Every Founder Should Have Imposter Syndrome | Behind The Growth w/ Ben Jeffries


0:00Every founder should have imposter syndrome.

0:01Laura Donadio: If you don't, like you have a problem. You're in the wrong rooms. You're not challenging yourself hard enough, right? So you've obviously built an incredibly successful nine-figure business. Do you ever stop and feel successful or do you always move the goalpost? As long as that's changing the goalpost for yourself and how you see personal achievement, but you're not then changing it for others around you, that's a core point. When you're hiring, you always have to hire smarter than you, especially if they're reporting to you. I need to feel like you are consistently challenging me. If I feel like you are always agreeing with me, that doesn't work.

0:32That doesn't work because I've not brought you in to agree with me. The reason is we want to get to that next chapter. I'm building for the future. I'm building to support my relationship. I'm building to support my family. Sure. What about the present? Because if you're not thinking about the present, then what future really is there to build for? Hi, I'm Ben Jeffries. I'm the CEO and the co-founder of influence.com. We're on a mission to pay a billion out to creators. This is Behind the Growth.

1:00Laura Donadio: we always start by asking guests to introduce themselves and to start with what they're known for so wow what a question it's always the question i don't know if you've ever been in like meetings when someone says introduce yourself you literally look like oh shit i've forgotten actually what my first name is yes fortunately for you i'm all good um so yeah very happy to be here thank you obviously for having me on um i'm ben jeffries i'm the ceo one of the co-founders of of Influencer.com. Been doing Influencer now for over 11 years. So quite some time been involved in the creator economy. But we have launched our business to over 250 people now across pretty much every continent there is in the world.

1:42And we're working with some of the most exciting brands on their influencer marketing strategies.

1:47Laura Donadio: You've built an incredible business and size of business before even hitting 30. how has it felt spending most of your adult life building one business and not working for anyone else i'll tell you what a lot of like making it up as i've been going along i would like be lying if i said otherwise i think if i thought back to like my first ever craziest business idea which was one obviously when i'd be in like school i could never imagine like where we'd be now but I think for me the best thing is that whilst I have been making it up a lot of the time I've been learning a lot and obviously I've had to like change the way I think I feel like maybe I've had like 50 years worth of learning in about 10 years here 15 years but it's it's been something to the I think I always go back to like why am I still doing this and it's simply because I really really love what I do I love the people I get to work with and for me that like I suppose I desire to continuously try and improve as a person is like exciting take me through the beginning how did it how did it start because you were so young like how did you even know you wanted to build a business and that you wanted to build that what was the other idea i'd absolutely no idea that wants to build a business honestly so i would say it probably stemmed back to when i was in school so i was that kid at school who would always think of as i was saying these like crazy business ideas and I was that kid he first bought 100 iPhone cases off eBay and would then try and come into school and try and sell them for a bit of a markup right why I was like that I just think I always wanted to do something more and I'd always had this like entrepreneurial itch that kind of was exciting I think maybe I I looked up to a lot of entrepreneurs who were like role models and I was like imagine if I could think of a business idea I didn't know what that business idea was but imagine if i could have one um and so in the early stages i feel like often people who have that entrepreneurial itch have to think of a few different business models before they get the one that is actually their business model so to speak and the way that influencer first came about was actually by having a clothing business before right so i'm not a fashionista whatsoever would never proclaim that i am um but me and my friends believe it or not used to have a saying at school, which was chatting breeze, terrible expression, because it actually meant like, stop chatting shit, right?

