Alan Barratt - From £27 to £72 million
嘉宾：Alan Barratt
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§01Transcript — part 1
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This week on The Diary of a CEO, I've got one of the UK's most incredible, incredible CEOs joining me. This conversation epitomizes why I started this podcast. It has everything: a remarkable underdog success story, a brutally honest, lovable entrepreneur, heartbreaking sacrifices, and life lessons that only someone in his position could share with me.
There was laughter, there were tears, and I walked away feeling deeply inspired with a new perspective on what matters most in life. This week, I welcome to The Diary of a CEO, Alan Barrett, the CEO and founder of Grenade, the world's fastest-growing sports performance and weight management brand, but also one of the most exciting companies in the United Kingdom.
Alan and his wife, Juliet Barrett, started the business with 27 pounds in the bank account. A few years later, the business was worth 72 million and counting. I'm obsessed with their products, and I'm not bullshitting you when I say this because he came on the podcast. I'm actually genuinely obsessed.
I can't remember the last day I didn't have a Grenade bar or a protein shake in the office. When he came to my office, he saw 10 bottles of protein shake on my desk. I promise you he's not paying me to say this. Protein products always taste bland and powdery to me, and Grenade tastes like heaven and it's nutritionally good for you. It's an actual miracle.
My manager told me she listened to this podcast back five times, and that's a record for guests I've had on this show. So I think that says something. I couldn't be more excited for you to overhear the conversation I had with Alan. So without further ado, I'm Steven Bartlett, and this is The Diary of a CEO. I hope nobody is listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself.
Alan, hello. Thank you so much for coming today. I've probably overwhelmed you in the last hour since we've been talking with my admiration for yourself and the products you've created. I think it's worth me just starting with this. You're the CEO and founder of Grenade, and my life is pretty overwhelmed with Grenade.
We also work together in a marketing partnership. Outside of that, if you go to my hotel room right now and you can't find 10 bottles of either drank or yet-to-be-drank Grenade, then I would be blown away. If you can't find 10 bars of Grenade in my hotel room, specifically on my desk—there's more than 10, I know there is—then I would be absolutely blown away.
Are you inviting me to your hotel room? Because we're on camera, that's slightly creepy.
Not quite! But you did just bring a bunch of Grenade bars and drinks with you when you came here today, so they will be making it back to my hotel room. I shall not be sharing. You've created a tremendous and phenomenal business, a UK-born and bred business in what I consider to be a tremendously short amount of time when I think about other players in this space.
When I read your story, I think this is the first place I wanted to start. I read that you started with 27 quid in the bank, right?
That's right. Well, actually we started with 500, but it was quickly down to 27 pounds.
One of the questions I get asked all the time by entrepreneurs is: can you start a business without loads of money? There's this preconception that you need rich parents or millions of pounds. Can you tell me how Grenade began?
Absolutely. Without going back to my childhood and boring everyone senseless, the business that we had—and I say "we" because my wife is the co-founder, so Juliet and I started Grenade—we had a distribution business which I started in 1999 just out of my garage at home.
The idea of that was to import American-made sports nutrition products and distribute them throughout the UK. I won't bore you with the whole journey of that, but I met my wife in 2003, she then came into the business in 2005. By 2008, we'd got bored of that business and sold it, and basically decided to follow the dream, which was to have our own brand, which was Grenade.
We'd spent four years trademarking, between 2006 and 2010, which took a lot of discipline, time, and effort to be able to do. We did everything ourselves. To date now, we've accumulated over 200 design marks, trademarks, and pending patents. We locked Grenade down globally as a brand, which I think is probably the best thing we ever did.
But yeah, we just had no money to operate with in terms of doing anything. We didn't pay ourselves a salary for four years. We didn't take a day off for four years. We couldn't afford to employ anyone. But we really learned quite quickly the power of doing something with very little money and being very cost-conscious.
For instance, when it came to doing a trade show, a lot of our competitors—the big sports nutrition brands—would have Formula One cars in there, giant booths that took a week to build, and you could pretty much live in them. They cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. We couldn't do any of that.
So we got a friend of mine, and we convinced him to lend us his tank. He's more eccentric than I am. We borrowed this tank and drove it into this show, and we just stole the show. That was our booth. We just drove it in, put some camo netting over it, had some product, and then my wife and I just stood there. We got a T-shirt each that we paid about six pounds for, and it was just the two of us.
I'm not really sure at what point what we thought we were doing when I look back, but it seemed like a good idea at the time and probably was. At that show, there were a few Americans there. This was a British show, and one of these American guys took a picture of our tank and this product and sent it to the weight loss buyer for GNC in the US.
This guy contacts us and says, "I've worked at GNC for 20 years. I see 120 weight loss products a week, and yours stood out." At that point, then, I think we just thought, "You know what? We're onto something here." It certainly would have been a lot easier if we did have rich parents. I've got far from rich parents! But if you've got the time and the willingness to do something, then you don't need absolute pots of cash. You just need the willingness and the ability to go and do something and make a difference. Disruption doesn't necessarily have to be expensive; it just needs to be disruptive.
You started that by saying you don't want to take us back to your childhood and bore us with that, but I'm really intrigued about your childhood. I think with successful entrepreneurs, there's a bit of a reputation that they were all bad in school and they're all dropouts. I've been known for saying things like "university is a scam" and so on. What was your educational background? What was your experience in school?
My family had had their own business; they'd only ever worked for themselves. Since post-Second World War, they had a heavy goods vehicle mechanics business. It was just my dad, my uncle, and my grandad. They'd worked exceptionally hard—too hard, really, I think—and never made any money.
My uncle, for example, never moved out of home, never had a girlfriend. Nowadays, I think he'd have been someone who was probably prescribed as having some sort of social disorder. He probably never spoke to 20 people in his whole life. He worked with my dad in this business, and the expectation was I'd go into that business.
Anyone that knows me knows I'm not practical. I couldn't put together something from IKEA with the instructions and all the parts! I'm not mechanically minded. I physically just can't do it, and I've just got no interest in how things work. I just want them to work; I don't have the patience for it.
So I was never going to go into that family business. But what I learned there was this tremendous work ethic they had. My grandad died at work when he was 84. He went blind and still went to work because he still didn't have anywhere else to go. My uncle had a stroke and went to work because it's what he'd always done. My dad had had one day off work in 30 years when he had mumps.
They had this amazing work ethic, and I thought, "I'm going to work hard, but I want to have something to show for it." It wasn't about making money, but they just didn't really have anything to show for it, to be honest. I used to go to work with my dad when I was 11 and help out, and I just hated it. I wasn't interested.
From the age of 14 onwards, I was really interested in weight training because I wasn't interested in other sports. I wasn't interested in rugby, cricket, football, or any of the traditional stuff. I was kind of interested in being healthy and doing something, but I didn't know what it would be.
At the age of 14, I went to a gym on work experience. In the late 80s, all the big movie stars were Jean-Claude Van Damme, Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was a big deal to watch Commando and Predator in the late 80s because it was an 18, and we were like 13. I remember thinking, "I want to look like that," because I was really skinny. I was just under 11 stone and 6 feet tall. Everyone used to call me "Big Al" for a joke because I was so bloody skinny.
When I went on work experience, my dad and my family were really against it. They were like, "You're wasting your life, it's a waste." Academically, I'm fairly clever, but I just hated school. I found it really boring, I couldn't get on with the teachers, and I was probably disruptive. Not in the sense of swearing and throwing things around, but I've just always wanted to challenge convention.
I remember once the teacher wrote a word on the board—the word was "Mississippi"—and she spelled it wrong. I remember saying, "You've spelled that wrong." She said, "No, I haven't." I said, "Yes, you have. It's M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I." I was six.
