The Factory Reset: Why Sedge Beswick Walked Away at the Top | Behind The Growth with Sedge Beswick

0:00Sedge Beswick: So many people accidentally fall into running businesses, which is brilliant, but at some point you have to just pause. Every 12 months, what's the vision? What's the goal? What's the target? What are you building for? At what stage in your life are you building for?

0:12Laura Donadio: You're also a big advocate of quitting to grow. I think we could all learn to quit things that aren't working sooner. When you walked away from the agency you founded, you obviously walked away from some of the goals that you had at that point in time.

0:25Sedge Beswick: I made the right decision for me, I made the right decision for the business, and I made the right decision for my kids. and subsequently everything else just becomes noise.

0:31Laura Donadio: That's a big misconception, isn't it? That, you know, once a woman becomes a mother, then your kids need to become the center of your life. And I think there's definitely a balance to be found, right? Ambition doesn't die in the delivery room. And I will say that all day, every day. What was your most expensive lesson and how much did it cost you? I'm not sure I should share this.

0:49Sedge Beswick: Hi, I'm Sedge Beswick and I help other people to grow their business. And this is Behind the Growth.

0:58Laura Donadio: so i know you need no introductions but can we start with who you are and what are you known for

1:06Sedge Beswick: oh i am sedge bezwick and i'm definitely known for being an og in the creator space but i left that world about three years ago and have been doing lots of different bits and pieces but primarily helping other people to grow their business whether that's through mentoring whether that's through YouTube, whether that's through advisory, I'm having a lot of fun.

1:28Laura Donadio: Were you always this entrepreneurial growing up? Is that something that you always saw yourself do?

1:33Sedge Beswick: So I was about eight or nine. My dad imports his words cheap shit from the Far East. And I decided to start selling his yo-yos in the playground. I obviously didn't realize that that was my first business and it nearly got me expelled from school because someone tried to complain when their yo-yo broke and it was a pound so I told him what was his issue he didn't know how to use his yo-yo properly it's his fault it's always customer's fault always obviously the easy thing to do was to just in the playground give him a new yo-yo but yeah I think I always loved and enjoyed without even realizing I was doing it just learning like how the world works and how things piece together and so yeah I've definitely always been entrepreneurial in some way and varying different successes.

2:24Sedge Beswick: Love that.

2:25Laura Donadio: Selling yo-yo at nine never heard that. Did you have obviously like that's already very like salesy and very sort of like business mindset. What did you want to be growing up? What was like the career? So the first thing I really wanted to

2:39Sedge Beswick: be was a nanny. Okay. And now yeah very different and now I have children I couldn't think of anything worse than looking after someone else's kids it's unbelievably wonderful and brilliant but it's incredibly hard and then someone else's snot and shit is not fun and then when I got to about 16 I really wanted to be a sports psychologist and the reason for that is I trampolined as a kid um it is where I got a lot of my competitiveness my ambition my drive and I had a problem with trampolining, which is ultimately why I decided to quit. And I had my own sports psychologist and I was like, wow, this is an unbelievable position to help people to get back their game, to build their confidence, to help them.

3:25Sedge Beswick: And also I think realizing that yes, athlete is a strong word for a trampolinist when I was very young, but it's like even discipline is a discipline, but you also have a team around you and you realize it's not about you. And I a lot of that is what I've taken into business but I moved sixth form to be able to do psychology because the school I went to didn't offer it and I got seven percent and I wasn't allowed to take it through to A2s so then I had to really quickly pivot as to what I was going to end up doing career-wise.

3:54Laura Donadio: Okay but I've heard you talk about sport quite a lot did you not want to sort of find another way to pursue sports and because there's obviously so many careers within that

4:03Sedge Beswick: industry sport feels like it's not too far away from the creator space but it's a totally different beast and it is a hard if you think who you know it's not what you know it's who you know generally speaking in life data up tenfold in sport um and so i really when i had the agency i wanted to launch a sports division we started to increasingly do more in sport but it wasn't until i exited and actually as part of my exit i negotiated that i had complete free reign within sport, which is why that was the first thing that I then did next.

4:37Laura Donadio: Is that something that you still want to actively move into and continue to grow?

4:41Sedge Beswick: I really, excuse the pun, enjoy helping people on the sidelines. So there's a lot of things that I now know that I don't want to do. And I definitely don't want to run another agency. And that naturally was the route that that was going. So the business exists, it still trades today, but I did sell my shares, my equity, my IP within that essentially.

5:02Laura Donadio: So obviously we know that you exited a big agency and we know that you've turned around your career into a completely different direction. Yeah. You're also a big advocate of quitting to grow. So looking back, would you have quit anything earlier?

