Rory Sutherland, Elfried Samba and Lottie Whyte on founder focus and knowing your customer

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Latte, I'm really excited about this episode. Right. Um, where Rory and I always get together and we're always thinking about who can we bring in, um, uh, so that we can show the world how they think slightly differently to the norm and how you're building some phenomenal stuff. And one of the first people on top of the list was yourself. Obviously, we've worked together. To all the guests, >> Oh, no. [laughter] You can watch the previous episodes. This is the first time I've said it. But, uh, I really wanted to speak to you about longevity, right? We talk about, uh, everybody's now thinking about being healthier. Everyone's thinking about what they need to do to be able to live a longer, happier life, right? And with my master, you guys seem to be, uh, focusing in that space. So, I wanted everybody to, uh, hear what you've been up to. But before we get into all of that, it'll be great for you to give a bit of an introduction of yourself, or anybody that doesn't know who you are or my master. It'll be great to give you the floor to, uh, uh, let our audience know about what you've got going on.

>> Sure. So, I'm Ly White. I'm the founder of Maya Master. I am ex Agency. I was at MNC Sachi for before I started my company. And Maya Master is kind of the home of recovery tech. And our whole mission is how do we take all these incredible technologies that are emerging, um, you know, ice baths, saunas, hyperbaric chambers, and make them something that the everyday person can have in their home at a price that they can actually afford. And, you know, the overall mission is to help people become 1% better every day. We've been working on that concept [laughter] and how we roll it out. Um, and it's really exciting to wake up every day and put something out into the world which is genuinely helping people feel better. And we hear, you know, from customers who are overcoming chemo, through to Carlos Alcaraz, who was using our stuff at Wimbledon, uh, through to the everyday person who's really focused on how do I live a longer, happier life. Um, and so it's really exciting. We're scaling pretty fast. We're the 30th fastest growing company in the country right now. Um, and I'm I'm excited about the mission. Yeah.

>> So, so how did the journey start? So I think a lot of the times people kind of like drop into a a brand scale story and they don't know how it started. You just like keep going. It's almost like a Christopher Nolan film, right? It [laughter] always starts in the middle of the action, right? But then the only time you hear about the early days is >> years later. You guys are currently [clears throat] building, you're currently scaling, you're active within the business. It'll be great to hear about the origin story and how it is running my master today. What does it feel like to be in the middle of the tornado?

>> Yeah, tiring and stressful. That's [laughter] what it feels like to me in the middle of the tornado. Um, [clears throat] but I think two things. I heard this thing the other day which was, you know, a lot of people are like, want to start companies and they're sitting there with this question like, what's my passion? Like, what's the, you get told like, you should just know your passion. And I heard somebody the other day say, think about what you were obsessed with between the ages of 14 and 16 >> and do something to do with that. And for me, all I did was play sports. Like that's what I did all day long. And then I went on to marry my husband Joe, who was a professional rugby player. He played for Harlequins and he played for England. And he was out with an injury. Uh, he tore his Achilles, um, a couple of years ago. And he was with his time off, he was meant to be fit in my kitchen. And instead, what he was doing was he put a stuck a literal different end onto the end of his B&Q drill and he started using it as a massager on his calf. [laughter] He took it into the Harley Quinn's changing room, which is obviously a professional sports environment where they have, you know, elite physios and people to treat their bodies. He's using this B&Q drill in the changing room. All the lads are taking the absolute mickey out of him. He goes off to get treatment, comes back up the corridor, and all he's can hear is this [laughter] coming from the changing room. And he walks back in, Carl Sincler, Chris Robshaw, you know, some big rugby names are using it and they're offering cash out of their wallets. And they said to him, Carl Sincler said, "Joe, I need this in my life for my back. I'll give you 500 quid right now if you if you let me have it."

>> What?

>> Yeah. So he buys the >> Clearly rugby players don't know much about how much drills cost.

>> Well, exactly. But or he was just earning too much money. Who knows? Exactly. Um, but yeah, so we go back to B&Q and we buy like 20 more of these drills. And Joe sits in the spare room and like hacks the end off, re puts another end on and starts selling them to all the rugby players. It spreads to all the other teams in the league. It spreads to England. Uh, and we start just selling them like via messages to different people and sending them out in the post. [laughter] And and then we take two grand out of our savings and go to the national cycling show at the Excel and we're like, let's give it a go and see if we can sell it to the general public. And like, I hope no one who bought them is listening because we haven't been sued today and I really hope that that that doesn't happen. Um, but yeah, that's that is the origin story. So I think when they say like >> an idea can come from anywhere, that's really true.

>> So the principal use was it that the rugby players were using it, they had a particular, what, back pain or?

>> Well, they all have something, right? Like they all have some niggle inside. >> Cyclists, it's going to have to be the same, I imagine.

>> Have the same, you know, all either in their shoulders or they've got something wrong with their knees or like. And, you know, this was like at the very when kind of massage guns weren't a thing. Like now they're, you know, universal. And yeah, every, this was kind of our core customer insight was that everybody has a niggle, right? Everyone has something that is bothering them somehow. Um, and yeah, that's how we started.

>> And obviously the are professional athletes and you said that they have professional um doctors and medical staff over there. Why didn't they have the right equipment for these niggles?

>> Well, I think what's interesting and, you know, has been very obvious in the rise of the wellness space, like we was, we started kind of playing around with this stuff in 2018, 2019. And a lot of the stuff that's very accessible now just wasn't then. It was the reserve of, they might have had it in the club, but they couldn't have afforded it at home. You know, they couldn't, they didn't have something to treat themselves every night when they were sitting on the sofa. Or Joe had this injury and he was being sent for this, uh, treatment, this shock treatment. Uh, he was being sent twice a week because it was costing the club four grand every time he went. He could only go twice a week and he wanted to be doing something every day. So it was kind of like this accessibility point, which is the other core pillar of what we're doing, right? It's like, how do we bring this into the home so everyone can feel better every day?

>> That's really interesting. Because a lot of the times people have an idea of the business they want to start, right? And they put this plan together and then they try to force it so that people buy it. It seems that the blueprint or we obviously had Ben Francis here. You kind of know the audience you want to serve, but you don't really know the product until people start paying, right? And it seems like you kind of fell into the space. But I also think we had already been discussing the fact that we wanted to start a business, right? So like we had planted the seed in our minds and we were open to looking at problems. And then when you set that kind of frame in your mind, you're you're literally thinking, I'm suffering with this problem or this person I'm speaking to is having this issue. And it's about solving problems, right?

>> A surprising number of businesses start actually almost by luck. >> That you stumble into something. Actually, maybe it's not surprising. I mean, it's a sort of, um, uh, you know, someone simply notices. Effectively, Roger L. Martin is very good on this. He always thinks that the three things that kind of give you inspiration for a new strategy or strategic direction are anomaly, analogy, and resolve a contradiction are his three things. And actually, when I, you know, I thought this is quite interesting. And when I looked at it, nearly all the businesses you see that are successful have basically happened on one of those three things.

>> And it also seems that something goes wrong that you may think is the worst thing to ever happen. And within that, you're able to flip it into something positive, right? Because [laughter] there was an injury and then trying to figure out a solution to that problem, you're able to figure out a gap in the market that other people didn't see. And then it started this flywheel. At what point did you start to acknowledge that you're an actual business and you're not just solving people's niggles?

>> Yeah. Not for [laughter] We were the niggle solvers for quite a while. And both had big other jobs. He was off playing for England. I was really into my ad career. Um, and we just did trade shows. Like we we went to the end of races every single weekend. We just like show up and try and sell the thing. And although we probably took too long doing that, it's actually like, what better customer insight than being at the end of a triathlon or a cycle race and literally spending the entire weekend talking face to face to your customer. Like, it's informed everything that we've gone on to do, right? But if you said to someone, go and spend two years, you know, every weekend talking to your customer in the cold, uh, you might not be up for doing that.