You're joking!
No. I got into an argument with her. Anyway, she went and looked in the dictionary and I was right. That happened quite a lot where the teacher would mark something according to the answer, and very often the answer was wrong. I bunked off school a lot. I pretended I was ill a lot because my mom was a bit of a soft touch and she knew I wasn't really ill.
I did kind of muddle through school and did quite well, but I started A-levels and thought, "I just can't stand this anymore." I dropped out after a year. I got into a big row with one of the teachers. I won't tell you what I said, but it got me into a lot of trouble.
What did you say?
I started dating a girl when I was doing A-levels who was quite disruptive in the school. I think I was probably seen as someone who had quite good potential academically, and I started hanging out with her. I'd already discovered a like for going to the gym at this point, so there were people there that were a good influence and people there that were a bad influence, but they were all 10 years older than me.
I was all of a sudden surrounded by people I looked up to who were a combination of business people, regular people, and just generally criminals. I was going to the gym, and there was this big concerted effort from the schools and my parents to really stop me going into this environment because they didn't think it was going to be good for me. They thought I was going to be wasting my life.
I'd been to some sort of bodybuilding event, I think it was, on this one evening. I went and worked at this event, and it made me late on Monday morning for biology. I missed the class. I turned up, and the teacher collared me. She'd been dying to have a go anyway because I'd been going out with this girl who she didn't like.
She just said, "Where were you this morning?" The way she spoke to me, she was really quite rude, to be honest. I said, "I'm really sorry, Miss. I worked last night, and I got in at 4:00 this morning, and I didn't get up in time. I was just about to come and see you and apologize for missing your class." She just started lecturing me and telling me off. I've got a really short fuse for this sort of thing; I just don't like being told what to do. So I did just tell her to eff off and walked off.
She just—I can still see the look on her face—she was horrified. She stood there mouth open. Actually, my form teacher saw and overheard. She said, "Oh, you need to go and apologize." I was like, "Nah." I thought, "You know what? I don't want to be here. I'm not enjoying it. I didn't really see myself getting anywhere." With no disrespect to anyone else who goes to college or university, I just knew it wasn't for me. I've always wanted to do something differently.
If there's a million people or a thousand people or 10 people going one way, I just always want to go the other way. I don't know if it's—my wife thinks I've got Asperger's.
Why does she think that?
Oh, just because I'm quite dyspraxic. I walk into things a lot. If there's a doorway and it's 10 feet wide, I guarantee I'll walk into one of the door frames. I'm quite clumsy. I actually learned I've met another friend recently who's actually very heavily dyspraxic, and his takes the form as well which mine does, where if I'm packing to go away, it takes me a long time to do it.
I can't decide what I need to take, so I try and take everything. I have to be really disciplined. I'll go away for four days and I'll take five pairs of shoes, six pairs of shoes or something. When I think about it, you don't need to have more pairs of shoes than days you're going for. It comes back to your point you were saying about potentially decision fatigue you were talking about the other day, but struggling to make decisions. I get a form of dyspraxia like that.
Maybe it's just I'm just pigheaded and awkward, I don't know. But I've just never really seen the point. If you want to make a difference doing something, do you make a difference by doing what everyone else is doing, or can you make a difference by doing something that no one else is doing?
So I just decided from that moment on, I just didn't want to be in the education system any longer. I took the bus from that sixth form straight to the gym I trained at and I said, "Can you give me a job?" He said, "Your mom and dad are going to kill us if we give you a job." I said, "Well, I've just walked out of college, so I need a job." They'd got no money either, so they employed me on less than minimum wage. It was about one pound 80 an hour, I think. This was mid-90s. It was about 70 pounds a week; it wasn't a lot then. I took it, and I loved it. It's one of the best things I ever did. I did that for four years working in this gym.
You talk there about hard work and how that runs in your family. You were taught hard work as a principle when you were very, very young. One of the things I hear often these days is there's almost this movement that encouraging people to work hard is bad because it's negative for their mental health; they can get overworked and overstressed. But when I listen to entrepreneurs that I respect like Elon Musk, they all cite hard work as a clear, controllable advantage and responsible for their success. In your journey to building Grenade with your wife, how much do you think hard work plays a role in success?
I would say at its simplest form—and I'm not saying this is a good idea because I think frankly we probably worked too hard. This is going to sound a bit of a silly thing to say, but I think we probably worked too hard in the sense we probably should have taken a bit of a step back at some point and maybe—when you're working *in* a brand, I think everyone should take time to step back and work *on* the brand.
So we definitely went down a few rabbit warrens. But with regard to hard work, just by working more hours than anyone else was doing—certainly our competitors—not having children, working seven days a week... if we were awake, we were working on the brand. And actually, we still are, because it's very all-consuming.
You're never *not* thinking about it. Apart from when I'm flying, actually. That's why I like flying, because if I'm flying around, I'm hopefully not thinking about my brand because I'm trying not to crash.
Just for context, Alan is a pilot and flies his plane. Anyway, carry on.
And I have been in one plane crash, but not with me flying! But I think because we'd never built a brand before but we had this work ethic, I think maybe we used hard work as a substitute for lacking a lot of knowledge. So, there's the two of us, and we've got no money. We know what we want to do, and within a year we're trading in the US and there's the two of us and we're working from home. When you think of it really, it's just suicide.
But approaching things fearlessly because we were probably very naive probably stood us in good stead. Actually, I remember thinking at the time: there's going to be no one that's working harder than we are, there's going to be no one that's got a better brand, there'll be no one that makes better product. We're going to do more sampling. When we hire people, we're going to get the best people. We're going to have the best relationships with our suppliers, the best relationships with our retailers. We're going to build up this amazing trust with our consumers.
Hard work forms part of that, but collectively I thought if we thought about it, we went and did it. Someone said to me once, "You're better off being a has-been than a never-was." I always remembered that because I thought, at least if this all goes horribly wrong, I never want to look back and say, "Oh, I wish we'd worked harder. I wish we'd done that. I wish we'd gone to that show. I wish we'd met that person."
So actually, we always put just tremendous amounts of pressure on ourselves. I think it's one of those probably issues I have today, whether it's Asperger's or not, where if I think about something, until I've gone and done it, I can't get it out of my mind. Sometimes the strangest of things—nothing like we're going to run around killing people or anything—but I think hard work for us just meant getting up, putting the hours in.
That's what's been good actually about training for 30 years; it taught me a real discipline of putting the weights away, consistency. I think consistency is so important. People never talk about consistency in business. It's one thing working hard, but how long do you work hard for? A day, a week, a month, a year? What does a year of hard work mean? Some of my family work hard their whole life. So for me, I've worked hard my whole life.
Nowadays, people just don't have the staying power perhaps to do that; they get burnt out. I've been through stages where I've probably felt pretty burnt out, and you probably have as well. But that's where it really takes that discipline and that mental strength to keep going and maybe re-evaluate things you're working on or perhaps take a bit of time to do something else. But I'm just one of those people that I can't do something half-cocked. I'm either all in or I'm all out. I'm just one of those extreme people. Someone said to me once, "Al, you see everything as black and white and there are shades of gray." I just thought, "I just can't operate in the gray." Despite wearing all gray, apparently!
Going back to Grenade, the business has grown unbelievably. I think it's now the fourth most popular chocolate bar in the UK?
That's correct, yeah. I should caveat that by saying in the groceries and in single sales. But yeah, the technical IRI definition.
And you have multiples and multiples less support and resource and decades to your name than all of the competitors in that space. For that to be the case, there must be something unique about the product, about the brand. From your perspective, what is that?
