Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jn5S-eX5twE
so you do something with greeting cards is that something you do from your spare room nick jenkins former ceo and founder of moon pig a company now worth 1.6 billion dollars my first proper business was moon big which although it's been a success of course it went through various ups and downs like all overnight successes it took 11 years i got to confess i probably slightly stumbled on it i look at it now and think wow that accidentally was a really good business model unfortunately we too often we measure the things that are easiest to measure and the easiest thing to measure is how wealthy someone is i'm reluctant to create this illusion that that you know if you work incredibly hard you can make a lot of money and that will make you successful you have to be a successful human being the most exciting times i ever had in my business were when my back was absolutely against the one thing this is going down bizarrely i found that quite invigorating but at one point my shells all said look nick this is never gonna work it's never gonna make money by the time i got to the end of it i was pretty much down to zero [Music] nick jenkins former ceo and founder of moonpig a company now worth 1.6 billion dollars nick's achievements are miraculous he's incredibly inspiring and he created a business that's touched many of our lives but the thing that i found even more intriguing about nick was he bucks most of the typical entrepreneurship and success narratives i think we're all sold the belief and the story that in order to be successful in business or any discipline in life you have to undergo tremendous sacrifice you have to work yourself into the ground nick and his story and his philosophy disprove all of that he's got another way of doing it if listening to this episode does anything outside of just inspiring the hell out of you and giving you very practical business information it will definitely prove in my view that there is no such thing as a born entrepreneur and also once you become an entrepreneur the path to success isn't the same for everybody a lot of what you've been told is a lie without further ado i'm stephen bartlett and this is the dire of a ceo i hope
nobody's listening but if you are then please keep this to yourself [Music] nick super intrigued when i meet entrepreneurs um because there's a huge sort of narrative and i guess a debate that's happened in the entrepreneurial community about whether entrepreneurs are made whether they're born whether it's something that can be taught and um from listening to you describe your early years and your school years and your upbringing um i wondered what your opinion on that was and also whether you think you were born on japan i think there are some traits that are common to all entrepreneurs well one of those is decisiveness you've got to be able to take decisions and when i after i worked in russia for a bit went and did an mba and when i was there there were lots of people on that course who were brighter than me um but and they would come up with a beautiful powerpoint presentation of five different choices of strategic options but actually sometimes he's just got to say i haven't got the perfect knowledge let's go with that one and take a decision and so i think decisiveness is a very and really an attitude to risk is is the other thing i think i always took the view that you know i started with nothing i could end up with nothing and i it i wasn't that worried about about failing um and that's quite important and so so i think those sort of things are are innate you can teach someone like that to be a better entrepreneur and to some extent i mean i i went off and said the business i had nothing else to do to be honest at the time i came back from russia and i had a spare year and i thought i couldn't think of a good cunning business plan so i'll do an mba while i'm coming up with a cunning plan and that that was that probably made my first business a bit better because i i gave me more of an idea of the rounded idea of business and um and and so on so so i think you can improve on that but i don't think but if you're if you're risk-averse you're not going to do it where does where does decisiveness and um that risk appetite come from do you think in people and
what i guess where does the alternative come from where does the fear um and the lack of willingness to to make a decision come from in people or in you like where did it where did that decision come from in you i don't know you have some people who are physically courageous they will leap in you know rugby players will leap in and do things and and other people who who are not and then you have some people who are intellectually courageous who will just um they're just not afraid of saying let's do it um um no i'm not i'm i'm not sure but i think i think it comes from not having a fear of a fear of failure or not you know we're all going to make mistakes and things will go wrong but but uh if you're frightened of ever making a mistake um then then then you won't do it much times like if you if you ski and you're frightened of falling over you're never going to be a great skier so you aren't going to fall over you it's quite also you were just talking about almost that mental assessment you made on what failure meant because you were like well if i go to zero that's okay yeah that doesn't mean death no no no no it doesn't i mean it wouldn't be great you know but but but it's survival and i and i've of all the friends i've seen who've gone through that and i've had a lot of friends who've gone through uh who've gone through business failures the ones i admire the most are the ones who it's the way they've dealt with that and some of them have thought well i can't change that i can't so all i can do is change the way i approach the next step and move on and if you just dwell on failure what does that mean how does that reflect on me um then uh then you'd never yeah you you'd never move on so i think it's our own in our own attitude to failure that's that's quite important what was your underlying drive to even start a business versus just going and getting a job at i don't know pizza hut or something i suppose i probably looked at that and thought if that goes well i'll probably make more money per hour than if i go and work with pizza so there's an element of one want to i mean maybe there's an element of laziness that
comes into this it's wanting to take that shortcut and think well well actually if i if i start my own business and and that goes and it goes well then obviously it's it's better than an hourly paid job one of my great philosophies on business is just keep everything as simple as you can possibly make it until you have to make it more complicated um people often start they start you know way too complicated and and and uh over-engineer things that you if you read that book the lean startup it kind of talks talks to some of those values about just trying to is find find the simplest way to test the hypothesis as cheaply as you can without using losing years of your life and there's nothing there's nothing quite like not actually having any money to do that so when the moon pig when when we we raised money on a very bitty basis you know there was never like a well that occasionally would pour something in it and you know you you you hear it hitting the bottom but it never actually filled the well up so we never really have much money to experiment with so we had to be uh very lean with what we did and i think perhaps the one the one useful thing the only textbook that i ever went back to from my mba years was a statistics uh textbook because what i wanted to work out is the least money i could spend to get a statistically significant answer to how much a cost to customer acquisition is for a particular channel because why spend two and a half why spend 25 000 pounds finding out that a particular channel doesn't work for you when you can get the answer for two and a half thousand um and uh you must see this all the time but i i you get people who say we're going to spend a million pounds on our when you've got too much money you just let's throw some money at this and see what works well why waste it when you can get the answer for two and a half grand yeah and then and then and then and i always look at that and i don't think i don't think i've wasted two and a half grand i've spent two and a half grand some of that will have been let's say i was aiming for a 10-pound cost of customer acquisition and and actually it was 20. well then 1 250 pounds of that was spent on acquiring customers at the right price and 1 250
pounds was spent on finding out that i should never do that again and that's that's the way i would look at that but if i spent 25 000 pounds on it yeah then you know it would have been it would have been a waste and also if you can the more you spend money to find out the answers to things and when you've got those answers and you're then putting that in your business plan to raise money i'm always more impressed when people say right i want to raise money for marketing this is what we've done so far this is what it cost us so far so if we scale this up that's that's what we can do as opposed to just saying please give us lots of money to spend on marketing we don't know what we're going to do yet um yeah i had this conversation actually with my gym owner the other day i didn't even know that he was um aware of who i was but i was leaving the gym he goes can i just have two minutes pulls me into the back room and um he tells me about this idea and to be fair i can't say the idea because he and we're going to talk about this topic as well he thinks that if you tell the idea then i'm going to run off with it we'll talk about that all the time yeah we'll talk about that straight after but um but but so it's idea for rolling out gyms in the country he said i need to i need to raise investment to put 10 of them in and i was like your this idea you have is totally contingent on this central hypothesis i'm just going to say he doesn't podcast that um people that drive long haul want to work out in service stations yeah you don't need to put 10 in to figure out if that hypothesis is correct you can put a shipping container in the car park keep it there for free and if anyone picks up the dumbbells that's that's an indication that your hypothesis is correct and then introduce another variable which is cost yeah so then charge them to pick up the dumbbells and if you if you come back to me in six months time and say steve they picked up the dumbbells they worked out and they gave me 10 pounds a month then all you need is capital yeah and we'll go make ten of them yeah yeah we're on the same page you know i'll prove what you can prove
