00:00:00
so you do something with greeting cards is that something you do from your spare
00:00:03
room nick jenkins former ceo and founder of moon pig a company now worth 1.6 billion dollars my first proper business
00:00:12
was moon big which although it's been a success of course it went through various ups and downs like all overnight
00:00:18
successes it took 11 years i got to confess i probably slightly stumbled on it i look at it now and think wow that
00:00:23
accidentally was a really good business model unfortunately we too often we measure
00:00:28
the things that are easiest to measure and the easiest thing to measure is how wealthy someone is i'm reluctant to
00:00:33
create this illusion that that you know if you work incredibly hard you can make
00:00:36
a lot of money and that will make you successful you have to be a successful human being the most exciting times i
00:00:42
ever had in my business were when my back was absolutely against the one thing this is going down bizarrely i
00:00:47
found that quite invigorating but at one point my shells all said look nick this
00:00:51
is never gonna work it's never gonna make money by the time i got to the end
00:00:54
of it i was pretty much down to zero [Music] nick jenkins former ceo and founder of
00:01:06
moonpig a company now worth 1.6 billion dollars nick's achievements are miraculous he's incredibly inspiring and
00:01:16
he created a business that's touched many of our lives but the thing that i found even more intriguing about nick
00:01:22
was he bucks most of the typical entrepreneurship and success narratives i think we're all sold the belief and
00:01:30
the story that in order to be successful in business or any discipline in life you have to undergo tremendous sacrifice
00:01:37
you have to work yourself into the ground nick and his story and his philosophy disprove all of that
00:01:44
he's got another way of doing it if listening to this episode does anything outside of just inspiring the hell out
00:01:49
of you and giving you very practical business information it will definitely prove
00:01:55
in my view that there is no such thing as a born entrepreneur and also once you become an entrepreneur the path to
00:02:03
success isn't the same for everybody a lot of what you've been told is a lie
00:02:08
without further ado i'm stephen bartlett and this is the dire of a ceo i hope
00:02:12
nobody's listening but if you are then please keep this to yourself [Music] nick
00:02:25
super intrigued when i meet entrepreneurs um because there's a huge sort of narrative and i guess a
00:02:30
debate that's happened in the entrepreneurial community about whether entrepreneurs are
00:02:35
made whether they're born whether it's something that can be taught and um from listening to you describe your
00:02:41
early years and your school years and your upbringing um i wondered what your opinion on that was
00:02:47
and also whether you think you were born on japan i think there are some traits that are
00:02:53
common to all entrepreneurs well one of those is decisiveness you've got to be
00:02:56
able to take decisions and when i after i worked in russia for a bit went and did an mba and when i was there there
00:03:02
were lots of people on that course who were brighter than me um but and they would come up with a beautiful
00:03:07
powerpoint presentation of five different choices of strategic options but actually sometimes he's just got to
00:03:12
say i haven't got the perfect knowledge let's go with that one and take a
00:03:14
decision and so i think decisiveness is a very and really an attitude to risk is
00:03:19
is the other thing i think i always took the view that you know i started with nothing i could end up with nothing
00:03:24
and i it i wasn't that worried about about failing um and that's quite important and so so i
00:03:32
think those sort of things are are innate you can teach someone like that to be a better entrepreneur and to some
00:03:38
extent i mean i i went off and said the business i had nothing else to do to be honest at the time i came back from
00:03:42
russia and i had a spare year and i thought i couldn't think of a good cunning business plan so i'll do an mba
00:03:47
while i'm coming up with a cunning plan and that that was that probably made my first business a bit better
00:03:54
because i i gave me more of an idea of the rounded idea of business and um and and so on so so i think you can
00:04:02
improve on that but i don't think but if you're if you're risk-averse you're not
00:04:05
going to do it where does where does decisiveness and um that risk appetite come from do you think in people and
00:04:13
what i guess where does the alternative come from where does the fear um and the lack of willingness to
00:04:19
to make a decision come from in people or in you like where did it where did that decision come from in you i don't
00:04:24
know you have some people who are physically courageous they will leap in you know rugby players will leap in and
00:04:29
do things and and other people who who are not and then you have some people who are
00:04:33
intellectually courageous who will just um they're just not afraid of saying
00:04:37
let's do it um um no i'm not i'm i'm not sure but i think i think it comes from
00:04:42
not having a fear of a fear of failure or not you know we're all going to make
00:04:47
mistakes and things will go wrong but but uh if you're frightened of ever making a mistake
00:04:53
um then then then you won't do it much times like if you if you ski and you're
00:04:56
frightened of falling over you're never going to be a great skier so you aren't
00:04:59
going to fall over you it's quite also you were just talking about almost that
00:05:02
mental assessment you made on what failure meant because you were like well if i go to zero that's okay yeah that
00:05:07
doesn't mean death no no no no it doesn't i mean it wouldn't be great you
00:05:12
know but but but it's survival and i and i've of all the friends i've seen who've
00:05:15
gone through that and i've had a lot of friends who've gone through uh who've
00:05:19
gone through business failures the ones i admire the most are the ones who it's
00:05:22
the way they've dealt with that and some of them have thought well i can't change
00:05:25
that i can't so all i can do is change the way i approach the next step and move on and if you just dwell on
00:05:31
failure what does that mean how does that reflect on me um then uh then you'd never
00:05:37
yeah you you'd never move on so i think it's our own in our own attitude
00:05:42
to failure that's that's quite important what was your underlying drive to even
00:05:46
start a business versus just going and getting a job at i don't know pizza hut
00:05:49
or something i suppose i probably looked at that and thought if that goes well i'll probably
00:05:56
make more money per hour than if i go and work with pizza so there's an element of one want to i mean maybe
00:06:00
there's an element of laziness that comes into this it's wanting to take
00:06:03
that shortcut and think well well actually if i if i start my own business and and that goes
00:06:08
and it goes well then obviously it's it's better than an hourly paid job
00:06:14
one of my great philosophies on business is just keep everything as simple as you
00:06:17
can possibly make it until you have to make it more complicated um people often start they start you
00:06:23
know way too complicated and and and uh over-engineer things that you if you read that book the lean startup it kind
00:06:30
of talks talks to some of those values about just trying to is find find the simplest way to test the hypothesis as
00:06:36
cheaply as you can without using losing years of your life and there's nothing
00:06:40
there's nothing quite like not actually having any money to do that so when the
00:06:43
moon pig when when we we raised money on a very bitty basis you know there was never like a well that occasionally
00:06:50
would pour something in it and you know you you you hear it hitting the bottom but it never actually filled the well up
00:06:55
so we never really have much money to experiment with so we had to be uh very lean with what we did and i think
00:07:02
perhaps the one the one useful thing the only textbook that i ever went back to from my mba years was a statistics uh
00:07:08
textbook because what i wanted to work out is the least money i could spend to get a statistically significant answer
00:07:15
to how much a cost to customer acquisition is for a particular channel because why spend two and a half why
00:07:20
spend 25 000 pounds finding out that a particular channel doesn't work for you
00:07:23
when you can get the answer for two and a half thousand um and uh you must see this all the time but i i you get people
00:07:29
who say we're going to spend a million pounds on our when you've got too much
00:07:32
money you just let's throw some money at this and see what works well why waste
00:07:35
it when you can get the answer for two and a half grand yeah and then and then and then and i always look at that and i
00:07:41
don't think i don't think i've wasted two and a half grand i've spent two and
00:07:44
a half grand some of that will have been let's say i was aiming for a 10-pound
00:07:47
cost of customer acquisition and and actually it was 20. well then 1 250 pounds of that was spent on acquiring
00:07:54
customers at the right price and 1 250 pounds was spent on finding out that i should never do that again
00:07:59
and that's that's the way i would look at that but if i spent 25 000 pounds on
00:08:02
it yeah then you know it would have been it would have been a waste and also if you can the more
00:08:08
you spend money to find out the answers to things and when you've got those answers and you're then putting that in
00:08:12
your business plan to raise money i'm always more impressed when people say right i want to raise money for
00:08:16
marketing this is what we've done so far this is what it cost us so far so if we
00:08:20
scale this up that's that's what we can do as opposed to just saying please give us lots of money to spend on
00:08:25
marketing we don't know what we're going to do yet um yeah i had this conversation actually with my gym owner
00:08:29
the other day i didn't even know that he was um aware of who i was but i was
00:08:32
leaving the gym he goes can i just have two minutes pulls me into the back room and um he tells me about this idea and
00:08:38
to be fair i can't say the idea because he and we're going to talk about this
00:08:42
topic as well he thinks that if you tell the idea then i'm going to run off with
00:08:44
it we'll talk about that all the time yeah we'll talk about that straight after but um but but so it's
00:08:50
idea for rolling out gyms in the country he said i need to i need to raise investment to put 10 of them in and i