4:16But essentially, I was like, wouldn't it be so fun if given that everyone in every sentence basically uses this phrase chatting breeze, that I put it on t-shirts, I put it on caps, and then I try and sell them, obviously, to my friendship group. So did that. And suddenly, after getting obviously sales from my friendship group, I was like, how can I grow this brand somewhat further because ultimately i don't just want to be the kid at school with the brand i want to see where i can take this so i i suddenly thought well obviously if celebrities wear your clothes that can help grow the brand i think i looked to like when um 50 cent was promoting vitamin water in the success era i was like oh my god there's a huge opportunity here so i did what every kind of you know inspiring hungry like you know determined entrepreneur does and thinks right i'm going to solve this problem by messaging thousands of people to see see if i can solve this just so happens i'm a massive chelsea football club fan as you know so i reached out to every chelsea first team player every chelsea reserve team player every chelsea youth team player and i reached out to them all on twitter and i said if i send you some clothes can you post a tweet wearing my clothes that's all i ask um i very quickly realized none of the first team players responded why would they um the reserve team players i know always the ambition kind of be foolishly curious right none of what one of the reserve team players responded but who did actually respond was a handful of the youth team players and what i noticed as a pattern was these youth team players had like 20 30 40 000 followers on twitter and people who followed them were very loyal chelsea fans and suddenly because they were looking for the next gen of talent right exactly so suddenly when they then posted wearing my clothes i was getting a really good like response rate going to either our website or following us as a brand and i was like hold on there's something in this right if i can get not just one or two of these but if i can get a handful or posting i'm building up this like chatter especially when actually people who follow one typically follow a handful of them that it feels like this is the next biggest thing within a community so you know i said well i could end up continuing to try and scale this clothing thing but i'm not particularly passionate about it and you know if anything's very true in business it's that you have to be long-term passionate about it otherwise as you go through the peaks and troughs um of success and failures over a career in those troughs you're just going to back out so i was i'm not passionate about it but i am passionate about this idea which i think it's got more legs i can start offering out to other brands so that was basically how the initial idea came about but obviously when was this this was going back 12 years ago i was on my way to university i worked really hard to get into university because i thought you know what i'm going to do that big corporate ladder stuff and i'm gonna pass grades get in and try and see what I can learn there and try and get some more experience went to university and then decided to drop out and actually focus on influencer full-time obviously there's a lot within that I've skimmed over but yeah how did you meet Casper so when I started you know at university I was like okay well I'm going to try and scale this business idea up I want to try and do my university studies to try and learn because it was all business studies so it was all connected whilst also continuing to build the business but what i realized as i was building the business that it meant i had to be like out and about quite a bit so i would go back home quite a lot and hang out with friends who were at london universities quite a lot and you won't believe me when i say this but it's true story casper who was at the time a creator with seven million subscribers matched with one of my best friends who I would see regularly in in London on tinder and they ended up obviously going out when they were going out I was like obviously coming back and forth quite a bit I was like my friend I was like this could be it this could be the moment where I can go from having this kind of let's call it like bedroom style business where I didn't have an office I was just trying to scale it and I could really you know scale it up by having a co-founder who was one of the uk's largest creators at the time she was kind of like yeah whatever like cool like you have a chat with him if that's what you want to do but you know i spoke to casper after she set up like a proper like coffee about it and he was at this time where he wanted to go from being a creator to more of an entrepreneur so it was the perfect match the perfect match in

