respect all those people around me i need to change a lot more people's
01:21:11
lives than i'm already doing a heck of a lot more over the next 10 years if i'm lucky enough to live that
01:21:17
and and drive everything forward for the benefit of people but also make a
01:21:23
success of my businesses so all of that i'm quite greedy you see but also probably to get stephen
01:21:29
bartlett to come to my next charity ball and take a table and be supportive of all these children that we help and
01:21:36
bring in some of your amazing clientele and connections that's a promise okay thank you so much john appreciate it
01:21:44
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you
