Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kj6ZssVhzW4
why am i doing this i'm doing this because society wants me to do this i'm doing this because my mates want me to do this it's a [ __ ] that's not going to happen and i think it you showed that little boy inside was just like ruined by it sorry it's still quite emotional [Music] what an amazing story what a cruel amazing twisting career my next guest has one of the most fascinating journeys through business and through life that i think i've ever heard she spent her life surrounded by a couple of people that that i actually consider to be inspirations of mine one of them is sir david brailsford who's been the sort of elite performance coach and cycling coach for team sky which went on to win more than they were ever expected to win he's the i guess the author of this this marginal gains thinking which changed how business and sports teams function the other person she was surrounded by throughout her career is steve peters who a lot of you will know from the book he authored the paradox which redefines from a psychiatrist's point of view how our mind works and where our behavior comes from and the other male figure in her life that's important for the story you're about to hear is her brother david miller who was this incredibly sort of highly regarded cyclist british cyclist who had this cruel twist to his career where he got involved in the doping scandal which really left a stain on british cycling as we know it and david miller recounts the story of him being sat in this this cafe shop with david brailsford and being tapped on the shoulder by three men wearing suits who would then raid his house and find syringes and that was one of the key moments in british sporting history where i think in many respects things have never been the same and we always view our elite performers with an element of skepticism but this is fran's story and fran's story is one of tenacity it's
one of success it's one of jumping off cliffs and figuring out how to build your skydiver as you fall her story is inspiring it's peculiar she went from starting her own business to spending i think 12 years that team sky worked her way up to the very very top and when it became team ineos she became the ceo leading a predominantly male dominated industry and then out the blue in the middle of a pandemic when retail was on its ass she decided that she was going to change lanes and become the ceo of bell staff which is a brand that has been struggling that's been making losses and then was then kicked up the rear end by covid she's brave she is unusual she's inspiring she's tough she describes herself or at least she respects the idea of being a difficult woman something we'll talk about so without further ado i'm stephen butler and this is the dire of a ceo i hope nobody is listening but if you are then please keep this to yourself [Music] fran i i've done a lot of stalking of your your history your past your professional career and uh i was stalking your twitter feed the other day and i saw a quote that you'd um you'd written i guess in in honor of your brother um david who is a a world renowned professional incredibly accomplished cyclist and the quote said following a boy who loved it so much he got absorbed into the fabric of it and has spent a lifetime carrying the weight of the cruelty wonder brilliance and tragedy it would bring him um is ultimately what got you into the world of cycling i was slightly taken aback by some of those words cruelty wonder brilliance and tragedy can you explain why you chose those words oh it's a big opening question um yeah i mean listen my brother was was unease a very talented guy he was we were so when we were about 10 and 12 my parents got divorced my dad
went to live in hong kong and my mom stayed in the uk i stayed with my mum my brother went with my dad and so when we were like kids we'd cross in the air so he'd come home from hong kong i'd go out to he'd come home i'd go out and he had nothing to do when he was here because we'd moved so we had no he had no friends around so my mom entered him into a cycling club um and he'd go and he'd do the time trials he was super good at it by the literally from like 15 to 19 he'd gone from never really riding a road bike to being like courted by nine of the biggest teams in the sport and he got signed very young by a big french team and they kind of made all these promises to my mum about it and he was obviously you know he was a kid he was desperate to win the tour de france and to go and fulfill his dreams and he totally fell in love with the sport and he was completely enamored by it and in the space of five years he'd gone from this excited talented you know brilliant kid to this damaged incredibly sad deep deeply deeply shamed young man and it was like how has a sport done that like how is this is it it's a game right like sports a game it's entertainment how is that something that's fundamentally to entertain people basically ruined him like taking him down to the core of who he was and it just and then he built himself back up and he's you know he's gone on to do incredible things but it was just a the sport has had this unbelievable impact on my life on my brother's life on my life on everything the decisions i've made and everything else i guess that's why i chose those words give me some detail on you talked about the sport bringing him down to his core and ruining him what caused that ah so he went into the sport in 1998 he turned pro which for any of your listeners who know anything about cycling was the festina year so it was the year of the big fastina scandal where they raided all the hotel
rooms and the guys all kind of protested and sat down on the road and only a few of the sort of teams were able to finish because so many guys got pulled out of the race and it was it was the dawning of the epo era so it was the era where they discovered effectively athletes and coaches had discovered that you could use epo in the same way they used build to use altitude training to perform to increase physical performance um and it was just a transformative drug it was they couldn't detect it they couldn't test for it and they brought in some interventions like a hematocrit test so if your hematocrit went over 450 you'd be pulled out of racing but it was a it was a health check it wasn't a doping check and it was rife basically so when he this young sort of dreaming kid went into the sport he he genuinely thought you could do it clean you wouldn't ever have to cheat i don't even think he really knew that much about doping at that point in his life and pretty quickly he realized that actually most the guys at the very top were doping that the doping was endemic that the expectation was you were dope that that was what you would need to do if you wanted to be a professional and you wanted to be any good and he resisted it for a really long time like he he was a time trialer which is you know race against the clock basically only racing yourself and so he really stuck to his time trialling because he was like i can do that like with the technology with aerodynamics with focus on my training it's a shorter period of time there's less requirement to kind of be as cardiovascularly supreme as the guys who are trying to win the tour are um and so he did very very well time trialling went to his first tour de france and won yellow like day one um and but but what was happening was behind the scenes this sort of erosion of his belief that he would be able to do it clean his his recognition that actually if he if he really wanted to take it seriously
and try and win the tour he was going to have to cheat the people around him that the kind of network and the framework around him was people who weren't looking out for him weren't thinking what's best for him weren't trying to work out how to make help him fulfill his potential they were trying to work out how to get him good enough to make enough money to win you know for them as a business he was a commodity in their business um and i'd like i haven't actually ever told this story but francois mcgrane who owned coffee's which is like a company that basically does telephone loans i don't know what they do now probably you know online loans but um he had he met my mum so when we had all these teams that were sort of courting david he met with my mum and he promised her that he would look after him like promise looked looked her in the eyes and said i'll look after him and and yet he did nothing like he he built a team that was allowed to just get on with it he sort of closed his eyes to it and actually when the big investigation into cofferdie started it was francois mcgrane who effectively called out my brother he was like i think moncuti is probably clean but david miller i wouldn't put my hand on my heart for him and it was like you [ __ ] do you know i mean like yeah and you and he he's 24 years old like what he's the only exposure he's had the professional support is your team so if that's what's happened it's your team and p don't get me wrong david absolutely has to take responsibility for his decisions in that but i for one know that when i was like 19 to 25 i wasn't making the best decisions i've made in my life and i had some influential people around me who had they told me to do things or if and it's that insidious thing isn't it it's a bit like kind of i was listening to a book the other day about um decision making and you know how if you look at like nazi germany and people say oh they were just following orders
and there was this big study done apparently where they put people in a room and they told them like there's going to be some there's going to be a student in there it's a study i can't really anything with my gran or someone who did the study and you're going to press this button don't worry because to shock them and the shock's going to get bigger and bigger and bigger and it's like and 65 of the people would have pressed the button that would have effectively killed the person in the other room and it's like what and that's the human condition right so this idea that we that we would make a better decision or we'd make a better choice or that we'd do it differently people seem to impose that on guys who decide to cheat in sport or decide to make these like well how dare you make that decision it's like if you were in an environment in a culture where that becomes the norm where that becomes what people do this idea that you're going to be the one person who and don't get me wrong i know there are other people who do that and fair play to them that isn't that's impressive you know that you've been brought up in a certain way to enable you to make those decisions but david was he was fragile he was impressionable he was a dreamer he was doing something he'd always wanted to do he was passionate and desperate desperate desperate to to be a success and i think he just got taken down the wrong path you know and you do you feel like you went through that with him as a close family um i'm trying to understand the impact i had on you being the sister and i know you you guys are very close yeah i mean the impact it had on me was i was he never he never came to he went to my mum and told her that he was dating and and they they they sort of she just said well just stop just come home like don't worry about actually you know sort of at the very beginning he said there's a lot of drugs and my mom was