9:03Laura Donadio: that sense but also i think who knew tinder was also fostering business relationships i know you know who would have thought but it worked really well because i think casper at the time was signed by gleam and i know you had dom obviously um it all feels like you know there's a strategy behind the guest on the podcast there's a strategy there's a red thread exactly and casper had obviously seen that whilst he was signed as a talent there that gleam had just sold to dentsu and i think why that's important is obviously casper being that entrepreneurial instinct himself I think when I'd had that conversation with him he thought well why can't I do that too yeah of course and I think that then brought the perfect marriage of us being able to come together I mean like we were supposed to have probably like a 30 minute coffee and I'm not joking I'm not really a nervous person but I was fucking nervous for this like really nervous and within five minutes of the conversation I realized that we were just basically like best mates hanging out and that actually we were very similar but yet very very different as two characters and i was like there's something within this magic but between this that i really believe can help scale influencer um and really kind of change a category of the creator economy did you worry at that point in time that there might be some inequality within the relationship because obviously he was bringing a huge audience to the table but you were also bringing the idea and i feel like that's that can always kind of create the second balance right so to be very kind of like it probably took us nine months to come to an agreement over what it would look like and it was a very important nine months because i think we had to work out the dynamic of how we could get the best out of casper's skill sets and the best out of my skill sets as well um and i think you know i'm very fortunate in the fact that casper is genuinely one of the smartest people i know whilst also having his social media fame attached to him but actually he can split the way that he thinks in kind of different rooms um and i actually think that's one of his greatest strengths and i think i never really looked at that as something that you know for me to be kind of concerned by but almost actually something that i could be excited by because i was partnering with him yeah of course i could use that as a great strength for how we could go and tackle the creator economy together and how in addition he could help leverage us to be in the right rooms and like if i look back over the last 12 years like we've been on main stage at web summit like that's fucking crazy that's like 50 000 people center stage and how did we get that they asked casper to be a talent on stage and then casper was like i want to do it with that and the fact that we were able to be on that center stage and actually talking about influencer like i've got so much like love and respect that he was able to kind of create that opportunity for me but these are just opportunities that you really firmly like dream believe like could never happen one day but they do and i think you can kind of either lean straight into that or you can be kind of playing in your mind kind of you know worrying but i kind of took the approach i'm going to lean in were you did you have parents that had the entrepreneurial spirit like is that something that you were surrounded with at home or like yeah well so my dad worked in finance so but my mom actually worked in pr back in the day as well um but they were there was such a great mix of parents to have i know pr and finance is that not like founding a business you know kind of um but actually they were always pushing me to um you know try and push myself to think about the skills that i enjoyed doing most and i actually remember one of the most valuable bits of like work experience or internships that i ever did was when my parents were like on my gap year so my year between university and in school they were like you're gonna get a fucking job you're not just sitting at home waiting and i was like sure um so i got this internship at a local magazine publication in tunbridge wells um which was basically selling classified ads which are like two by two adverts in the back of a local publication to people around tunbridge wells now that's doing cool sheets calling up actually doing people that was my biggest ever lesson in failure because i was calling people who were telling me to stop fucking calling them and never to speak to them again and i would have to just mark a sheet say yeah that one call done the next done the next and it's rejection after rejection it's rejection after rejection but then when you get that one which says yeah do you know what are you you're like oh my god this is amazing and i would say that mixed with having also previously um before that you know done like restaurant jobs on the weekend again like that customer service sales skill invaluable and it's like something which i'm so grateful that i was pushed to do at a young age reason i was asking that is because obviously negotiating a partnership like you have with casper at the age you were at obviously takes a lot of like strategic thinking and commercial acumen and especially if you're going at it for nine months that's why i was asking if you had people around you that So literally just before I obviously entered into conversations with Casper, I entered a university competition, right?

14:33Where I was able to win this like startup grant. So I had it at cash and obviously the naive, crazy, foolish youngster in me was like, well, obviously it makes so much sense to spend that cash on finding a great lawyer to help negotiate this contract. Like, why wouldn't I do that? Right? Anyway, that was what the nine months worth of negotiation was. but I had the right sort of advisors around me. The funnest thing about that is it took us nine months to find and actually negotiate what we wanted. And we inserted so many different roles and responsibilities from both sides. Since that signature occurred, we've never looked back at that agreement.

15:11No, I can imagine. Never looked back. But I would say it was helpful because still to this day, we probably do every year like a refresher on our roles and responsibilities together just because we're like, well, how can we add the most value over the next 12 months to the business? We're also bringing in a lot more senior people around us. People are a lot smarter than us. And it's really important that when we bring them in, we try and work out how can we get the most out of them and play our roles in bringing together and bringing those great minds to actually lead on the functions that they've set out to lead.