>> That's really interesting. So, you knew the space you wanted to go into and then you found the problem to solve. And then you started to spend more face time with the consumers, which probably gave you some insight in terms of the kind of business that you need to be creating. Rory talks a lot about the fact that a lot of senior business leaders don't spend time with the consumer. They spend more time in the boardroom. And actually, the best ideas, the best inspiration comes from actually meeting your customers at face value. Do you still do that today?

>> All the time. In fact, one of the things that I do really regularly is answer the. We have a a phone line, right? A customer phone line. I answer the phone line like a couple of days a month. And it's like, it feels like a total waste of time because you should be doing more important >> free market research. And also, it's it's it's feedback. It's fantastic.

>> And you're like, "Oh my god, I did not realize that was an issue." Or they literally say to you like, "I'd really love it if you did this though, because that would help me do X." And you're like, "Right, well, that's the new product that we got to go and launch." I can't remember which business it is, but there's one business where they devote Monday morning. You know, this is a senior leadership team to analyzing the complaints from the previous week.

>> And the argument is, you know, some complaints are always going to be, you know, complete outliers.

>> Yeah.

>> But of course, what they do by doing that is they notice the recurring complaints and they go, okay, if you got a one-off complaint, Yeah.

>> You know, maybe there's nothing you can do. It's daft to try and legislate for that because some complaints will always be of that nature. But once you get a recurrence,

>> Yeah.

>> You got to you've got to do something.

>> Exactly that.

>> It's weird. I'm trying to remember which business it is because it struck me as in it might, I don't know if it's AO, but it's it's a pretty large business. And I was kind of astonished but very, very impressed by it as well.

>> Yeah, I think I think too many people lose touch, you know, with that. I don't think there's a better thing you can be spending your time on than with the people who are buying, using your product. Or the thing it gave us going to the shows was we were on the ground trying to sell the product. And you hear the objections. You're like, "No, I wouldn't buy that because it's too loud." Or, "I wouldn't do that because it would just sit in the cupboard and I don't understand how to use it." Okay, well, they're the things we got to fix. Or they're the things we got to address on our landing page, right? Like to help people overcome them. You understand? Someone said to me, I think on Twitter, um, one of the best market research questions I've ever heard. And it was, they just bought something. I can't remember what it was they bought. And with it arrived one question, which was, "What almost stopped you from buying this today?"

>> Now, the argument is, of course, you don't have any data on the people who didn't buy. Yeah.

>> But from the people who did buy, getting data on what the kind of sticking point might have been, totally, eg, it wouldn't arrive on time, or whatever it may be.

>> Such a quick fix is >> Such a quick fix.

>> But literally there do >> You know, I worked on this for that that question never occurred to me before, but it's a brilliant question. Yeah. Exactly.

>> You know, in other words, what what what was your near sticking point? Or what was your near deal breaker?

>> Yeah.

>> Because what's a near deal breaker for someone who buys is probably a deal breaker for three people who didn't. Exactly. Same thing when you answer the phone. By the way,

>> It's so crazy how everybody's so obsessed with like >> um quantitative data,

>> right? The numbers. And usually they base their decisions on people that already buy. But nobody looks at qualitative data. And a lot of the times people make the decision in a dark room and they force it into the world. And they don't actually take the time to pay attention to whether people received it in the way that they initially um um that initial intention.

>> They don't realize why people don't buy. They don't realize >> Actually, they don't even read their own comment section. There's certain brands that turn off the comment section. I find that insane because it assumes that the whole value proposition that's provided by social is merely to shout. But I actually think that the the people that have been able to benefit the most in the modern day era are those that listen the best.

>> Well, worse still, the data is presented as an average. Yeah.

>> Which in a way is [laughter] completely misleading because it's the variance that matters. If you think about it, the whole existence of McDonald's was because Ray Croc was selling milkshake or thick shake machines. And suddenly notices this order from what was the first McDonald's run by the McDonald's brothers for something like 16 of these things, which is completely bizarre because, you know, a typical restaurant will buy one or possibly two.

>> And his instinct [clears throat] absolutely perfectly was, I have to find out what the hell is going on here because no one's done this before. And of course, the outlier in that case, the anomaly as Roger Martin would call it, actually was the whole decisive factor. And we've got something here which is really unusual. Now, what an average does is it disguises it in the mass.

>> Just an average.

>> It's just an average. And so, you know, of the thousand orders that come in, one weird order for 16 doesn't really affect the average. It's it's it's buried. But of course, he noticed this one completely freakish order. And the entire thing effectively, uh, the entire story of McDonald's arose from what? Someone noticing one data point.

>> Mhm. Yeah.

>> By the time by the time it starts influencing the wider average, it's too late.

>> Exactly.

>> It means that it's more adopted. Right.

>> So you're too late to the party. Now, obviously, we talked about listening to the audience and being, uh, uh, speaking to the audience at face value, allowed you to get all these great insights. What is the biggest insight that you got that you still think about today from those early days, uh, being there, um, giving people products, getting their feedback? Is there anything that still lives with you today?

>> That the wife makes every decision in the house. >> Even if it is the man is completely buying it for himself?

>> Uh, this is interesting, isn't it? Because that was what no one's ever been able to attest this, but even when go you go back to the 1950s, where typically the man might earn 100% or at least, you know, 75% of household income, it was always stated that the majority of consumer decisions were made made by the wife.

>> It is. It was insane to me to watch it. So we would be on our stand, you know, trying to sell our stuff. And people would come by the stand. And if it was a woman and they fell in love with the thing, they just hand over the money and they bought it. And if it was a man and he was there by himself without his wife, 99% of the time he said, "I'm sorry. I've just got to go call my wife. I'll come back." Every like literally every single time he had to go and get permission from his wife to spend money on this thing. I I'm not joking you.

>> It was always a joke about northerners, wasn't it? That they gave their entire wage packet to their wife, who would then give them like two shillings for beer money to spend.

>> But in a weird way, I mean, there aren't, I mean, I always wonder about this because one of the things I noticed about the United States is there's a what you might call there's also a bloke economy of things like gas barbecues, leaf blowing machines, speedboats, you you know what I mean? Bass fishing boats. This may be a European thing that you know that it's a consumer matriarchy to some extent.

>> It really is. And I mean, you know, about 70% of our customer base is male. And they're the people who are really passionate about it and they're looking at the, you know, technology and they're getting into it.

>> Stay on it. I mean, man up, British [laughter] consumers, you know, exercise a little bit of autonomy every now and then. You know what I mean?

>> It's going in their garden. It's going to take up space in the garden. She's got to be okay with that. You know, it's a pretty big purchase. She's got to be okay with that. And then it's like, can I persuade her to >> Don't get me started on the space thing. [laughter]

>> Kitchen implements, you know? I mean, Ninja make an ice cream maker that actually makes soft serve ice cream.

>> Now, the reason I can't buy it isn't because I can't afford it, is my wife would go bonkers about bloody kitchen surface. There you go. You man up.

>> No, no, I should man up. [laughter]

>> Seriously, my life wouldn't be if I came home with a bloody kitchen with an ice cream maker, my life wouldn't be worth living. There it is. There it is.

>> And then how did you use that insight to make the right, like to transform the business? Like, what what changes did you make to be able to accommodate for that >> discovery?

>> Just understanding that we also had to talk to women, you know, we really had to talk to women. Even if they weren't the person who was going to buy, or if they weren't the person who, you know, was going to use the product necessarily, certainly at the start, um, was that they had to understand and they had to kind of fall in love with it to a degree as well, otherwise, it just wasn't going to get over the line. This is why you need company cars, by the way, because then you can have a really bling ass car and say, "I didn't want all this stuff. The company [laughter] insists on it." Okay, you could never, you'd never be allowed to buy adaptive cruise control with your own money. [laughter] Um, but no, I mean, Sky, the Sky marketing department in a less politically correct age, I'm not attributing it to the present Sky marketing department. Uh, back in the '90s used to call this the female handbrake. In other words, every bloke on the planet would have a full Sky package. And the obstacle to them reaching 100% penetration.

>> You're not buying sports. We don't do sports.

>> Yeah.

>> But by the way, the reason why I ended up getting Sky when I was younger was because my mom was hooked on Prison Break.

>> I see.