I'm probably a fairly eccentric person, as you've probably gathered by listening to this podcast, but brands are always extensions of their founders, good and bad. I think because I care about the brand so much, and because my wife cares about the brand, and we built this thing that we care about... I think hopefully everyone we come into contact with—whether it's suppliers or retailers or consumers—I hope everyone we come into contact with leaves with a little bit of that.
If we don't care, why should anyone else? So I think we've built this amazing brand that people really care about. And if people don't care about it or they don't like it, that's just as good, because for someone not to like something we're doing, they'll still go and tell people, but at least they've got an opinion about it.
So I think with Grenade, hopefully it stands for a lot of things that both are hopefully fairly obvious, and that's things like taste. People can immediately see taste or a benefit to a product. Early days, we always focused on product deliberately where there was an immediate feeling, so weight loss and pre-workouts where people could have it and within 20 minutes they knew they'd had something.
Otherwise, if you have a product like water, for instance, most people can't tell the difference between water, so if you just drink another brand of water, do you genuinely think, "Well, it tastes better than that other brand?" Most people couldn't tell. So we always tried to focus on something where the stuff that we were good at hopefully shone through and certainly consumers' feeling something was really important to us.
That's still the case now with our bars. I think our bars just taste better than everyone else's. The quality of ingredients we use—and everyone says this, but for us, it's really true—we really do go over and above to find the best ingredients and the best suppliers. No one else just seems to bother. And that's not just in this industry; that's in lots of industries. We spend years on product development, literally years. I spent two years working on our first bar, which was Caramel Chaos, which we launched in 2015. That was a two-year project. The last bar we just launched a few weeks ago, which is the White Chocolate Salted Peanut, that was a further 18-month development project just on flavor. Even though we had the concept and bars, just 18 months on a flavor. I just don't know anyone that goes to that much trouble. Again, maybe it's the OCD thing or something.
But it's strange, whenever we talk to people about the brand, people's faces light up. It just seems to put a smile on people's faces, so that's priceless.
How important was—because I think this sometimes about our business—we were at the right place at the right time in some respects. How important was this concept of luck or opportunity, do you think, to your business?
I certainly would never, ever say we've been lucky. I don't really believe in luck per se, but I do think if we were to try to define luck, it's really just an opportunity meeting preparedness. Definitely we are having a moment in time. Lots of businesses get this. It's actually—I've talked about this quite a lot in fact—in terms of timing, you cannot, I'm pretty sure as a business, out-maneuver bad timing.
Clearly we've been in an area where people are more health-conscious, certainly younger people. Sugar is the enemy. I just don't see it changing anytime soon. We've come along with something which is high protein and low sugar with our drinks and bars, so we're certainly helping a lot with that wave by making sure our product is everywhere that we think it should be. But yeah, we're definitely having a moment in time.
In some ways, actually, we've been quite unlucky with some things that didn't come off. One of which was we had a huge Bollywood star that loved our weight loss product, and he was talking about it everywhere, and we couldn't get product into the country. It got stuck in customs. This guy's one of his films in India is still the highest-grossing film of all time—it's bigger than the Harry Potter movies. India's a big country, we had a lot of people talking about it, but there's no product. That was actually quite unlucky, really. By the time we got product into the country like a year later, the buzz had died down, so we kind of missed out there.
A friend of mine invented lactose-free milk, for instance. Lactose intolerance is quite a big thing nowadays, and it's everywhere. It nearly bankrupted him; he lost a fortune and milk got poured away because he invented it in the 1970s and no one knew what lactose intolerance was. So timing's huge.
Yeah, we're never going to turn around and say we haven't had good timing because we have. Then again, the opportunities that we've had through timing, everyone else has had as well, including a lot of the really big players that we compete with. So they've had access to the same consumers that we have.
I think if we're going to talk about potentially disrupting the confectionery industry, because lots of people now rather than go and buy a regular chocolate bar will go and buy one of our protein bars... When I actually saw the top 10 best-selling chocolate bars in the UK, I was actually quite surprised because we were the only brand that had been launched in the last 20 years. It just hasn't been disrupted. If you think of what Uber have done, and Starbucks and Amazon and Airbnb, mostly these are brands that weren't around 20 years ago.
There's been a lot of disruption in the drinks space, you know, we've seen it with Fever-Tree and BrewDog, they've come along with something different or done it better or been a challenger brand. And actually, no one had really done it in chocolate or with food. I think because most of the brands are so big and powerful that no one had really thought to do it. But again, it's back to that "if everyone's doing one thing, I'll go and do something else."
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You've really managed to disrupt the space quite effectively there, I think. And I guess the incumbent sometimes gets complacent, right? If you're one of those 20-year-old brands just thinking, "Well, we're number one, we're number two, we're number three," and you've got your spots in distribution in key areas, who's going to knock us off our perch? And then the wave comes in and Grenade are there on the surfboard with a great product.
Well, that's why we do a lot of NPD, which is new product development. Half of my time is what we call EPD, which is existing product development. So we are always redeveloping our own product to make them better because technology changes, ingredients change, and we're learning all the time. I'm a big, big fan of learning. The minute you're not learning, I'm bored. I always want to be learning, which is weird bearing in mind that I hated school, but I wasn't learning anything there!
So I spend a lot of time doing EPD. My thought is: if I can make my product better, then so can someone else, so I'll do it first.
Smart. Disrupt yourself.
Yeah, I'm always disrupting myself.
You mentioned there the incident with the Bollywood star where you had someone talking a lot about you in another country but you couldn't get the product there on time and it felt like a bit of a failure or a missed opportunity. I think that people see entrepreneurship, because of Instagram and movies and whatever else, as a very rock star, glamorous thing. And of course there is, you know, as you said, you've got very nice cars, you've got Lamborghini, you've got planes, etc.
But what I don't think they see enough of, because we generally tend to shine the light on the finish line as opposed to the journey, is all of the bullshit that comes before that, all of the hard times and the sacrifice. Could you speak to your personal sacrifices and also what your hardest moments were on this journey?
Wow. Yeah, we had some fairly dark—you do still have dark days. This is going to be probably quite a broad answer to this question. People say to me a lot, "What's it like? Oh, you're successful, you've made it." Firstly, we don't consider ourselves successful. And I'm probably sure most entrepreneurs never think they're successful because you just look for the next best thing.
That doesn't mean to say that you're never satisfied; it just—people say, "Oh, you've got there." I haven't got there. I don't know where "there" is. So that's something that we're always pushing ourselves and disrupting ourselves and keeping going. In a way, that's probably quite sad because we don't ever give ourselves probably a pat on the back for a job well done. But the job hasn't been done, and having a brand—a brand is never finished. So we're always working on the brand and trying to improve the brand, and the brand evolves.
In the early days, my wife and I had a genuine conversation about having to potentially losing the house. And actually, we said, you know, if we end up in a one-bedroom bedsit somewhere together, as long as we're together, we'll be fine. So yeah, really hard. Like I said, we didn't have a day off for four years. We were enjoying ourselves and having fun and working hard, but we had that sacrifice of not having children.
That will probably be a big—that was a conscious decision we made because we just didn't really have time for children. When your wife and you are just both working 24/7 in the business, there's no time for anything else. People, yeah, don't see that. And it's very nice to have nice things, but nice things are the icing on the cake. It's not the cake itself.
So yeah, we've had hard times and I'm sure there's probably still hard times to come, but as long as we're happy and healthy and the people around us and stuff are happy and healthy, then we're hopefully doing good work. But yeah, being an entrepreneur's quite a lonely life. It's not an easy life.