15:45Laura Donadio: Do you ever stop and wonder what you would have done if you didn't start that business or where you would be now? professional football plan i'm joking did you tore your knee do you know what it was that hamstring at a young age if you watched me in sport i was absolutely shocking at football but i would say i think from a young age i actually did want to be a consultant okay it seems like a very odd career to aspire to have but my cousin um who was a few years older than me um about five or six years he worked at a center and i was like wow that's like the coolest thing when he would explain his jumped to me he was like we go in to big corporates we see what issues that they have and we solve for them and then we go on to the next so it's like such a variety and i was like wow that's really interesting i'd love to learn more um just so happens that he left after a few years and then set up his own business and that was cool because we were in that scaling like growth mindset together which i think is really really important um but i would say you know it's really following a passion and whilst that wasn't the career that I went down the career that I went down now was just purely because I became totally obsessed with an idea and was really interested and obviously loved it to bits what's the one thing that you believed when you started the business about leadership that you've realized recently that you were so wrong about you have to be careful there's a great book that I read called the siloed effect so it is really important as I said a bit earlier that when you bring in great leaders that you do have to let them do what they've got the experience to actually do within their function you have to find ways and it's your job to be like that integrator where you can bring the best in them and that you've got to make sure that you're being that like connective dots and that's and that's pretty hard like yeah you know when in particular you know you're hiring people for the first time who maybe in some instances are much more experienced than you and you're having to sit face them and say i you know i i don't agree with that decision i think we have to go down that path but ultimately i think it's the way and that's what i've learned it's the way that you you know challenge on particular ideas and should never like challenge people you know you should challenge on the ideas that they say but never them as like a personal trait and i've typically found that that has meant that you end up with the best possible discussion and best possible decision as well as what your own experience is because whilst you may not have as many years you may have as many scars and experiences in in other areas so to speak that are relevant to that situation i don't disagree one piece of advice that i got in one of my previous roles was when you're hiring you always have to hire smarter than you even if they're reporting to you it especially if they're reporting to you because they will be able to challenge you and free up your time to actually focus on the things that you should be focusing on and like at the time it was really hard because like it is really difficult especially when you're challenged to sometimes like you know i was working corporate at that time is challenged to sometimes hire someone at the same like pay level as you or like very close and you're like wait why am i not getting paid more and you know it's like that thing of like challenging all that thinking but so true and when you look back you're like oh wait that was very smart i hired a new cmo last week and a new ceo today and you know it sounds a bit cringe i need to feel like you are consistently challenging me right if i feel like you are always agreeing with me that doesn't work that doesn't work because i've not brought you in to agree with me where there's plenty of people around that you can hire who just agree with you the reason is we want to get to that next chapter and you also want to set the direction exactly you need people to be doing that because that's how you get momentum and like not every decision is going to be a right decision fuck me like we're the amount of wrong decisions we've done over the years are crazy but again they're all stepping stones and learnings in one direction right before i move on to my next question biggest mistake that you can remember oh lots of mistakes honestly lots of mistakes and actually it maybe sounds cliche but it is probably one which i have made a few times over my career which is sometimes when you know that someone is the wrong fit you've stayed on with them for too long and you kind of i think every entrepreneur every founder every manager has this belief that that typically someone can you know turn things around and maybe become the right person for for the role that they're hired for but i typically have seen in situations that when someone's like love is lost you shouldn't try and spend a lot of time convincing them or even trying to retrain them into a role that they weren't brought into And I would say those on like a hiring perspectives are things that you naturally want to do because typically when someone's like joined the journey of your spaceship or your rocket ship as you're scaling up, you kind of want them to be there forever.

20:56Right. And it's particularly hard for some of like the OGs, so to speak. And if I'm honest, like, you know, some of the OGs influencer have gone on to set up their own companies. and i'm like immensely proud that we've even got this like influencer alumni but i remember the point when they want to leave me trying to do everything to keep them right now don't leave please stay please stay here but it becomes a mistake in the sense in relation to your question is that you basically spend wasted time in in trying to convince them i've learned that actually when someone wants to go it's about 10 grand be like cool well you know appreciate we we've had this conversation if if that's a path then let's work out a smooth transition and let's go back out to the market and then see who we can find and you typically find that it's so much cleaner

21:48Laura Donadio: in your head yeah i definitely made that mistakes a couple years back when i was running big teams of like trying to convince people because i was so scared of having a hiring gap where you know someone else would have to pick up that workload whilst we were hiring to replace them but you end up just creating worse of a situation for the team as well and then you just become emotionally involved in the situation where you're like i almost took it as a personal rejection if then they wouldn't stay after you know trying everything to keep them and they still decided to leave it was like why am i not good enough and it's not it's not on you it's just they're on their own path i'm quickly going to interrupt this episode to remind you to please hit subscribe if you're listening on YouTube and for those listening on Apple or Spotify to not forget to hit the follow button.