like well just come home go to art school don't worry about it it's just cycling um and yet he stayed and he persisted and then i think when he was in 2001 when he eventually made the decision to kind of cross the line as it were he he had he spoke to my mom i think in that period and she was just like you you know you have you have to stop you have to come home and he was like no i want to do you know i want i want to be successful i want to go on this journey he never had that conversation with me all i ever saw was the kind of it was like an erosion of him do you know me it's like i could tell something was going on i wasn't an idih i mean it's like he's probably he's probably cheating but he we had all been indoctrinated into it as well it was like well that's kind of you turn a blind eye you kind of think well you know he's he's doing really well he's you know on the cover of all the magazines he seems happy-ish and it was only when he he'd come home in the off-season and he'd come come and stay with me and my mates living in london and he would he would drink so heavily that you'd be like okay this isn't normal you're a professional athlete and he would the the depressions he'd sink into and the self-loathing that he that would come out and it's like in vino veritas you know that kind of this and i'd be like what on earth is going on here and then eventually it kind of you i realized what was happening and i kind of felt responsible for never stepping in and saying something and never being like you don't need to do this i was just like well you know if you're happy and you're enjoying it and you're doing well who am i to judge kind of thing um so i think as a family it kind of bonded and pulled us apart like we kind of we all turn a blind eye to it i think we've all got our demons to deal with from that perspective um my dad i think was had a very different view of it all my brother and my dad sort of
you know have have an ongoing difficult relationship my mum and my brother are very close i'm very close to my dad and my mum but you know so as a family we've kind of it it's definitely created divisions because everyone had a different view of it and then in terms of the impact on me i went into cycling i ran my own cycling agency i was working in the cycling industry i totally rode the coattails of my brother's success and i was like [ __ ] okay now it's all gonna come crashing like he got arrested and put in prison and you know i was like oh god this is not ideal and i literally remember speaking to him afterwards and he'd just come out of you know 48 hours in custody and he was like and i remember it being like a week and a half before the tour and he said to me don't worry france um they're still gonna let me ride the tour you know you're like oh it still makes me want to cry because it's like david they're not gonna let you ride at all that's not gonna happen and i think it you show that little boy inside it was just like ruined by it sorry it's still quite emotional but yeah so it just it just impacted everything it impacted all my decisions because at that point i was then like [ __ ] now i've got to go into the office the next day and i've got to stand in the velodrome events and i'm david i'm not david miller's sister the kind of glory front cover of the magazine i'm that i'm the sister of this shamed cheating lying horrible human being who no one likes anymore and who has disgraced british cycling and is is a you know he he's like a complete social pariah and i'm like oh [ __ ] okay now i've still got to go and do my job and did you feel that you felt your judgment and yeah massively people would re and it was in the days of forums you know like my forums were a really big deal and i'd be like okay i'm just going to have a little bit of a look on a forum and see what people are saying and i'd see people i work with
commenting you know people who were at the velodrome who were like doing the timing at my events or and they all you know literally like people wishing him dead but you know it was just like it wasn't cool and yeah i really felt i felt it for him i didn't i wasn't embarrassed because i was like you know it is what it is he's made a set of decisions he's paying the price for it um but it was at that point sort of about six months after that i was like okay i probably can't represent him anymore because if i have to have another conversation with a journalist an ignorant journalist about this kind of binary right or wrong conversation where you're like this is not how life works i'm gonna end up punching someone in the face so i should probably stop doing that speaking of punching people in the face no um i had it just that felt like a good turn towards one of the things that i saw you share online which was this article about being a difficult woman and the importance of um dispelling this sort of like niceness aura that women typically um are associated with in business that i think the article was suggesting holds them back how important has that been especially you know when you were dealing in an industry which is pretty much full of men and you got to the very very top as the ceo of ineos how important was it to be willing to punch people in the face being a little bit difficult at times as is such an interesting question because that whole being a difficult woman i think is the older i've gotten the more i've kind of explored feminism and explored kind of the sort of female condition the human condition it's like women are judged very differently for for behaviors that in men would be seen as completely normal so you know there's a sort of famous kind of meme that's the sort of you know men are assertive women are chippy you
know men are confident women are arrogant you know it's like the same behavior gets viewed very differently to a very different lens i've never filtered myself it's not been anyone who's ever met me knows that i don't really come with a filter and i think it's really really important that young women recognize that they don't have to apply a filter you don't have to be the quiet one in the room you don't have to i remember reading um cheryl sandberg's book about lean in and it was like um you know when young women will come into a meet room and they won't sit at the table like they physically won't sit at the table they'll sit back at the sides and i was like [ __ ] off who does that and then i'd go to meetings and i'd be like i've noticed that like the 19 20 21 year old younger women in the room they'd wait for the guys to sit down they'd be like what the [ __ ] are people why are people doing that and it you just until you realize it's happening you don't realize it's happening and so yeah i've always felt quite strongly that you just need to be yourself be confident be willing to get get told you're a [ __ ] get told you're and don't get wrong when i was younger i was actually a bit of a [ __ ] i probably i probably didn't um measure that behavior i was a bit like well it's just who i am and everyone needs to suck that up and actually you still have to be polite and have manners and you still have to recognize that being aggressive is actually just sometimes being aggressive it's not being assertive and that balance i think i've learned as i've got older but i think it's yeah i think women are judged totally differently for behaviors that men would be absolutely it would it would almost be uh sort of respected in a man for certain behaviors and in women it's it's reviled there'll be there'll be young women listening to this and they'll be thinking you know i'd love to be like that fran and i'd love to be a bit more you know assertive and etc etc but i just you know it's just
not who i am and so kind of the question that popped into my mind was where did that you know some might see it as confidence but it's like a confidence in being your true self right where did that do you know where that came from in you was it you know is there experience is it something happening in the household is that your mother was taught you that behavior your father yeah i think it's probably half nature half nurture like i think i i you know my mum tells a story about when i was little and i said you know i'd just literally go off and speak to people like she she'd be sat at you know the bar you know on a holiday and she'd want to know what's going on with a couple over there she'd be like francis go and ask them what they're doing you might be like okay and off i'd go and chat to them so i think i've always been very innately confident and that doesn't that's never gone away um but equally i think i've been very lucky i've been very blessed i've worked with people and in and around people where i've been allowed to be myself i've been allowed to kind of grow up and make mistakes and fail and be a bit of an idiot and get told you're being a bit of an idiot and not not have that be a judgement upon me and limit me um and i think it's really interesting that kind of you know being assertive or being being your true self has become a bigger and bigger thing that people talk about and actually being your true self doesn't mean you have to be assertive and confident it means you have to be your true self and for a lot of people that is a bit more insecure or a bit more and that's fine but you can bring that to the table you can be an emotional person you can be lack a bit of self-esteem and just be honest about that so for me i think it's just partially how i was brought up but more the people i have been surrounded by on the journey of my life and career i've been incredibly blessed that they have allowed me to
make a lot of mistakes and correct and course correct me as i've gone on that that point about being assertive and being direct and being open and honest you know what um i was actually chatting yesterday about one of the how i've changed over the last 10 years from like the kid at 18 to the kid at 28. and the the key thing i said to my team is like the big change that i've seen on myself is i'm way more direct yeah and i'm not sure why i'm doing that i'm like i don't know whether it's because i've got so many things to do that i'm trying to save time at all times um i'm way more honest with my feedback and there's this sort of fine line between being an [ __ ] and being honest and direct and trying to be time efficient and like realizing that sometimes your feedback or the way you say things might hurt people's feelings but that's secondary to what we're doing here um how have you toed that line i imagine from what you've said it's more difficult as a woman to to because people will you know they'll they'll determine the same behavior to be a really negative thing but how do you toe the line between being like direct and firm which is so important in my opinion when you're dealing with teams and especially if you're dealing with teams of uh you know high testosterone testosterone men how do you toe that line and and also i guess the more important question for me is do you agree that it's an important trait to have okay so have you read a book called radical camber it's up there on my bookshelf somewhere but i've not read it yet okay so yes i do think being honest is important i think being a [ __ ] to people is not acceptable and so i think i i think honestly can get veiled sorry being a [ __ ] can get failed by i'm being honest right like well i'm just being honest and it's feedback and you should take it it's