00:08:56
was like your this idea you have is totally contingent on this central hypothesis
00:09:01
i'm just going to say he doesn't podcast that um people that drive long haul want to work
00:09:06
out in service stations yeah you don't need to put 10 in to figure out if that
00:09:09
hypothesis is correct you can put a shipping container in the car park keep it there for free and if anyone
00:09:16
picks up the dumbbells that's that's an indication that your hypothesis is
00:09:20
correct and then introduce another variable which is cost yeah so then charge them to pick up the dumbbells and
00:09:26
if you if you come back to me in six months time and say steve they picked up the dumbbells they worked out
00:09:31
and they gave me 10 pounds a month then all you need is capital yeah and we'll
00:09:35
go make ten of them yeah yeah we're on the same page you know i'll prove what you can prove
00:09:41
on the least amount of money first and evidence is evidence is always so important um
00:09:46
and people miss that but let's talk about that topic then so this idea of it
00:09:50
really really it shows me that the entrepreneur is somewhat naive when an entrepreneur comes up i'm sure you get
00:09:54
this all the time they picture an idea and then they say well they sound cagey to tell you the
00:09:59
full thing because they think you're going to run off and do it yeah yeah yeah
00:10:04
when i would say to them look if you get the the day you go live with that the moment you start advertising that idea
00:10:11
you're you're opening you're lifting your skirts to the whole world so uh so
00:10:15
you're gonna have to go live with us at some point otherwise you're not going to
00:10:17
sell anything and if you don't sell anything you're going to raise any money
00:10:19
from anybody so at some point you have to uh you you have to tell people what you're doing with moon pig there was no
00:10:26
way that i could i could protect that idea the only way you can protect it is be the best and and and be the biggest
00:10:31
amen yeah i mean and then i we had probably 20 competitors that followed after moon pig
00:10:37
you know during our time then they would they'd pop up and they'd flare up and
00:10:40
then they'd die off again um and and even now moon pig is 65 to the market when you started moon pig was there
00:10:47
anyone else doing personalized um sort of gifting cards online yeah funny enough that there was there was a very i
00:10:53
came up with a business plan and i developed it and then i looked the first thing i always do is i look around not
00:10:58
just at what direct competitors i've got but how people are trying to solve that
00:11:01
problem in other ways because you know if you're trying to solve a problem clearly that problem exists already and
00:11:06
people are trying to solve it in one way or another and and i did come across a company that was doing um
00:11:12
personalized greeting cards and and i approached them and said oh i've got a choice i can either i've come
00:11:17
up with this plan i can either do it myself or i can invest in your business and um and
00:11:22
and anyway he the terms he offered were ridiculous and also the other problem was i could see that is we would we were
00:11:27
going to fall out over the content of the cards because um i just didn't think he had a very good
00:11:32
eye for cards um without that business anything ever turned over more than 300 000 a year
00:11:37
and then it died about two years later um and uh and moon pig went so i i went off and did my own thing and what it
00:11:44
taught me actually looking back at it is that is that it was all about the content it was about the quality of the
00:11:49
of the cars the quality of the design of the cars because actually the customer doesn't really care how the car was
00:11:54
produced they didn't care about the technology at all what they want is the end product and and we have the best end
00:11:59
product that's so interesting because um a lot of entrepreneurs are put off from
00:12:03
starting an idea because when they google their idea that they have they find 10 of the people that are already
00:12:08
doing it and i i really want to touch on this point because i think it's quite
00:12:11
liberating for entrepreneurs listening when i started my business in fact every business i've ever started that's been
00:12:16
successful had a major incumbent already and we might we became the biggest and it's exactly what you
00:12:21
described it's those there's probably a thousand small details that go into
00:12:25
making a successful bit listen more let's just say there's a thousand yeah
00:12:28
thousands more details like into making your business and it's and um you're
00:12:31
basically going to war on a thousand details yeah and if you can um you know if you can be better in just
00:12:38
certain ways and sometimes you only need to be better in a few simple ways i think it can i i agree and but then
00:12:44
then if you look at the example of bread um people have been eating bread for thousands of years you know people like
00:12:50
bread we know what people prefer to pay for bread that's half of your market
00:12:53
research done already you don't have to say we've got something called bread do
00:12:56
you do you like it you can you can get some slices you just ham in the middle and call it a sandwich
00:13:00
all that's been done for you so then you've then got to work out right well i
00:13:04
know i know that there's a market for this so how do i just make it a little
00:13:06
bit a little bit better do i make it as a you know add seeds to it do i put cumin in it do i or do i have a shop
00:13:12
that is in a location where that isn't well served so you only have to tweak an
00:13:16
idea that's already there so your chance of success your chance of succeeding
00:13:20
your chance of surviving is considerably greater because you've answered most of
00:13:24
the questions already before you've even invested any money um the chance of that
00:13:27
becoming the chance of multiplying by a factor of a thousand and suddenly thinking that's like the guy in shortage
00:13:31
has just invented stuff called bread it's amazing never had it before um so you don't get that and i think that's an
00:13:37
important thing for entrepreneurs to think about is that you don't have to be
00:13:40
unique i think that's you know people always are what's what's unique about
00:13:44
you just got to be i agree with you you've got to be better in some respect and um and people tie themselves in
00:13:50
knots trying to think of trying to invent things so i think it's a really hard it's the hardest possible way of
00:13:55
making money i mean actually when you i i read a report about the fact that the the people who've most people who've
00:14:01
made money have made money doing something they were previously employed to do because because they've spent 20 years
00:14:06
learning how to do something they know all the contacts and then they start up their own business it's logical not you
00:14:11
know when i'm looking at investing in people i think well you know this industry really really well you're very
00:14:15
convincing um and and you you know all the pitfalls in advance perhaps of course you're more likely to succeed
00:14:22
yeah but they also know they also because they know the pitfalls they know that where the opportunity to create a
00:14:27
better product would be as well yeah yeah you know because so often i will i will come up with a business idea and
00:14:32
look at it and it's only after i've gone through this sort of fourth iteration of
00:14:35
the business brand that i think and that is why no one has done this before that's very very true um
00:14:44
if you'd known how hard it would be um to start a business and to um make it successful do you think you
00:14:50
would have started because i'm here i'm asking i want to know a little bit about
00:14:54
the like the importance of delusion well funny if that's something i've always believed that an element of
00:14:59
self-delusion is very very important and i think that's one of the reasons why
00:15:04
actually when i i when i finished my b i did have the opportunity to go and join a vc firm
00:15:10
i thought i could if i can work for vc firm for three or four years i'll get
00:15:12
more experience before i start my own business anyway i went for a job interview shock horror they turned me
00:15:17
down so i had to go and start my own business and and i realized now that if i had gone through several years of
00:15:22
investing in other people's businesses i probably would have developed that kind
00:15:25
of uh that hard skin of of this is actually incredibly hard but this is why this
00:15:31
won't work and i see that i see that a lot now in me now that i look at as an investor i look at a lot
00:15:37
of things and i'm i'm less wide-eyed than i was when i started moon pig and i can see the
00:15:41
reasons why something won't work and you become you can become too cynical about
00:15:45
it whereas when i started moon pig if i'd known all the problems that i was going
00:15:50
to come up against i may not have started it and believe me there were plenty of times in the middle of that uh
00:15:55
when i would have happily given it up i mean people often say whether was there a difficult period and they said there
00:16:00
was just one but it lasted from 2000 to 2005. um and and it was [Music] that was difficult it was it was tough
00:16:08
and i was wondering how to pay the salaries and i'd talk to me about the detail of that difficult period well
00:16:13
as as as you know better than anybody that starting a business is one thing and coming up with a product that people
00:16:19
might want is one thing getting customers is probably the single most difficult thing about setting up any
00:16:24
online business um and i think most people underestimate that and we we tried all sorts of permutations and bear
00:16:30
in mind this was 2000 so this was well before social media so a lot of stuff was very manual um i you know you will
00:16:37
laugh at this but when i was when i was doing affiliate deals i would phone up a
00:16:41
company and say we'll put an advert on your thing and if you send any traffic
00:16:44
to us we'll give you a bit of commission on this and i'll send you a spreadsheet
00:16:47
every week to tell you how much i owe you literally it was that manual and i would write up a contract for each
00:16:52
separate contract for each individual company had a big filing cabinet of them i mean this you know that sounds like
00:16:57
very dinosaurish but that's how it was and now it's it's much much easier um
00:17:02
but we were we were struggling to find ways ways that we could throw money at driving
00:17:07