on the least amount of money first and evidence is evidence is always so important um and people miss that but let's talk about that topic then so this idea of it really really it shows me that the entrepreneur is somewhat naive when an entrepreneur comes up i'm sure you get this all the time they picture an idea and then they say well they sound cagey to tell you the full thing because they think you're going to run off and do it yeah yeah yeah when i would say to them look if you get the the day you go live with that the moment you start advertising that idea you're you're opening you're lifting your skirts to the whole world so uh so you're gonna have to go live with us at some point otherwise you're not going to sell anything and if you don't sell anything you're going to raise any money from anybody so at some point you have to uh you you have to tell people what you're doing with moon pig there was no way that i could i could protect that idea the only way you can protect it is be the best and and and be the biggest amen yeah i mean and then i we had probably 20 competitors that followed after moon pig you know during our time then they would they'd pop up and they'd flare up and then they'd die off again um and and even now moon pig is 65 to the market when you started moon pig was there anyone else doing personalized um sort of gifting cards online yeah funny enough that there was there was a very i came up with a business plan and i developed it and then i looked the first thing i always do is i look around not just at what direct competitors i've got but how people are trying to solve that problem in other ways because you know if you're trying to solve a problem clearly that problem exists already and people are trying to solve it in one way or another and and i did come across a company that was doing um personalized greeting cards and and i approached them and said oh i've got a choice i can either i've come up with this plan i can either do it myself or i can invest in your business and um and and anyway he the terms he offered were ridiculous and also the other problem
was i could see that is we would we were going to fall out over the content of the cards because um i just didn't think he had a very good eye for cards um without that business anything ever turned over more than 300 000 a year and then it died about two years later um and uh and moon pig went so i i went off and did my own thing and what it taught me actually looking back at it is that is that it was all about the content it was about the quality of the of the cars the quality of the design of the cars because actually the customer doesn't really care how the car was produced they didn't care about the technology at all what they want is the end product and and we have the best end product that's so interesting because um a lot of entrepreneurs are put off from starting an idea because when they google their idea that they have they find 10 of the people that are already doing it and i i really want to touch on this point because i think it's quite liberating for entrepreneurs listening when i started my business in fact every business i've ever started that's been successful had a major incumbent already and we might we became the biggest and it's exactly what you described it's those there's probably a thousand small details that go into making a successful bit listen more let's just say there's a thousand yeah thousands more details like into making your business and it's and um you're basically going to war on a thousand details yeah and if you can um you know if you can be better in just certain ways and sometimes you only need to be better in a few simple ways i think it can i i agree and but then then if you look at the example of bread um people have been eating bread for thousands of years you know people like bread we know what people prefer to pay for bread that's half of your market research done already you don't have to say we've got something called bread do you do you like it you can you can get some slices you just ham in the middle and call it a sandwich all that's been done for you so then you've then got to work out right well i know i know that there's a market for this so how do i just make it a little bit a little bit better do i make it as
a you know add seeds to it do i put cumin in it do i or do i have a shop that is in a location where that isn't well served so you only have to tweak an idea that's already there so your chance of success your chance of succeeding your chance of surviving is considerably greater because you've answered most of the questions already before you've even invested any money um the chance of that becoming the chance of multiplying by a factor of a thousand and suddenly thinking that's like the guy in shortage has just invented stuff called bread it's amazing never had it before um so you don't get that and i think that's an important thing for entrepreneurs to think about is that you don't have to be unique i think that's you know people always are what's what's unique about you just got to be i agree with you you've got to be better in some respect and um and people tie themselves in knots trying to think of trying to invent things so i think it's a really hard it's the hardest possible way of making money i mean actually when you i i read a report about the fact that the the people who've most people who've made money have made money doing something they were previously employed to do because because they've spent 20 years learning how to do something they know all the contacts and then they start up their own business it's logical not you know when i'm looking at investing in people i think well you know this industry really really well you're very convincing um and and you you know all the pitfalls in advance perhaps of course you're more likely to succeed yeah but they also know they also because they know the pitfalls they know that where the opportunity to create a better product would be as well yeah yeah you know because so often i will i will come up with a business idea and look at it and it's only after i've gone through this sort of fourth iteration of the business brand that i think and that is why no one has done this before that's very very true um if you'd known how hard it would be um to start a business and to um make it successful do you think you would have started because i'm here i'm asking i want to know a little bit about the like the importance of delusion
well funny if that's something i've always believed that an element of self-delusion is very very important and i think that's one of the reasons why actually when i i when i finished my b i did have the opportunity to go and join a vc firm i thought i could if i can work for vc firm for three or four years i'll get more experience before i start my own business anyway i went for a job interview shock horror they turned me down so i had to go and start my own business and and i realized now that if i had gone through several years of investing in other people's businesses i probably would have developed that kind of uh that hard skin of of this is actually incredibly hard but this is why this won't work and i see that i see that a lot now in me now that i look at as an investor i look at a lot of things and i'm i'm less wide-eyed than i was when i started moon pig and i can see the reasons why something won't work and you become you can become too cynical about it whereas when i started moon pig if i'd known all the problems that i was going to come up against i may not have started it and believe me there were plenty of times in the middle of that uh when i would have happily given it up i mean people often say whether was there a difficult period and they said there was just one but it lasted from 2000 to 2005. um and and it was [Music] that was difficult it was it was tough and i was wondering how to pay the salaries and i'd talk to me about the detail of that difficult period well as as as you know better than anybody that starting a business is one thing and coming up with a product that people might want is one thing getting customers is probably the single most difficult thing about setting up any online business um and i think most people underestimate that and we we tried all sorts of permutations and bear in mind this was 2000 so this was well before social media so a lot of stuff was very manual um i you know you will laugh at this but when i was when i was doing affiliate deals i would phone up a company and say we'll put an advert on your thing and if you send any traffic