like one of the sort of best lessons i've ever been taught and one of the most influential people in my life by a mile is steve peters um he's a forensic psychiatrist yeah and he always says like you have to be compassionate like even if you're telling someone they're losing their job or you know if you're having to give someone really honest be compassionate be be sensitive to the fact that you're going to get a better response from someone if you're just nice to them you know you can say some really really shitty things to people and it get a horrible response or you can say shitty things but get a really positive response back because you do it in a different way so i think it's really crucial to be honest it's really crucial to be authentic but that doesn't mean you get a license to be a [ __ ] and have you is there a place for aggression and anger and being annoyed in business in your view no not not ever uh well you can you can feel those things but i don't think you can inflict those things on other people no i don't think that's acceptable it's um it's remarkable how many of the world's most sort of admired leaders when you read their biographies and stuff you find out how much of a [ __ ] they are like steve jobs was a good example where i was told you know from a friend that they basically had to put him in his own building and warn people that worked in that building that you know the way steve was and elon musk in his biography is is very very similar but uh the reason i asked you about radical canada is when i read it it made a lot of sense to me about about people like that so that she basically describes this quadrant where effectively you've got how much you care about people and how sort of willing and honest you're able to be and so if you're very very honest but you don't care about them at all
then you you're basically an arrogant [ __ ] and if you really really care about them but you're really really honest then you're radically candid but if you really really care about them and you're not honest then you're kind of it's almost like a malignant empathy do you know me it's like i'm going to be really nice to you but because i'm not going to be honest with you you're not going to develop and so that for the first time and she said in a business it's better it's way better as much as it's counterintuitive to be the arrogant [ __ ] because actually the feedback is what's important so if people are getting the feedback and they're being told the truth they are like some people might be able to handle it but the people who can handle it will develop and get better it's worse to be empathetic and not be honest than it is to be an arrogant [ __ ] and i was like oh that's why there's so many arrogant [ __ ] in the world because actually it does work like on the and genius you know it forgives a lot right when people are geniuses they can behave very differently and they get away with it because they're geniuses and there is merit in that and i think if people are very very very honest with you and give you brutal feedback as long as you're like able to take it on board you'll get better but if someone's lying to you and saying you're doing a great job stephen don't worry about it it's absolutely fine because they don't want to hurt your feelings you're never going to develop that's true you you switched from working over to bell staff um quite relatively recently um and i was reading i think i was listening to one of the the podcasts you've done and you talked about how you'd worked in cycling pretty much your whole life it was your pretty much your everything in terms of your professional experience um i've also recently quit my job and uh how does it feel uh everything you feel everything right you feel
you know it's bittersweet you feel excited on one hand you're unsure about the future but i trust myself enough to know that i'll figure it out because i always have um but yeah all feelings um i guess my question for you is and the bit that i found particularly interesting is people will do a thing for ten years for five years whatever and then they'll tell themselves that they are that thing they'll like give themselves the label i work in cycling i'm a cycling person yeah it seems to be incredibly difficult especially if they've been in that industry for a long time to then take on a different label you're now working in fashion and it comes with a whole new set of challenges completely outside of your comfort zone to some extent in some ways how did you make that switch how did it feel tell tell me all about it um it's again i'm going to reference steve peters but i remember because i was so wedded to my job in cycling like i lived and breathed it i loved it i cared deeply about the people it like had this it was so wrapped up in my identity but i hadn't necessarily got a huge amount of satisfaction out of the job over the last two or three years for a whole host of reasons nothing to do with the team just personal development wise and every time i spoke to steve you'd be like well then why don't you just leave i'd be like because i don't know who i am if i leave the cycling team do i mean and that was a much longer conversation than that but what effectively i was saying was i don't know who i am if i'm not that and he he said over and over again you will be whoever you go on to be that's not going to change you are still there you're letting this thing influence all these views about yourself you're letting it influence what you your value your worth your you know your sort of substance your contribution to life like you're letting it's a job it's like it's a job and i was like you don't get it
you don't understand it's more important than that and you know what when i got asked to go and do bell stuff and i left and it broke my heart like i cried my eyes out and i started a bell staff and i i sat feel awful saying this but within 48 hours i was like oh my god i love it here and i love the people here and this is brilliant i'm so excited and actually it is just the job that was just the job and yes i miss it and yes it was incredible and yes i loved the people and i still love the people but it's just the job it's not my family it's not who i am it's not my identity it's just a part of my life and i'll be eternally grateful for having done it but now i've got a new challenge and i was like i'm really pleased i did it when i did because everyone i think had been saying to me for a long time you know once you leave you'll be like oh i should have done this five years ago and i don't feel like that at all i feel you know i did that for the right amount of time i loved it i've banked it moving on to something else and it's that point there about thinking that that job was your identity that i think really like holds people down yeah um because you're right jobs are they're fat friends they're community they are purpose yeah as you say they're your identity um and that's dangerous like that's dangerous you know because actually they're not they're not they're not your identity and no matter how much you love it no matter how passionate you are about it if you it then this would be the lesson i would sort of give to myself the sort of it doesn't matter it's a job you're being paid to do it it's a job and and i would have railed against that even a year ago like no it isn't it's more important than that and you know as soon as you as soon as i left i was like yesterday and my brother always you say to me your team aren't your family your team aren't your family and i never really understood what you meant because i thought well they are my family
like you know what i mean i love them they are my family and they leave you like oh no what he means is your family are there forever your family are wedded and you can't un-pick your family they they're something that's whereas when you leave a job you take away the memories you take away the happy times to take away the good stuff but you're the fabric of who you are doesn't change and that's what i try and do i just finished writing my book on there's a chapter on this idea of labels and me trying to resist these labels to make sure that i continue on my journey of challenge and keep myself you know stimulated and i don't get to you know a certain age and feel like i'm having a midlife crisis because i don't know who i am and i can't leave and i don't have any skills um and to really sort of realize that the label i have is me it's like steven i'm a guy with a bunch of skills and experiences and i can apply these skills and experiences to a bunch of different challenges i'm not social media ceo you know what i mean yeah and that i find really liberating so i quit i started djing we're doing this pokemon this theatrical play i'm just trying to do all of the things that i think i shouldn't be able to do right but speak to me about the challenge so you you decide to take this job at bell staff and it is a big challenge it's it's widely reported that bell's staff has been it's had you know struggled across the years it was recent it was acquired and i think 2017. it was making losses then and the losses of i think narrowed over the last couple of years to some extent but it's a big challenge right a big challenge it would have been much easier to take a different job so first and foremost i didn't take it i was i literally had a conversation with my chairman ineos um about you know maybe maybe over the next couple of years i want to think about moving on and doing something different and when we when dave b comes back from the
tour this was in september so when he comes back from the tour at the end of the season i think i'd like to sit down and have a chat with my chairman and my boss dave about my future that was the sum total of my conversation and literally a week later i got a call saying jim would like you to be the ceo of old stuff and you know with the best one in the world when jim ratcliffe asks you to do something you don't kind of go let me have a think about that and i just thought okay well what an opportunity and and i went for it but i didn't i wasn't looking to change i wasn't i hadn't like planned to move on so that was in some ways whilst it was quite traumatic sort of three or four weeks of because i literally i got phoned like on the 16th of september and i was enrolled on the first of october wow so it was like yeah like two weeks of just why did you want to have the conversation though when they've got back because i wanted to so i wanted to i'd sort of been thinking like i said about the conversation with steve about kind of i'm not sure if i'm happy doing this job anymore and i'm not sure if i'm fulfilled i've kind of reached the point sort of middle of last year where i was thinking you know what i do need to start thinking about my future in my life and my career and i don't know whether that's always going to be in cycling and i don't know whether the ceo of the cycling team is 100 y1 so i wanted to speak to my chairman first to kind of sound him out and then when dave gets back from racing i don't want to interfere with the racing have a conversation about my future so i just literally put it on the rate the radar of the german i'd probably be a little bit out of frustration for myself as well but like i want to feel like i'm moving this on because otherwise i'm going to sit and not do anything with it do you know what i mean i'm going to did you feel stagnant yeah in the role is that the main the crux of what you're