22:32Laura Donadio: It only takes a second. It's free, but it will mean the world to us. So you're scaling with a lot of new senior hires. You've obviously always kept the agency independently whilst you're competing with a lot more agency networks and acquisitions are going left, right and center at the moment. Is that something that's ever been tempting? Does every founder have a price? I mean it is very tempting and I think any founder who denies saying that every fan has a price they're flat outlying right of course every do you know yours have you thought about it I think I go back to kind of what I what I've always thought is firstly what's the alternative right I love what I do in Flintstone like absolutely love it I love the company we've got I love the

23:23to your point that you asked earlier when you when you said to me like what job would you be doing if it wasn't influenced like sure those ideas that i had back 12 13 years ago i actually couldn't imagine doing something that wasn't influencer right now because of that first beliefs right so it has to be something that's like really interesting that's going to push the company forward versus necessarily um something that's just beneficial to me as well i would say the space is heating up which is really exciting and i believe that you know we we have this like saying within internally influencers that we do believe we're just getting started why would i want to leave at this stage right and i think one of the things that we're seeing right now in particular in the agency space is there is a strong drive from brands who love independence they love specialists and that's working in our favor right so rather than kind of getting lost in the noise of do you want to get acquired where you then have to go into like different phases of like management presentations to try and pitch to sell your business you know for me for the for the next few years it's certainly just heads down growth there is a lot of opportunity i think what we'll probably more likely see is ourselves actually doing quite a few acquisitions we're looking at quite a few at the moment as well but it's kind of fucking weird as well because i've never made an acquisition before right i know so i have to bring in you know cfos i'm going to bring

24:50Laura Donadio: in advisors to help support and all of that that's all right because i'm learning but it's super interesting learning isn't it um a couple weeks back i got offered to acquire business and i was like whoa that really wasn't on the bingo card this year and it didn't work out and that's you know i truly believe that everything happens for a reason but i was like what i was considering i I was like, this is not something I ever thought I'd be doing. So it's super interesting. I think that's okay, right? And I think it's so easy as founders to have imposter syndrome. And I think a lot of people kind of feel that imposter syndrome and often can sometimes recluse and be like, oh, is this normal?

25:32It's 100 % normal. Like every founder should have imposter syndrome. If you don't. like you have a problem you're in the wrong rooms you're not challenging yourself hard enough right and i think only until you can kind of embrace it and kind of use it as like a way to kind of energize yourself more that's how you get that growth and you know still to this day like you know i'm very fortunate that i get to do a lot of presentations i get to pitch to brands i get to pitch on the stage i'm still fucking nervous like literally minutes before where i'm thinking oh my god what's the fuck up what's if someone asks my name and i don't know my name is like that sort

26:06Laura Donadio: the stuff but we figured this one out you know what your name is you're good easy energy exactly um i was going to ask you whether you'd ever think about stepping down and do you ever feel like there will be a place that you're at with influencer.com that will then allow you to take a step back and build something else or is that something that you don't even want to consider so 100 there needs to be a stage at some stage in the influencer journey where i'm not the ceo now do i want that to be anytime seen absolutely not i want to keep going on to keep you know driving us forward but do i believe that there needs to be that stage at some moment yeah 100 100 i think you know for me what what would i do next and you know when i when i think about that i'm obsessed with the crazier economy and i can't escape thinking about the crazier economy like I think every idea I have though I try and bring into the world of influencer but there'll be a time where a business isn't complimentary and when that time is that you know I believe that we've got influencer to where it needs to get to and that it is in the capable hands for someone else to take over then maybe that'll be when I'll explore that but I'm certainly not gonna you know after my influencer journey retire I can think of anything worse I'm a complete workaholic i could see you working until like literally you physically cannot anymore i mean i think it's just because genuinely it's the amount of enjoyment that oh and like i'm right there with you like i wrote like someone was asking me the other day i was like oh what will you do when you retire and i was like sorry what's retirement what's retirement i will find another way to work i don't know i'll be mentoring people i don't know what i'll be doing but i'll be doing some form of work there's no way i love it too much i suppose one of the best things that well actually one of the best pieces of advice i ever got given by someone was to get a coach or be part of a community to obviously have those like shared experiences and honestly well firstly having a coach changed my life because i think the moment that you can talk to someone impartial you suddenly realize to actually think differently about various situations because sure everyone's going to have a biased opinion in some aspects but when you have someone who's coming at impartially you're like wow i didn't think about it like that i didn't think about it like that it's a different perspective as well exactly but i would say that's one side but then the second side that power of that community and the shared experiences is invaluable and i think you have to be within any of those communities what you give is what you get out right because i think a first step is joining one but then to be able to have that freedom and flexibility to like give scenarios where you're like has anyone else done the exact same thing then anyone else fired someone for the first time does anyone else know we could recruit this anyone else know this that or the rest of it you need that power power and strength and community as any entrepreneur or founder because you need to be able to like learn from others outside your Yeah, and soundboard things.