Very often I'm probably quite—probably admire people who can be content in doing something that's perhaps a bit more regular in terms of having a regular job or whatever, and they have kids and family and they go on holiday a couple of times a year and stuff. I sometimes look at that thinking, "That's probably quite nice," because you know what it's like. It's nice getting on planes and going places, but you've always got a thousand phone calls, a thousand emails. Wherever you are, you're supposed to be somewhere else. I go to America a lot, but I go for the day.
So it's—I try and make it enjoyable, but a lot of the time it's not enjoyable. It's miserable. You're in hotels, you're on your own, you're stuck in traffic, you've missed planes, late for planes, planes are delayed. But I just always try and reset at the end of the day and think, "Actually, we're really lucky to be here and doing what we're doing," and we're having this moment in time, so I really want to try and enjoy the roller coaster because there's a lot of highs and lows, as you'll know.
Yeah, and I can relate to all of that. You talked about there never really being a "there," there not being a finish line. I think we're all guilty of living our lives with this narrative in our heads that "we'll just do *this* this year and then we'll stop and enjoy it." But as an entrepreneur, what I've gathered from you there is you'll never just stop and enjoy it. The industry's changing, your brand's constantly changing. This isn't a four-year play and then you're going to retire and stop forever. So how do you ensure that life is good on the journey, not just in this invisible imaginary date in the future?
By trying to do what you said to do, actually, on one of your LinkedIn episodes months ago. Last year, I've actually quoted this quite a lot because it really resonated with me when you said this. I think you said—I'm going to misquote you now—but you said something like, "Don't cut down the rainforest and then donate to the bees."
Yeah, yeah.
What I took from that was actually, yeah, always looking for that next best thing and trying to get somewhere else, whereas actually it's fine to just stop and say, "You know what? I got there. I made it. I did it." Everything we set out to do, we've done. Which actually we have, to be fair. But there's a few more things I want to do.
But it's really hard to remember that. You have to constantly say that back to yourself because otherwise you get drawn back in again and think, "Oh, I'll just do *that*, I'll just do *that*, I'll just do *that*." You always want to run out of things to do, but it's never going to happen.
When you think about saying to yourself, "You know what? We actually did it. We actually did what we set out to do and achieved great things," do you ever worry that that narrative in your head will make you complacent or less hungry?
That's my biggest fear. Complacency and boredom and not learning—just my biggest fears. So, you know, the day that I'm not at Grenade is going to be a strange day. Whether it's a month, a year, 10 years, 20 years, I don't know. I know that I'm unemployable, so I'm never going to have another job! So this will be the last proper job I ever have.
I would, yeah, I absolutely fear that. And actually, that's why I got back into my flying over the last 18 months, because I'm going to want to transfer the 70-plus or 80 hours a week I spend on Grenade somewhere else. Aviation's quite a good thing because I've known people who have been flying for 50, 60 years and they're still getting qualifications and ratings.
You know, I want to go and do my rotary license and become a helicopter pilot, so I'd like to have helicopter and fixed-wing ratings and stuff. So I'll have to go and find other things to do pretty quickly. But as long as I'm at Grenade, I would hope we'd never become complacent. And I certainly try and surround myself with people that I don't want to let down, they don't want to let me down, and that we all care to the point we go out and do the best decisions possible we can for the brand. Because if we make great decisions for the brand, who loses? No one. It's great for us, it's great for the team, it's great for our investors, it's great really for our competitors—we put a lot of value in this space—and most of all, it's brilliant for consumers. They get great product in the locations they expect to find it, and it's better for their health.
You touched on something there as well about investors, and there was a point earlier you referenced about what you might do after Grenade. I read that you sold part of Grenade for a 72 million valuation?
We did, yeah. So that was of March 2017. The last clean valuation we had was Lion Capital came in and valued the business at 72 million.
That's interesting because you had 27 pounds in the bank.
Yes, that's right. It's the exact opposite! I know, it's bizarre. From 27 pounds to 72 million.
Good headline that. We'll use that.
Yeah, definitely use that. So that was a couple of years ago. And they've been great partners again. We've learned a lot; they know a lot about brands, they've invested in lots of big consumer brands which people will know. Because, you know, no one's done this before. When it was my wife and I and we're at home and there's us and four cats, and no one's done it before, there's no one to ask, there's no path to follow. You just have to go and do what feels right at the time.
Some things we got right and some things we got wrong. But even then I remember the first time, for instance, we went into Tesco's. We found out the product had gone live in Tesco's—this was Thermo Detonator, our weight loss product. It was a Friday evening, and we drove out to go to our local Tesco's, which is about 20 miles away because it was only in the big stores, to go and see the product.
We were leaving the house and driving out of our road at like 10:00 or 11:00 o'clock at night, and the neighbor drove past. He said, "Oh, where are you going?" We said, "We're going to Tesco's." He said, "To go shopping?" "No, we're just going to go and look at our product on the shelf." He said, "But you know what it looks like!" I said, "Yeah, but we've never seen it on a shelf of a supermarket before."
So it was a really weird conversation because he was quite right, but he didn't really get it. But we still do that! I can't go anywhere in the world and I'm like, "I wonder if we're in there?" and I go into like Walmarts and stuff in Canada. We go to quite obscure places. There's lots of places again, like out in the Middle East and stuff, we can be found. I've got friends who are in the forces and they send us pictures and they're like, "Yeah, we're at this really obscure place in Afghanistan and your product's here." No way!
So we get a lot of pleasure from going out and seeing that. Grenade's our baby. It's probably like having a child and seeing them swim for the first time or something, or walking. So when Grenade makes its little baby steps of doing something, we just get a tremendous amount of pleasure from seeing that, and we still do. I can't imagine a time where I ever won't care about that or it won't be impactful to me.
On the point of this investment from Lion Capital... one of the things that I think a lot of people think, especially when they don't have money, is that money will be the answer to all of their problems, it'll make them exponentially more happy, and once you have money, everything is solved. Going from a place where you didn't have the money to now having the money, what can you tell people who are thinking about that?
I can tell you that being brutally honest about it, I have had money and I have not had money, and I know which I prefer.
Sure.
But it's really weird how people think there's a link between money and happiness. How can those nondescript bits of paper with the Queen's head on just make you happy? I think the missing link there is that you can buy stuff that might make you happy temporarily, but I think really all having access to some financial means does is it just gives you options.
So, you've got the option of maybe having a newer car or a bigger car, or the option of going on a different holiday, for instance. But as far as I remember, and you'd have to take my word for this, but even as a kid when I was in infant school and I was walking around the school and I was like five or six years old, I remember a teacher saying to me once, "Al, you're always smiling."
She actually wrote—when I left infant school and went to junior school—she wrote in my book and she put "Keep smiling." So I just remember always being happy, and we never, ever, ever had any money when I was a kid. We never really went anywhere or did anything because my mom and dad couldn't afford to, but they always gave us loads of love and if they could do something, they did. But they always gave us time.
More so my mom than my dad because my dad was working all the time. I didn't really see my dad when I was little because he worked seven days a week, so I didn't really have much of a relationship with my dad till I was older. But having money just gives you options. It's really got nothing to do with happiness, and I think if you are unhappy, having money is not the answer.
I'll go one step further. I think for people who potentially... you could win money, you could inherit money, or you could make money. Now, I've made money by hard work, so I've got that gratification of knowing the value of a fiver. If you win money or inherit money, I honestly can't imagine anything worse. I think they call it the curse of the lottery, don't they? Where people win the lottery, and all of a sudden you've got people who win millions and millions of pounds, and for the first time ever they've got options that they never had.
I think they think it's probably going to be amazing, and I'm sure for the most part it is. But then people go out and buy like three helicopters and stuff, and then they realize that actually it's quite a lot of time and effort and work having a helicopter. They're really expensive things, and they go wrong, and they depreciate, and they're quite dangerous.