to us we'll give you a bit of commission on this and i'll send you a spreadsheet every week to tell you how much i owe you literally it was that manual and i would write up a contract for each separate contract for each individual company had a big filing cabinet of them i mean this you know that sounds like very dinosaurish but that's how it was and now it's it's much much easier um but we were we were struggling to find ways ways that we could throw money at driving traffic because everything that we threw money at was too expensive and the only thing that was really working in all of this was the viral effect that we knew that we were we got very very good at measuring everything and and we could see that if we brought 100 customers in that and those 100 customers we knew exactly how many them would buy cards we knew how many of them wouldn't come back again but of the ones that bought cards we knew that they would attract about for every customer that we had they'd attract a third of a customer just because i send you a birthday card you think it's funny you look on the back of it moonpig.com and so that viral effect was the thing that kept us going for five years and it was only really because i understood the statistics behind that and i could understand the model and think right although everything else appears to be failing although this online campaign doesn't appear to be too expensive that appears to be too expensive and we we can't i couldn't tell you if someone gave me 10 million pounds i couldn't have told you what we could have thrown it at um to make it work i could see that just the customers alone were driving the sales growth and if only we could survive that long that we would we would make it through um but i was the only person who believed that all of my shareholders at one point my shells all said look nick you know it's not going to work this is never going to work it's never going to make money and you you know we're not going to put more money in and we really recommend that you don't put any more money in too because when this all goes wrong you're going to have to have some money to pay the rent and and it was it was that bad um how much did you had you bet on this
personally well i mean i put in i was i i'd gone off and worked in russia for a while and i probably made about a million and and by the time uh by the time i i put about 150 000 pounds into mubic at the beginning to get the idea off the ground by the time i got to the end of it um i i was pretty much down to zero i think i'd taken all the equity out of the flat which previously had no mortgage i'd taken all my savings and all that so i pretty much got down to zero so at the point where people are trying to discourage you to i was pretty much already at zero zero anyway so so and that that's when it's that's when finally it started to turn and um you know but i could i could see i could see the stats i could see where it was going um it's just that you know after four years of i've had three or four different business plans you know i know the last business plan wasn't you know inaccurate but this one this one's better oh and i know the previous two weren't that accurate but this one this one this one works yeah it's tough that's that delusion did you ever genuinely consider quitting no no i didn't know because that big because i because i could see where the numbers were going and i had i did have a firm belief that uh the repeat rate was there um the viral effect was there and i could see how i could see how we weren't spending we went through a year we spent no money on marketing whatsoever no money on customer acquisition and we and our sales grew by 30 percent you know so that's now i appreciate having invested in lots of other e-commerce businesses i appreciate how unusual that is um it was my first business so i didn't know quite how unusual it was but but i knew that actually look it's not as if there's so many businesses i see now that the moment you turn the marketing tap off yeah just goes to zero yeah and all you and and that's one of the things i'm always really aware of when i'm aware of now when i'm investing is when is it i said well what what's going to happen when you turn that money to turn that tap off because because when we did turn that
tap off it just kept on growing and that's what i see is the real quality of a business is when you're adding layer upon layer of customers now you know not all businesses are as good at repeat business as moon pig was but but that was that that was the the thing that i recognized that kept me going through all that and stopped me from throwing the towel in and that's thankfully because you had a great product underpinning yeah the the main focus was was do people do people like what we're selling um and we knew that we knew it's a very very popular product we could see that in the viral effect with people not only do people who bought it liked it but the people who received it liked it so the main focus was always on create a really really good product and then of course on top of that you then got to make sure that you've got your production right so that your gross margins are right and and you're tweaking all of those little knobs within within within that uh engine um and um and the the key thing also just is understanding um is understanding every every metric and we looked at like it's like a lose run that you're polishing um every day you're looking at is there is there anywhere where anyone's getting stuck along this journey and and are they not understanding what we're you know the button that they're supposed to press next are they getting confused in which polish that one out so there was a constant process that that time when we weren't spending any money on customer acquisition we were spending all of our money on uh on customer retention and just polishing that lose run of the customer coming in through the front door and going into the shopping basket when you reflect on that and the the fact that moonpig ultimately succeeded in a market where many others failed you talked about you know the guy that you whose business you tried to buy and you say what was it about what we did that made us succeed or what was it about me nick that made this business succeed what is your answer well i think i think i probably did have a good understanding of what people wanted in a card and the if you get down to the
the simplest version of that is that is that a card is about showing someone that you've uh you want to show them that you've that it's relevant you've thought about them so you've chosen something which is relevant to them that they're interested in or that's that's a something you both find funny and you can weave their name into that as well um to make to show that you've made an effort and then the double whammy i would always personalize moon picard have it sent back to me and write on the inside so that's like a double personalization and it's it it basically is about showing you've really thought about them and that's and and and it's amusing as well and and the the great thing is quirky british sense of humor that we we love slightly mildly offending each other and then we we stick the cards up in our fridge so if you focus on that focus on the on on the product everything else everything else follows in behind that focus on the product and then make it very very efficient um and uh and everything else should follow whereas whereas if you don't focus on the product and you're just constantly selling something that people don't really want it's incredibly hard work on the product a lot of people have this idea i think when they start businesses that you have to have your hypothesis your idea of what this business is going to become the product of yourself perfectly nailed before you um before you launch and then you know i made the mistake of when i started my business kind of being too romantic about that initial idea so i was trying to force the idea into the world as opposed to listening um if we'd go back before you started moon pig what what was your hypothesis like what in terms of like personalization what you know how did you arrive at a card it was it was very simple actually i i thought through the different ideas and i and and i realized right the this internet thing is is going to happen so i don't know much about it but no one else knows anything about it either but i did at least understand how to build a team so i spent 10 years in russia building a team of people and building a successful business um and and i went through this thing of what
things could i what how can i use the internet to make a business and digital digital products were all being given away for free so everyone had this idea that if you could download it it ought to be free well that's a hard one to make money in the advertising business back in those days was incredibly tough because there wasn't much of a market not much spend was going online and you were spending more money to get people to come to your site to look at the adverts and people are going to pay you for the adverts that was tough too then i looked at physical goods and if you take say a digital camera one of those things i looked at if i took my sort of satsuma fujitsu 32db i figured that somebody at some point would write an algorithm that would merely compare the price of my fujitsu 32dd with someone else's and then they'd buy the cheapest one and that ultimately would end up squeezing all the margin out of that game so you'd end up with a lot of physical stocks stuffed sitting in warehouses and minimal margins so so i looked at one of the things that i can what are the things i can sell on the internet where i can actually improve the product make it better and personalization is one of those things it's very difficult to do personalization in store because it takes up floor space and equipment and so on um and um and i thought of a number of different things including uh personalized cds well i'm really really glad i didn't do that one and cards occur to me because i used to um i used to typically buy cards and tips out the caption and write something a bit funnier um more relevant and more relevant on the front and and and equally journalist friends of mine would uh whenever anyone left the office they'd be given a spoof magazine front cover which would take a day and a half of graphic design time to put together and i and i figured we got digital digital printing was beginning to develop at the time and you got the internet and it made it possible to combine those two to make it possible for someone to order a single personalized greeting card which has got hands down got to be better than the unpersonalized thing and then i could