>> So, so we, it was first on channel 5.

>> And then we watched it. The reason why I remember it is because >> Brilliant series.

>> Oh, it's amazing.

>> Sensational.

>> Season one. It ended on the biggest cliffhanger ever. And then my mom said, "We have to watch the rest of it, [laughter] right?" But if she didn't say yes, we're not getting it. We're not getting it. Uh, so >> If you think about it, this is a bit mischievous, but an awful I I was joking to someone in Belgium saying that if you had an all-male planet,

>> Yeah.

>> Most BS actually live in a travel lodge. You have an amazing car. Okay. Travel lodge, no tidying, [laughter] right? You get a free really good breakfast, you've got a big TV, and there's a bar in the evenings.

>> So, [laughter] right. That's absolutely what we do. Okay. And then we'd have a sort of like a Dodge Viper parked outside. Right. [laughter] That's it, basically. Done. Really.

>> Okay. Yeah. Totally happy. No, no further requirements of life.

>> Skip meals and forget all that. And we probably wouldn't last very long, right? [laughter]

>> That's what would happen. But but then when you think about it though, there's a lot of industries where women do drive the purchase decisions within the household. And just they probably, like in most industries, right? Because a lot of the times the reason why we wear nice things or we do stuff. And and I guess the selling factor for, uh, uh, um, the women in the household for this is longevity, right? Because you're talking about prolonging your life and therefore living a healthier, longer life, which therefore improves the quality of the household. That's how I would sell it anyway.

>> Exactly. But, uh, did you think that that messaging or that focus on longevity had an influence on the female audience or on the consumer? Do they understand the wider world that you're building as opposed to just the products?

>> Well, I think what's been interesting is the way that the wellness industry has rapidly evolved and become part of kind of mainstream conversation. No one was really talking about longevity five years ago, you know, and when we started, we were selling to athletes or people who would go out and cycle 60 miles at the weekend and like these kind of hardcore amateurs, I would call them. And but the narrative, the conversation and the passion for wellness and the data points, Whoop watches and everything else have made us, you know, wellness obsessed as, uh, as you know, a consumer. So now the narrative has changed. Now, if you say longevity to people, they're like, "Oh, yeah." If you said that to people, kind of five, six years ago, it wasn't a kind of understood term in the way that it is now. And I don't think people were thinking about it as they are now.

>> And I think that a lot of people were very rigid in their health goals. It was all this obsession about being hyperproductive and time management and all these different things. And I watched a podcast with Daniel Ek. Uh, it was the founders' podcast. And he talked about his obsession with energy management. Yeah.

>> Not necessarily with time management and productivity management. It seems that people are now starting to realize that it's not about how you use, it's not about what time you allocate to things. It's more about how do you make sure that the time that you use influences your energy levels in the positive way. And obviously, there's a bio, there's a biological way to do that, right? So, and your products are the ones that focus on how you actually physically feel healthier. And are there any particular products that you think that people are flocking for over others when, uh, uh, from your consumer base?

>> Yeah, I think that is so interesting. And I'm smiling because I was literally writing about this on the way here. I was writing about energy management, uh, for like an email to go out to our database. And how Joe and I manage our energy. And it's everything from like the relationships you hold, where you spend time with people, what you prioritize. Everything is about your energy, right? Um, in terms of the products, what's been really surprising is, as I said, we launched this as an as an athlete recovery business. And so many people get in touch with us now to talk about this is their moment of mental clarity in the day. And how the products we're we sell are helping them from a mental health perspective. Like an insane number of our customers are not really using them for physical recovery, but they're actually using them for mental health reasons, basically. Um, and so I guess that comes back to >> Which products in particular in term >> Yeah, sorry, K- which which products in particular do people find massively beneficial in this >> Particularly the ice baths? So how a lot of people use those is it's five minutes in the morning where a they're doing something difficult. So they're proving to themselves at the start of the day, you know, eat the frog kind of thing, basically. And the second thing is, you know, there are a lot of benefits. They say it's like literally having six coffees when you get out of the ice bath, right? That level >> Has some effect on anxiety, doesn't it? Weirdly.

>> Exactly. Yeah. It helps to reduce anxiety. There's so many mental benefits to it. Um, and so that one. And then the second piece around the sauna, I mean, there's actual data around how it improves your brain health. Um, but also for a lot of people, it's people's 20 minutes to shut the door >> have complete tranquility at the end of the day. So, uh, you know, those two products in particular, I think.

>> Yeah, it's really interesting because when I everyone talks about habits, right? And consistency, etc. But you realize that a lot of people optimize for them at their most motivated state, not for them when everything is just like going to [ __ ] right? And I I've found with my own personal journey is that I now have habits that, uh, because I have to control the downward spiral, right? Yeah. The reason why a lot of people don't continue with whatever it is that they they set out to do is because you'll put a goal to say that I need to do this seven days a week. Right. Exactly. And the week that you do it six times, you're like, "Oh my god, I'm a failure." [laughter] And then off you're off. Right? And one thing that's really interesting about the energy management side is if you now optimize for energy management and not just productivity management, you start to look at context. What am I doing that day? When do I need energy? And how does my day need to be laid out to ensure that for that moment in time, I have the utmost energy possible? For example, before when we did the first couple of episodes for the podcast, I would treat it like a normal day, right? [clears throat] But I forgot that I needed a different energy to be able to be present, have a conversation. What I ate mattered. How much sleep mattered. I get destroyed by Rory in the podcast because like, if you're not switched on, you don't have enough sleep, you don't have enough food. And you're you almost like structured your day to be ready for that optimal moment. It has a cat a categorical effect on the quality of the time that you spend during that period. So actually, are most people utilizing the the the the ice bath in the morning, sauna in the evening? Is that the usual cycle? Or do some people flip it? Are different people utilizing it differently? Or is that just like the standard way?

>> I think obviously, as you pointed out, the thing about energy management is it's so personal. [laughter] And this is the problem with kind of like broad brush pieces of advice is that everybody operates totally differently. The kind of early morning early riser versus late night owl is a classic example. Right. Some people are just more productive at 11:00 p.m. at night. I'm most productive at 5:00 a.m. So, like, I'm getting my ass out of bed at [laughter] 5:00 p.m.

>> No, no. I I mean, being a bit of an introvert, I my problem is that you stay I stay up insanely late. I mean, if I go on holiday, I effectively end up going to bed at going to sleep at 4:00 in the morning.

>> Partly because I like that nighttime quiet so much.

>> That in other words, you know, the phone doesn't ring. There are no interruptions. And the problem is, it's fine if I can work from home the next day, pretty much.

>> Yeah.

>> You know, you know, I'm not saying staying up till 4:00 in the morning, but staying up till 2:00 in the morning is fine. Or 1:00 in the morning is fine if you, you know, you get out of bed at 8:30, 9:00. Yeah. But if you've got to get into London, I find it an absolute pain in the ass. Yeah. But it's very difficult. And and, uh, my father was exactly the same. I he he was self-employed. He got up at about 10, 11 in the morning every day and would work, but he'd be working typically at sort of 11:00 at night.

>> Right.

>> And it's partly just the peace, you see, because there are no distractions, mercifully.

>> Yeah.

>> But no, but equally, funnily enough, I mean, one of my arguments I was making the other day is I don't mind, I don't mind getting into London at 7:00 in the morning because, yeah, it's effing early, but you get a really early ride in and you end up with two bonus hours. Yeah.

>> The really dumb time to get into work is 9:00.

>> Yes, it is.

>> Because it's, you know, I basically either get in at 7:00 or get in at 11:00. Everything else, you're just battling with everybody else. Everything goes wrong with the tube at that time.

>> Also, from an energy management point of view, it's really stressful.

>> It's really, really stressful. Completely right. Yeah. So, [clears throat] so you're basically coming into the office or wherever you're going stressed out. You're you've been frustrated because the tube has been delayed or all these things happen. And I really think that it's really important to make sure that clutter, right, is a is a big. So I'm I used to be one of those people that would just expect people to accept me for just being a bit of a mess, right? All over. I'm just being creative, etc., etc.