All their family and friends would change. So I think the nicest thing about the way that Jules and I have built the business and we've created value is the fact that our friends and family have seen us do it and seen the sacrifice. Everyone says, "You know what? You deserve it. The sacrifice you've made."
Now, people might say something different behind our back, of course! I don't think they would. If anyone would ever say a negative comment about that, it's just people that just don't know us. And frankly, I couldn't care less anyway, to be honest. But yeah, if you all of a sudden you won the lottery, do you think most people's friends and family would be pleased? Because I bet they wouldn't. Because jealousy creeps in. I think it's hard to be jealous of someone that's worked hard because anyone can work hard. It's not unique to that one person, whereas if you do it via luck—i.e., winning the lottery—I think people wouldn't like that. And I think people would realize how their friends and family would change.
I always prefer the detail because it gets me thinking. I'm going to ask you another question which is just—I'm not going to give any context to the question—and it's a fairly deep question, but I just like asking this question sometimes to some people. Are you scared of death?
Oh, that's a good one. I don't think so, but ask me 10 minutes before I'm about to die. I don't think I'd be scared of it. I've never really been around death much, touch wood. I'm very fortunate to have close family and friends nearby. I guess it probably depends how it happens.
You know, if you believe in reincarnation and that stuff, I'm probably going to come back as a toilet plunger or something if reincarnation is a thing! Something actually—I live opposite someone who passed away actually about four years ago who was extremely well known, who was extremely wealthy, pretty much a billionaire. He had this enormous empire, but he never got married, never had children. I think he was actually probably quite a lonely guy.
I never actually met him because he passed away just after we moved in, but we'd exchange a few messages. But I actually knew one of his close aides, and they were there when he passed away. He'd actually had cancer. He'd spent something like a hundred million dollars on prostitutes, drink, and drugs. When he passed away, he said to this person that was there, "How can I leave all this behind?" But he'd had an amazing life and been around the world and done all these sorts of things.
I guess it depends how long that time period is between perhaps you knowing you're going to die and you dying. I've thought potentially: what's worse? Would you want a long drawn-out illness but at least you had time to do things?
Oh, I'd rather go in my sleep.
I think I'd rather go in my sleep and not know anything about it.
Yeah, I heard Ricky Gervais say the other day after his documentary Afterlife, he said that, "My one wish for humanity would be that everybody could die in their sleep and not have any..." That's actually quite a nice sentiment. You know what I mean? Because then it's really the—and this is a bit of a morbid topic—but it's really the process of I think knowing that you're going to pass that I think is the cruel part. When I think about death, I think: how did I feel 100 years ago? That's how I'll feel when I'm dead. I didn't feel anything. I wasn't in pain, I wasn't lonely, I wasn't sad, I wasn't depressed. I was just... it's a sense of almost...
I think as well it depends what you've done in your life and what you leave behind. I really want to leave something iconic in sports nutrition because sports nutrition is my life. I've done it, I've been involved in it since I was 13, 14 years old. To hopefully do something big in an industry I'm passionate about and love, I would like to look back and say, "You know what? I couldn't have done any more."
So if I leave something iconic that lives on after me, I think that'd be great. Now, most people do that through children. But I'm the last of the Barretts. My sister can't have kids. So if I don't have children, that's it, we're done. We've got generations of hard workers. So it's—very often I think potentially I will probably be thinking, "Oh, you know, I wish I'd had children" or whatever, so that potentially something could carry on. Because otherwise as well, what's it all for?
Most people again want to just make sure their kids are okay and look after their kids, but like I said, I can't do that. So it's been fairly important to me the last few years to be involved in philanthropy in some other ways to try and make things better for other people and people who are less fortunate. So I would hope that friends and family around—depending how many have got any friends and family left at the time—would look back and just think, "Oh, he had a great life and worked hard and did everything he set out to do." Because actually, I don't have any regrets. As long as you've got no regrets, then I'd hate to look back and think, "Oh, I wish I'd done that. I wish I'd done that."
What about you? Are you scared of death?
I'm not scared of death as long as I do myself justice. I think the only thing that I—it's kind of what you just said there—the only thing I'm really scared of is regret. I just want to do myself justice. I want to fulfill my potential, if that's even a possibility. Fulfill it and leave a legacy in terms of in everybody that I encountered, and hopefully their kids and their kids' kids because of who I was and the way I conducted myself and the value that I brought to the world.
It's really weird hearing yourself talk about yourself in past tense!
Yeah, I know! It is! Especially when you're like half my age!
No, but I think I got to—I wrote in my diary when I was 18—and I've talked about this a lot on this podcast—I was broke living in Gorton in Manchester just after dropping out, and I wrote in my diary that I wanted to be a millionaire, have a Range Rover, and all these things. Then by the age of 25—and I wrote this before 25, and everyone's seen my diary, many pictures of it on the internet—I got that.
There was this almost anticlimax feeling because I thought, "Right, I achieved everything that I set out to do." I don't know what I was expecting—some marching band to come out and start being like, "You've made it!" and throw me in the air. But I'm sat in my boxer shorts in my house, I'm like, "I've got to carry on tomorrow." So what do I do now? Just write more stuff that I want to get? It got me thinking at 24, 25 years old: what's the point?
I think this podcast was inspired by me searching for "the point" in it all. So that's I think why I ask the question a lot.
Yeah, you're absolutely spot on. I've never really thought of that before, but something that you've really worked hard for and looked forward to and it's something specific is probably never quite as good when you get there as you think it's going to be. What do you actually think it's going to feel like?
When we did our first big deal with Grenade in 2014 to Grovepoint Capital, they came in—and you know, the brand's only four years old at that point—but we haven't had a day off, we're pretty tired. They came in and valued the business at 35 million, and you know, we sold half the shares and rolled half the shares. That was before the bar was even created; that was just sports nutrition product.
I remember feeling a tremendous sense of weight being lifted off me. But I think that was just the pressure of the deal and the roller coaster, because they're on, they're off, they're on, they're off. You know what it's like; it's a very, very invasive thing to go through because someone is actually just backing *you*.
I remember having a conversation—and we're great friends still with Grovepoint—they're taking a tremendous gamble because they're about to make someone overnight incredibly wealthy. That does weird things to people. You can tell they didn't want to say that, but they actually...
The night before the deal, I said to them, "You really are on the fence about this, aren't you?" And I said, "Are you worried I'm just going to basically just go off and start taking drugs and go off the rails because all of a sudden I've got money that wasn't there a day ago?" He said, "Well, yeah." I said, "I can do all that now. Honestly."
I said, "If you're really that worried about it, don't do the deal. Let's not do the deal, and I'll just keep doing what I'm doing and let's just forget the whole thing." I genuinely meant that. It was a lot of money. But it really makes no difference other than being able to have options and just go and buy stuff.
So I didn't really care one way or the other whether the deal went ahead. And actually, after we had that conversation, it was fine, it went ahead. They backed us to go and do what we said we'd do, and surprise surprise, we exceeded what we said we'd do, because that's what hopefully good entrepreneurs do. We proved to the wider world that Alan and Juliet Barrett were backable. Next year, Lion Capital came along and they didn't hesitate twice to back us because we've got a track record of being backed.
That's not necessarily the case with lots of these businesses because, yeah, it does funny things to people and people go off the boil and become complacent. My problem is: what to do with all the ideas I've got? I've actually filled iPads full of ideas and I don't know what else to do!