charge more for the product online than for the product in the shop but more to the point there's no stock so um so what we've got is a pile of cardboard in the corner of the room and a pile of envelopes that's the only stock which i think represented about a quarter of a percent of turnover so compared to the digital camera business where you might have a whole load of digital cameras on the water coming in from wherever you buy them from loading the warehouse and so on um it's it was um it was a very efficient business model i mean i i gotta confess i probably slightly stumbled on it rather than you know it it being i look at it now and think wow that that accidentally was a really good business model um you get paid up front you pay supplies in 60 days there's no stock i mean it's it's uh it was great so um but but fundamentally it was a better product and on day one right from the very beginning my the business plan i came up with when i was doing my mba was i want to to make it possible for a customer to buy a single personalized birthday card which technology has suddenly made possible whereas previously that would have been 200 quids worth of graphic design time a bit of lie through i mean just not possible but core to that is that the person who's receiving it has got to think that's a really cool card and there was a point where you made the decision to sort of step back from operations i i've always tried to my general approach this is uh is try to focus on the things that only you can do um and when you really narrow it down and you become a bigger company you realize that actually that really does narrow it down a lot because i was trying to hire people replace the things that i was doing with people who could do it better than i could do it uh and then once they're doing it better than i could do you think gosh well i'm not going to interfere with that anymore so leave them to it and then it eventually then comes down to um
uh to a role i i my role eventually that became that of executive chairman so i brought in a ceo and i became executive chairman and i suppose then my role was that strategic role of making sure that we're we're pointing in the right direction and also that we take those big decisions what are you bad at i'm i'm or not good not as good as someone else's actually say i i think i'm i'm a i'm good at short-term detail i can i can sprint on real fine detail um so i can i can sit on a spreadsheet for six hours overnight and come up with a beautiful bit of financial modelling but i i've got a million one things going on and and so so so i don't know that i'm necessarily a complete a finisher um and there are people who are good at that so interesting when i'm looking at hiring people i i will often although um i academic results aren't everything that you always need someone who has got straight a's at a level because they're very good at understanding the question and delivering it delivering the answer so they understand what's expected of them and they deliver it in a very predictable way whereas ceos can often be quite maverick and you ask them one question and they will answer something else completely different but much more interesting and that's fine you can afford to have one or two of those mavericks but somebody in the company has to be a good completer finisher um they understand the question and they deliver it have you this is interesting so there's certain people in my in my in my previous business where i knew they were like useless at organization and process and they were they were just dread they could they were like unreliable but they had one skill which was genius yeah and so it would almost be like making an exception for them within the company where okay they might take a long time to reply to emails and stuff like that but that one point of like creative genius that they brought to the company was worth it yeah did you ever have that very definitely you've got you've got some people
i think creative genius always comes at a price yeah and and it becomes because someone has focused on one thing at the expense of something else generally um and and so you just have to work with it um and and say right okay well that's recognized person doesn't do that and actually those skills can easily be dealt with by something else that get them a good pa someone who can organ get a good complete finisher behind them who picks up after them and and and then they will come up with the ideas that nobody else would have come up with yeah i think that works you know i hate i hate powder i hate mixing powder with water i hate protein powders that you have to mix with water up until now and obviously he'll sponsor this podcast so i'm tremendously biased but that's a that's a true story i've never been able to use the like my protein powders that you mix with water because i always think they taste absolutely awful up until hull released their brand new protein flavor the amazing thing about all of these proteins is there's 20 grams of protein you get all of your vitamins and nutrients 26 of those and as huel always is it's nutritionally complete and if you are someone that's trying to go a little bit lower on the calories it's only 105 calories so when i wake up in the morning especially i've been working out a lot lately come downstairs quickly blend it together in my nutribullet drink it's 100 calories and then my next sort of main meal because i'm a breakfast skipper will be at lunchtime highly recommend it um and i shouldn't say this because i don't have any approval to say this but there's some amazing amazing flavors coming in the ready to drink range that i've been lucky enough to try um and one of those is my new favorite flavor so stay tuned you were talking about that struggle you had for the first five years of music specific i heard you talking some interviews about you know three four five etcetera being
particularly hard but um what was what was the personal sacrifice of that i'm thinking now about how easy it was to maintain like relationships and friendships when you know in your head you probably have that red read those red numbers from the management accounts and sort of etched into your mind at all times can't be honest never really got in the way that never got in the way no no i i'm a lot of people confuse um that's all we're running your own business you're working all the hours at godsends um i never did if something needs to be done i could i if and only i could do it then i would do it and there were time you know there's the odd time when uh i remember once when our entire printing team uh uh were off ill and i came back from a business trip to australia for most from australia to discover that we were three three days behind on on our printing schedule and i simply i simply got in the printing room i was the only other person qualified to use the printer so i just sat in the printing room and i worked uh 24 hours a day for two for three days i think to get it all done so yes there were times but but i had a great social life i've always been a great believer also that that i i need to i like to manage a business you know during reasonable hours i don't i don't think it's important that people need to sacrifice themselves on the altar of my business and i don't like them doing that one because it makes me feel guilty about skyping off um you know if you've got all of your whole of your people in the office and they're they're working 24 hours a day and and you're sort of you know taking half the day off to go and do something fun i feel awful um so so i try to make sure the same standards apply and and and that people should people should work a proper you know proper day's work in the hours that they would like to work within reason um but i do expect them to go off and go and do something different and recharge their batteries in the evening and the weekends and
you know because otherwise you just run out of steam and particularly it was a creative business you know we're trying to make people laugh if you're exhausted and miserable um um that's tough it goes against a lot of the sort of typical narrative doesn't it in entrepreneurship like the hustle porn star entrepreneur who just like back in doesn't sleep and just caffeine and just you know they're like crying in the street like and they're like you know eating ramen noodles and stuff like that what does that what does that narrative make you uh make you think well i think that's true if you start a business with a lot of people start a business with nothing and a lot of businesses fail and and as those businesses are failing clearly obviously you're down to your last pennies and that's tough and and and so i think that the thing that they're describing is that is the last sort of death throes of a business and i you know i've seen lots of businesses that i've invested in go through the same thing where there is no money left you can't pay salaries uh and the the founders are down to uh you know they're living in the office um under the desk and and exactly eating noodles uh and and so that happens um but it but it is it isn't it isn't an essential part of the journey but generally the death rows and occasionally you survive i mean you know i had i not had had i not had that last bit of cash that i put in i i may well have been one of those cases um what about focus a lot of entrepreneurs you know have i get a lot of messages from entrepreneurs that have multiple businesses three or four startups they're doing at the same time well i wouldn't invest in anybody that had multiple startups but what way you know because if i'd had three businesses going at the same time as a moon thinking was going badly you you focus on the one that's going well because it makes you feel better so i and then the person then they then they turn around to the investors who put