>> There's nothing worse than one of those creatives.

>> Yes. Okay. [laughter] Uh, but I I started to realize and and that really the clearer my space, the clearer the mind. The more I'm doing things in themes. So my Monday to Wednesday is completely different to my Thursdays and Fridays. Right.

>> That's clever. If you can partition that.

>> Yeah.

>> If you can start to almost say, okay, I basically say between Monday and Wednesday, I'm in mercenary, right? I'm in like go mode. Like, uh, I do it this way. And then on Thursdays and Fridays, the types of meetings that I have is completely different, right? So I wake up early now, not by choice, is because I had to do it to be able to make sure that I have the right energy at the right times. If I want to be creative, I need quiet. So I actually solve the most creative problems between around 5:00 to 9:00 in the morning. So that's when I get into like the real core of a problem. Then I go to the gym.

>> Yeah.

>> Then I do all my like quick jobs, like email responses. And then from the afternoon, basically, you can just have my time. I'm ready to connect. I'm ready to speak. But I, it took me a while to be able to understand myself.

>> One of the greatest tricks is just only doing email for certain portions of the day.

>> Not I mean, actually slowing down what it is, how frequently it polls the server so that you only get new emails every two hours. The problem is then people use bloody email to tell you the meeting's been cancelled.

>> [laughter]

>> I mean, actually, actually the whole system of of of messaging is a mess because everybody egotistically thinks that if they use WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, you do too. And that arrogant assumption that you will obviously use. So it's like, you know, I'm at the church, but there doesn't seem to be a wedding happening. Did you not get my message on wank chat? [laughter] You know what I mean? Kind of [ __ ] I'm 60 years old, you know, for crying out loud. I'm not going to be only a dumb platform. And this business is unbelievably irritating. I mean, I it's just so stupid. And actually, I think we should go back to telegrams and things like that where where the postman comes once a day and you deal with it. And that that's it. That's about.

>> Except t-shirts.

>> Actually, I'm deep in a conversation with about, I'm not joking, 50 other founders who are all saying WhatsApp is the most stressful thing in their life. You're just groups upon groups upon constantly being bombarded with information. Can't delegate, by the way, because if you forward a WhatsApp message, it doesn't explain who you forwarded it from. Exactly.

>> So, I then forward something to my wife and say, "Can you contact this person?" And they go, "Well, I have no idea who this is from. It's just a So, it's more work." [laughter] And it and and email is appalling to begin with, and WhatsApp is worse than email.

>> Yeah, exactly. [laughter]

>> So, which is quite an achievement, really. And incidentally, I mean, Paul Gray makes this point, no one has attempted to improve email significantly. I mean, it doesn't nest well. It doesn't. Now, theoretically, we should expect AI to solve this problem for us in some shape or form, but I'm not sure it will. I'm I'm genuinely. Some people use this thing called Superhum. Is that right?

>> So, so help me out. Plug. There's a there's a tool called Fixer, right?

>> Yeah. Yeah. Fixer.

>> I'm going to say not it's not sponsor. It's not a sponsor of the podcast or anything, but not yet. It not yet. [laughter]

>> Where's the camera?

>> Yeah. But it allows me to have drafts written, uh, be like, so when I come, um, to respond to emails, it's understood how I respond to things. It's also plugged in to other chats across the business. So it knows how to respond and gives it context. So now I'm only like editing like 10% of the time.

>> But really, like you, because a lot of the email responses are not like they don't need your thinking. It just needs you to to sign something off or move things on, right? And you realize actually how many other times or how much time you spend thinking about a response because you've just come out of a different mindset. You come into this email and you're like, "Wait, hold on a second. What was that again? What meeting did we have? What what happened in that session?" And then you end up spending time to be able to respond to a very quick email. But if that context is already put together and you just have to basically approve and sign it off, it just saved you so much time.

>> I've got a question about your habits, right? [clears throat] So you talked about you've understood your energy and how best to optimize yourself.

>> Partitioning of the week is really interesting, by the way.

>> Yes. But what about when you're leading a team? And what because you can't, everybody has different ways of doing this, right? So how do you juggle? Right. You might not want to talk to me in the morning, but my best time to talk to you is in the morning. Like, how are you creating boundaries that work for everybody else as well? So I know that between 10 till 11, there's a slot there where I, anybody can hijack it if it's important. But then also, if something is important, you can just call me, right? So if I know that if I get a call, it's important, it vetoes the whole system. You can't be very rigid. There's almost a process or system that works for like 60 to 80% of the time, which is enough. But then when there's an emergency and you need me, just call. I think that we forget that that's an option.

>> Right. So, a lot of the times when we work with our partners, somebody will be like, "Oh, I emailed them last week." But I'm like, "If this is important, that's why, sorry to add to the stress, we're on WhatsApp, [laughter] right?" And sometimes when there's certain things that's really, really important, just call the person. A lot of people hide behind, um, text, right? And actually, we, when you think about how we've structured our business, it's really about building trust with whoever it is that we're working with. And you, you have to understand how they work. They have to understand how you work. And you obviously have a system for the majority of the time to limit everything being in chaos. But there's sometimes when you have to go like outside and say, you know what, the inquisitive thing is to talk to this person at this time. I know Alf, you're doing this, but actually this is really important. And I know when I get a Slack or a message or something around that time, it's important for me to to pick that up. And

>> It's I couldn't have done it two years ago. Two years ago, you just had to be in it. But then if you're fortunate the stage of where you're at on the journey.

>> Yeah. I think a lot of the times people give you advice on businesses not in the right season for your business. 100%. Right. And I think that instead of having like sweeping statements of, we should do this. And we actually spoke about this. And this is nicely, uh, comes into like this next topic of the conversation, which is you've gone from being like, you found the problem, you speak to the consumers, you're now a business. How do you build the team? How do you set structure? What is the journey beyond that point?

>> That like raw idea, we're just shifting numbers and we're now a business. What is that transition that you guys made? Uh, and how is the business right now?

>> Yeah. Okay. Really quick potted history because I think it's really important for people listening, you know, you listen to those podcasts of people and you're like, "Oh, they got from here to here." But what about all the [ __ ] that happened in between? So, 2021, quit my job to start the business. Uh, hired one employee. Got to like, I don't know, 250k of revenue or something. 2022, uh, raised a little bit of capital, not much, angel investment, maybe like 300k of angel investment. Thought, "Oh my god, this is loads of money." [laughter] Hired like eight people. Uh, tried to like launch on Amazon, do B2B, um, you know, do e-com, be events, do all the things. Like anyone who went, launched in Selfridges, anyone who came to us with an opportunity, we took it because I thought that's just how you scale a business, right? More opportunity, more sales, better. Obviously, that didn't work because you cannot do all of those things with 250k and eight people, or you can't do them well. Anyway, um, failed, spent all the cash basically. Uh, was going >> Which of those things succeeded or would you say that none of them did because you spread it too thin?

>> Spread it way too thin.

>> Which would you have focused on if you'd had the time again?

>> Well, then we had to focus on something because we were this close to going bust. And so we restructured the team. I had one guy. It was me and one guy in the world's most awful box office with [laughter] no windows, no heating, nothing. And we just said, I said, "Look, we've got to either break a million quid this year or let's just call it a day."

>> Um, and me and him sat there and decided we're just going to go all in on e-com and we're going to go all in on Meta ads. Website, Meta ads, that's it. And we're going to become as good as we possibly can at those two things. So, it was us two. And then in about, uh, April, we hired a videographer basically to make the ads so we didn't have to outsource that anymore. And we broke like 1.2 million by the end of the year.

>> Yeah. And then, uh, 2024. Um, we went on Dragon's Den in February.

>> Um, ended up doing like 5 million. Um, but kept the team super lean. There was three or four of us who did 5 million. Yeah. And then on track to do like eight figures pretty much, um, now. And have still a pretty lean team, like eight or nine people. But I think probably the core lessons are, and I say this to founders all the time, I'm like, "Just stop trying to do so many things. Like, just do one thing and do it really, really well. Like, pick a channel. You know, pick one to two SKUs. You don't have to have a million things. It's so distracting. Unless you've gone and raised, you know, a huge amount of money, then it's a different process. But if you're building something from scratch and you're effectively bootstrapped, I think you stay focused and you can do a lot with a few talented people."