Yeah, you're right there, having that bit of an anticlimax. So, the point I'm making is the deal that night... the deal nearly got delayed because one of the banks involved just saw "Grenade" on a transaction and thought that we were arms dealers! So the money got flagged and held up. We did the deal but didn't get paid. The money went into escrow, so we signed half our company away and didn't get a penny for it until that was on the Friday until the Monday when the banks reopened.
But we went home and I literally had a curry and a Cadbury Creme Egg. Because I like Cadbury Creme Eggs and I just wanted to treat myself to a Creme Egg. That was a really weird way probably to celebrate.
Did you celebrate?
No, not really. No. That was my celebration: I had a curry and a Creme Egg. But I don't drink, I don't smoke. I had a security business years ago, so I don't really want to go out to nightclubs. I can't, if I'm going to talk, I like to be able to talk. I don't want banging music over me and stuff. Yeah, I don't really do celebrating as such, not in that way. I should do, but...
That's what I kind of learned was that the distance between one accomplishment or one major life achievement and the next is so far. It's almost like I can liken it to climbing Mount Everest. You climb the mountain for, say, I don't know how long it takes, let's say 30 days, and then you spend 10 minutes at the top.
Yeah.
Really, like 99% of life is in fact the climb. We are not very good, for whatever reason as entrepreneurs, at celebrating the steps up the mountain because they seem so gradual and insignificant. So I'm trying to actively teach myself to get better at celebrating the journey because, as you said earlier, the mountaintop for me probably doesn't exist.
No. And at some point, are you worried about having to come back down?
As in, how would you mean? As in failing or selling out?
Either. Still coming back down. Because the problem is the higher the high, the lower the low.
Of course. It's going to be one hell of a fall from the top of Mount Everest. I don't actually worry about failure, and this is probably because our businesses are slightly different in a sense. My business—we sell a way of thinking and ideas. It's less tangible.
We make stuff.
Yeah. I feel like we're slightly less dependent on like distribution and wholesale and retail, and we haven't got these big boys that are powering over us that can shut us down and... that's a bit of a worry creeping into us.
So I actually—and also because of where I come from—this business was started like two miles down the road in a boarded-up house. I was there for every day of that climb. The thought of me going... I was happy back in that house. I was as happy then as I am now. 100%.
Me too. Not in the house, I wasn't there, but the same!
You know what I mean? So if you take me back there, I know I'm going to be happy. And I also know I've got way more of what really matters inside my head than I did when I started. So I'm like, well, take me back and it'll be quicker and it'll be... and I'll do things so differently. And I enjoy the journey; the start was always for me the most enjoyable part as well.
So I'm not scared of it. I don't want to go back! Because I think the hustler slightly changes in you. You still work and give everything, but a different type of work. I'm not scared of going back, but I wouldn't want to.
No.
I've seen a lot of photos of you and Richard Branson.
Okay.
I feel like—I don't know Richard Branson, but I've read his books—I feel like you share a lot of traits, specifically with the whole fearlessness thing. Because every time we mention something—even the fact that you fly a plane—you're very just like, "Right, it's in my head, now I'm doing it."
Yeah. Just do it.
Where does that come from? Does that come from somewhere?
It's so easy, isn't it, just to be scared of everything and just to do nothing. Actually, my dad's a lot like this. He worked really hard, and I guess he worked for himself, so he took risk, but he would always look at the downside potentially. So he never really encouraged me to go and do more. Not in a bad way, but if I'd have just gone and been a van driver for him, he'd have been very happy for me because he could understand that. He could see you do it; he'd know what was involved.
Whereas if I'd say, "I want to go and do this, this, and this," the first thing he'd say would be, "But what if it doesn't work?" And you think, "Yeah, but what if it does?" And I think we probably get that a lot. Don't get me wrong, you don't want to get fearlessness mixed up with just blatant stupidity, being reckless.
But we went into the US—like I said, my wife and I on our own to sell product. The first thing we did before we actually got there, we went to one of the big fitness shows, which was the Mr. Olympia. We went over there as consumers before we took the brand there just to see what we were getting into. We went in and we thought, "What's everyone else doing? If we rock up and do our thing, and we're going to bring a tank in, and we're going to bring in the best team we can get from the UK, are we going to make fools of ourselves?" And we decided, you know what? There's no one here that scares us. Not in an arrogant way, but you've got to have that sense of fearlessness because if you don't, you'll just never do anything. It's just so easy to say no, and then you say no to everything your whole life and then you have regret and think, "Oh, I wish I'd done that." I can't think of anything I wish I'd done, to be honest, other than maybe wishing I'd done the same things but sooner. So yeah, I'd say to anyone: if you're going to go and do it, just do it. What's the worst that can happen?
That was a great point. I want to get some more advice from you based on your business experience and your success.
I'm not successful, remember!
As your "journey so far"! You've been successful so far. It's funny that we can't...
The "journey so far."
From your journey so far, what are the key pieces of advice you would give to an aspiring entrepreneur? Someone sat in their bedroom right now listening to this with an idea that they've been considering but they're umming and ahing. What would you say to them? You're speaking right into their ear, sat in their bedroom or on that train or at work. What would your advice be to get them to go from thinking about something, umming and ahing, to where you're sat right now?
For me, just do it. But commit to it; don't half-do it. I can only speak for myself and it depends what the idea is and what the person is like and what the downside could be if it all went horribly wrong.
Let's play a game. I've never done this before. I'm going to pretend to be that person, and I'm going to rebut you. I'm going to rebut you with everything that I hear in my direct messages and emails. You've just told me just do it. I'm going to say, "Well, I'll do it like next year because I don't have enough money right now and I need to pay my rent, and also my mom has told me that she needs help because she's got an illness, so I need to provide for her. So I can't."
How will circumstances be different in a year's time? How will you have more money or time a year from now?
I feel like I'll be ready then.
But you're not ready now?
I don't feel like I'm ready now.
It sounds like you don't want to do it. So if you don't want to do it, you shouldn't do it.
But I do really want to do it because I've seen a lot of people...
Have you got time to do it?
I work a full-time job in a call center.
So you've got your evenings and you've got your weekends. So you can make time if you want to do it. Is there a way you can do it so you can test the water somehow? Can you do it somehow part-time? Could you involve your mom in the business somehow? Is it something that she could help with?
Maybe. It's like, I want to start a hairdressing salon. So it's probably going to be hard to do it in the evenings and weekends. I really, really want to do it though.
Can people come to you evenings and weekends, or can you go to them? Can you be mobile? Does it have to be a physical site? Rather than commit to a physical site, can you build up a client list and go to them and do an amazing job and get them to tell their family and friends so that you can go to them as well, and actually build up a client list so then you can have your own location then people come to you? Is that a possibility?
I just don't know where to start.
Are you cutting anyone's hair at the moment?
I do my sister's and her friend's.
So she's got friends. How many clients is that?
About eight girls in total.
About eight. Okay, so you're doing that. And do they come to you, or do you go to them?
I go to their houses usually.
And that's evenings and weekends?
Weekends predominantly.
So do more of the same. You're already doing it. Now you just need to expand it. But looking at it the other way: what does good look like? What's the dream? What would you like to have?
§02Transcript — part 2
I want to own the biggest luxury salon chain in the country. I just don't know where to start because I'm cutting their hair but I've only got so much time on the weekends and...
Hang on a minute. So what else do you do at the weekend? What's more important at the weekend then now than you taking a step towards your dream of having the global chain of hair salons? What else are you doing at the weekend? You wake up, it's Saturday morning. What are you doing all day? You've got all day to do whatever you want.
Netflix.
Netflix. Okay, there you go! So you do have time. You just choose to spend that time doing something else. But now there's just excuses creeping in. So do you have time to brush your teeth every day?
Yeah.