money into the third one and they say i'm yeah and i've given up with that one i'm off to so there is no way i mean when i invest in a business i would make sure that there's a clause that says that the foundation the founder shareholders have to be 100 focused on that they're not allowed to have more than a four five percent stake in another unlimited company i'm pretty strict about that yeah i i mean i just think it's laughable yeah absolutely laughable that people come along and they get you i've got three ideas and i'd like you to invest in this one but i've got those just in case that one doesn't work yeah for me it's for me as well i i tend to think all three will fail because you're giving like 30 in my way that i've even if you're not prioritizing you're giving 33 of your time and energy and all your competitors are giving 101 and a lot of them might be sleeping under the desk so if you're giving 30 you're it's already hard enough to succeed giving 100 yeah so you're really setting yourself up to failure but i think there's this weird thing where entrepreneurs find it impressive to some some entrepreneurs find it impressive to list multiple businesses that they're doing and i swear if i hear an entrepreneur come to me with an idea and they've also got another thing they're doing i'm immediately deeply unimpressed by them because i think they've got this focus problem um and maybe they're you know like maybe they sat down and tried to think of a business idea and for me like when business ideas don't come from some type of inspiration when they're literally just contrived from i'm going to try and think of a business idea i think that it's typically more difficult i think like some form of inspiration even if it's a small thing of inspiration as a it's integral to success and creating something unique um but yeah that's another thing that irritates me about i i i i get just as irritated by that the times when you have to push on through that barrier and if you've got three things going
and one of them is an easier journey that's where you're going to focus yourself when in fact the that is the absolute time that you need to be completely focused on on on crashing through that wall that you've come up against and and that's where the best inspiration i ever had and sometimes actually looking back the most exciting times i ever had in my business were when my back was absolutely against the one thing this is going down this is going down and bizarrely i found that quite invigorating um when everything is going incredibly well there were times when i think everything's going very well everyone's doing their job frankly i could be here and not be here it doesn't make much difference um in terms of skills as well as an entrepreneur you i heard you talk about public speaking being integral to you did public speaking at university i did i did a lot of public speaking at university and a lot of debating and the skill i think that's important is the ability to be able to persuade people of your ideas not necessarily public speaking but in every meeting that you go to you need to be able to look people in the eye and convince them that your idea is right and and that could be in a sales role it could be sitting around a table with a bunch of developers and one of them saying i think this is the right way forward if you can't articulate yourself properly then you're never going to be listened to and that's a skill that i think is is um uh it's being recognized in schools i do a lot in education now so i i see now more and more they recognize that that's a skill that is really important that people should be able to look someone in the eye and be able to explain yourself very very coherently i i tend to actually believe i'd go one step further and think i can't think of a more important skill in life and business then we i call i refer to it as sales because and we think of sales we think of trying to get cash out of someone else's pocket by giving them something but i think if it was like meet a girl in a nightclub you know try
and communicate your idea to your team investors employees um everyone you encounter i think is a to some degree you're trying to sell something and it's usually yourself yeah but and those that are you think about how that compounds over the over 70 years of your life being good or bad at that one skill will anything change the trajectory of your life more than being like a good sales person and that comes from as you say from being able to articulate yourself and speak and yeah and just think coherently and put down a logical argument that people think yes okay i get that i understand it how does one get better at that i think a lot of that's practice um and i i think you know people make this uh sort of binary thing between public speaking standing on stage and speaking to a crowd of people um versus not doing anything at all and actually in between there's a whole load of stuff which is which is working within a team and being able to and that that's where most people come up against it is that they'll be sitting in a meeting with four or five other people and they've got something they want to say and they they if they're too nervous about saying something they just don't say anything at all and then their ideas are never listened to yeah and then they're devalued in that context and similarly it may not necessarily be a spoken word you've also got to be able to write well and convincingly then there's another side of it which is the numeracy side and i find i find that the the most convincing is when i went i i love a good spreadsheet but uh but when you can express ideas in in numbers and you say look this is the model that works and you can prove it in in numbers it is it's a very convincing thing particularly yeah i think right if we do this this is the evidence we've got that's what will happen yeah that's very convincing um so there's there's there's also being numerous and being able to explain things in numbers which is yeah yeah it's so true yeah you can be like orally persuasive which is you
know anecdotal persuasion i guess and then you can be persuasive with numbers which is uh or graphics and that's the other thing i i do see the quality of decks in the last 15 years has dramatically improved um and in that all that they're much much more engaging and and there's some real creative genius behind some of the stuff i mean occasionally they don't talk about the numbers which is a beautiful beautiful peaceful presentation and in a big sort of you know you go through the the docs end and it's all fantastic it looks lovely beautiful graphics and then you think you have kind of missed out the point about how you're going to make any money but so there's a lot more so again but that comes down to how you persuade people how you present how you present ideas not all of us not all of us understand things by listening some people understand by seeing i see patterns in numbers but not everyone does and i i realize that now that that just because i happen to see something one way doesn't mean to say that everybody else sees it in that way and you have to understand how people how people communicate one of the on that point about you know persuasion and communication um one of the most amazing things that happened to me inadvertently was um well one of them's right here i started doing a podcast and i from i never the unintended um consequence of me being forced to speak on stage because i was running around the world talking about marketing um and being forced to write out and i do quotes on instagram write these quotes every single day at 7 pm on instagram and then write i used to write this podcast i used to just be on my own um was that i a and was able to develop my ideas better so if you ask me any question marketing well i've already written it out i've written written an essay on it because i had to do a blog because i had to wear my personal brand or if you asked me something else about my life i've already spent you know a thousand hours talking on this podcast about it was i became um much i'd say 10x better at communicating and the impact that i had on my life was just profound so my conclusive point here is i really think for young people that there are ways to force yourself to
accelerate that learning yeah one of them is like keep like you know keep a blog yeah start a podcast even if no one's listening to it um and i i i people will start podcasts because they're trying to make money or because they want to be famous or have loads of followers but i but i think the more beneficial thing is the skill um the skills you'll learn from doing it and oh my god sales is just everything to me yeah you're right when you have to write a blog actually write the words down it really forces you to think about how to express things coherently in a way that verbally you can get away with a lot less discipline dragon's done something we share in common yes indeed yeah i've just uh just started on the show um it was a yeah i mean the first pitch everything walking in behind the cell i mean i first watched it when i was 12 years old it was also surreal how was your experience when dragons dragonstone and what advice would you have for me let's do the first question okay well so my so i i love the experience um i mean partly it because it's it's very forgiving television to make in the sense that uh you arrive on set apart from the fact there are seven cameras which was distracting for about the first hour or two other than that it's people walking through the door and they're saying this is who i am this is my business and it's one of those things that i think i think if you're if you're thinking about that as a potential career it's about as realistic as you can get while still being entertaining these are these are real businesses that people have spent sometimes several years developing and put their life and soul into it it's not some concocted thing that um you know here's 100 pounds go and see how much cheese you can sell on the market at the type thing that you see in the apprentice these are real businesses and i think it's been very inspiring i've seen a ground a real shift in