>> How do you maintain that discipline? Because now that you're obviously on the momentum of growth, it is it because you remember >> deeply you got post-traumatic stress from that period of like, "Oh god, this whole thing is." And also, you know, when you take money from people, you know, I know in the grand scheme of things, it wasn't a huge amount of money, but I still took money from angel investors, real people who signed me 25 grand or £10,000 or real money out of their bank accounts. And so, you know, when you're about to let people down because you made all the wrong decisions, I think that kind of sharpens your focus, right? And you're like, I'm I'm not gonna let this happen. Um, yeah.

>> I found it really interesting how in today's culture within business, people celebrate when they are able to raise money.

>> So wild to me.

>> Right? Which is really, that's the start of a journey, but people celebrating like it's the end of a journey.

>> Well, it's a bit like when you get married, right? And like the biggest celebration of your mar of your relationship is the day you get married. But really, like the big celebration should be, we we got through 10 years, through 20 years. Interesting point.

>> Way way tougher than going and having a great celebration.

>> I've always been very fascinated by happily ever after, right? So you get to this moment and then it's happily ever after. No one tells us what do you do beyond this moment.

>> Yeah. And you're about to get in the trenches. Right. I I've always thought that if I was ever a film person, I would start a film that starts at the wedding, right?

>> It says and

Happily ever after, then the film starts, right? I think that if more people knew what happens at happily ever after, then we'll be more we'll have more happily ever after. Four Weddings and a Funeral. [laughter] Not for the funeral, obviously, but you could, but no, but no, it's a very interesting point. Yeah. That that is the resolution point for so many films that it's a, you know, it's a beginning, not an end. Yeah.

And so what are the daily constants that you know are the important things you need to focus on? Because I, I remember, um, when I heard about focus intelligence, right? So everybody tells you about IQ, a few people know about EQ, so emotional intelligence. Now there's this whole concept about focus intelligence, which is doing less things but doing it better.

Speaking my language.

How do you do that?

Well, I think the reality is it is a daily battle for everybody because at the end of the day, like there's just so many, oh, there are opportunities everywhere. Also, if you're an entrepreneur, you get excited by opportunities because that is the reason you're an entrepreneur to start with, right? That's why you're doing the thing you're doing. But I am really bullish on being very clear. Like next year, we're just doing two things. Like the whole team is focused on two things. And if you are not working on one of those two things, don't be working on it. Like you shouldn't be touching it. And I think as a leader, you have to be that clear with your team. They need that level of direction.

Mhm.

I appreciate, you know, it maybe gets a little bit more complex as you get bigger. But, you know, I was speaking to the, uh, CMO of Jones Road Beauty and he, Cody, and he was saying the exact same thing. He's like, I don't know, they're 200 million pound business or something. He's like, we're doing three things next year. That's it. Like these are the three things that make us better, that will make us win. Everything else, forget about it.

Did you go back to the trade fair business at all, at all, or have you have you abandoned that?

Well, we haven't completely abandoned it. When it's not there in our coats every single weekend.

Got it. Got it. No, fair enough. No.

But try to make a habit of doing it like a couple of times a year to be out on the ground.

Yeah.

Cuz that is the one problem with putting it in meta, which is you learn a lot less about your customers.

Well, I mean, you do, but you don't. People are vocal on those comment sections, exactly as you mentioned. They are really talking to you. And the other thing is, we're a very founder business, you know, cuz we went on Dragon's Den and the story and we're in our, all of our ads and we're out there. I mean, people every day write to me on LinkedIn and they say, I just want you to know I've had a, you know, this is rare, just to be clear, anyone who's thinking about buying a sauna from my master, but they say, uh, you know, I've had a terrible experience and this is what happened. Let me send you the email chains of how this went down. And they're actually like, I just wanted you to know because like I'm a fan of the business and I want you to get better.

Was that an installation, bad installation experience principally, isn't it?

That could be, it could be that or it could be like, you know, they had an objection to buying something and they didn't get a quick enough response or, you know, whatever it could be anything. But, uh, I think people are really vocal on social, arguably too vocal, right? They're very quick to be like, in a way they...

Well, there's negativity. There's massive negativity. Pass. Cuz no one has a pretty good experience ever bothers commenting.

Never say anything. But that's really interesting because when we've spoke before, you mentioned the fact that Amazon is a massive competitor, right? So the role of brand, right? What does what role has brand played in terms of setting my master apart from the competitors that are currently in the same market as you?

Mhm.

Do you think that that's played a massive role? Your personal brands, your story, Dragon's Den, it'll be great to know what is the, the thing that made you different to the masses.

Yeah, I think this, I think storytelling is everything, right? I, I think we play in a world now where nobody's product is really different, you know, really. I mean, we make improvements to our product, we listen to our customers, we try to bring a great quality product to market and there are tweaks and things to it. But really, who is coming out with a something that's totally radically different? Nobody is doing that. And what people want is they want to feel something. You know, they want to feel something beyond buying a product.

And having the founder story, especially when you're at the beginning of the journey and you maybe don't have massive marketing budgets, it gives people a reason to believe in you over others. Um, and if you take the state of play as, okay, everybody's got a great product in this space, just say, I mean, of course there are, um, some tweaks and advantages, but it's like, then what am I getting behind? I'm getting behind their mission. I'm getting behind their story. I'm getting behind who they are as people. I want to be aligned with those people. And I think that is something that everybody can leverage. That's why the barriers to entry are so much lower now, right? To start a business because everyone has a story and actually everybody has an audience, whether it's 100 people or 100,000 people.

And you were obviously in the creative space before, right? You were in the creative industry. What role did that play in terms of knowing the importance of storytelling, the importance of branding? Did that play a role or was it just a necessity and it just instincts clicked in because you recognized that you couldn't go cash for cash against the competitors and it just like leaned into what worked. I think it'll be great to understand whether that was premeditated or is that just like instincts for survival?

Yeah. Uh, well, I, I worked at agency, but my role was always, uh, like people business development acquisition, so it's actually much more commercial than it was creative.

Okay.

And so I would say I have been not as bullish as I should have been on creative and I've been not as bullish as I should have been on storytelling. I think we could have done way, way more of it, actually.

Mhm.

Yeah.

But you have a lot more of your journey to come, right?

Yeah. Well, that's why we're working together, right? Because [laughter] it's like that's what we wanted to really think about.

Yeah.

As we enter the next stage.

On the flip side, though, can I just add something? There isn't a single person who we were, uh, competitive with four years ago in the UK that still exists. There's not a single brand.

Wow.

Yeah. All of them have died in the time that we've been going. And I think it's almost because they were too bullish on brand.

You know, they were too bullish on, a lot of them were bootstrapped, right? There wasn't anyone who raised a lot of money and going out and doing, you know, little pop-ups with a hundred people and, you know, doing these, sending out free product to anyone who, you know, would ask for it with any influence status. Um, and they just died because commercially it wasn't viable and it wasn't scalable. And so actually, we've probably held off some of the brand activities you would talk about and we've been more bullish on performance. And I think that was the right decision to this point.

I always say that, and here is almost, I would say that this is a warning to people within the creative industry as well. I always say this, that people focus on the nice-to-haves a little bit too early sometimes.

Exactly.

Really, if the goal is for a business to be around for a very long time, you first need to get past the survival stage.

Exactly.

You need the basics to be able to run as an organization. So when you are coming up with a strategy, you should be very, uh, intentional about whether this is something that helps the business today, tomorrow, or in the long term. Often than not, when you look at something like paid media or performance marketing, I often describe it as it feels like a salary.

Although it's very predictable, you know what you're going to get. You know it's going to come in a, in a very consistent manner. And then when you go with community, which I think is your insurance policy, that's your get out of jail free card when things go to [ __ ] right? Whereas I will criticize a lot of businesses becoming, you know, where effectively conversion becomes a kind of fentanyl to which they become completely addicted as the only metric that matters. I, I'll happily criticize some businesses for that. I wouldn't criticize any small business for focusing at the bottom of the funnel to begin with. Um, because, you know, ultimately, if you can't make that work, you can't make anything work at scale.