29:13Laura Donadio: And like, yeah. What a great plug for the Growth Collective here. Absolutely. That was the end of the world going out for you. You rolled the red carpet out for me to just slot it in. That leads me very nicely into the other question I was hesitating with. Never hesitate with me. Go. So you've obviously built an incredibly successful nine figure business. Do you ever stop and feel successful or do you always move the goalposts do you know what my honest answer is the goalposts are always moving and i would always give an analogy that i used to i still fucking hate doing like climbing and all the rest of it but when i was at school you see like the peak district where you go on the climbing and you think you're just about to hit the peak and as you're getting up there you realize that this is like the first like fucking smallest peak and keeps going and going and i would say there is that piece where you do consistently feel like you're changing the goalposts and sending that next stage of growth but that's that's also okay because i think as long as you are and this is the really big part about this as long as that's changing the goalposts for yourself and how you see personal achievement but you're not then changing it for others around you that's a core point because it's really important that you know on any journey that founders go on is that you have to think no one is gonna work to the same extent they might work as hard but won't necessarily work to the same extent and like why should they like it's not their business it's not their business they have a life outside of work that you might decide that you don't want to have up to a certain extent so you need to be making sure that when you've got people on the journey with you you know as you're consistently changing the goalposts you're making sure that they still feel that reward they feel they still feel that sense of achievements for everything that they're contributing and supporting with on that journey as you're scaling up together i'm like we're human we love a bit of praise everyone loves praise But if you're not giving that praise to those around you who are in many instances doing more of the fucking work to solve for that exact moment of time or that problem that you've got in that moment of time, then what type of leadership is that?

31:38So it's really, really important to make sure that you're bringing people on the journey in that shape. The best thing that we ever implemented at Influencer was something called EOS, which is the entrepreneurial operating system. it's the sort of thing when you first read it you roll your eyes and think oh my god this

31:52Laura Donadio: this sounds like another thing another HR thing literally it sounds like back in university when they were like build a business plan you'd be like what the fuck is this right but it is incredible because what it did for us as a business was it made us set a 10-year target which is to pay a billion out to creators it made us a three-year target a one-year target and then we set 90-day clear goals to the whole business we then also make sure every single person in the company has 90 day goals that ladder into the company 90 day goals so they see that sense of direction so they see that one year they see that three year and they see that 10 year target as well and then that helps them feel more part of the journey but it also means that you can't change the goalposts because you're very transparent over what the goalposts are yeah so you can't like exactly exactly if tomorrow influencer.com was to disappear obviously touch wood it will never but if it was the case what would be your biggest achievement do you know what i would say my biggest achievement and like i instantly thought as you asked that question i've got to give like a work achievement but i would say at ces last year i got to speak on which is consumer electronic show in Vegas I got to speak on stage with the CMO of MasterCard like what like that like those sorts of things are like pinch me moments and those sorts of things are only possible because of the success of Influencer and the career that it's driven but as I said those are very like work-driven answers really like it's probably the messages from my mom my sister and my dad that you know that will message me and say Ben we're super proud of you those sorts of things I'm like, well, at least, you know, they're seeing that, you know, it's making moves, so to speak.