getting at what was the person if i can relate uh i think i felt so i had done what was effectively 20 years in pro cycling it would like you say it was all i knew it's all i'd done i know everybody in it pretty much you know i've been in and around it my whole life i'm david miller's little sister it's like you know part of my dna we got we and i loved being part of team sky like we did that for 10 years and it was i sort of always say cup in the middle like blue blue and i absolutely loved it and then when skye said they were out at the end of 2018 i was like right i'm done i'm out of here i'm not going to do this anymore so i went straight to baby i was like it's been amazing i've loved it but i'm gonna once the team stops being sky i'm gonna go and he was like okay cool i don't think he believed me he was like okay cool and then we he said to me look would you help at least find a new sponsor let's see if we can find a new sponsor he's a bugger like that so i was like okay i'll try and help you find a new sponsor and then i'll move on and then you know february comes 2019 you know he's he meets jim jim decides that he wants to acquire the team you know he jim's arguably one of the most successful businessman in the world we went and met with him and talked about you know the design of the kit and everything else and i was like i'm gonna get sucked into it um and then and then one of the other senior managers in the team decided to leave and go and work for another team and debbie was like would you stay you can be ceo which was what i really wanted to be it's a massive opportunity and i was like okay i'll stay and i think that was the point of the decision there that i was like you know this is a big career decision to me that i'm staying again i told on my mates i was going to leave i was like you know this is it this time this time i'm going they're like okay um and so i stayed at ineos and then we worked on the one five nine project so elliott kip togues up to our marathon
and dave obviously was the project lead on it all he was the ceo my boss um but he very sadly got prostate cancer in that period so he was off doing the tour de france then he had to go and have surgery and so i took on like a deputy ceo role kind of delivering the sort of vision that he'd come up with and he structured all the performance team but then i was doing the delivery of the event everything from kind of working with the london marathon team to supporting the performance guys to doing all the engagement piece and everything else and i loved it as i felt like i was working 18 hours a day for like what was about five six weeks in the build up to the first of all the test event and then through into the actual event and i just loved it totally different totally new challenge new people different approach fresh it was i was like i was on literally cloud nine i couldn't have loved it more and i was working so hard like i was literally crippled by it but i loved it and i came out the other side of it not so much just because we've done it obviously i mean that was incredible but it just really made me realize that i was just going through the motions in in the cycling job i was just i was ticking over i was really comfortable i was good at it i loved it i was happy i liked the people but i wasn't growing i wasn't developing i wasn't learning new stuff and i wasn't kind of and i'd been going at a million miles an hour you know sort of in the team like on all these stuff where i was helping other people develop and helping other people achieve their potential and helping other people kind of you know rescue their reputations or enhance their and i was a bit like what do i want to be doing like why am i i'm not none of this has been about me and even actually cycling is a little bit about david you know what i mean i was on kind of this journey to sort of save young british talent from going through what david went through and it's like actually what do i want to do
maybe i want to do something different and that just planted a seed really and i think i probably went this way to the gym and you know if i'm honest i went because i thought i want to go and do something different i'm ready i'm ready to move on i'm ready to do something that's not this anymore and it was all it was almost like a kind of involuntary i think everything else about me was like just stay because it's comfortable and it's easy and you get good money and it's you know nothing's gonna nothing but that's gonna happen but my like soul was like you've got to you've got to go and do something else now and it was literally like in the space of two weeks it was like boom i'm i'm out of here so it was that see it almost identical to me in the sense of something niggling at you and then for me there was like a trigger moment where i was like i was like sent an email yeah yeah yeah and then you just send it and then but that idea of being able to throw yourself into uncertainty it's like throwing yourself off a cliff when you were like cushy in the house on the side of the cliff and you was like oh my god i'm gonna jump and you're throwing yourself off into the unknown in in the hope that so you'll build your glider as you fall and then land somewhere better and a lot of people can't do that like most people can't do that how do you how did you feel though about because because i found it really traumatic like i kind of i felt like oh first of all i felt quite out it was like i'm out of control of this now i literally said goodbye to my team who i'd worked with for 10 years and got on a train woke up the next day and went into bell stuff and like hi i'm your new ceo and i and that the trauma of kind of all of it it felt i had to move out my house i had to go and do say goodbye to people do have a different email had the same email my whole life like all that kind of stuff it just
doesn't shouldn't be that important but felt really significant how did you feel did you find it traumatic or not so i i'd already i'd quit business when i that i was my baby as well when i was i started business 18 quit that one when i was 21 so i'd been through it once before so when i earlier when i said the key thing for me was trusting myself i've done this before i know the feelings i know that i don't know what my future holds but when i did that when i was 21 it led to this even bigger business that was 200 times bigger and 200 times more successful so that was that's been this guiding thing in my life like i dropped out of university after one lecture and it worked out so when you have those case studies you think you know what i have no idea what the future holds but i'll back myself to figure it out now and um that's because i've done it like three times before so i imagine the next time in the future if ever that you decide to jump ship and build stuff or whatever you'll have that case study or that evidence in yourself that you've been yeah and that that i think will calm you a little bit the first time i quit i was all kinds of emotions and worrying and not sure what i was now and all those things but slightly easier the third time i'm a bit of a prolific quitter i think it's a really underrated skill yeah people talk a lot about starting as if it's the be all and then and end all of success but quitting is the thing you do right before right you start something new so yeah yeah i've been a heel fan for a long time as you obviously know by now but in the last six months i've got a real opportunity to get to know the people to get to know the ceo of huel which is james to get to know the founder which is julian the teams that agonize over the ingredients that go into these amazing recipes and i can honestly say with my hand on my heart my appreciation and admiration for huel and its people
has multiplied by a factor of 10 because and this is these singularities not only are they nice people but because i've seen firsthand how much they are non-negotiable about the values of fuel they will not compromise they will not compromise on the the goodness of the ingredients that goes into the products the amount of proteins and minerals and these things regardless if they can't get to where they want to get to with the products they will cancel the product i've tasted products and they said we've not managed to make it this we've not delivered on our promise of veganism we've not added enough fiber so we're canceling it and that sort of non-negotiable set of values has made me realize that they have my back when i choose you i was reading about this winning behaviors role you took on which is a very curious title yes it is what was your remit as the head of winning behaviors that team ineos so it was it was when it was team sky okay um same time um so basically 2010 we first started racing we started the team and he was begun the journey of starting the team in 2008 off the back of the beijing games started racing in 2010 we were [ __ ] like embarrassingly [ __ ] and we've been like smoking mirrors and like you know we're kind of we had the big bus and we had all the money and we were sponsored by sky and it's like oh we're going to be amazing and we were rubbish so we totally reset everything and dave beats be fair to him he's like a master of okay we're going this way it's not working we're going somewhere else but he's he's incredible assay and so he totally shifted the way that we're going to run the team we took a totally different approach we started to be very successful in 2011 we'd obviously set the objective when we announced the team that we were going to try and win the tour de france with a clean british rider in five years and that was in start 2010. bradley won the tour in 2012. so within the space of two years
three years effectively we've done it the following year chris froome won it and we had gone from being this team that was like on a mission like heads down arses up and we were going like there was nothing was going to stop us we were full-on and so when people sign up to that you know people are signing contracts in 2010 with a team that doesn't exist that has never raced on the road before that comes from a track background that's full of brits who aren't historically that famous for road cycling they were they were signing a kind of you know they were they were adventurers right they were like these bold ambitious this is a bit batshit crazy but we'll do it when people were signing contracts at the end of 2013 they were signing with a team that had won the tour de france twice that was arguably the most dominant team in the sport that had gone on you know sort of achieved this inc these incredible feats and they had a different expectation of what they were joining to what we were and we suddenly realized that actually if we were serious about continuing and continuing to be successful codifying what got us where we were was going to be crucial and we'd also seen for those of you listeners who are cycling fans we'd had the bradley wiggins and chris rooms kind of divide so brad had obviously come first in 2012 but freemiu had come second bradley didn't even bradley never rode the tour again so bradley didn't ride in 2013 from he did and he went on to win and he started to see this divide in a team where it's like well i'm team bradley or i'm team freeman is like no check your paycheck your team sky and that that kind of actually who are we what do we stand for what do we expect from people what do we need to be able to do to be the best in the world of this needed codifying and it needed it needed a way of a sort of charter almost to tell people this is how you're going to have to do this and really it was about eradicating losing behavior it was about saying to people
bitching backstabbing saying you're team through me or your team brad or you know criticizing people behind their back or whatever that's not acceptable but you being head of losing behavior would have been [ __ ] so we called it [Music] so it was all about creating a set of behaviors for the organization that enabled us to say to people this is what it means to put this jersey on this is what it means to be a part of this team it's not just about you know the glory and the winning this is hard graft this is you know it it was arguably the hardest thing i've ever done you know working in that environment it's it is unrelenting it is i mean it's brilliant and it's amazing and incredibly good fun but it's hard hard work and you've got to go all in you know this isn't this isn't for the faint-hearted and so the whole winning behavior thing was about creating an environment where we could give people the parameters that we expected them to live by but also ensure that they felt supported safe able to deliver their very best in an environment that is actually very high pressure so that was my job effectively helping dave create the behaviors in the first instance with the whole team and then helping keep them alive within the business what were some of those you mentioned a couple of them there about not being a backstabber and understanding the importance of hard work what were some of the other um let's just focus on losing behaviors some of the some of the traits or some of the threats to success that you'd see in the team i'm thinking this from an organizational standpoint as like yeah that's worked in business so we separated them into five different areas we had self team um communication continuous improvement and uh what was the other one oh it's gone anyway so quickly how quickly you move on right um but the the so they were t itself was all about identifying your own