Yeah. I think the Black Friday thing is a really good example because there's a lot of, uh, small brands that are like, we're not participating because, you know, we don't want to be seen as a brand that ever takes money off or quality. And I get the stance from like a brand point of view. At the end of the day,

it's the biggest shopping moment of the entire year. And it's like, you know, at a small point, who are you to take a stand to opt out of that?

No one's going to notice, isn't it? It's also like you said to me, it's like almost during that period, you fill the coffers to essentially have the budgets to do amazing brand things for [clears throat] the rest of the year, right? And so I think that's a really good example of sometimes brands kind of prioritizing brand over

keeping the business alive and healthy from a commercial standpoint, which allows you to do all of the other cool things you want to do from a brand point of view.

A lot of times people live in echo chambers. Doesn't realize that the world is much bigger than what's I used to say that the world is bigger than Ble Valley, which is where Gym Shark was based. When you get outside, you realize that there's more people doing different things. So you can't kid yourself to believe that you're at the center of everything.

Exactly.

And I think that's what a lot of people do is that they think that they're at the center of everything. Decisions revolves around them, but really the world doesn't really care.

Right. Exactly.

And if you're not involved in the conversation, it just moves along.

Yes.

Without you.

Which is really interesting. So obviously my mass is going, you are now a leader. Describe your leadership style. How do you get the team bought into the brand? How do you get the team bought into the mission? It'll be great to know how you rally the troops to go on this journey that you're going on right now.

Uh, high levels of integrity is my number one thing.

And I just think it's so missing often in leadership and I experienced it a lot when I was in agency. You know, you often learn the most from the worst, worst bosses that you [laughter] have. Um, but for me, it's like I am all about transparency. I don't hide anything from the team. I mean, they know every number. They know everything. Um, we're very authentic with what we're trying to do and very honest about what we're trying to do. And also, you know, we're genuinely excited about about [laughter] what we're trying to build. Um, you know, this for us isn't about like, how can we get exit and take cash off the table as quickly as possible. It's like, we're passionate about the mission. We love what we're building. Of course, it has to be commercially successful. Um, but I think people buy into authenticity and they buy into integrity and when you have trusted relationships, that's amazing. Um, and and also I think they're excited about it's, it's easier when you have momentum like we have right now. We're growing really fast. Of course, you can get really excited about that. It's like the wheels are turning. There's so much. We just had the best month ever. It blew all of our targets. Everyone's like, "Oh, wow. We did that together." and just giving people their flowers. You know, I think the, the thing is, none of the success is mine. When you have a success, you give it to the team. You're always shouting people out and when you have a failure, you, it's always your fault. And I think that's a good philosophy to live by.

How many employees do you have now?

Uh, maybe 12.

Do you think it's problematic that when you reach a certain size, I mean, little way to go yet,

it gets harder and harder to have that complete openness and integrity and also, you know, of necessity. I always wonder about this, you know, what size it, because you know, there's always a number, the Dunbar number, around 150, where everybody knows everybody else and they also know how everybody relates to everybody else. And you reach a certain size of business where effectively you have to compartmentalize it, but at that point, you do lose something.

Yeah, is that definitely true? Do you always have to do that?

[laughter]

Fundamentally, it's in, I mean, the whole question of team design is very interesting. So, um, Shopify, for example, I think this may also be true of Octopus Energy, their customer service teams tend to be 10 people.

Yeah.

With, you know, they're charged with a particular group of customers. So there's continuity.

But the argument is that when you have a team of 10, for instance, um, people feel bad free-riding. In other words, no one bunks off ill because they are actually pained by the idea of letting the other nine people down. It's close enough. The model that I think it was, chap called Toby Shannon used at, uh, Shopify was he said, there aren't, you know, there are sports where you have teams of five and there are sports where you have teams of 15, but there aren't any sports where you get a team of 55 or 60. And he argued that you can achieve a kind of cohesion and mutuality at that size which doesn't necessarily scale up as you get bigger.

It's complicated because obviously [clears throat] you need central specialisms and all that kind of thing as you get larger.

And if you think about probably the biggest bowling squad is American football. They get to 45, 55, but

they operate as different teams. So the defense team, the sub teams, the defense are completely different, completely different. And also the special teams are completely different. So they are still part of the same team, but they operate as micro teams. How I see it, especially with modern day technology, AI and everything that's happening. I, I do think that a lot of the reasons why people were just hiring a lot of people was because of empire building.

Right? I think that if clarity across the business is prioritized, and honesty, and and systems are prioritized to ensure that you make the most of what you've got. I don't, I think that the team at Telegram only have 50 people.

Yeah.

And they're like a 12 billion or plus, I don't know the numbers, like company. And apparently the the founder still, they have no HR department.

Yeah.

He does it all directly. It's because they set the business up like that in the first place.

Octopus Energy has no HR department. Yeah, I'm bothered by HR because I think it, it creates an intermediation between, uh, one employee and another.

Uh, which is there a lot. There was an awful lot, for example, between a more experienced and less experienced employee. You had that kind of master apprentice relationship which was, you know, very tacit. It was very reciprocal. But

uh, you now have a world where no one can actually fire anybody, nobody can hire anybody, nobody can promote anybody. That the people you deal with day-to-day have less and less control over your

your future.

Yeah.

And consequently, it's that actually, in a sense, that breaks down the nature of a team.

Mhm.

Because effectively, you have this sort of weird third party outside force.

Yeah.

Which is responsible for all those decisions. And so things that used to be within your gift or which you could earn, those decisions which used to be taken by the people immediately around you who knew who you were day-to-day are now being taken formulaically by someone based on some, you know, algorithm or principle. It's not the same thing.

Yeah. You, you basically don't want to have roles. So I have this weird thing about the word management, right? I, I don't like roles that just obviously, if you're a system lead, I prefer black belts, right? So I prefer. But what I found, especially what happens with a lot of startups, um, they, they have a core team of people that help them build that momentum. But now because the corporation world says that you now have to become a manager in order to earn more, you now have a very great executor that you're turning into a not so great manager.

Exactly.

Because that's not their skill. That, that skill is not working through people. Their skill is, I'm the best at doing this thing. But because life gets in the way, I have bills to pay, I want to get married, I want to do all that kind of stuff. I now have to change that and give that away because the organization does not deem that to be a, a valuable skill. Whereas I think that if people, and it's never an an or conversation, it's always an and conversation. If you have a path of people that become the black belt of their thing, going from white belt to yellow belt to blue belt of the thing, and they're getting compensated for their execution skills, and then you have people that are great at coordinating and bringing people together, more like project leads as opposed to managers, right? They're there getting the most out of people. They're there to report the performance of things. They're there to make sure that the, the, the, there's no friction between the team and leadership. I think that that's a much better position. And otherwise, you'll just have people that are there trying to make themselves useful or trying to prove the value that they have. And it actually ends up creating bureaucracy.

Really, what you want is clarity, right? And directness. And I feel like a lot of businesses just do it because that's how we've always done it.

It's exactly that. That's just the structure. You start here and then you get promoted and then you become a manager. And so many people, a, don't enjoy it and b, are not good at it, but they're amazing at their jobs. And I think why can't you create a structure where if that's your thing and you want to do that and you want to learn about that, great. But if you're just really great at doing the thing that you're great at, you should be allowed to progress and be rewarded equally.

You see that in the tech world.

It's also strange because in many cases, what you developed on the way up as a practitioner is a very, very unique skill.

Exactly.

Okay. And then you effectively put someone in a managerial role which turns the whole thing generic, effectively.

And there's no particular correlation between someone's technical ability at a specialist job and their managerial ability.

And it's a fundamental flaw, actually.

Yeah.

The idea that, I mean,

in a really, really well-run business where people knew what people were worth, it should be perfectly possible to earn six figures in a call center.