the time that i've been around in people's attitudes to becoming an entrepreneur um because of yeah partly but you know partly because i think there's also been a shift in attitude generally yeah and a lot of a lot of young people aspire to the idea that actually when you're young and you've got nothing to lose you can afford to make more mistakes so rather than so you can just go straight straight into it after after school start something and crash and burn start again and you can do it all now from your phone as well you know you can set up a shop using shopify on your phone in a couple of minutes and sell you know you can even drop shop drop ship things so you don't need a warehouse or anything like that so it's very incredibly accessible now yeah um more people young people want to be entrepreneurs than ever before but uh but but i i think it's it i'm i'm really looking forward to seeing uh and seeing this new series because i think you will add a uh kind of a different a different dimension to it in terms of thinking particularly the way that businesses now you know the way that particularly tech businesses and the way that they're funded um is yeah it's very it's very different from 20 years ago yeah one of the things i didn't expect as well was how useful the other dragons are when it comes to analyzing the business oh yeah yeah because they all come from different disciplines so deborah's going to help me with the numbers over here and peter's got his background in tech and you know logistics and all the amazing things he does and tuca's going to be able to really sort of interrogate the supply chain and sarah understands the craft industry and business generally and um so it was it's really uh they said sometimes you just gotta let them interrogate the business from all of their angles i i learned a lot i learned a very very important lesson from deborah about um the food business and going to supermarkets she was interrogating somebody and and talking about their gross margin and she said well of course as soon as your sales go up your gross margin will go down i'm thinking
what are you talking about and then and i asked her about this afterwards and she said well the problem is that supermarkets love to have young pioneer brands in uh and they um and they will allow you to be on their shelves so there's pyramid of products and they allow you these little innovative little companies to be to add interest to their shelves the moment that it looks interesting and you want to sell more of it the supermarket is aha now let's talk about the price because they they know how to make that stuff even better than you do they know how to squeeze you down to a barely acceptable margin and so your margin which looked okay at the beginning and they'll say well you can sell a lot more but we're gonna have to have a different price and that's and that was a lesson i learned from deborah so so sitting back and listening sometimes and and you know like you know tuca's knowledge of supply chain and in textiles in particular it's quite quite fascinating so jumping back to your business then moving so eventually you sell the business yeah um fully or in part well i sold i sold most of it in 2011 and i rolled over i rolled over into the venture capital investment in the new in the new company we basically merged two companies we merged photo box and moon pick together um with a lot of venture capital money and and so i reinvested in that and then we sold sold it all out in 2016. um so there's a couple of things here that was the first point where you became really rich well we moving started making a lot of money before we sold oh right so we were probably making about 10 million a year in dividends um so because it was making money faster faster than we could spend it on advertising so so so we just paid it out as dividends i think we paid out about 30 million pounds in dividends before we sold oh wow so um quite literally printing money so so by the time i sold actually it wasn't as if it was transformational because um i i hadn't spent the money i i've still got all the money that i'd taken out as dividends so when when you so if you you
really built enough wealth to take care of all of your sort of base basic maslow over your needs clearly you know yeah so when you when you sell how how does that feel well it was funny i i was i i was interviewed afterwards and uh on sky i think and they said well you know what are you gonna buy uh what are you gonna do now and i was like what did you do immediately afterwards and i thought well i cycled home and i made a peanut butter and jam sandwich i mean that was because there was a it's slightly it's a bit of a weird anti-climax selling i don't know how it was for you but i went into a large room and i had to sign about 200 documents um on my own and then i sort of done it now and they get a great well money have been banked later on back of the bike cycle home that was it oh there was no sort of you know no trumpets you know no signings shaking hands it was it was um um quite a non-event really so the money arrives the same day when you've sold um yes yeah well not not all of it i think it was done it was done in stages but mostly arrived on the same day yeah yeah and so that you sold the company over a 100 million at the time yeah rolled shares into the the holding company as well um to keep it sort of invested in an interest in the business um yeah i mean that's a that's a [ __ ] ton of money did was there sort of a loss in because you've given up your your business here you've given up your focus yeah your baby was there a bit of a lot like a loss of orientation like what do i do now with my life yes though at the same time i think i got to a point where i delegated everything within the company and i had been largely focused on the sale process for a year or so so after that sales process was over you think well now the day-to-day running of this business has been left to uh the the team they're all doing a fantastic job they're all bright and they're probably better than i am so me sticking around in that kind of if i decided to carry on running the business for profit i could have done but i but i i felt as though i'd run my
course i felt as i added everything i could add to that business and there were lots of other things i wanted to do in life um so um in a way it was it was a challenge to sort of create an identity outside of that you know because for a long time i've been missed a rusher i'd gone to russia and everyone knew me as the person who went to russia and did things in russia and then i did as i started moving i fell into obscurity again people think oh poor nicki does something with greeting cards um and i go home at christmas to back to shropshire and my parents friends would say so you do something with greeting cards is that something you do from your spare room yeah anyway very very very i mean having because i'd run quite a big business in russia and and then of course it started it turned into something serious um so it was an interesting challenge which is how do you sort of reinvent yourself after that and i i i actually stopped i went into the charity sector um full-time and i became a ceo of a children's charity for uh for a year full time and then i became a trustee of that for another four years why um well partly because i think i i'd i think i sort of satisfied i felt as i'd satisfied everything that i needed to you know i didn't want any more stuff so i wasn't it was it was going to be hard to get motivated just by making more money um so so i wanted to have i wanted to make sure whatever i did after that was useful so socially useful in some respect but for that you've got to kind of do the work you've got to understand how to make a how to make a difference and and that first year really made me realize how complicated it is and how difficult it is to make a to make a real difference um in the world um uh so it's fascinating um and and i wouldn't have been able to do that if i hadn't if i hadn't sold the company i wouldn't have the freedom to go off and and and do that it's not interesting that people they typically it's this is
a super like generalization and it's not necessarily the truth but it appears that we all start quite selfish in life it's like let me get rich and free first and then you see that transition when people do make money is their joy comes from philanthropy and helping others i think but i think you know in that very privileged position of of having seen what it's like afterwards because of course for most people they they want more things i think money a lack of financial problems can bring you happiness not having financial problems financial problems brings you misery when you're beyond financial problems um you're neutral and then there's and then there's and then there's financial freedom which is i'm now free i don't have to do the nine-to-five job i have the option if i want to do to do other things beyond that pretty i'd say it's pretty diminishing marginal returns i mean i think for some people the more money they make it's about it's not about the money itself it's more about uh their position in our you know you know if you're very competitive as a hierarchy of people and there's someone up there who's you know who's made jeff bezos up there and they see themselves on that trajectory they'll never quite be happy until they're up there and they'll never get there so yeah um i i realized very early on that if you if that i wanted to avoid getting into that into that sort of competitive mindset of thinking that i have to be somewhere on that trajectory i've kind of you know satisfied what i what i need in terms of in terms of you know stuff housing and whatever um and then thereafter it's about being free to explore other things one of the things i noticed about you that's like very different to the other um successful people that i've talked to and we touched on that a little bit was you and we talked about a little bit earlier but my question is i'm slightly related um is there seems to be a lot of like neurotic obsession with people's businesses hobbies i mean i remember sitting with eddie hearn here and him