managing your own emotions being in control of your own emotions so a losing behavior of that would be losing your [ __ ] you know being aggressive and arrogant with people not being able to recognize when you were too emotional to be in a high performance environment we have this the whole chimp model you know steve's philosophy around that is there's nothing wrong with being emotional there's nothing wrong with having a chimp but you have to know when to get out the room if that's what's going on don't bring your emotion into an environment where you're expecting people to perform at their very best so that kind of management itself absolutely critical and then team was all about the impact that you have as a team member you know i think people kind of think teams this kind of static thing that you create a great team and that's it it's like as you all know having won six very successful businesses teams like these organic ever-changing you know you could bring one person in and have a massive impact on the team you take one person out it can ruin a team do you know me so they're sort of the dynamics of a team and your role within that are crucial so you know not wearing a team kit you know wearing a slightly different trainer you know um criticizing the team not buying into the sort of collective opinion not sort of dave b has this really big thing about he'll listen he'll seek counsel from everyone he'll listen to everyone's opinion he wants to get to collective opinion he wants to get to a collective view of what the right direction is but ultimately if we can't get there he'll make the call and then you've all got to be on the bus non-negotiable if you sit in a meeting room and you agree with something and you say yeah okay whilst i don't agree with it i buy in you know what i mean i've given you my point of view you've said it's not the way we're going to go but i buy in and then you walk out the room and you're like i don't know if i can buy that that is
that is the one of the worst losing behaviors you can have because it's insidious and it it goes around you know a whole organization can be destroyed by a is like a virus so things like that fascinating i am you don't do a lot of public speaking right you used to haven't done it for a while now actually yeah but like white collar crime i think sometimes but yeah so i i sort of i used to love doing it like i really did used to love doing it but i've also i feel like the bit that i talked about which is some of the stuff i've just said i feel like that's a bit of my past now and i want to build a new build a new path for myself before i figure out telling people about it if that makes sense yeah so i don't want to take talks on social media anymore if i can help it to be honest for the same reasons yeah i mean you talked a lot about dave as well so david brailsford um and very fondly i think a lot of your tweets from my stalking were were centered around him and things that he was doing yeah what are some of the the key qualities of of him that have made him so successful and his mindset or you know oh big question i mean him and steve peters are the two most influential men in my life without a shadow of a doubt um you know they they are symbiotic because they are i think if dave hadn't had steve he maybe wouldn't be who he is and i think his steve hadn't met dave he maybe would be a slightly different version of himself so they they complement each other brilliantly dave is is a brilliant man manager he's he's incredibly visionary he's very brave you know you said the thing about jumping off a cliff and hoping you get your gliders you put dave's like the king of that dave's like we're gonna go we're gonna go and achieve that and everyone's like [ __ ] off and he's like come on let's go and he and people are like okay because he's so he's so bold with it he's so confident with it that he and he's an incredible leader that people would literally i mean i would have followed
that man off the edge of a cliff and i think that he has that quality in him you know he's unrelenting you know anyone who's working he's difficult you know like all geniuses are he's a he's a tricky guy he's why um how maybe is a better question in all kinds of ways you know he's very i think i've spoken about it on other interviews i've done he can be very um he can be very particular he's very detail-oriented he's he wants to know all the facts before he makes a decision he'll he'll go out he'll like go after something for age ages and you're like oh my god makes a decision i'll get on with it and then he'll make a decision that's totally off to the other side and you're like oh so doesn't make sense yeah or it's or it's brilliantly genius because you think oh all that work that you were doing and the decision i would have made and just got on with it and made the decision would have taken us that way and that would have been the wrong way and it's and it's that kind of you all the way through my career with him he would do that and i'd be like it's just he's just clever like that you know he's he's ferocious appetite for learning he unrelenting work ethic you know expects incredible sets incredibly high standards and expects people to meet them and all people can right no absolutely and he'd and you know we openly say that it's not all people can there's nothing wrong with not being able to meet them you've got to be compassionately ruthless you know that's what he always says which is basically if you're not if you're not you set a standard and if people can't meet them then they're not in the right organization and it's best there it's a bit like the arrogant [ __ ] it's better to be honest with them and say you know what this isn't for you than to kind of allow them to keep failing i think that can be very cruel to people
you know if they're in an environment they're constantly trying to be better but they just can't do it that's yeah you talked a lot about when we were talking about winning behaviors about this important about high work ethic and you've expressed that dave has a relentless work ethic as well um you you've probably observed how this narrative around hard work has become somewhat toxic over the last couple of years and now i i you know almost feel bad sometimes when i'm what i'm saying that i don't know how i would have been successful in what i've done if i hadn't have worked hard in fact i don't really know anybody that's really successful in their discipline or their sport or whatever that doesn't work hard so i know we're not trying to give anyone depression and anxiety by saying that you know they have to be a hustle porn star they won't be happy but i still can't get to the point where i will tell anybody that hard work doesn't matter yeah it really really matters to me and it's i can't imagine and you know what i was in the gym last night and i was thinking sometimes words really mess people up right so this i like when people say work they think of me on like a in a factory like or in like like i don't know in a mine hammering some rock all day but i was thinking because i enjoy my work so much imagine if i just changed the words of my hard pleasure yeah you know what i mean yeah yeah can you have too much of hard pleasure um it's interesting as you were asking me the question i think that my respect because i actually i similarly read something that you'd written about you you feel a bit of you feel a bit bad that you sort of hear heroes the kind of i'm working yeah they're kind of 18 hours a day and i'm going out about it yeah bragged about it yeah and and i sort of think i get it i get why people feel like that
and i think there's a difference between being exceptionally busy and working all the hours god gives and thrashing yourself and all those sorts of things and working really hard with purpose they're very different you know what i mean and when you're working really hard with purpose and you're passionate about what you're doing and you love the people you're working with and you're enjoying the the sort of striving for the achievement there's no shame in that that that's for me that's absolutely part of motivated ambitious people that's what you want them to feel and people used to know what's something in the work life balance there isn't a work-life balance my work is my life and i make no i make no sort of excuse for that i love it i'm passionate about it i enjoy it i have it's hard pleasure you know it's brilliant and i like the challenge of it and like you know i chose not to have kids i don't have a partner it's it's the passion point of my life is my work and that's right but that doesn't mean i need to be you know not going out and seeing my mates it doesn't mean i need to be up until midnight tapping out emails you know i mean i can still i take days off i you know i live a normal life but i work really really hard i've i've also struggled in the relationship department yeah and surprisingly never you know been that good at relationships i've never been able to hold a relationship down um i can't really see how it happens necessarily i hear you talk to me about that part of i was gonna call it sacrifice but when it's somewhat intentional yeah when you're aware of it it's hard to call it sacrifice just doesn't motivate me i know that sounds awful i'm not motivated to have somebody in my life i'm not motivated to be like i want a partner i want that companionship you know we when i arrived we were chatting about how this
environment that we're all living in actually i i love being on my own i i'm very happy in my own company i'm very passionate about what i do and i think that fulfills the space that maybe other people have other that have other passions for right and so yeah it's never been a it's never been a goal of mine i've never dreamt of the white wedding i've never wanted to and there's never a bit of me that sits at home and thinks i wish i had someone to sit and watch television ever that doesn't doesn't even cross my mind and my mates are always like do you not get lonely or do you not worry and i'm like no i feel like i should because it would make you all feel better but and you know about five or six years ago because everyone was on at me all the time i'd like did a bit of dating did some internet you know use some apps everything else i was like this why am i doing this i'm doing this because society wants me to do this i'm doing this because my mates want me to do this this is [ __ ] uh if it's right if it's right it'll come if it's not it won't did you did you date at all throughout the last i guess decade did you here and there but it's like kill me you know kill me now you know that kind of small talk oh god it's like my idea of hell on earth going and meeting a stranger having small talk slightly awkward with kind of one end game do you know what i mean and it's like and i'll know within two minutes of that end game's happening and then i'm like i don't really need this bulldog for an hour and a half yeah we don't need to dress this up so yeah no i just yeah it just never yeah i did a little bit but it's not it's i'm not looking for that and i think if i'm looking if i if i wanted if i wanted to get married if i wanted to get into a relationship i could and i'm not i'm not adverse to it but i'm just not out seeking it and i i think you get what you look for right yeah so other sacrifice um i don't think it's a sacrifice by the way yeah generally i need it no i i do you know what the reason why when i