33:44Laura Donadio: One last question, and then we're moving on to our quick fire. What is the biggest lie that founders tell themselves about building a business? Biggest lie? The biggest lie I think founders typically give is that they think that they can tackle every problem themselves. and i think it's also one of the most dangerous things that founders can think to do and i think the more you ask for help the more you join communities and that's again another plug but the more you kind of bring people into solving things you realize that that's why you've got these fantastic people around you because you're able to tackle and solve things together and i think the moment you start thinking that it's the way that you are able to actually you know push the business forward i'd also say though the biggest lie a lot of founders say on linkedin is they lie about the valuations that they get on their exits as well but we won't dig too much into that but oh my god some of the exit valuations that you see quoted you're like come on i think there's a that could be a whole valuations revenue numbers so much shit that's out there but absolutely the first one is the least glamorous part of growth in one word health okay so why i say health i would say over my journey of influencer i have felt ups downs i put on his way i've lost loads of weight you get in good routines you lose that fucking routine and it's one of those ones that when you're on that journey it needs to be the most consistent thing that you actually have because if you don't have the right mindset then everything else kind of deteriorates around you and that can also be outside of work that can be like family friends relationships that can all deteriorate so i would say health is definitely the one that yeah if there was one decision that you could go back and make differently what would it be again it's cliche but i feel like everything happens for a reason and i felt crushed in moments where we've lost pictures and you've given reasons and like reasons are where it felt like one decision but ultimately the success for where we've been able to get to now like the journey would have been so different had i made that one decision what's something your parents were annoyingly right about so when i dropped out of uni um my parents basically were like to me you're not fucking dropping out you're fucking joking you've worked so fucking hard we will you know we also work very hard to help you know pay for you to get to school and all the rest of it that i was like but i still want to drop out and they're like well the one this the one thing that you have to do if you do drop out is you have to go to an office every single day i remember feeling at the start like this is a fucking waste of time what am i going to be doing there they were incredibly right about it because that routine helped me understand what it was actually like to actually kind of be in that like scale up environment immensely grateful that they kind of pushed me to do that what's a hill you're willing to die on hill i'm willing to die on i would say the influence marketing

37:09influence marketing should be the largest marketing investment of any cmo every person at a company has has a length of time that is a journey and i think going back to some of the points that i've referenced earlier i think an important part is knowing when that person's journey is up and sometimes they realize that before you realize that but also sometimes the other way around

37:33Laura Donadio: sometimes the other way around yeah i've seen that um what are you still trying to prove and to whom i'm trying to prove everything i suppose i'm still trying to learn what being a good ceo is like i actually don't know the answer to that i think you could interview past employees some would say maybe great some would say like in worst person there is but i think i'm i'm still learning and i don't know if i'll ever get the answer i genuinely don't think i'll ever get the answer um but i think as long as if i can be better to the next person that we bring in than i was the the last person that left then that's a step forward i would say another thing that i'm still really learning is how to balance being like totally obsessed with work and how to manage relationships personal family friends i think some weeks as well i get it right in some weeks i get terribly fucking wrong like if i look to my whatsapps right now i have maybe like 20 unread messages from friends which could be from like two weeks ago as well and i'm so quick and good at responding to work stuff but sometimes my frame of mind is like i don't want to give this person a shit answer and sometimes maybe that's a mistake to leave it two weeks but i need to i need to work on that so we'll see i'm just gonna do it like anything work i'll be replying in like two minutes anything that'll work is you know it will happen when it happens what's something you believe about success that most people will disagree on success changes definitions consistently like there are moments when we have won some of the biggest deals which i genuinely thought like last year like would be a moment where i'd be like fucking yes we've done this where i have maybe being not as supportive in like you know going back on the personal side like friends or family to this to the same extent that actually that feeling of success there wasn't worth it and so i think it's really important to get balance and i think you know it's very easy as a founder to use a phrase like i'm building for the future i'm building to support my relationship i'm building to support my family i think one of the things that founders can get wrong is sure but what about the present because if you're not thinking about the present then what future really is there to build for i'm not gonna have anyone exactly it's our last question oh here we go so we always start by asking you what you're known for and we end with what do you want to be known for i'm known for influencer and i don't and i like but you can't escape no like the tie between me and an influencer and it's something that i'm super proud of like super super proud of um because i think we've built an incredible journey and and you know we've built so many incredible careers influencer as well and we've worked on so many incredible campaigns i would say what i'd like to be known for is at some stage and it goes back to a few of the questions that you asked for earlier is more than influence so right um but i suppose i'm not at that chapter yet but i'll be at that chapter at some stage but i think for now that's all right for me to be as an influencer because we're just on that on that chapter right now