telling me how like how i mean his book is called relentless like how relentless he is and to the point where he will sacrifice his family to for the business and he'll tell him he'll speak to have the conversation with his wife and say my business is everything if i you know don't make the date if i don't make this then it is what it is i am obsessed um you don't seem to be like that and that makes one would then therefore assume that the problem that sometimes comes with being like that which is a severe cost to sort of relationships wouldn't be present in you i think you can be driven by two things you can be driven by demons or driven by passion and it's much better to be driven by passion than demons yeah some people are some some people were offended at the age of 11 by a comment that somebody made to them that they'll never amount to anything and they have struggled ever since to prove to that person that a teacher said something bad to them and then finally they go back sort of 35 years they go back to school and and and they find this old teacher who says well i always thought you'd make something of yourself and they think [ __ ] i was hoping it's going to be more gratifying it was it was you know the teacher might just say i just felt you needed a bit of a kick um to get yourself off you and it worked didn't it um so um some people are driven by and the people who driven by demons are often it doesn't make them happy like an itch they're scratching and it just makes it makes it worse amen eddie hands basically like that and he he was quite honest about that his dad basically he was always trying to live up to his dad's expectations of him and i remember saying to him i remember saying to eddie i was you know what's the goal then eddie well you know we're gonna sell it for five billion yeah and then what and then he's like well you know then i you know i'll have my cigar and i'll go to the beach do you actually think you'd go to the beach cigar you just told me
you're obsessive and right and he goes probably not probably probably and actually the difficult thing is then what do you do afterwards i think because i think it's one thing a lot of people they think a business of starting a business is about you start a business and then you're working towards an exit and happiness comes and exit it doesn't happiness comes from the process of building a business and working with people and pulling together bright people watching the work and creating this thing i love the learning process i think that's perhaps one of the other things that i learned out of all of this is that i really really enjoy learning and it doesn't matter how much money you've got you can't learn japanese any quicker but you can learn a little bit quicker if you've got some really good but basically you've got to put the work in doesn't matter how rich you are you can't buy that you've actually got to put the work in that drives you so do you think you're a balanced person i'm trying to get i'll be honest what i'm trying to understand here is a lot of the entrepreneurs that i meet that the reason why they're successful is because of as you say you described it perfectly because of demons or something yeah and then that costs them somewhere else yeah you seem to be as was the case with the um the ceo of delivery who sat here a couple weeks ago fairly balanced person so i'm assuming then you have really well-balanced relationships i think i got great friends and great great friends and great relationships and and a lovely family and um um but but that's partly comes down to it and part of it comes down to standing back and thinking you know what is success and i look at success that more rounded thing what makes you a successful human being and and if you look at that then you're constantly looking you're constantly measuring yourself by well like actually what do my friends think of me what do i think i'm a good person am i a good person i think i'm a good person um how am i going to look look back at my life and be embarrassed at the way that i've trodden on people on the way up and and and in which case you know don't tread
on people on the way up so it depends on what you regard as success what you define as success in the beginning i think unfortunately we too often we measure the things that are easiest to measure and the easiest thing to measure is how wealthy someone is um so when i go back to talk to talk at schools about about all my old school about about and you're invited along presumably because everyone's heard of a business that you've created i i'm reluctant to create this illusion that that you know if you work incredibly hard you can make a lot of money and that will make you successful you have to be a successful human being what is a successful human being well i think it's all the you know those things that one you've got to be you've got to be a good citizen you've got to make your fair contra you've got to make a good contribution to society now if you're good at business um you are of course helping to pay a lot of the bills which is a great thing um if you pay your taxes properly but the um but but but equally it's about the way that you treat your employees it's about the way that you treat the people around you um and all of those things i think the things that you look back on your own life and you think did i did i lead a good life um was i was i was i a good person um or do i regret look back and think you know i was a bit harsh quick one as a serial entrepreneur that's currently building multiple projects across multiple industries everything from the marketing industry to blockchain to consumer goods everything one of the things that has been a lifesaver for me and again a company that i reached out to to evangelize about on this podcast because i'm a loyal customer and they ultimately ended up sponsoring this podcast is fiverr.com f-i-v-e-r-r what that site allows me to do is extend my capacity across all of my projects if i'm looking for a graphic designer someone to edit a video someone to do a website for me it allows me to extend my capacity without hiring people and the quality of freelancers on fiverr has been amazing and when the trust and the service you get is that phenomenal and the services
often offered are that diverse it's a no-brainer whether you have one member of staff you're a freelancer yourself or a thousand members of staff five it can be a game changer for you and i'd love you guys to check it out use the link below go to fiverr.com and send me a screenshot if you end up using the service one of you is going to win something very amazing as you look ahead in you know the next chapter of your life yeah we talked you talked there about how the journey is actually there where all the fun and fulfillment lives yeah um and you kind of like because i think we all kind of like mentally map out what the next phase of our life will look like we don't necessarily know the details that have a business plan but we understand like the the fundamentals of that phase what what are you what are you hoping will be part of that phase um at the stage of life you're at where money isn't you know money isn't gonna mean that you can can or can't eat um what are you trying to put into that chapter of your life well um the other thing i've realized um and i i listened to something bill gates said which is that if bill gates had become a doctor he could have affected quite a few people's lives but by going into business he affected millions of people's lives and he was very good at making money and so i don't see anything wrong with pursuing i mean now i'm actively pursuing the businesses that i that i'm involved with and i would love to make more money but then that gives me the freedom to do something useful with that money it as a whole other dimension to why are you doing it i mean i'm chasing because i need another lamborghini because i've got a very old battered discovery and a lamborghini it's just not what i was going to say i can imagine you're in a landfill no no i'm just a very very tired old discovery which i'm driving into the ground before i buy an electric car but there's got to be a reason for doing it and and you know the reason the reason for creating companies partly because it is it is good fun i mean i you know thoroughly enjoy you have an idea and you're creating something um