was younger i wouldn't have thought it was a sacrifice and then i started reading all this stuff about the importance of like you know 18 19 and 20 even 24 year old steve would have thought you know i don't need to [ __ ] anybody and i can just i'll be fine i'm a lone wolf yeah and then i fully went for the whole recluse thing like wholeheartedly and i was broke so i had no choice anyway so i was broke and i was just not this renegade that was determined to build build businesses and then i started reading some stuff and it talked about the importance of like meaningful connections and relationships and i realized that i didn't really have those and if i was going to become wildly successful then it would just be me and my louis vuitton bag set up inside of my house and i and then and then i started to change my perspective and thought steve you know what you need to create a little bit more openness or balance towards that stuff so i tried a little bit more but that doesn't i see i see i have incredibly meaningful relationships and incredible connections i have my friend i have like five or six friends who are my world i mean i'm incredibly close to them they are they're kids they're you know my god children i feel very very connected i don't feel isolated in any way i don't feel like i'm missing out or sort of not having to and i actively participate in the lives of my friends kids and in my friends lives and i think that that's my connection that's my tribe you know i mean they and you know i would go to war for them and it's it i just don't think that that added bit of a companion for me right now you know i'm not saying not forever but i'm not sure that bit for me is something that i need and i think that it's that there's a difference there because i do agree with you i think you should absolutely have to have connection
the human condition is to feel connected to feel part of something to to feel you know sort of the that you'll have a purpose within your community and i think having your own community and having your own tribe is crucial i don't think that needs to be through companionship with one other human being there's a pressure that you talked about the societal pressure you know and i've got to be honest right i'm going to be completely honest because i would be really dishonest if i didn't say this i have been guilty of when i have a friend who is struggling in that department feeling like i need to help them because again that's my own world if you pressed upon them i'm thinking well in order but in order for me to be happy i would need that so i need to make sure you have that thing right that pressure especially for women is intense post 30 and it causes a ton of anxiety i see it in my direct messages from strangers um not easy well it's interesting though so when i'm 42 now and the pressure drops away because i think you get to the point where people think it's rude to ask if you're going to have kids because they're like can you still have kids okay right fine you get to that age right but but certainly all through my 30s when you're going to settle down do you not want to have children and i and i feel very very lucky that i feel the way i do i've never really had a biological clock that's ticked ever and i've never felt the need for companionship of one other person like i said my tribe is very important to me but and i think that's potentially biological so i think i'm lucky i don't because i do i have friends who you know they would they're desperate to meet someone they're desperate to have children they're desperate to move on to that bit of their life and i've just never felt like that so it and i feel very lucky because of that because i think if i'd have felt like
that my whole life would be very different does nurture play a role in that because i know it did for me yeah my my parents were toxic for each other like watching my mom scream at my dad for seven hours a day every my mom's like this african nigerian woman and that the this decibel she's able to achieve is like gold medal worthy she is unbelievable at shouting right and she can do this amazingly high energetic scream for seven hours a day without flinching and i watched that as a kid growing up my dad sat there this passive english man who didn't say a word ever and this african woman just just torturing him with this loud sound and me thinking like the lesson i learned was relationships are prison and for this is the lesson i like for a man you are trapped and it's torture so any time when i was young like 16 a girl would like me and i'd chase her and i'd try and get her on the playground whatever minute she said she liked me deep feeling inside of me of like escape quick so i would like come up with all these reasons why girls that i just spent the last year pursuing why we were not right and we couldn't be together and she needed to leave me alone and i i didn't notice that until i was like 25 and then i started to work on that part okay but nurture does that play a role do you think in your views on relationships or men or whatever or women or whatever i think it probably plays a role in my view of having kids because my mum was adopted so my mum literally didn't know who her mom and dad was she was kind of picked out of an orphanage by my grandparents um and never hadn't until she had david and i had never met anyone who looked like her you know like we all you know connect to our families because we've got families similar features whatever she'd never had that and so my mum loves my brother and i with a kind of
wonderfully oppressive kind of dominate and it's you know she she just loves us with everything that she's got because we're we're for a whole host of reasons but also i think because we're the only physical you know sort of biological connection she's ever had and that love always used to scare me a little bit you know not from her but i used to think like i've got dogs and i worry about my dogs and i've got like nine god children i've got two nephews and a niece and the minute they get on a plane or they go i'm panicking like what if the plane crashes what if they die what if it's like i can't handle it and i'm like jesus if i'd have had my own kids that would i wouldn't have been able to handle the that amount of love i know that sounds ridiculous but i think that always played quite a big part for me that i was like the responsibility of it the constantly having to worry about it the constant all of my female friends who have kids they live in a state of almost permanent anxiety because they worry about their kids all the time in a in a love way you know it's like that wrong love you have for a puppy um but and i don't think i ever i've never felt that i wanted that in my life i never thought that i needed it and i never felt that i wanted it i always felt quite like no i'm good i've got the right amount of love going on in my life i don't want that additional responsibility and burden in many ways of having something that is always ever present and and would cause me i think quite a lot of anxiety is that in part because you have so much responsibility and naturally honestly worry that comes from your other love in life which is your career yeah for sure yeah because that's the way i feel it's like a kid as well i really have yeah yeah and it's why i don't think i need a companion because i already have i get so fulfilled from my job i get so i get so much from that and so much from
kind of working in and around people and having that kind of i've got the community of my friends and the community of my work and i think those those two things i find very fulfilling so the idea of having a companion or children or anything else in the mix of that didn't really ever appeal to me in interest i mean i was i was engaged to be married when my brother got uh served his band say 2004. and i've been with the guy for like i don't know seven years and i remember like moving into our how we bought a house together in shepherd's bush and we moved into the house and i remember like vividly putting the key in the door turning the lock and thinking i don't want this like i don't want this i loved him to bits he was an amazing guy but i was like i don't want this kind of i don't want to be in a normal life with a normal husband and a house and kids and i just didn't want it i wanted something different i've got a tattoo that says a lifeless ordinary i just wanted to just do it differently and i don't know where that came from but i've had it my whole life that kind of i just don't i just didn't feel the need to conform to society's kind of pillars overcame you go to university and then you're going to get a job and then you're going to meet a guy and then you're going to get married then you're going to have kids i was always like not interested any idea why no and i'm fascinated by it because i feel very blessed because of it because it's like i say i think it's it given me a freedom that a lot of people don't have had you wanted it had you wanted that you know you know the typical life that society says people have to live and followed all the timelines and milestones do you think you would have been able to achieve as much as you have i was in my head my ego was going i would have been amazing at it i'd have been like a boss um no because i don't think you can i don't i you know
i'm i'm a feminist i'm a you know i'm absolutely passionate about equality i'm passionate about women's ability you know women can do anything that men can do and should have the opportunity to do that but i equally don't think it's possible to have it all i really don't i don't think you can have and i know there are women who do and perhaps off to them i think it's incredible you read about these women in the city who've got like five kids and they're ceos and it's like fair play to you but i couldn't do that because i would feel constantly compromising and i don't like compromise and you're obsessive a little bit in terms of your focus i don't like compromising i yeah i probably am obsessive makes it sound a bit like it's it's i'm not in control of it i'm in control i'm aware of what i'm doing but it's a bit like i so i'm we were talking about having a peloton and you know i kind of feel if i'm going to go all in on my fitness and my health and get lean and everything from my 40th i got like down to 65 kilos i was like a boss and i was like all over it but then i was a bit like crap i've got to do my job as well and i sort of feel like i'm i'm not great at doing having two or three focuses i can i can go at one thing and be brilliant at it but if i start adding in layers of complexity like i can stay on top of my health i can stay on top of my fitness but i can't if once i start going down there right i'm gonna get super lean i find it hard to manage my work do you know what i mean so i don't know there's obsession or whether it's just my opinion i'm myopic sure yeah if people were to you know people they read about you online and they say you've been the ceo of this amazing sports team you ran your own agency before that you're now the ceo of bell's staff a lot of people especially young women are going to think that's exactly what i want to do they're going to think that's amazing there's always a disclaimer that comes