traffic because everything that we threw money at was too expensive and the only
00:17:10
thing that was really working in all of this was the viral effect that we knew that
00:17:15
we were we got very very good at measuring everything and and we could see that if we brought 100 customers in
00:17:21
that and those 100 customers we knew exactly how many them would buy cards we knew how many of them wouldn't come back
00:17:26
again but of the ones that bought cards we knew that they would attract about for every customer
00:17:32
that we had they'd attract a third of a customer just because i send you a birthday card you think it's funny you
00:17:36
look on the back of it moonpig.com and so that viral effect was the thing that kept us going for five years and it was
00:17:42
only really because i understood the statistics behind that and i could understand the model and think right
00:17:47
although everything else appears to be failing although this online campaign doesn't appear to be too expensive that
00:17:52
appears to be too expensive and we we can't i couldn't tell you if someone
00:17:55
gave me 10 million pounds i couldn't have told you what we could have thrown
00:17:57
it at um to make it work i could see that just the customers alone were driving the sales growth and if only we
00:18:03
could survive that long that we would we would make it through um but i was the only person who believed that all of my
00:18:09
shareholders at one point my shells all said look nick you know it's not going
00:18:13
to work this is never going to work it's never going to make money and you you
00:18:16
know we're not going to put more money in and we really recommend that you don't put any more money in too because
00:18:21
when this all goes wrong you're going to have to have some money to pay the rent
00:18:24
and and it was it was that bad um how much did you had you bet on this personally well i mean i put in i was i
00:18:32
i'd gone off and worked in russia for a while and i probably made about a million and and by the time
00:18:38
uh by the time i i put about 150 000 pounds into mubic at the beginning to get the idea off the ground
00:18:44
by the time i got to the end of it um i i was pretty much down to zero i think i'd taken all the equity out of the flat
00:18:51
which previously had no mortgage i'd taken all my savings and all that so i pretty much got down to zero
00:18:57
so at the point where people are trying to discourage you to i was pretty much already at zero zero
00:19:03
anyway so so and that that's when it's that's when finally it started to turn
00:19:07
and um you know but i could i could see i could see the stats i could see where it was going
00:19:13
um it's just that you know after four years of i've had three or four different
00:19:17
business plans you know i know the last business plan wasn't you know inaccurate
00:19:21
but this one this one's better oh and i know the previous two weren't that
00:19:24
accurate but this one this one this one works yeah it's tough that's that delusion did you
00:19:28
ever genuinely consider quitting no no i didn't know because that big because i because i could see where the
00:19:35
numbers were going and i had i did have a firm belief that uh the repeat rate was there um the viral effect was there
00:19:41
and i could see how i could see how we weren't spending we went through a year
00:19:44
we spent no money on marketing whatsoever no money on customer acquisition and we and our sales grew by
00:19:49
30 percent you know so that's now i appreciate having invested in lots of other
00:19:54
e-commerce businesses i appreciate how unusual that is um it was my first business so i didn't know quite how
00:20:00
unusual it was but but i knew that actually look it's not as if there's so
00:20:03
many businesses i see now that the moment you turn the marketing tap off yeah just goes to zero yeah and all you
00:20:08
and and that's one of the things i'm always really aware of when i'm aware of now
00:20:11
when i'm investing is when is it i said well what what's going to happen when
00:20:15
you turn that money to turn that tap off because because when we did turn that tap off it just kept on growing and
00:20:21
that's what i see is the real quality of a business is when you're adding layer
00:20:24
upon layer of customers now you know not all businesses are as good at repeat business as moon pig was but but that
00:20:30
was that that was the the thing that i recognized that kept me going through all that and stopped me from throwing
00:20:35
the towel in and that's thankfully because you had a great product underpinning
00:20:40
yeah the the main focus was was do people do people like what we're selling um and we
00:20:45
knew that we knew it's a very very popular product we could see that in the viral effect with people not only do
00:20:49
people who bought it liked it but the people who received it liked it so the main focus was always on
00:20:55
create a really really good product and then of course on top of that you then got to make sure that you've got your
00:21:00
production right so that your gross margins are right and and you're tweaking all of those little knobs
00:21:06
within within within that uh engine um and um and the the key thing also just is
00:21:13
understanding um is understanding every every metric and we looked at like it's
00:21:18
like a lose run that you're polishing um every day you're looking at is there is
00:21:22
there anywhere where anyone's getting stuck along this journey and and are they not understanding what we're you
00:21:27
know the button that they're supposed to press next are they getting confused in
00:21:29
which polish that one out so there was a constant process that that time when we
00:21:33
weren't spending any money on customer acquisition we were spending all of our
00:21:36
money on uh on customer retention and just polishing that lose run of the customer coming in through the
00:21:43
front door and going into the shopping basket when you reflect on that and the the fact that moonpig ultimately
00:21:49
succeeded in a market where many others failed you talked about you know the guy
00:21:52
that you whose business you tried to buy and you say what was it about what we did that made us succeed or what was it
00:21:59
about me nick that made this business succeed what is your answer well i think i think
00:22:03
i probably did have a good understanding of what people wanted in a card and the if you get down to the
00:22:09
the simplest version of that is that is that a card is about showing someone that you've uh you want to show them
00:22:15
that you've that it's relevant you've thought about them so you've chosen
00:22:18
something which is relevant to them that they're interested in or that's that's a
00:22:21
something you both find funny and you can weave their name into that as well um to make to show that you've
00:22:27
made an effort and then the double whammy i would always personalize moon picard have it sent back to me and write
00:22:31
on the inside so that's like a double personalization and it's it it basically
00:22:36
is about showing you've really thought about them and that's and and and it's
00:22:39
amusing as well and and the the great thing is quirky british sense of humor that we we love slightly mildly
00:22:44
offending each other and then we we stick the cards up in our fridge so if you focus on that focus on the on on
00:22:52
the product everything else everything else follows in behind that focus on the product and then make it very very
00:22:57
efficient um and uh and everything else should follow whereas whereas if you don't focus on the product and you're
00:23:03
just constantly selling something that people don't really want it's incredibly
00:23:06
hard work on the product a lot of people have this idea i think when they start businesses
00:23:11
that you have to have your hypothesis your idea of what this business is going to become the product of yourself
00:23:16
perfectly nailed before you um before you launch and then you know i made the mistake of when i started my business
00:23:23
kind of being too romantic about that initial idea so i was trying to force the idea into the world as opposed to
00:23:29
listening um if we'd go back before you started moon pig what what was your hypothesis like what
00:23:36
in terms of like personalization what you know how did you arrive at a card it was it was very simple actually i i
00:23:42
thought through the different ideas and i and and i realized right the this internet thing is is going to happen so
00:23:48
i don't know much about it but no one else knows anything about it either but
00:23:50
i did at least understand how to build a team so i spent 10 years in russia building a team of people and building a
00:23:56
successful business um and and i went through this thing of what things could i what how can i use the
00:24:02
internet to make a business and digital digital products were all being given away for free so everyone had this idea
00:24:08
that if you could download it it ought to be free well that's a hard one to make money in
00:24:13
the advertising business back in those days was incredibly tough because there wasn't much of a market
00:24:18
not much spend was going online and you were spending more money to get people to come to your site to look at the
00:24:22
adverts and people are going to pay you for the adverts that was tough too then i looked at physical goods and if
00:24:28
you take say a digital camera one of those things i looked at if i took my sort of satsuma fujitsu 32db i figured
00:24:35
that somebody at some point would write an algorithm that would merely compare the price of my fujitsu 32dd with
00:24:39
someone else's and then they'd buy the cheapest one and that ultimately would
00:24:42
end up squeezing all the margin out of that game so you'd end up with a lot of
00:24:46
physical stocks stuffed sitting in warehouses and minimal margins so so i looked at one of the
00:24:51
things that i can what are the things i can sell on the internet where i can actually improve the product make it
00:24:56
better and personalization is one of those things it's very difficult to do personalization in store because it
00:25:01
takes up floor space and equipment and so on um and um and i thought of a number of different
00:25:06
things including uh personalized cds well i'm really really glad i didn't do
00:25:10
that one and cards occur to me because i used to um i used to typically buy cards and tips out
00:25:15
the caption and write something a bit funnier um more relevant and more relevant on the front and and and
00:25:22
equally journalist friends of mine would uh whenever anyone left the office they'd be given a spoof magazine front
00:25:27
cover which would take a day and a half of graphic design time to put together and i and i figured