and uh if seeing your idea come play out and you think yeah i was right that that hypothesis was right so we pull together some good people and it starts to work and then 10 10 years later absolutely that that that worked and we've got a whole lot of people in employment they're enjoying themselves and the great thing also is when you step back from that and you think that that thing i mean moon pig has a life its own i was in the car the other day and there was a moon being advert came on the radio i've been i've been out of that for a long time now i haven't been involved you know haven't worked there for 10 years and and yet that's it sort of carried on without me um there's a huge sense of pride in that when you see that it must be surely yeah and actually you know when you sell a business it's also a sense of pride that it worked for them as well i think the very best deals are deals where both parties came away happy will you ever be a ceo again i don't know that i will because i enjoy i enjoy the sort of that being having the freedom to do different things um and there are plus and minuses to have this this plural life um i've realized that having doing 10 of 10 things is twice as much work as doing 100 of one thing um twice as much work definitely twice too much work but partly from a very simple perspective is the is the um i mean nesso now post covered but before that they actually simply they're getting from one place to the other oh yeah you know and that that gets in the way of things um but also it's the constant juggling in your head and and and that and then suddenly you think oh i've been focused on that for a bit and it's it's more work um so i would like to be more focused i want to get interested at a level where i feel as i'm able to make a positive difference to it um and that means that means actually a smaller number of a smaller number of things i had a job when i was at university and the most boring job ever it was a it was transcribing
license details it was working for a ford dealership transcribing license details from one ledger to another and i'd get to about 10 o'clock in the morning physically it was it was so boring it was physically painful and i would i would i would think surely it must be five o'clock it's not it's still ten o'clock in the morning and it was horrible absolutely horrible and and the one thing i look back at my life but it's one of the the greatest things is i've never i've always got to five o'clock wishing it was two o'clock um and uh and that's that's i think a sign that that you're not bored um and there's the stuff i'd like to be doing like i look for i wake up on monday morning i think fantastic i can get stuck in and i can do stuff and so but that idea of that idea of of there not being enough hours to do to to get the stuff done is is a sign that it's enjoyable the ones that don't like what they do you know because i've worked jobs outside call center night shifts for you know just pick up the phone book the hotel for them because they can figure out how to use the computer yeah yeah you know for dorothy yeah she doesn't know where she wants to stay she wants to stay in manchester doesn't know where manchester you know night shifts of doing stuff like that i've had worse jobs as well where i had to open the yellow pages and just call someone and try and sell them something um which was awful um but what is that what liberates people from that place i i mean i would maybe guess that it's information and maybe skills so maybe they could the other thing is when you've got one of those jobs you take the view look i've got an opportunity to learn how this to learn how this works if i learn how this does work works but take it seriously do it well um then actually i might know what it takes to become a supervisor um if you become a supervisor i might have then what it takes to go up to to go one notch higher and suddenly i'm actually then managing people and and and that's a little bit more interesting than what i was doing so to some extent you have the control to be able to sign how much time and effort enthusiasm you put into it and
there's some jobs that will not be that interesting but then then then say to yourself right what can i learn about doing doing this that's going to enable me just to do my bosses job um and and actually what your employers will be looking for is someone who's applied who's interested and they'll look amongst the 10 people who are doing that job and think nine out of 10 of those people are just doing this because they want to pay the bills this one is genuinely trying to work out how to do the job better i've got one last question for you yeah never asked this question before but but it feels like i should you're you know you're you know several years ahead of me in business right so you've experienced a lot more than me you've had a child you've gone through you know even dragon's den you've been through that experience as well and had a taste of all of that you know um attention and um uh press and all that stuff what would be the one piece of advice you'd give to me it can be relating to anything it's just you you know maybe what's something that you think i need to learn or know based on me being on 20 you know 28 29 now i think i've just left my companies just hold my shares a little bit yeah um as you go as you go through you can get to a point where you think right i've had a huge success and i look at moonpick and think will i ever have a success as big as moonpig i don't know i don't know but i've got to be okay with that and in order to be happy i have to be i have to be okay with the idea that i may never i may never better that because if if you're always constantly thinking right i've done that i therefore have to do that it can be recipe for misery and like like you look at pop stars who who have a huge career and then and they're kind of done by 25 and actually you know you know that they're not going to quite come back and and then a couple years later and and so i look at it and i think well i don't have to better what i did in terms of i don't i'm not going to judge myself by having a business that was
worth more than moonpig because actually that's setting myself on almost impossible task what i'm going to do is make sure that whatever i do i feel as though i was being i feel as it was useful um and some of this might not be as obvious or as prominent as setting up moon pig because sometimes you catch a wave and i look at moon pig and i think did i just catch a wave i was in the right place at the right time i i had a good idea and i managed it well but actually i had it you know i just caught that wave perfectly and sometimes you that that that can be hard to break to to to recreate um so so i think being managing your own expectations is uh is is is a uh is an important part of human happiness um and and thinking okay i may never better that but actually i'm gonna do something different now and that will be just as interesting it'll be just as rewarding as as as as as what i did before do you ever regret so like with with my company um i think i left in 2019 when the valuation was maybe 200 million i think now it's like 500 yeah and it's probably going to go i shouldn't i'm guessing here okay i'm not involved in the company anymore i'm probably going to go to a billion i reckon yeah um do you ever regret moon pig is now worth what one point something 1.1.6 well i i for for a long time i said eight years after i saw the when i sold the business it was making about 11 12 million pounds profit not not ebitda proper profit like money you could spend um and um and eight years later it was making about 18 million so i think yeah it was an improvement on where on on where it was but it wasn't so spectacular that it was um so that they're happy with their deal uh and i'm happy that i've got the chance to go off and do something else um and then i looked at floating and think well because the thing about floating is that nobody knew we were going to have covered and and um and that obviously massively boost uh boosted the business and i think property has permanently put more people
on online so that was a fairly unpredictable uh part of it then there's another question which is if i had stayed in running that business would it have done as well as it has and i don't know that it would have done to be if i'm really honest because the guys who came afterwards a guy called stan ron who came into moon big after me um who was awesome i mean he was a you know brilliant um and then and then and that then nicole rytha who's running it now is has just taken it to another level so we're going to take where he came in and he's just so and so so i i i'm not sure that i would have done i'm not sure had i stayed in there's no guarantee that it would have done what it what it did and in fact i'm not sure it would have done so you know i and actually i've had some done some really interesting things so if you're asking me the question would i rather have had sort of 36 percent of 1.6 billion yes what i'm questioning is whether we would have got there if i'd remain in the helm well listen nick thank you so much for your time it's been an incredibly interesting diverse conversation and yeah um thank you as well for uh you sent a text message i think to our mutual friend before i went on the show just giving me oh yeah yeah and he passed that over to me and i i yeah i kept that in mind i won't show what that advice was i kept that in mind and um yeah i mean your story is super inspiring and there's a british success story and someone that's so i'm so fascinated by you because you're so unorthodox in so many ways and you also don't [ __ ] so a lot of people it's tempting to portray yourself even with the last example there you could have said well you know you basically said that you're you're unsure whether the business would have performed better or worse without you i think that takes great humility and self-awareness to admit that and that's the reason why i started this podcast because you know to share some of that honesty with the world so thank you for coming on thank you for being an inspiration to me thank you for being one of my favorite dragons as well you're just very real and funny thank you it's good to have a real sense
of humor well it's been a real it's been a real pleasure meeting him in person so um brilliant superb and um yeah hopefully we'll get you back again once uh to talk more about your charity in particular which i wish we had more time to yeah to talk about because that's that was super inspiring to read about as well um but yeah thank you thanks nick great [Music] you