Okay, so you find time to do that. There's nothing wrong with starting off small. Everyone starts off small. I started off small. When I had my distribution business back in '99, my first sale was five pounds. I lost money on it. I drove over a box of flapjacks about a seven or eight-mile round trip in the back of my car to leave it in a gym for him to pay me two weeks later. So I had to make two trips to make five pounds. But that was the first way I got my first gym. I ended up supplying hundreds of gyms. You have to start somewhere. Everything you do from this point on should be a step towards that goal, no matter how small. Because at the moment, working in the call center and watching Netflix is not a step towards that goal. If you want that financial freedom and you want to change your life, only you can change it. It's not going to change around you.
I think that's brilliant. I don't think I talked you into it!
I'm going to come back in a year and he's going to be a hairdresser!
I'll probably be out of a job now! But that's literally the narrative that I hear all the time: "I really feel like I want this thing," but I think you've hit the nail on the head—actions don't align with the goal.
Yeah, they don't. And it's so frustrating! Let's rewind 10 years. We're doing the podcast. I haven't started Grenade yet. I come to you and I go, "Right, I want to make a fat burner product, but I'm going to put it in a grenade bottle so it really, really stands out. But the bottle doesn't exist, so I've got to go and make it. And then there's only me and my wife, and we haven't got any money but we've got four cats and we work really hard. But the really the endgame is well, I want to take on Cadbury's and I want to then learn and we want to supply the military and we want our fat burners, then we want to take all the fat burner technology and we're going to make protein bars. No one's eating protein bars at the moment, but we're going to make everyone eat protein bars. We're going to put them everywhere. All the locations where you'd never find a protein bar, we're going to put them in there. Everyone's going to love it. We're going to go all around the world and it's not going to make any sense but we're going to make an absolute fortune and someone's going to come in and pay hundreds of millions of pounds for it." You'd probably go, "Al, what are you smoking?"
I would have definitely not invested!
But you'd have been wrong.
I would have been wrong, and I definitely wouldn't have invested. I think I would have never discouraged you at that point because my belief was...
Because I'm bigger than you!
You're significantly bigger than me! But also, in my head, the first thing my brain thinks is it doesn't really matter what you've said you're going to accomplish in that case. All that matters is *you*. And I don't—at that point I wouldn't have known you.
I wouldn't have even cared.
You know what I'm saying? But that's a huge ambition, and the pattern that I've seen with successful entrepreneurs is a lot of them have big ambitions, and at the end of the day it just comes down to the person.
Do you know what? While you were saying that, one of the best attributes anyone can have—over and above education, financial means, luck, just about anything else I can think of—personality. How many times do you meet someone... because actually I'm just me, like you're just you, so you don't—you kind of take it for granted because we're us.
But actually when I meet people I've known for 20, 30 years and they go, "Oh, we always knew you'd do well no matter what you did" because I'm just the type of person to go out and make it work because I'm determined and irrational and lots of other things. But personality goes a long way. That's actually one of the things I learned from working back in the gym back in the day 20 years ago: personality goes a long way. Having a decent memory... and you know, we had 500 members and I knew everyone's first name.
Really?
And that's really important to people. It's good just to learn and memory's important, but you could see what it means to people, the fact that you've taken the trouble to know their name. Some of the things I learned there for free—interacting with people, learning what people like, don't like—all this stuff we actually put into the brand in some of the simplest forms. Firstly, making it really memorable, because all the weight loss products at the time had all got really silly names that no one could remember.
Having something simple. All the competitors at the time were like 12 capsules. Well, I knew from talking to people in the gym that people forgot to take capsules or just didn't like taking capsules. So we thought, "Well, why is it 12? Why don't we make it four?" So it's just back to that point of learning all the time. Personality is key.
My take on that and why personality would be so key is because, as I've said a few times, the only thing that really exists in the world is other people. There's not physical barriers that are going to stop you from being successful. In my mind, it's just a bunch of people that you have to convince of your ideas or your products or get to love what you've created. Personality kind of links to the mover of these human obstacles, which is sales. Being able to sell your product, your brand. And personality, as I can see from you, if you walked in and I was the managing director of Tesco, because of your enthusiasm and your love and your energy, I'd be pretty into it. I'd believe in what you were telling me.
That's hopefully the first win: hopefully being likable, or even just being memorable. If you're not likable, just being memorable. But I think then quickly followed up with doing what you said you'd do and doing it well or, again, exceeding expectations.
That conversation has actually happened with Tesco recently where we've now got a six-year relationship with them. Stuff that we said we'd do, we've gone and done and we've done it better than they thought we'd do. Now we've got some credibility with them and, more importantly, some trust. Trust is one of those really infallible things that's either there or it's not. People say, "Oh yeah, well I trust him 90%." You don't trust them then! You can't trust someone 90%; it doesn't make any sense. Either you do or you don't. It's back to my black and white thing again. They said, "You know what? If you say you'll do it, you'll go and do it."
On that point, that sounded a lot—and I know what people, I think some people would be thinking—oh, that sounds like visualization. It's a big term in self-development and personal development, this idea that you can think something, you can want something. I've literally had—I'll tell you a story that no one knows, right?
I was in the back of a cab in New York. I'm talking to this girl that I just started talking to. This was a couple of years ago. We're sat in the back of the cab, and she's asking me how I created the business and things like this, and I'm just like, "hard work, etc., etc." She goes, "Yeah, you willed it into existence." I go, "What do you mean by that?"
She goes, "Well, you can think something into existence. You can think about it and then it appears." I was trying to explain to her that that's not exactly how it goes. You can't think without all the hard work. She was like, "Yeah." I got out of the cab. I got out of the cab in the middle of the street; we had this massive argument in this car because she genuinely believes if you just think about something, you can make it happen. There's this book called *The Secret* which has kind of influenced people into thinking in this way. I wanted to get your take on that.
It reminds me of—I don't read many books, because I don't really have that much time, I'm ashamed to say. But there's a lot of these kind of—I'm not into self-help books and all these, and that sounds like it's along that vein of, "Yeah, just think about it and it'll happen" and positive thinking. Don't get me wrong, I do think negative thoughts are probably toxic, so you should avoid them and try and have positivity. But positivity's great, but it's not going to get you out of lots of situations.
There's been a lot of this, "four-hour work week" and "take control of your life" and "you can make millions of pounds but you only work three hours a year" and all that stuff. I just don't get that at all. I don't know anyone who has built a meaningful business, no matter how—and I'm not talking about in terms of size, whether it's your local butcher's or a global media business—that hasn't put in a lot of sacrifice and hard work and had the timing and the headwinds that we talked about. I can't think of one. I can't think of someone who just woke up one morning, had an idea, didn't really do it very well, and then all of a sudden it was just ginormous, they made loads of money and then everyone lived happily ever after. I just don't think that's happened.
Even if you look at the likes of Amazon and the stories of Jeff Bezos in his first desk was his door and all this. Surely, I just—yeah, when people start talking about the power of positive thinking and self-help and they take away all the things we talked about like consistency and timing and hard work and stuff, yeah, I'd rapidly tune out as well to be honest. I think I probably would have... I wouldn't have let her back in the cab! I'd have let her take her chances in the Bronx.
It's so frustrating! I completely agree. I believe that positive thinking and knowing where you want to go matters. But I liken it to getting in a car: you set the sat nav, but then you turn the key and drive. Just setting the sat nav leaves you in the garage.
Yeah, it does. I think we might have been separated at birth! It's entirely likely, definitely. But if you're just standing still, you're learning nothing. So it comes back to that learning piece again and just doing it really. We'd always really try and encourage that.