00:25:32
we got digital digital printing was beginning to develop at the time and you got the internet and it made it possible
00:25:37
to combine those two to make it possible for someone to order a single personalized greeting card which has got
00:25:42
hands down got to be better than the unpersonalized thing and then i could charge more for the product online than
00:25:49
for the product in the shop but more to the point there's no stock so um so what we've got is a pile of
00:25:54
cardboard in the corner of the room and a pile of envelopes that's the only stock which i think represented about a
00:25:59
quarter of a percent of turnover so compared to the digital camera business where you might have a whole load of
00:26:04
digital cameras on the water coming in from wherever you buy them from loading the warehouse and so on um it's it was
00:26:11
um it was a very efficient business model i mean i i gotta confess i probably slightly
00:26:16
stumbled on it rather than you know it it being i look at it now and think wow that that
00:26:22
accidentally was a really good business model um you get paid up front you pay supplies in 60 days there's no stock i
00:26:27
mean it's it's uh it was great so um but but fundamentally it was a better
00:26:32
product and on day one right from the very beginning my the business plan i came up with when i
00:26:37
was doing my mba was i want to to make it possible for a customer to buy a single personalized birthday card which
00:26:44
technology has suddenly made possible whereas previously that would have been 200 quids worth of graphic design time a
00:26:49
bit of lie through i mean just not possible but core to that is that the person who's receiving it
00:26:55
has got to think that's a really cool card and there was a point where you made the
00:26:59
decision to sort of step back from operations i i've always tried to my general
00:27:04
approach this is uh is try to focus on the things that only you can do um and when you really narrow it down and you
00:27:12
become a bigger company you realize that actually that really does narrow it down a lot
00:27:18
because i was trying to hire people replace the things that i was doing with people who could do it better than i
00:27:22
could do it uh and then once they're doing it better than i could do you think gosh well i'm not going to
00:27:26
interfere with that anymore so leave them to it and then it eventually then comes down to um
00:27:32
uh to a role i i my role eventually that became that of executive chairman so i brought in a ceo and i became executive
00:27:40
chairman and i suppose then my role was that strategic role of making sure that we're we're pointing in the right
00:27:45
direction and also that we take those big decisions what are you bad at i'm i'm or not good not as good as
00:27:53
someone else's actually say i i think i'm i'm a i'm good at short-term detail i can i can sprint on
00:28:00
real fine detail um so i can i can sit on a spreadsheet for six hours overnight and come up with a beautiful bit of
00:28:06
financial modelling but i i've got a million one things going on and and so so so i don't know that i'm necessarily
00:28:12
a complete a finisher um and there are people who are good at that so interesting when i'm looking at hiring
00:28:18
people i i will often although um i academic results aren't everything that you always need someone who has got
00:28:26
straight a's at a level because they're very good at understanding the question and delivering it delivering
00:28:32
the answer so they understand what's expected of them and they deliver it in
00:28:35
a very predictable way whereas ceos can often be quite maverick and you ask them one question and they will
00:28:41
answer something else completely different but much more interesting and that's fine you can afford to have
00:28:46
one or two of those mavericks but somebody in the company has to be a good completer finisher um they understand
00:28:52
the question and they deliver it have you this is interesting so there's certain people in my in my in my
00:28:58
previous business where i knew they were like useless at organization and process
00:29:02
and they were they were just dread they could they were like unreliable but they had one skill which was genius
00:29:08
yeah and so it would almost be like making an exception for them within the company
00:29:13
where okay they might take a long time to reply to emails and stuff like that but that one point of like creative
00:29:18
genius that they brought to the company was worth it yeah did you ever have that
00:29:23
very definitely you've got you've got some people i think creative genius always comes at
00:29:28
a price yeah and and it becomes because someone has focused on one thing at the expense of
00:29:34
something else generally um and and so you just have to work with it um and and say right okay well that's
00:29:41
recognized person doesn't do that and actually those skills can easily be dealt with by something else that get
00:29:45
them a good pa someone who can organ get a good complete finisher behind them who picks
00:29:50
up after them and and and then they will come up with the ideas that nobody else
00:29:54
would have come up with yeah i think that works you know i hate i hate powder i hate mixing powder with water i
00:30:02
hate protein powders that you have to mix with water up until now and obviously he'll sponsor this podcast so
00:30:08
i'm tremendously biased but that's a that's a true story i've never been able
00:30:12
to use the like my protein powders that you mix with water because i always think they taste absolutely awful
00:30:17
up until hull released their brand new protein flavor the amazing thing about all of these proteins is there's 20
00:30:22
grams of protein you get all of your vitamins and nutrients 26 of those and as huel always is it's nutritionally
00:30:29
complete and if you are someone that's trying to go a little bit lower on the calories
00:30:34
it's only 105 calories so when i wake up in the morning especially i've been
00:30:38
working out a lot lately come downstairs quickly blend it together in my nutribullet
00:30:42
drink it's 100 calories and then my next sort of main meal because i'm a
00:30:46
breakfast skipper will be at lunchtime highly recommend it um and i shouldn't say this because i don't
00:30:52
have any approval to say this but there's some amazing amazing flavors coming in the ready to drink range that
00:30:57
i've been lucky enough to try um and one of those is my new favorite flavor so stay tuned you were talking about
00:31:04
that struggle you had for the first five years of music specific i heard you talking some interviews about you know
00:31:09
three four five etcetera being particularly hard but um what was what was the personal
00:31:15
sacrifice of that i'm thinking now about how easy it was to maintain like relationships and friendships when
00:31:23
you know in your head you probably have that red read those red numbers from the
00:31:27
management accounts and sort of etched into your mind at all times can't be honest never really got in the way
00:31:33
that never got in the way no no i i'm a lot of people confuse um that's all we're running your own business
00:31:40
you're working all the hours at godsends um i never did if something needs to be
00:31:44
done i could i if and only i could do it then i would do it and there were time you know there's the odd time when uh i
00:31:49
remember once when our entire printing team uh uh were off ill and i came back from a business trip to
00:31:56
australia for most from australia to discover that we were three three days behind on on our printing schedule and i
00:32:01
simply i simply got in the printing room i was the only other person qualified to
00:32:04
use the printer so i just sat in the printing room and i worked uh 24 hours a day for two for three days i
00:32:10
think to get it all done so yes there were times but but i had a great social life i've always been a great believer
00:32:16
also that that i i need to i like to manage a business you know during reasonable hours i don't
00:32:21
i don't think it's important that people need to sacrifice themselves on the
00:32:24
altar of my business and i don't like them doing that one because it makes me
00:32:27
feel guilty about skyping off um you know if you've got all of your whole of
00:32:30
your people in the office and they're they're working 24 hours a day and and
00:32:33
you're sort of you know taking half the day off to go and do something fun i
00:32:38
feel awful um so so i try to make sure the same standards apply and and and that people should people should
00:32:43
work a proper you know proper day's work in the hours that they would like to work within reason um but i do
00:32:49
expect them to go off and go and do something different and recharge their batteries in the evening and the
00:32:53
weekends and you know because otherwise you just run out of steam and particularly it was a
00:32:58
creative business you know we're trying to make people laugh if you're exhausted and miserable um
00:33:04
um that's tough it goes against a lot of the sort of typical narrative doesn't it in
00:33:08
entrepreneurship like the hustle porn star entrepreneur who just like back in doesn't sleep and
00:33:13
just caffeine and just you know they're like crying in the street like and they're like you know eating ramen
00:33:19
noodles and stuff like that what does that what does that narrative make you uh make you think
00:33:23
well i think that's true if you start a business with a lot of people start a
00:33:26
business with nothing and a lot of businesses fail and and as those businesses are failing clearly obviously
00:33:31
you're down to your last pennies and that's tough and and and so i think that
00:33:35
the thing that they're describing is that is the last sort of death throes of
00:33:39
a business and i you know i've seen lots of businesses that i've invested in go
00:33:42
through the same thing where there is no money left you can't pay salaries uh and
00:33:47
the the founders are down to uh you know they're living in the office um under
00:33:51
the desk and and exactly eating noodles uh and and so that happens um but it but it is it isn't it isn't an
00:34:00
essential part of the journey but generally the death rows and occasionally you survive i mean you
00:34:06
know i had i not had had i not had that last bit of cash that i put in i i may well have been one of those cases um
00:34:12
what about focus a lot of entrepreneurs you know have i get a lot of messages from
00:34:16
entrepreneurs that have multiple businesses three or four startups they're doing at
00:34:19
the same time well i wouldn't invest in anybody that had multiple startups but what way you know because if i'd had
00:34:25