Because the very best practitioners there are that good. You know, I come every now and then, you know, I make quite a lot of calls. Every now and then, I, you know, to customer service and every now and then you come across something which is like a 10x. You go, okay, this person is genuinely 10 times better than I expected. And the effect it then has on your loyalty and subsequent, you know, attitude towards that brand.

Yes.

Can be absolutely transformative. And yet those jobs tend to be treated as if they're minimum wage jobs, which is a nonsense.

And they're a front line with your customer as well.

Absolutely. That. Yeah. And of course, salespeople can sort of lay claim to the revenue they generate because it's immediate.

But a really good call center person, you could measure it.

Yeah.

But it'd be quite time-consuming because loyalty is obviously slower to measure than acquisition is.

And that seems to be a fairly major distortion, which is we're rewarding people not on the value they create, but on their ability to lay claim to it.

Exactly. And that's, you know, and that's what's interesting. If you have a small team, everybody knows how valuable someone is, even if there's no metric attached to that person's performance.

Yeah.

Because they just go, I couldn't cope without X.

Yeah.

And then the whole thing becomes formalized. You need formalized sort of, you know, bonus or reward structures. And in, in effect, it takes a step back. It becomes stupider.

Because you then suddenly only value someone by what you can measure, which in some cases, of course, leads people to game the system or to pursue one particular metric, you know, to the point of insanity, or it can lead to all kinds of perverse outcomes, in fact.

Or to be selfish. So you're not actually putting the goal of the organization above your individual goals, right? Because you are rewarded on your individual performance, right?

So you will get people in procurement who get a bonus for effectively choosing a lower cost supplier who aren't then held responsible for the, uh, loss in customer satisfaction that results.

You talk about the whole concept of being, uh, micro rational but macro stupid.

That's when you get those decisions.

So within your narrow, um, sphere of responsibility, you're being perfectly rational in what you're doing. But, uh, if you look at it within the wider interest of the business, it's, it's actually dafted. Yeah, I mean, the example I always give is, you know, a well-known retailer's car park in, uh, very prestigious, extremely good retailer. It's Mark Spencer. [laughter] And, um, you know, don't get me wrong, I actually venerate them as an organization. I think they're absolutely brilliant. But they have, okay, they have this car park underneath the shop and it effectively fines people, uh, too readily because you drive in, the number plate recognition clocks your arrival. You then pay five minutes later after you've sorted out the app.

And it tells you you've got an hour left, but as far as the A&PR is concerned, you've already used five minutes of it between driving in and paying. So people drive out, their app says you have 3 minutes left. They then get fined because technically they stayed for an hour and 2 minutes.

Now, it occurred to me that the person who got the contract to run the car park almost certainly, that was awarded by procurement. And of course, the reason they can offer the best deal is precisely because of their propensity to fine people because it's part of their whole business model. Now, the person who appoints that person has no responsibility for the fact that certain people are driven batch insane and stop shopping there because that doesn't come within customer satisfaction, doesn't come within, come within your remit, purely paying. No. And then of course, what's fascinating is in the lifts in the M&S, you then travel up and it says, please do not address any complaints about parking to store staff. You must address them to the car park operator, which is the classic example of an accountability sync. It's off.

Which is we've palmed this off.

Now, it's kind of, I don't know the legality. It is as far as the consumer is concerned, this is your car park. Exactly. You can't palm it off by saying, no, no, no, it's an independent operator who's responsible because you chose the independent operator.

And so this kind of thing is insane where effectively what you do, it's rather like, you know, a retailer, this literally happened to me, probably, I won't name them.

Yeah. Go on.

It [laughter] was actually, okay. Okay. Yeah. Bought something, bought from Harvey Nichols and it arrived. This wasn't me, it was my daughter. Bought something. It arrived without the belt. And now we bought it from their website, but it was delivered from the manufacturer. And it arrived without the belt. And so we get in touch with the retailer who sold us this thing. And they said, no, you have to take that up with the manufacturer.

Sorry. Right. Now, interestingly, the manufacturer, luckily, my wife speaks fluent French because that's what she studied at university. So was able to do all the, "Sh, Madame, this year, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." But I mean, 95% of customers, you're requiring them to deal with a French company in French to sort out this problem. And this question of an accountability sync seems to be happening all over with larger organizations where effectively, it's a bit like Douglas Adams's conception of the someone else's problem field. Do you remember that? There's a wonderful thing in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which is a somebody else's problem field, which renders things invisible because it's not my problem.

Yeah.

And the extent to which organizations are doing this in a way that seems perfectly reasonable to them, but which is literally deranged to the customer. I mean, you know, absolutely, you know, you sold me this thing. Okay. And and you know, similarly, you know, I, you know, I think kind of if you buy something, uh, from a retailer, the retailer should take responsibility for delivery. You shouldn't say, oh, it didn't arrive, you need to take it up with DHL. That's not, sorry, I mean, legally you may be in the right there, I have no idea to be honest, but fundamentally, no sane consumer will think that's a reasonable way to behave. But somebody's done it effectively to, you know, effect create an accountability sync again, you know, how can we, how can we create things so that as soon as it leaves our hands, we can wash our hands of the whole affair?

And that seems to be happening more and more. And of course, don't even mention the public sector there, where, you know, which probably does the same thing but worse. And that's not, that's not to criticize, you know, I'm sure the marketing people of both those brands I've mentioned are absolutely admirable people doing the best they possibly can and as far as I can see doing a very good job. But then these decisions are taken with no reference to marketing or to the customer. They're simply taken to optimize some cost reduction approach. And effectively, these people can get the credit for reducing the cost, but don't get the blame for the destruction of long-term customer value. And that's, that's micro, you know, micro intelligent, macro dumb.

Yeah. But really, it comes back to customers across the entire organization. And so often it's just siloed, right? And I guess the question as you get bigger is, how do you keep our little conversations that we had, you know, on the stand, how do you stay as close to that as possible and make sure that it's integrated or somebody's looking at it across the entire thing? And it's not like, right, well, we sell the product, we ship the product, we deal with the customers. Yeah. But then even when you talk about breaking the business down to its core essence of, I remember a time when at Gym Shark, our names was the department that we were looking after. So I was called social and Craig was called email. And and you could speak in a round table and you can ask somebody a question, they'll get the answer. Uh, I was watching a, um, a podcast or I was listening to a podcast, but I was watching it about Oracle and the fact that, um, they talk about the fact that they would ask three questions and it will take months to get the answers to those three questions, right? Because you have to go through these different departments and everything wasn't joined up. And it took them 10 years to fix that, right? So it's almost like the game is [clears throat] when we've got something going that works, when we can get information instantly, when we can have communication instantly, when we, uh, figure out problems instantly. How do we keep that as we grow? So basically the output or the input of that and the output has to stay the same as we grow to keep us very simple to understand as a business and keep it very frictionless to move and be able to attain information and be able to make sure that decisions get made faster. Whereas really, as businesses go bigger, it's almost like making it more complicated is supported.

Yeah.

Which is weird.

Yeah. It's so weird. But also, it's like, to the point about clarity. If you are really clear as a business about what your customer experience philosophy is, what is, you know, what's the stance on this? Like, how should our customer be treated? What is the number one vision, mission on this thing? Then everybody in the organization should be aligned to that thing. It's like, okay.

I think that survives in family-owned companies. And I think it survives very well in founder companies. Uh, keeping that alive in a PLC where the preoccupation of the people at the top is no longer their customers.

Yeah.

In other words, they've effectively shifted focus towards the investor community.

And I've often argued, I don't think you can solve the problem, but nice though it would be, just by putting a marketing person on the board. Good though that would be, because they're still on their own and they're still going to look like the weirdo if they raise marketing questions. I, I personally think that large organizations should have a customer board.

And I think it should, you know, obviously there should be shared representation between the two boards, but effectively reserving some time for people at the center of an organization who can resolve these conflicts between, you know, what procurement want, what marketing want, for example.

And having time each month to focus on those questions, uh, would be an enormous leap forward because, you know, fundamentally, board meetings have become ludicrously financialized. They're about cost. And as a result, they're about cost reduction first. Value creation takes a back seat. And then we wonder why there isn't any economic growth in a way.