with all of these things what is the disclaimer in terms of the cost of the success you've achieved what are the things that you know if i'm you you would turn to me as a as a young aspiring ambitious person and say by the way before you follow in my footsteps here's what you need to know you know i wouldn't have fun because i think yeah i really wouldn't i i feel exceptionally blessed i feel really i love what i do i've loved the journey i've been on like all the mistakes i've made and like i said at the beginning you know i've been very very lucky to be allowed to make all kinds of mistakes and then not follow me around it's like i've been kind of carried and supported and encouraged to to fail and to try and to do stuff that other people just wouldn't have got the chance to do so i'd be like no go for it like don't don't worry about it like don't worry about [ __ ] up don't worry about making mistakes let's get on with it what would you tell me though that i had to have in terms of my qualities would you say okay well if you're going to follow my footsteps then you're going to need a little bit of this and a little bit of that it's so hard isn't it stephen because you can't follow in someone's footsteps that's true it's impossible and that's the thing i think that people you know i would say you can't you can have your own footsteps and you can go into your own thing and jesus if someone says to me at 25 this is the career path you're going to follow i've been like there's just no way there's no way i could tell someone how they're going to do that because it's bonkers i explain to people some you know people like oh you know tell me a bit about your background and i i hear myself saying it i'm like that's bonkers so i don't you can follow in someone else's footsteps but i do think it's like
a bit like the beginning i was like you know just be yourself you know be nice to people be approachable take the opportunities when they're given to you recognize that sometimes things are scary and you're going to have to do it scared and actually change is sometimes the best thing that can happen to you and you know all those things that you read in cliche memes on instagram they're pretty much true you know what i mean it is it's and you've just got to take that approach in life because you're not going to get another one but it's not easy fran it's the stress of your job it must be pretty intense you're running now um a big company that's you know in the process of like sort of turning themselves around and kind of reinventing themselves to some degree and i know the stuff that you have to deal with because i've dealt with it yeah but i'm not curing cancer but it's i feel like a lot of it's relative right still big problems are big problems for relative to the challenge you're facing so like that's i guess tell me about that perspective though because a lot of people would be like oh my god that's a tough you know you're in a tough job and there's problems everything i'm so lucky steven that's the thing i think you're like i'm so someone you know an incredibly successful man bought a business three years ago and has said to me it's not working very well i i really like what i've seen you do in the two years i've been exposed to you could you go and run it for me it's like yes yeah i'll go and do that what a great opportunity and i'm and i'm just it's i just feel very lucky and yeah they're big challenges and you know brexit at the moment's bonkers and all our shops are shut because i've covered and i'm having to meet and work with new people but you know i wouldn't change it for the world i think it's i think i'm i think if you can and this is where steve peters has been so powerful because he's like it it's a bit about it not defining you you just just try your best dude and that was you
know what uh jim ratcliff actually text me i text and say thank you very much for the opportunity we're not friends we don't like hang out thank you so much for the opportunity this is incredible because i hadn't spoken to him about it at all it was all via sort of you know determined in the business and he just he just replied and said fran the only thing i can ask you to do is your best and you know when you're like the freedom of that the the op and that's what dave b has always been like he's like you can just do your best friend you can't there's nothing more you can do in life and i think if you release yourself of expectations and what's the standard you've got this don't get me wrong i did not feel like this for the last 10 15 years this has been in the last probably two years that i started to realize you know what what is the worst that's gonna happen like what's the worst case scenario here bellstar folds let's say or when i was in the cycling team we didn't win the biggest bite race or you know whatever as long as no one's dying as long as nothing's you know that as long as people are okay the people are okay i'm kind of i'm kind of all right with it you know it's just there's life and one of the things i mean i completely i completely understand i tend to believe that anything caring about anything beyond your best is like anxiety and worry and useless yeah it's like that mark twain quote isn't it it's like there's a men they'll spend their whole lives worrying about stuff that's never actually going to happen and isn't it that's what worry is because you're worrying about something it hasn't even happened yet or that sort of um there's a brilliant renee brown podcast where she talks about foreboding joy and it's this idea that you something really exciting is happening but all you're thinking about is [ __ ] what if it goes wrong so rather than
enjoying the joy of it the kind of you know she uses the example that she's on the plane to go to her first oprah appearance and she's like i spent the entire plane journey there worrying the plane was going to crash then i spent the whole car journey there wearing that i was going to make a mistake on the show or say something stupid then i spent the whole time in the green room worrying i was wearing the wrong outfit and at no point did i stop and think i'm going on oprah this is amazing and it's that isn't it it's like i think you can burden yourself with all this responsibility and all these kind of negatives and actually it's like we just want an opportunity why don't you try and flip it try and see the world in a bit more of a positive light and i feel like that that's something i'm really working on for myself because i just think like i say we only get one of them you get this one opportunity i've been very lucky there's nothing in my life touchwood that has caused real trauma or you know that i feel that i would go back and change and i think when you're halfway through that's not a bad place to be you took the job uh in the middle of the midst of covered yeah it was october the 1st first started october the 1st that's brave in retail i know i'm crazy that's well yeah yeah brave no but being positive being optimistic about it you're coming into this business and it's um i mean it's been smashed in all directions by all things um what's your what's your what's your what's your approach what's your strategy what are you thinking i mean at the moment well the first three months in the business i just wanted to get to know everyone there so i did one to one to everyone i think it's really easy to kind of go into business with preconceptions of what's gone wrong and what what you'd fix and i tried i spoke to all the kind
of mentors i've worked with over the years and said like what would you and they all gave me the same advice which was speak to people listen don't make any rash decisions you know wait get up get a proper plan but give it you know the kind of 100 days piece and initially i was like i don't need to do that and actually you just really do you know so i've just spent just trying to understand how it went and the other thing is understand the industry you know like i literally knew nothing about the other than i buy clothes i didn't know anything about fashion so so yeah so and now my plan is i you know as is always my ambition i want to do the best possible job of it i believe in bell staff as a brand um i think it's an incredible brand with an incredible history i think the product is amazing i think the design team have been doing a brilliant job over the last three years getting the product to a place that's really true to who we are as a company um and i and i would really love to take it to profitability and beyond you know i really i really believe that it's possible to do that and i think you know we're lucky to have the backing of jim and ineos to support us through what is going to be quite a significant period of transition and change but then i think we build the foundations for growth and go from there and retail's changed a lot yeah totally you know thinking about the high street and how you know in e-commerce and the internet now like there's anyways we saw debenhams being bought by boohoo and it's also just bought topman and some of the other arcadia brands it's a moment of transition that's been accelerated by this pandemic what's your thinking about the changes with in retail i mean god i'm so early to it you know but i mean i think like anything it's just i think it's accelerated what was happening anyway
right like the high streets were were dying people were moving online i think the rapidity of that change has just been you know it accelerated massively so people's behavior around how they're shopping was was on the cusp of quite significant change i think that change has flipped massively so you know people are much much happier shopping online even like an older generation who historically wouldn't have been i do fundamentally believe when we all start opening up again people are really going to want to go shopping you know and i think people are going to this idea that people aren't going to go to the shops i'm not sure i buy it because i think it's like yeah you want to get out let's go and do stuff even you might want to stephen there's always hope isn't that you know i see shopping is not actually for the purpose of shopping i see it as an experience and i see the internet as a place where if i almost the utility and shopping is like a thing to do right yeah so i do i do wonder if retail will will seize hold of that part and have the experience experience yeah exactly i think that it's going to have to because i don't think it's ever going to be there to be making money so i think it's going to be about adding on the experience of the brand for people particularly for our brand you know we we can create an experience and a story and a narrative that other brands maybe can't you have a 96 years old so yeah we've got all of that heritage that i think we can speak to so i think i definitely think that experiential piece will be quite a big play over the next few years this is a morbid question but i like to ask it sometimes i think sometimes are you scared of dying no no are you no i was when i was religious up until about 18 years old and then once i realized that i was going to the same place that i came from which was nothingness and peace it was quite a liberating feeling and i thought death was actually