three businesses going at the same time as a moon thinking was going badly you you focus on the one that's going well
00:34:30
because it makes you feel better so i and then the person then they then they turn around to the investors who put
00:34:36
money into the third one and they say i'm yeah and i've given up with that one
00:34:40
i'm off to so there is no way i mean when i invest in a business i would make
00:34:44
sure that there's a clause that says that the foundation the founder shareholders have to be 100 focused on
00:34:48
that they're not allowed to have more than a four five percent stake in another unlimited company i'm pretty
00:34:53
strict about that yeah i i mean i just think it's laughable yeah absolutely laughable that people come along and
00:34:59
they get you i've got three ideas and i'd like you to invest in this one
00:35:02
but i've got those just in case that one doesn't work yeah for me it's for me as well i i tend to
00:35:07
think all three will fail because you're giving like 30 in my way that i've even
00:35:10
if you're not prioritizing you're giving 33 of your time and energy and all your competitors are giving 101
00:35:16
and a lot of them might be sleeping under the desk so if you're giving 30 you're it's already hard enough to
00:35:21
succeed giving 100 yeah so you're really setting yourself up to failure but i think there's this
00:35:26
weird thing where entrepreneurs find it impressive to some some entrepreneurs find it
00:35:30
impressive to list multiple businesses that they're doing and i swear if i hear
00:35:34
an entrepreneur come to me with an idea and they've also got another thing they're doing i'm immediately deeply
00:35:39
unimpressed by them because i think they've got this focus problem um and maybe they're you know like maybe
00:35:47
they sat down and tried to think of a business idea and for me like when business ideas don't
00:35:52
come from some type of inspiration when they're literally just contrived from
00:35:57
i'm going to try and think of a business idea i think that it's typically more
00:36:01
difficult i think like some form of inspiration even if it's a small thing of inspiration as a it's integral to
00:36:07
success and creating something unique um but yeah that's another thing that irritates me about
00:36:14
i i i i get just as irritated by that the times when you have to push on through that barrier and if you've got
00:36:20
three things going and one of them is an easier journey that's where you're going to focus
00:36:24
yourself when in fact the that is the absolute time that you need to be completely focused on on on crashing
00:36:30
through that wall that you've come up against and and that's where the best inspiration i ever had and
00:36:36
sometimes actually looking back the most exciting times i ever had in my business were when my
00:36:40
back was absolutely against the one thing this is going down this is going down and bizarrely i found that quite
00:36:47
invigorating um when everything is going incredibly well there were times when i think
00:36:52
everything's going very well everyone's doing their job frankly i could be here
00:36:54
and not be here it doesn't make much difference um in terms of skills as well as an
00:36:58
entrepreneur you i heard you talk about public speaking being integral to you did public speaking at university i
00:37:03
did i did a lot of public speaking at university and a lot of debating and the skill i think that's important is
00:37:08
the ability to be able to persuade people of your ideas not necessarily public speaking but in every meeting
00:37:13
that you go to you need to be able to look people in the eye and convince them that your idea is right and and that
00:37:19
could be in a sales role it could be sitting around a table with a bunch of developers and one of them saying i
00:37:24
think this is the right way forward if you can't articulate yourself properly
00:37:27
then you're never going to be listened to and that's a skill that i think is is
00:37:30
um uh it's being recognized in schools i do a lot in education now so i i see now
00:37:35
more and more they recognize that that's a skill that is really important that people should be
00:37:40
able to look someone in the eye and be able to explain yourself very very coherently i i tend to actually believe
00:37:45
i'd go one step further and think i can't think of a more important skill in
00:37:48
life and business then we i call i refer to it as sales because and we think of sales we think of trying to get cash out
00:37:55
of someone else's pocket by giving them something but i think if it was like
00:37:58
meet a girl in a nightclub you know try and communicate your idea to your team investors employees um everyone you
00:38:05
encounter i think is a to some degree you're trying to sell something and it's
00:38:09
usually yourself yeah but and those that are you think about how that compounds over the over 70 years of your life
00:38:14
being good or bad at that one skill will anything change the trajectory of your life more than being like a good
00:38:19
sales person and that comes from as you say from being able to articulate yourself and
00:38:23
speak and yeah and just think coherently and put down a logical argument that people think yes
00:38:30
okay i get that i understand it how does one get better at that i think a lot of that's practice
00:38:35
um and i i think you know people make this uh sort of binary thing between public
00:38:40
speaking standing on stage and speaking to a crowd of people um versus not doing
00:38:44
anything at all and actually in between there's a whole load of stuff which is
00:38:46
which is working within a team and being able to and that that's where most people come
00:38:52
up against it is that they'll be sitting in a meeting with four or five other
00:38:54
people and they've got something they want to say and they they if they're too nervous about saying
00:39:00
something they just don't say anything at all and then their ideas are never
00:39:02
listened to yeah and then they're devalued in that context and similarly it may not necessarily be a spoken word
00:39:09
you've also got to be able to write well and convincingly then there's another
00:39:12
side of it which is the numeracy side and i find i find that the the most convincing is when i went i i love a
00:39:18
good spreadsheet but uh but when you can express ideas in in numbers and you say
00:39:22
look this is the model that works and you can prove it in in numbers it is it's a very convincing thing
00:39:27
particularly yeah i think right if we do this this is the evidence we've got
00:39:32
that's what will happen yeah that's very convincing um so there's there's there's
00:39:36
also being numerous and being able to explain things in numbers which is yeah yeah it's so true yeah you can
00:39:42
be like orally persuasive which is you know anecdotal persuasion i guess and then you can be persuasive with numbers
00:39:48
which is uh or graphics and that's the other thing i i do see the quality of
00:39:52
decks in the last 15 years has dramatically improved um and in that all that they're much much more
00:39:58
engaging and and there's some real creative genius behind some of the stuff i mean occasionally they don't talk
00:40:04
about the numbers which is a beautiful beautiful peaceful presentation and in a big sort of you
00:40:08
know you go through the the docs end and it's all fantastic it looks lovely beautiful graphics and then you think
00:40:13
you have kind of missed out the point about how you're going to make any money
00:40:16
but so there's a lot more so again but that comes down to how you persuade people how you present how you present
00:40:21
ideas not all of us not all of us understand things by listening some people understand by
00:40:25
seeing i see patterns in numbers but not everyone does and i i realize that now that that just because i happen to see
00:40:32
something one way doesn't mean to say that everybody else sees it in that way
00:40:35
and you have to understand how people how people communicate one of the on that point about you know persuasion and
00:40:41
communication um one of the most amazing things that happened to me inadvertently
00:40:45
was um well one of them's right here i started doing a podcast and i from i never the unintended um consequence of
00:40:53
me being forced to speak on stage because i was running around the world talking
00:40:56
about marketing um and being forced to write out and i do quotes on instagram write these quotes every single day at 7
00:41:02
pm on instagram and then write i used to write this podcast i used to just be on
00:41:06
my own um was that i a and was able to develop my ideas better so if you ask me any question marketing well i've already
00:41:12
written it out i've written written an essay on it because i had to do a blog
00:41:16
because i had to wear my personal brand or if you asked me something else about my life i've already spent
00:41:22
you know a thousand hours talking on this podcast about it was i became um much i'd say 10x better at communicating
00:41:29
and the impact that i had on my life was just profound so my conclusive point here is i really think for young people
00:41:34
that there are ways to force yourself to accelerate that learning yeah one of them is like keep like you know
00:41:40
keep a blog yeah start a podcast even if no one's listening to it um and i i i people will start podcasts
00:41:48
because they're trying to make money or because they want to be famous or have
00:41:50
loads of followers but i but i think the more beneficial thing is the skill um the skills you'll learn from doing it
00:41:57
and oh my god sales is just everything to me yeah you're right when you have to write a
00:42:02
blog actually write the words down it really forces you to think about how to express things coherently
00:42:07
in a way that verbally you can get away with a lot less discipline dragon's done
00:42:14
something we share in common yes indeed yeah i've just uh just started on the
00:42:18
show um it was a yeah i mean the first pitch everything walking in behind the cell i mean i first watched
00:42:25
it when i was 12 years old it was also surreal how was your experience when dragons dragonstone
00:42:29
and what advice would you have for me let's do the first question okay well so
00:42:32
my so i i love the experience um i mean partly it because it's it's very
00:42:38
forgiving television to make in the sense that uh you arrive on set apart from the fact there are seven cameras
00:42:44
which was distracting for about the first hour or two other than that it's people walking through the door and
00:42:49
they're saying this is who i am this is my business and it's one of those things that i
00:42:53
think i think if you're if you're thinking about that as a potential career