I get asked to look at and invest in lots of businesses, and so far I haven't actually invested in any businesses because, first of all, they mostly want some time, which I don't have. I don't necessarily see that many people who I think are potentially that investable. Nowadays as well, because crowdfunding's been a thing and people—it's probably easier now than ever to obtain funding or obtain money, even if it's just the "three F's" (friends, family, and fools) to get them to invest in you.
But people almost go off and start investing money, but they don't actually use their *own* money, or they don't take a risk on their own money. Someone said to me years ago with business, "I've always used my own money. It's always been my risk; it's been on me." If it went wrong, it hurt me and no one else. And that I think now is quite rare. People do like to go and borrow money from as many people as they can, but then if it doesn't work, it doesn't hurt them. You do need people to have skin in the game.
Businesses I've looked at over the last few years, they just don't have enough skin in the game. If it... there's almost no incentive for them to do well. We *had* to do well because we put everything into it. There was no going back. If I had to go and dig holes in the road for 10 pounds a day, I'd just, you know, hand me the shovel. I'd just start digging. I'd finish the day with 10 pounds more than I started with, and at least while I'm doing it, I'll be thinking and learning. I'll be thinking, "I don't want to do this for the rest of my life. How can I not dig holes for 10 pounds?"
I get the fact that people get caught in ruts and stuff as well, but people should be holding themselves accountable for if it goes wrong.
We can talk all day! Let me ask you one more question then. This is more of a little bit of a game. Dinner party question I ask a lot of people. There's six seats at the table. Two of them are occupied by myself and you.
Okay.
There's four seats remaining.
I'm not sure I'd invite you!
Well, it's my house!
Yeah, okay, so we've got no choice. I thought it was *my* dinner party!
Fine, but I'm cooking.
Are you ordering the delivery or Uber Eats?
There's four seats remaining. You can invite anybody to those seats, dead or alive. I'm going to make a few rules. You can't, unfortunately, invite your wife on this occasion.
Fine.
Because she's vegan.
And you're cooking steak!
She's not vegan?
She's not vegan, fine.
Oh, she's not. No. But you can invite anybody dead or alive. Who would you invite and why would you invite them? Just what are those names that popped into your mind?
You start to gravitate towards people that I know and I respect. I'd definitely ask Richard, I'd ask the big man Mr. Branson. Just because I never, ever, ever get bored of talking to him. He's got 50 years of business experience, and he's just a thoroughly bloody nice bloke.
What's the one thing you've learned from him?
Oh, I mean, definitely about being yourself and humility. He has got this amazing energy that anyone who is around him just picks up on. It's incredible. And just the fact that he really cares. I've seen him—he's just genuinely concerned about people. It's actually quite miraculous to watch. They say don't meet your idols because you'll be disappointed, but he goes far and above what you'd actually expect as one of probably the world's best-known people and most successful people. But again, he doesn't consider himself successful.
Frankly, I just don't know how he does it. I don't know how he crams everything in. That's quite remarkable. So definitely him.
One of my first early mentors that no one's going to know, but is actually a guy called Stuart Sapcote. I used to train Stuart when I was 15, 16 years old; I was his personal trainer. Again, he taught me—and he didn't know he did this—but again, wildly successful guy, very, very low-key, so no one would have heard of him. Big property development business. Again, really, really nice guy, and he just always looked after me and sort of treated me like a son, really. Got lots of good advice, always very honest. And again, I saw with him how to treat people and how to behave. Still kept in touch with him and his wife. So I'd invite him. And again, him and Richard would get on.
In terms of other people—these are going to sound really obvious—I'd have to invite Jeff Bezos.
Really?
Yeah, I'd have to invite Jeff Bezos.
What do you admire or like about him?
I mean, again, just the ability to disrupt, transform. I learned this week, for instance, all the things they've done that have failed—and there's a lot, and they have spent billions on stuff that's failed—and just the ability to just fail quickly and plow on and disrupt and put the consumer first. And again, starting off with an idea of just selling books, and then now it's just everything. It's just insane.
Doing that in like 20, 25 years—it's pretty spectacular. Don't know what he's like as a person, I don't know if he'd like your cooking! But I think he'd be very interesting to get into the mindset. Again, I like to meet people and see what they're like because if you read a book, for instance, that's been ghostwritten by someone else, you never really know. You want to look in someone's eyes, don't you, and just... that emotion. Yeah, you pick up on that. So I'd invite him just to be interested to know what makes him tick. Plus him and Richard would argue about space because they're big space competitors! So that would be fun. If the food was bad, we could literally sit back and just watch the two of them just tear chunks out of each other! Which again, actually Richard wouldn't do because he doesn't get annoyed. I don't know if Jeff does, but I think watch them have an intellectually competitive conversation would be good.
How many have I got left? I've got one more seat. Okay. I'd invite my mom.
That would be interesting.
I'd bring my mom just because she wouldn't get a lot of the conversation, but she's really lovely. Stuart likes her, I think Richard would like her. And I'd like her to sit back and be proud. I'd really like her to be proud.
So I think we'd like to eat your food and then... I don't think it'd probably sink in with her, but if we sat there with her son and Sir Richard and a few other people... She wouldn't know Jeff Bezos was. That would be quite funny because she tells us, "What do you do?" And he'd say, "Everything." And he'd say, "I own a website" or whatever. She'd go, "Oh, it'll never take off! What if it doesn't work?" That's what she'd do, yeah! And we'd all be laughing. And she'd carry on anyway. My mom's a very, very, very slow eater, so it would be a very long dinner conversation. Hence, we'd get maximum benefit out of everyone else there.
What's your mom taught you? If there was one thing you think... because I can think of when I think of my mom, there's the overarching lesson I think that she taught me. What's the one thing that you think your mom taught you?
Definitely hard work. Yeah, real grafter. Compassion, you know, really caring. And you know, did a great job of raising me and my sister with just, you know, very little means at her disposal. I remember when she was... we were having quite a hard time as a family and she said, you know, if she had to work her fingers to the bone, she'd make sure we're okay.
And you know, when I was 12, I really wanted like a Sega Master System. It was the computer system at the time, which actually I just went and rebought a couple of weeks ago! It's like 30 years old now and it still works. I went and bought—because I sold mine which I regretted—so I'm buying back my childhood stuff! So I went and bought another one. But she went back to work—because she couldn't, my mom's got quite poor health, she's got osteoporosis—but she actually went back to work to save up to buy me that games console when I was like 12.
I'd like to say I felt bad at the time, but I probably didn't, but I feel bad now! So it's fine. I bought them a bungalow! So it's fine, yeah! I swapped a games console for a bungalow, so they've got a bungalow in Dorset. So I did that. But yeah, I'd like to think I've made them proud.
Thing is, mom and dad as well are proud of no matter what I did. All mom's ever said is, "I just want you to be happy." So and because I've always been happy, she's always been proud. So as long as you're happy... But um, yeah, so there you go, there's the six.
That's great. Thank you so much. Many of the people you'd invite to the table are the same that I'd invite. I'd definitely invite Richard and Jeff for sure. genuinely deserve all the success that you've had, even though you won't admit you've had success. And it's good to know that people like you are getting what they deserve out of life because that's not always the case. But thank you again for taking the time to come up here, because I know how busy you are.
No, I really wanted to make it a priority because likewise, and I'm not one of these... I don't tend to follow many people that I don't know or haven't met, but every time I see some of your stuff on LinkedIn or whatever, I always watch it because it's always profound. And it gets back to that learning piece: I always want to try and think, "you know, I want to learn stuff," because very different businesses, different stages in careers, but we'll have a lot of the same issues and problems. It's really interesting to learn. So again, thanks for the invite, really means a lot.
Thank you so much. Thank you.
Thank you.
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