i would dare i say not a good thing but um not something to be scared of interestingly i had to uh when would it have been so three three years ago i crashed my bike and landed on my head and i got like i mean for some reason whenever i crashed my back i landed either my face or my head and i landed on my head towards your brains it's just i wish and um our team doctor at the time was like because i'd got a bit of concussion he was like i think you should go and get a brain scan he's very over cautious so i went and got an mri and mike they've made my mum come up because i don't have her husband so after that that's the one downside actually to being single is that whenever you have to have like somebody come and look after you it's like mum i'm 42 years old but please could you come and stay at my house um so my mum had to come up because of the concussion i wasn't allowed to go home on my own and i got this phone call from a brain surgeon who had been given my mr they looked at my mri and they'd found all these patches in my brain and he was like there's these we've found is are you he rang me and he's like are you with someone and i was like yeah and he's like oh we've got yeah and he's like we've got a [ __ ] just tell me bedside manner he's improving um and he said um we've got your brain scans we've gone through them and they're we're seeing changes in your brain and you know when you're like but i've never had an mri so how can you how can you have how are there changes anyway long story short i've got all of these unusual patterns in my brain like patches that could be they were like they could be potentially the starts of tumors they could be just your i know right they could until you went through excuse me rude i had to go and like so i went with my best mate actually and go meet the brain surgeon he talked us through it and i mean she
it was one of those hilarious and horrible situations all at the same time because he was sort of going through because she she works the nhs and she's like what could what else could it be if it's not team as well could it be and he's like well you know have you ever been like a very heavy drug user and we're both like no and she was like yeah she was like this week lizzy we don't need to go into this he means heroin she's like oh yeah no no we've never done heroin um and so and she was asking all these questions and so basically i had about a year period where they weren't sure what it was they still aren't i still have them and it's symptom-based so they're like we could do biopsies and see what it is and i'm like nah you're all right um or or if i ever develop symptoms which would be you know sort of electric pulsing or anything like that and i think that period is quite good for me because it and it's probably where a lot of the positivity in there actually doing what you only get one chance thing came from because i i was a bit like [ __ ] if i have tumors kept growing in my brain that's quite intense and what does that mean for my life like what would i change like what would i do differently and i genuinely i remember being sat in my living room having everyone had gone home by this point and i sort of had had my first proper other ski it's like a two-hour mri which is quite intense and i was like you know i wouldn't change anything i would carry on living my life the way i live it now i wouldn't change anything i would i would probably go deeper and harder in some of the things that i really enjoy because i like my job and seeing my mates i would keep spending the money the way i spend it i literally wouldn't change anything and i was like and it felt it literally felt quite freeing it was like great this is this is good because i think a lot of people would get that kind of diagnosis and be like right [ __ ] what do
i need to do differently and i didn't have anything that i thought no i wanted i don't want to change but interestingly my my job has now changed and i think deep down the reason i had the chairman conversation the reason i was willing to say yes to this opportunity at bellstaff is had i maybe not had that incident and had all of that associated thinking and sort of bit of deep deep sort of soul-searching i maybe wouldn't i maybe would have said no it's right i'll stay at cycling but i just thought you know what [ __ ] it let's go and give it a try what an absolute blessing that is to know to know that you wouldn't change anything i think i am i have this sand timer is it behind me somewhere is it there it's usually sat behind me but the reason i have a sand timer in my house is because it's that sort of visual it's the only way you can really see time at some point i realized that um i was getting older and that you don't notice and that you can fall into the trap of thinking and as i think most people do that will just like live forever yeah and it's not until you realize that life is finite you have those those moments that you realize that you know like at some point i'm gonna die and seeing my time pouring away is that reminder of like is this important and am i making the right decisions am i living true to myself um and i wrote a little article about that called deathbed thinking which pretty much says the same thing which is that giving you that perspective of from your deathbed potentially you know what what really matters remarkable um i mean i'm so i'm so inspired by your story and every time i sit down with someone um who's become a success in their career or their you know step issue i i it feels like there's similar themes but so so different in so many ways what what does the future hold for you do you think do you know any ideas you're going to end up world domination right no exactly no i would believe you if you said that
that's the funny thing i took that seriously i don't know what the future holds and i don't really mind like i don't mind i sort of as long as as long as my family and friends are healthy and happy and as long as you know actually that's all that matters as long as my friends and family are happy and healthy and then i'm pretty cool with whatever the world throws at me i'm i'm sure it will be a laugh it'll be fun everyone else seems to need a plan no that's that's five year plan three year plan don't get me wrong i used to have five year plans but they're all hilarious when i go back and look at my five year plans i'm like oh i love how ambitious i was like where's that yacht i think when i was a kid i was very i remember actually when i set my agency up my best mate and i set it up together and we got a coach and we were about 22 23 and the coach was like right go off into separate rooms and write out where you want to be in 10 years time and then come back in and read them to each other and we were best mates like we lived together for like three or four years set a business up together he was dating my best friend we came back in and he and we had them base right like written on a piece of paper like holding from each other and he was like right i want to be running a successful business earning a good salary i want to be living in a nice house with a wife and three children um and i want to be healthy and happy and i was like oh [ __ ] you've done it you're listening i want a yacht and a chair i want to have loads of money yeah i was literally i had this like really materialistic list about wanting to be like successful in a global sensation and have all this money and all this cold 23 22 23 did you have stuff growing up material stuff yeah we were quite not i mean when mike was my dad my dad was in the raf so to begin with you know middle class but then when he left to go
to hong kong he went into civil aviation in kind of the glory of the expats so definitely very very lucky and i got you know business class travel everywhere yeah so it was pretty next level yeah it's incredible that you've wanted it for you it's so bad but now i wouldn't i wouldn't want that list now but it was just it was that really interesting like oh okay we want totally different things and i i didn't have partner i didn't have kids i didn't have a nice house anywhere i was like i wanted the i wanted the universe you know i mean i want to go over there and do something massive well you've smashed it fran and i'm sure you've you've been paid well along the way for that um money the money becomes irrelevant though right the money is not the money is just a great tool for helping my friends and family for doing cool stuff with people so having experiences i spend all the money i earn doing stuff with the people i love give me an example uh took my sister-in-law to dubai for her 40th birthday with my best mate we stayed on the palm with an amazing time i've sort of took my brothers back to hong kong for his 40th i take my friends on holidays i yeah i just go and do stuff with the people i love experiences i spend my money on experiences going and doing stuff seeing stuff but always with the people i love and none of my mates can afford to go to the hotels i go to so i was like well i'll just pay because i don't want to stay in a rugby showtime so i can relate well listen thank you so much for all of your time today it's been truly fascinating and even you know researching your background and your mindset has been um really really inspiring and energizing for me and i can relate to so many elements and the other other elements i'm just amazed and impressed by so thank you for your time i know you're incredibly busy person so it feels like an additional honor for you to have said
yes to come and chat to me today um and where can people find you i guess just you know these days it's pretty easy you just google someone's name but yeah i don't do i i have a private instagram and i do i'm on twitter but i don't really use it very often so and i'm rubbish with linkedin well if they want to speak to enough i'm sure they'll find me they'll find me yeah and thank you so much for inviting me it's been fascinating i've really enjoyed talking to you thank you thanks people ask me for book recommendations all the time and i finally got one for you it's a book called happy sexy millionaire which is authored by me i spent the last almost two years in jungles around the world in costa rica and indonesia in solitude writing this book it's the most important thing i've ever created and there's this crazy thing when you write a book because you spend so much time pouring your heart and soul into it and everything you know and all of the revelations you've had in your life and then there's this barrier which is that people have to buy the thing in order for them to get that thing that means so much to you i wish that wasn't the case it's just the way the industry is and in order to get that distribution and to get it on shelves you need a publisher so please please please if you can if you've ever liked anything i've ever produced this podcast my instagrams anything i've ever said read this book there was no ghostwriter i wrote every single word myself there's some real surprises in there it's an honest sometimes hilarious incredibly vulnerable hopefully valuable recount of my life my journey everything i've learned across across the way and really the answer to being fulfilled to being happy and to achieving success it is the most important important thing i've ever created so i implore you to go to amazon now or wherever you get your books and get that pre-order and everybody
that pre-orders the book because pre-orders in this crazy publishing industry count as way more than just a normal sale if you get that pre-order i'm going to put you into a group with everybody that's pre-ordered it and i'm going to send you some exclusive stuff so the first things i'm going to do is a series of voice notes which i think are um are going to be pretty powerful i'm going to give you access to some tickets which nobody else will have and i'm going to do everything i can to thank you for for giving me that sort of nine quid of your money whatever it is happy sexy millionaire you can pre-order it everywhere now and if you do get that pre-order please do dm me because i'd love to thank you myself [Music] [Music] you