00:42:57
it's about as realistic as you can get while still being entertaining these are
00:43:01
these are real businesses that people have spent sometimes several years developing and put their life and soul
00:43:05
into it it's not some concocted thing that um you know here's 100 pounds
00:43:11
go and see how much cheese you can sell on the market at the type thing that you
00:43:14
see in the apprentice these are real businesses and i think it's been very inspiring i've seen a ground a real
00:43:20
shift in the time that i've been around in people's attitudes to becoming an
00:43:23
entrepreneur um because of yeah partly but you know partly because i think there's also been a shift in
00:43:29
attitude generally yeah and a lot of a lot of young people aspire to the idea that actually when you're young and
00:43:34
you've got nothing to lose you can afford to make more mistakes so rather than so you can just go straight
00:43:39
straight into it after after school start something and crash and burn start again and you can
00:43:44
do it all now from your phone as well you know you can set up a shop using shopify on your phone in a couple
00:43:49
of minutes and sell you know you can even drop shop drop ship things so you don't need a warehouse or anything like
00:43:53
that so it's very incredibly accessible now yeah um more people young people
00:43:58
want to be entrepreneurs than ever before but uh but but i i think it's it i'm i'm really looking forward to seeing
00:44:03
uh and seeing this new series because i think you will add a uh kind of a different a different dimension to it in
00:44:09
terms of thinking particularly the way that businesses now you know the way that particularly tech businesses and
00:44:14
the way that they're funded um is yeah it's very it's very different
00:44:18
from 20 years ago yeah one of the things i didn't expect as well was how useful the other dragons
00:44:23
are when it comes to analyzing the business oh yeah yeah because they all come from different disciplines so
00:44:28
deborah's going to help me with the numbers over here and peter's got his
00:44:31
background in tech and you know logistics and all the amazing things he does and tuca's going to be able to
00:44:35
really sort of interrogate the supply chain and sarah understands the craft industry and business generally and um
00:44:41
so it was it's really uh they said sometimes you just gotta let them interrogate the business from all of
00:44:46
their angles i i learned a lot i learned a very very important lesson from deborah about um the food business and
00:44:52
going to supermarkets she was interrogating somebody and and talking about their gross margin and she
00:44:57
said well of course as soon as your sales go up your gross margin will go down i'm
00:45:02
thinking what are you talking about and then and i asked her about this afterwards and she said well the problem
00:45:07
is that supermarkets love to have young pioneer brands in uh and they um and they will allow you to be on
00:45:14
their shelves so there's pyramid of products and they allow you these little
00:45:17
innovative little companies to be to add interest to their shelves the moment that it looks interesting and you want
00:45:22
to sell more of it the supermarket is aha now let's talk about the price because they they know how to make that
00:45:28
stuff even better than you do they know how to squeeze you down to a barely acceptable margin and so your margin
00:45:33
which looked okay at the beginning and they'll say well you can sell a lot more
00:45:35
but we're gonna have to have a different price and that's and that was a lesson i
00:45:39
learned from deborah so so sitting back and listening sometimes and and you know
00:45:42
like you know tuca's knowledge of supply chain and in textiles in particular it's quite
00:45:47
quite fascinating so jumping back to your business then moving so eventually you sell the
00:45:52
business yeah um fully or in part well i sold i sold most of it in 2011 and i rolled over
00:45:59
i rolled over into the venture capital investment in the new in the new company we basically merged two companies we
00:46:03
merged photo box and moon pick together um with a lot of venture capital money and and so i reinvested in that and then
00:46:10
we sold sold it all out in 2016. um so there's a couple of things here that was the first point where you became
00:46:15
really rich well we moving started making a lot of money before we sold oh right so we were
00:46:21
probably making about 10 million a year in dividends um so because it was making money faster
00:46:29
faster than we could spend it on advertising so so so we just paid it out as dividends i think
00:46:34
we paid out about 30 million pounds in dividends before we sold oh wow so um quite literally printing money so so by
00:46:40
the time i sold actually it wasn't as if it was transformational because um i i hadn't spent the money i i've still
00:46:47
got all the money that i'd taken out as dividends so when when you so if you you
00:46:51
really built enough wealth to take care of all of your sort of base basic maslow
00:46:54
over your needs clearly you know yeah so when you when you sell how how does that feel well it was funny
00:47:00
i i was i i was interviewed afterwards and uh on sky i think and they said well you know what are you gonna buy uh what
00:47:06
are you gonna do now and i was like what did you do immediately afterwards and i thought well i cycled home and i
00:47:12
made a peanut butter and jam sandwich i mean that was because there was a it's slightly
00:47:17
it's a bit of a weird anti-climax selling i don't know how it was for you
00:47:20
but i went into a large room and i had to sign about 200 documents um on my own and then i sort of done it now and they
00:47:26
get a great well money have been banked later on back of the bike cycle home that was it
00:47:31
oh there was no sort of you know no trumpets you know no signings shaking hands it was it was um um quite a
00:47:38
non-event really so the money arrives the same day when you've sold um yes yeah well not not all of it i think it
00:47:44
was done it was done in stages but mostly arrived on the same day yeah yeah and so that you sold the company over a
00:47:50
100 million at the time yeah rolled shares into the the holding company as well um to keep it sort of invested in
00:47:55
an interest in the business um yeah i mean that's a that's a [ __ ] ton of money did was there sort of
00:48:02
a loss in because you've given up your your business here you've given up your
00:48:06
focus yeah your baby was there a bit of a lot like a loss of orientation like what do i do now with my life
00:48:13
yes though at the same time i think i got to a point where i delegated everything within the company and i had
00:48:17
been largely focused on the sale process for a year or so so after that sales process was over you think well
00:48:23
now the day-to-day running of this business has been left to uh the the team they're all doing a fantastic job
00:48:29
they're all bright and they're probably better than i am so me sticking around in that kind of if
00:48:34
i decided to carry on running the business for profit i could have done but i but i i felt as though i'd run my
00:48:39
course i felt as i added everything i could add to that business and there were lots of other things i wanted to do
00:48:43
in life um so um in a way it was it was a challenge to sort of create an identity outside of that you know
00:48:51
because for a long time i've been missed a rusher i'd gone to russia and everyone
00:48:54
knew me as the person who went to russia and did things in russia and then i did
00:48:58
as i started moving i fell into obscurity again people think oh poor nicki does something with greeting cards
00:49:03
um and i go home at christmas to back to shropshire and my parents friends would say
00:49:09
so you do something with greeting cards is that something you do from your spare room yeah anyway very
00:49:16
very very i mean having because i'd run quite a big business in russia and and
00:49:19
then of course it started it turned into something serious um so it was an interesting challenge which
00:49:24
is how do you sort of reinvent yourself after that and i i i actually stopped i went into the charity sector um
00:49:29
full-time and i became a ceo of a children's charity for uh for a year full time and then i became a
00:49:35
trustee of that for another four years why um well partly because i think i i'd
00:49:42
i think i sort of satisfied i felt as i'd satisfied everything that i needed
00:49:45
to you know i didn't want any more stuff so i wasn't it was it was going to be hard to get
00:49:51
motivated just by making more money um so so i wanted to have i wanted to make sure whatever i did
00:49:56
after that was useful so socially useful in some respect but for that you've got
00:49:59
to kind of do the work you've got to understand how to make a how to make a difference
00:50:04
and and that first year really made me realize how complicated it is and how difficult it is to make a to make a real
00:50:12
difference um in the world um uh so it's fascinating um and and i wouldn't have been able to do that if i
00:50:18
hadn't if i hadn't sold the company i wouldn't have the freedom to go off and
00:50:21
and and do that it's not interesting that people they typically it's this is
00:50:25
a super like generalization and it's not necessarily the truth but it appears
00:50:28
that we all start quite selfish in life it's like let me get rich and free first
00:50:33
and then you see that transition when people do make money is their joy comes from philanthropy and helping others
00:50:39
i think but i think you know in that very privileged position of of having seen what it's like afterwards
00:50:46
because of course for most people they they want more things i think money a lack of financial problems can
00:50:53
bring you happiness not having financial problems financial problems brings you misery when you're beyond financial
00:50:58
problems um you're neutral and then there's and then there's and then there's financial
00:51:02
freedom which is i'm now free i don't have to do the nine-to-five job i have the option if i want to do to do
00:51:07
other things beyond that pretty i'd say it's pretty diminishing marginal returns
00:51:12
i mean i think for some people the more money they make it's about it's not about the money itself it's more
00:51:16
about uh their position in our you know you know if you're very competitive as a
00:51:20
hierarchy of people and there's someone up there who's you know who's made
00:51:24
jeff bezos up there and they see themselves on that trajectory they'll never quite be happy
00:51:29