You know, in other words, it's about minimizing risk and cost, not maximizing opportunity.

Yeah.

Um, and it's also about remembering why we're doing this in the first place.

I think people lose the energy, the drive. We were speaking about this sweeping statement about the fact that the people that got here will not be the people that take you to the next direction. No, it just means they have to play a different role. They're there to remind everybody coming in, why are we here? Why do we do things this way? Why the customer matters to us? All those key founding team members, they may no longer have the skill to be the best at CRM or whatever, but they are the extension of the founder. And they, so Alex Ferguson, I'm not a Manchester United fan. I'm, I'm an artist that I was disassociating [laughter] myself about.

Yeah, but I wasn't born in the UK.

Okay, fair enough. So, you're right. Got my dad, honorary. I was, I get it. I get it. There's a whole thing, right? But effectively, there were certain players like the Neville brothers,

that were not necessarily in the team purely because of their talent, but because they were his soldiers on the pitch that set the culture.

Yeah.

Right. So, this is the extension of him. Here's how we operate on the field. And they, he knows that they will make sure the message is clear amongst the players.

Yeah.

And,

there's a name for it, I think in business sometimes called a plant, which is by analogy with an office plant, which is someone who effectively is, it's like a catalyst in chemistry. They're there actually not for what they themselves do, but for the effect they have on the behavior of everybody around them.

Very interesting, very interesting conception.

Especially when you have a founder business, a fast-growing business, when you have people that have gone through the wars and seen the stories. Now, if they leave, then the founder has to be the one to always vocalize this, which is impossible, right? So, you actually have to say, all right, these are the people that we are building the foundation of this business in with. Let's document that entire journey and let's make sure that everybody beyond this point that comes in understands why we're doing the way that we do it. Why we don't do certain things. Why we're open to certain things. That's the thing that makes you different. Because at the end of the day, when you think about the definition of a company, it's a collective of people. The collective of people that you have versus other people is the thing that makes you different. Which is why people is a priority, not just externally of your business, which is consumers, even internally is the priority of leadership, right? Because that's the things that make you different.

And actually, you should opt, I mean, Ogleby always did this. They over-optimize for staff retention, really, on the grounds that, you know, three people doing a job for two years is not the same as one person being there for six years. You know, I mean, the cynical view is always that only a third of people in any company do all the work because a third of them have just arrived and don't know what they're doing and a third of them are planning to leave, so they don't care. [laughter] That's probably a bit extreme, but I would agree that actually, you know, um, uh, length of tenure matters. I mean, this is another thing because what we try and do is we try and formalize everything. We try and make it rule-based and then you end up effectively treating people as units of production and the idea being that they're fungible because all we need is someone to perform this tightly defined function. But nearly all people have, it's the dormant fallacy. You may remember me talking about this. Nearly everybody has a value and a function that goes way beyond what their job description, you know, attributes to them as their resp, you know, you have a core responsibility, but, you know, anybody actually doing their job will spend a third of their time devoted to things beyond their absolutely narrowly defined

role.

Um, friend who worked for Goldman Sachs always said the, the really magical thing about it, what made it different was that he said everywhere else, uh, you know, if you got a request from the Uruguay office, uh, you'd kind of go, well, I mean, there's nothing here for us, let's just get this off our desk. Are they going to pay us? Goldman Sachs, no one asked those questions. If someone asked for help, you helped.

And now, admittedly, probably the guy who heads the Uruguay office of Goldman Sachs is going to be the minister of finance six months later. So it pays to keep them sweet, but, um, nonetheless, there was this automatic culture that by default, you made yourself useful.

And so it was, you know, it's very interesting because we, we don't think of those organizations, you know, particularly not a large investment bank as being socialistic.

Because obviously, as an entity, they're deeply capitalistic, but within the organization, they're actually surprisingly socialistic. You know, there's an enormous amount of, you know, sacrificing self-interest for collective good.

It pays to understand people because they're the common denominator in everything that we do.

Yeah.

Right. And so, Lassi, we've come to time. Um, obviously, I'm going to ask you to do the phenomenal task of summarizing your biggest lesson throughout your journey right now. And if there was a parting message to send to entrepreneurs that want to do the same thing or go onto their journey or solve a major problem, what would be the, the number one advice that you give them?

Um, I'm going to do the advice piece first. The number one piece of advice is that the barriers to entry to start something have never been lower and the cost of failure, I think, has never been less. Like, it's okay to start, to try and to fail and to start again. And you should totally embrace that philosophy and be totally unafraid of giving something a go because I truly believe that entrepreneurship is one of the most incredible things you can do in your lifetime to create something you believe in, to bring other people along with you on the journey. So just start, give it a go, try and be totally open to failing and starting again.

Um, and the second thing was, what was the second thing? The first thing that is my second thing.

Well, that, that you basically answered both.

Yeah. I think you did. [laughter] Yeah. I mean, one of the things that's sort of rescuing, I think, the UK economy is this extraordinary change, even in my lifetime, which will be, by the way, even more important because we've created 50% of the population become university graduates, and there simply aren't the graduate entry-level jobs for them anymore, and there will probably be even fewer of those. But the extent to which entrepreneurialism in general, uh, has enjoyed this, you know, reputational, uh, well, I think it's probably a revival.

You know, but it, it was considered, you know, my father always said when he went to university in the 1950s, you were expected to go. It was, bear in mind, this is 1953. It was sort of law, medicine, church, there were, you know, civil service, military was acceptable back then. But you went into one of these sort of five socially approved activities. And, you know, if you went and did something interesting, it was kind of indulged, but you were thought to have, you know, slightly lost the plot.

And that's completely changing. And I think it's really, really important. And hopefully, we'll also acquire this, it's okay to fail mentality, which the US has had for probably quite a few more years.

Yeah.

There's more problems to solve than those five professions.

Exactly.

There's more problems to solve in those five.

TB put it beautifully. He said that actually, an entrepreneur who fails in business is no more a failure than a soldier who dies in battle. It's part of the overall process.

It's part of the process. I wish more people were comfortable with that. Like, failing is totally part of the process.

Yeah.

I'm so comfortable with it now. I'm like,

failing all the time.

One, one weird marketing. How much are you starting to gain business through referral?

Yeah. Yeah. A lot of our businesses.

A lot of it through. That's that's really interesting. Have you, have you found ways to amplify it?

Yeah. Obviously, I don't, I wouldn't take ice baths in public, but but people just, you have got products which are highly talkable.

Yeah.

And it's very cult-like, right? It's like, it's a bit like they say, you, I think I heard this on a, why are you laughing?

You just killed me with that. You went to take an ice bath in public. [laughter]

Well, actually, they do, but I mean,

uh, you know, it's one of those things that people love to tell you about. It's like, you know, I, I do ice baths and I did it for this long and I did it at this temperature. And it's a bit of a like. And you know when someone's a vegan, don't worry, they'll [laughter] tell you soon enough.

Exactly. They love to tell you. And so, you know, there's not a lot we need to do to encourage people to talk about it and to share it. And that's really exciting thing I think that we can tap much further into as well.

That's fascinating.

What's the longest you've lasted in an ice bath?

Uh, 3 minutes.

Oh, yeah. I can't continue with that. All right. Cool. [laughter]

Is that what, what's the target length of time?

Uh, you don't want to do any less than 60 seconds, really, but you, you've got to work up to it as well.

Got it. Got it. So, don't be like hanging out too long if it's your first time. You know what I'm saying? Disclaimer.

Yeah. [laughter] You, you won't see me doing three. But, um, Lassi, thank you. You've been incredible. Fantastic. Thank you. And, uh, this is one of my favorite episodes.

Again, all the guests,

do you get the female handbrake on ice baths and saunas as well?

Yeah.

Yeah. Because there's one obstacle. Do you convert a room into a sauna, or is it just a standalone? Or you can just put it in your garden as a

You just put it in the garden as a garden truck.

Yeah.

As a fantastic standalone thing.

Interesting. Yeah.

Okay.

Episode done. [music]