until they're up there and they'll never get there so yeah um i i realized very early on that if you
00:51:35
if that i wanted to avoid getting into that into that sort of competitive mindset of
00:51:39
thinking that i have to be somewhere on that trajectory i've kind of you know
00:51:42
satisfied what i what i need in terms of in terms of you know stuff housing and whatever um
00:51:49
and then thereafter it's about being free to explore other things one of the
00:51:52
things i noticed about you that's like very different to the other um successful people that i've talked to
00:51:58
and we touched on that a little bit was you and we talked about a little bit earlier but my question is i'm slightly
00:52:02
related um is there seems to be a lot of like neurotic obsession with people's
00:52:11
businesses hobbies i mean i remember sitting with eddie hearn here and him telling me how like how i mean his book
00:52:17
is called relentless like how relentless he is and to the point where he will sacrifice his family
00:52:22
to for the business and he'll tell him he'll speak to have the conversation
00:52:24
with his wife and say my business is everything if i you know don't make the
00:52:28
date if i don't make this then it is what it is i am obsessed um you don't seem to be like that
00:52:35
and that makes one would then therefore assume that the problem that sometimes comes with
00:52:41
being like that which is a severe cost to sort of relationships wouldn't be present in you
00:52:49
i think you can be driven by two things you can be driven by demons or driven by
00:52:51
passion and it's much better to be driven by passion than demons yeah some people are
00:52:56
some some people were offended at the age of 11 by a comment that somebody made to them that they'll never amount
00:53:00
to anything and they have struggled ever since to prove to that person that a teacher said
00:53:05
something bad to them and then finally they go back sort of 35 years they go back to school and and and they find
00:53:11
this old teacher who says well i always thought you'd make something of yourself
00:53:14
and they think [ __ ] i was hoping it's going to be more gratifying it was it was
00:53:19
you know the teacher might just say i just felt you needed a bit of a kick um to get yourself off you and it worked
00:53:23
didn't it um so um some people are driven by and the people who driven by demons are
00:53:30
often it doesn't make them happy like an itch they're scratching and it just
00:53:33
makes it makes it worse amen eddie hands basically like that and he he was quite
00:53:37
honest about that his dad basically he was always trying to live up to his dad's expectations of him
00:53:42
and i remember saying to him i remember saying to eddie i was you know what's
00:53:45
the goal then eddie well you know we're gonna sell it for five billion yeah and
00:53:48
then what and then he's like well you know then i you know i'll have my cigar and i'll go
00:53:52
to the beach do you actually think you'd go to the beach cigar you just told me
00:53:56
you're obsessive and right and he goes probably not probably probably and actually the difficult thing is then
00:54:01
what do you do afterwards i think because i think it's one thing a lot of people
00:54:05
they think a business of starting a business is about you start a business and then you're working towards an exit
00:54:09
and happiness comes and exit it doesn't happiness comes from the process of building a business and working with
00:54:14
people and pulling together bright people watching the work and creating this thing i love the learning process i
00:54:19
think that's perhaps one of the other things that i learned out of all of this
00:54:21
is that i really really enjoy learning and it doesn't matter how much money you've got you can't learn japanese any
00:54:27
quicker but you can learn a little bit quicker if you've got some really good
00:54:30
but basically you've got to put the work in doesn't matter how rich you are you
00:54:34
can't buy that you've actually got to put the work in that drives you so do
00:54:37
you think you're a balanced person i'm trying to get i'll be honest what i'm
00:54:40
trying to understand here is a lot of the entrepreneurs that i meet that the reason why they're successful
00:54:46
is because of as you say you described it perfectly because of demons or something yeah and then that costs them
00:54:50
somewhere else yeah you seem to be as was the case with the um the ceo of delivery who sat here a couple weeks ago
00:54:58
fairly balanced person so i'm assuming then you have really well-balanced relationships
00:55:04
i think i got great friends and great great friends and great relationships and and a lovely family and um
00:55:09
um but but that's partly comes down to it and part of it comes down to standing
00:55:13
back and thinking you know what is success and i look at success that more rounded thing what makes you a
00:55:17
successful human being and and if you look at that then you're constantly looking you're constantly
00:55:22
measuring yourself by well like actually what do my friends think of me what do i
00:55:25
think i'm a good person am i a good person i think i'm a good person um how
00:55:29
am i going to look look back at my life and be embarrassed at the way that i've
00:55:32
trodden on people on the way up and and and in which case you know don't tread
00:55:36
on people on the way up so it depends on what you regard as success what you define as success in
00:55:41
the beginning i think unfortunately we too often we measure the things that are easiest to measure and the easiest thing
00:55:46
to measure is how wealthy someone is um so when i go back to talk to talk at schools about about all my old school
00:55:53
about about and you're invited along presumably because everyone's heard of a
00:55:57
business that you've created i i'm reluctant to create this illusion that
00:56:01
that you know if you work incredibly hard you can make a lot of money and that will make you successful you have
00:56:05
to be a successful human being what is a successful human being well i think it's all the you know those things
00:56:10
that one you've got to be you've got to be a good citizen you've got to make
00:56:12
your fair contra you've got to make a good contribution to society now if you're good at business um you are of
00:56:17
course helping to pay a lot of the bills which is a great thing um if you pay your taxes properly but the um
00:56:23
but but but equally it's about the way that you treat your employees it's about
00:56:26
the way that you treat the people around you um and all of those things i think the things
00:56:30
that you look back on your own life and you think did i did i lead a good life um was i was i was i a good person um or
00:56:37
do i regret look back and think you know i was a bit harsh quick one as a serial entrepreneur
00:56:43
that's currently building multiple projects across multiple industries everything from the marketing industry
00:56:48
to blockchain to consumer goods everything one of the things that has been a lifesaver for me and again a
00:56:54
company that i reached out to to evangelize about on this podcast because i'm a loyal customer and they ultimately
00:56:59
ended up sponsoring this podcast is fiverr.com f-i-v-e-r-r what that site allows me to
00:57:05
do is extend my capacity across all of my projects if i'm looking for a graphic designer someone to edit a
00:57:12
video someone to do a website for me it allows me to extend my capacity without hiring people and the quality of
00:57:19
freelancers on fiverr has been amazing and when the trust and the service you get is that phenomenal and the services
00:57:26
often offered are that diverse it's a no-brainer whether you have one member
00:57:30
of staff you're a freelancer yourself or a thousand members of staff five it can
00:57:34
be a game changer for you and i'd love you guys to check it out use the link
00:57:37
below go to fiverr.com and send me a screenshot if you end up using the service one of you is going to
00:57:45
win something very amazing as you look ahead in you know the next chapter of your life yeah we talked you
00:57:50
talked there about how the journey is actually there where all the fun and fulfillment lives yeah um and you kind
00:57:55
of like because i think we all kind of like mentally map out what the next phase of our life will look like we
00:58:00
don't necessarily know the details that have a business plan but we understand
00:58:02
like the the fundamentals of that phase what what are you what are you hoping will be
00:58:08
part of that phase um at the stage of life you're at where money isn't you know money isn't gonna
00:58:14
mean that you can can or can't eat um what are you trying to put into that chapter of your life well um the other
00:58:19
thing i've realized um and i i listened to something bill gates said which is
00:58:23
that if bill gates had become a doctor he could have affected quite a few people's lives but by going into
00:58:28
business he affected millions of people's lives and he was very good at making money and so i don't see anything
00:58:33
wrong with pursuing i mean now i'm actively pursuing the businesses that i that i'm involved with and i
00:58:39
would love to make more money but then that gives me the freedom to do something useful with that money it as a
00:58:43
whole other dimension to why are you doing it i mean i'm chasing because i need another lamborghini
00:58:48
because i've got a very old battered discovery and a lamborghini it's just not what i was going to say i
00:58:52
can imagine you're in a landfill no no i'm just a very very tired old discovery
00:58:56
which i'm driving into the ground before i buy an electric car but there's got to
00:58:59
be a reason for doing it and and you know the reason the reason for creating companies partly
00:59:03
because it is it is good fun i mean i you know thoroughly enjoy you have an idea and
00:59:08
you're creating something um and uh if seeing your idea come play out and you think yeah i was right that that
00:59:16
hypothesis was right so we pull together some good people and it starts to work and then 10 10 years later
00:59:22
absolutely that that that worked and we've got a whole lot of people in employment they're enjoying themselves
00:59:26
and the great thing also is when you step back from that and you think that that thing i mean moon pig has a life
00:59:31
its own i was in the car the other day and there was a moon being advert came on the radio
00:59:35
i've been i've been out of that for a long time now i haven't been involved
00:59:39
you know haven't worked there for 10 years and and yet that's it sort of carried on without me um
00:59:44
there's a huge sense of pride in that when you see that it must be surely yeah
00:59:47
and actually you know when you sell a business it's also a sense of pride that
00:59:50
it worked for them as well i think the very best deals are deals where both parties came away happy will you ever be
00:59:55
a ceo again i don't know that i will because i enjoy i enjoy the sort of that being
01:00:03
having the freedom to do different things um and there are plus and minuses to have this
01:00:08
this plural life um i've realized that having doing 10 of 10 things is twice as much work as doing
01:00:14
100 of one thing um twice as much work definitely twice too much work but partly from a very simple
01:00:21
perspective is the is the um i mean nesso now post covered but before that they actually simply they're getting
01:00:28
from one place to the other oh yeah you know and that that gets in the way of things um
01:00:33
but also it's the constant juggling in your head and and and that and then suddenly you think
01:00:37
oh i've been focused on that for a bit and it's it's more work um so i would
01:00:42
like to be more focused i want to get interested at a level where i feel as i'm able to make a positive difference
01:00:47
to it um and that means that means actually a smaller number of a smaller number of things i had a job when i was
01:00:52
at university and the most boring job ever it was a it was transcribing license details it was working for a
01:00:57
ford dealership transcribing license details from one ledger to another and i'd get to about 10 o'clock in the
01:01:03
morning physically it was it was so boring it was physically painful and i would i
01:01:07
would i would think surely it must be five o'clock it's not it's still ten
01:01:10
o'clock in the morning and it was horrible absolutely horrible and and the one thing i look back at my life but
01:01:15
it's one of the the greatest things is i've never i've always got to five
01:01:18
o'clock wishing it was two o'clock um and uh and that's that's i think a
01:01:22
sign that that you're not bored um and there's the stuff i'd like to be
01:01:26
doing like i look for i wake up on monday morning i think fantastic i can get stuck in and i can do stuff and so
01:01:31
but that idea of that idea of of there not being enough hours to do to to get the stuff done is is a sign that
01:01:38
it's enjoyable the ones that don't like what they do you know because i've
01:01:42
worked jobs outside call center night shifts for you know just pick up the phone book the hotel for them because
01:01:47
they can figure out how to use the computer yeah yeah you know for dorothy yeah she doesn't know where she wants to
01:01:51
stay she wants to stay in manchester doesn't know where manchester you know night shifts of doing stuff like that
01:01:55
i've had worse jobs as well where i had to open the yellow pages and just call
01:01:58
someone and try and sell them something um which was awful um but what is that what liberates people from that place i
01:02:05
i mean i would maybe guess that it's information and maybe skills so maybe they could
01:02:10
the other thing is when you've got one of those jobs you take the view look i've got an
01:02:15
opportunity to learn how this to learn how this works if i learn how this does work works but take it seriously do it
01:02:19
well um then actually i might know what it takes to become a supervisor um if you become a
01:02:23
supervisor i might have then what it takes to go up to to go one notch higher and suddenly i'm actually then managing
01:02:28
people and and and that's a little bit more interesting than what i was doing
01:02:32
so to some extent you have the control to be able to sign how much time and effort enthusiasm you put into it and
01:02:36
there's some jobs that will not be that interesting but then then then say to
01:02:39
yourself right what can i learn about doing doing this that's going to enable
01:02:41
me just to do my bosses job um and and actually what your employers will be looking for is someone who's applied
01:02:47
who's interested and they'll look amongst the 10 people who are doing that
01:02:50
job and think nine out of 10 of those people are just doing this because they want to pay the bills this one is
01:02:54
genuinely trying to work out how to do the job better i've got one last question for you yeah
01:02:58
never asked this question before but but it feels like i should you're you know
01:03:02
you're you know several years ahead of me in business right so you've experienced a lot more than me you've
01:03:07
had a child you've gone through you know even dragon's den you've been through
01:03:11
that experience as well and had a taste of all of that you know um attention and um
01:03:17
uh press and all that stuff what would be the one piece of advice you'd give to me
01:03:23
it can be relating to anything it's just you you know maybe what's something that
01:03:26
you think i need to learn or know based on me being on 20 you know 28 29 now i think i've just left my companies just
01:03:35
hold my shares a little bit yeah um as you go as you go through you can get to a point where you think
01:03:41
right i've had a huge success and i look at moonpick and think will i ever have a
01:03:44
success as big as moonpig i don't know i don't know but i've got to be okay with
01:03:48
that and in order to be happy i have to be i have to be okay with the idea that i may
01:03:53
never i may never better that because if if you're always constantly thinking right i've done that i
01:03:58
therefore have to do that it can be recipe for misery and like like you look at pop stars who who have
01:04:03
a huge career and then and they're kind of done by 25 and actually you know you know that they're
01:04:08
not going to quite come back and and then a couple years later and and so i look at it and i think well
01:04:14
i don't have to better what i did in terms of i don't i'm not going to judge
01:04:17
myself by having a business that was worth more than moonpig because actually that's setting myself on almost
01:04:22
impossible task what i'm going to do is make sure that whatever i do i feel as
01:04:26
though i was being i feel as it was useful um and some of this might not be as obvious or as prominent as
01:04:34
setting up moon pig because sometimes you catch a wave and i look at moon pig and i think
01:04:38
did i just catch a wave i was in the right place at the right time i i had a good idea and i managed it well but
01:04:42
actually i had it you know i just caught that wave perfectly and sometimes you that that that can be hard to break to
01:04:49
to to recreate um so so i think being managing your own expectations is uh is is is a
01:04:58
uh is an important part of human happiness um and and thinking okay i may never better that but actually i'm gonna
01:05:03
do something different now and that will be just as interesting it'll be just as
01:05:06
rewarding as as as as as what i did before do you ever regret so like with with my company um i think
01:05:13
i left in 2019 when the valuation was maybe 200 million i think now it's like
01:05:17
500 yeah and it's probably going to go i shouldn't i'm guessing here okay i'm not involved
01:05:22
in the company anymore i'm probably going to go to a billion i reckon yeah um
01:05:26
do you ever regret moon pig is now worth what one point something 1.1.6 well i i for for a long time i
01:05:34
said eight years after i saw the when i sold the business it was making about 11
01:05:38
12 million pounds profit not not ebitda proper profit like money you could spend um and um
01:05:45
and eight years later it was making about 18 million so i think yeah it was an improvement on where on on where it
01:05:50
was but it wasn't so spectacular that it was um so that they're happy with their
01:05:53
deal uh and i'm happy that i've got the chance to go off and do something else
01:05:57
um and then i looked at floating and think well because the thing about floating is that nobody knew we were
01:06:01
going to have covered and and um and that obviously massively boost uh boosted the business and i think
01:06:07
property has permanently put more people on online so that was a fairly unpredictable uh part of it then there's
01:06:13
another question which is if i had stayed in running that business would it have done as well as it has and i don't
01:06:18
know that it would have done to be if i'm really honest because the guys who
01:06:21
came afterwards a guy called stan ron who came into moon big after me um who was
01:06:26
awesome i mean he was a you know brilliant um and then and then and that then nicole rytha who's running it now
01:06:32
is has just taken it to another level so we're going to take where he came in and
01:06:36
he's just so and so so i i i'm not sure that i would have done i'm not sure had i stayed in
01:06:42
there's no guarantee that it would have done what it what it did and in fact
01:06:46
i'm not sure it would have done so you know i and actually i've had some
01:06:50
done some really interesting things so if you're asking me the question would i
01:06:53
rather have had sort of 36 percent of 1.6 billion yes what i'm questioning is whether we would
01:06:59
have got there if i'd remain in the helm well listen nick thank you so much for
01:07:02
your time it's been an incredibly interesting diverse conversation and yeah um thank you as well for uh you
01:07:07
sent a text message i think to our mutual friend before i went on the show just giving me oh yeah
01:07:12
yeah and he passed that over to me and i i yeah i kept that in mind i won't show
01:07:16
what that advice was i kept that in mind and um yeah i mean your story is super inspiring and
01:07:21
there's a british success story and someone that's so i'm so fascinated by you because you're
01:07:26
so unorthodox in so many ways and you also don't [ __ ] so a lot of people it's tempting to portray yourself even
01:07:32
with the last example there you could have said well you know you basically said that you're you're unsure whether
01:07:37
the business would have performed better or worse without you i think that takes
01:07:39
great humility and self-awareness to admit that and that's the reason why i started this podcast because you know to
01:07:45
share some of that honesty with the world so thank you for coming on thank you for being an inspiration to me thank
01:07:49
you for being one of my favorite dragons as well you're just very real and funny
01:07:52
thank you it's good to have a real sense of humor well it's been a real it's been
01:07:54
a real pleasure meeting him in person so um brilliant superb and um yeah hopefully we'll get you back again once
01:07:59
uh to talk more about your charity in particular which i wish we had more time to yeah to talk about because that's
01:08:04
that was super inspiring to read about as well um but yeah thank you thanks nick great
01:08:23
[Music] you