5:17Sedge Beswick: Great question. I think we could all learn to quit things that aren't working sooner. I think we get really into this mindset that if I keep pushing, if I keep trying, if I keep going, I keep going. eventually someone somewhere has got to look after me and this has all got to fall into place and there's an incredible book by Steph Sword Williams the career come down which is again we work our way through this cycle and we get to this point and then what do we feel and I obviously quit trampolining I quit the business that I founded I quit even the agency that I went again within sport because it wasn't helping me to get to where I wanted to get and quitting comes with such a negative association.

5:58Sedge Beswick: You failed. You haven't managed. You've given up. But actually, it's around making space, freeing yourself up to do the thing that you're really good at. And if you're entrepreneurial, if you're running a business, if you're trying to grow, whether that's your career, whether that's your business, whether that's personally, some things don't fit. You have to be able to let them go.

6:16Laura Donadio: Yeah. And there's always another route as well, right? Like you can always bounce off something and then create something else.

6:21Sedge Beswick: Yeah. The best people I know in business have always quit they stop trying and give themselves the freedom the time to be

6:28Laura Donadio: able to do it the route and the way that's going to work so how do you think and what would be your biggest piece of advice into figuring out at what point should you quit what are the signals that tell you okay like this is the time now that i need to start thinking why am i still putting

6:46Sedge Beswick: my head against the wall like we intuitively know the things that we should quit we you have been in a bad relationship and you have known that you should have left that relationship and you went back. And then when you decided to leave again, it's the thing that's the tricky part is sticking the quick. It's knowing this isn't working. This isn't helping me to become the person that I want to become, to build the life that I want to become. And it can be anything from relationships, friendships, mindset in the way that you deliver. And obviously then businesses, jobs, it's the full package. So I think it's really like listening to your gut, listening to your intuition.

7:18Sedge Beswick: If it's not working, visualize where you want to be. And there's a big difference of manifesting and visualizing. Both require a hell of a lot of graft to actually make work, but visualizing where you want to be and who you want to be. And actually, if there's things that you know intuitively are not working, when you visualize where you want to be, those are the first things that drop. But in order to stick the quit, you really have to think about where it is that you're going and what you're building for.

7:45Laura Donadio: There's also a lot of grieving, right? Because you have to accept that what you thought like whether it's a partner it's a job you always think oh it's going to turn around it's going to get better and like you kind of hold on to that hope right and you have to let that go you have to decide well actually no it's not like if it's been that bad for this long maybe it's just you know time to like call it a day I've said so many times like I've gone through the seven

8:07Sedge Beswick: stages of grief not from just losing friends family members but even when I left the business it was like I knew intuitively it was the right decision it was the right time and timing is everything. But there's still a lot of things that have to happen as part of that process. It's not easy to just leave a business and switch. It's not easy to just leave a job and move on. You've got to still go through the process of what didn't work. What was I good at? What do I want next? How do I make sure it's not a sidestep, but it's the step that I want to be able to take? And that grief is also a process to work out what wasn't working, what you want more of, what you want less of.

8:39And that's why with any job description, you should never see it as a,

8:43Sedge Beswick: well, I can't apply because I can't do all of these things. It's got to be, well, actually, how do I shape that role to help what can I bring that they might not even know that they need right

8:51Laura Donadio: now yeah absolutely so when you walked away from the agency you founded you obviously walked away from some of the goals that you had at that point in time is there anything that you still look back and think ah I wish I would have been able to fulfill that or were you just sort of like you made your piece and you had grieved enough at that point in time that it was?

9:14Sedge Beswick: Yeah, I really questioned for a long time whether I would regret exiting the business. Because in theory, I would have come back, sold the business, gone through the private equity route, had the big sexy headlines. And one of the things I probably struggled with at the time, there were so many agencies within my space that we're selling and what the leverage and the lever that they can pull is that obviously their name is out there they've got this big coverage in the drum in the campaign whatever it might be but that's a very small bubble that we live in and the sacrifice for me was so severe I had a choice I spend time with my kids and I'd be present and I chose to have kids when I was 34 or I quit and you never know when you make these decisions whether it's the right decision and I can definitely say now looking back three years on I made the right decision for me I made the right decision for the business and I made the right decision for my kids and subsequently

10:17Laura Donadio: everything else just becomes noise yeah and it all falls into place and you find yeah you find the confidence in your decision I've also heard you say motherhood sharpens drive how does that look like in practice. Yeah, I've pulled all of the quotes. Thanks for reading my LinkedIn. You're welcome.

10:34Sedge Beswick: Motherhood did sharpen my drive and I have no shame in saying I'm incredibly driven. I'm incredibly ambitious.

10:40Laura Donadio: I think that's a big misconception, isn't it? That, you know, once a woman becomes a mother, you're not allowed to have ambition, you're not allowed to have drive and your kids need to become the center of your life. And I think there's definitely a balance to be found, right? But you're a great example of that.

10:53Sedge Beswick: Ambition doesn't die in the delivery room. And I will say that all day, every day, because moms get written off before they've even had kids. So when you look at hiring, it's, well, they've just got married. I've had a quick stalk, or they've just mentioned that they're planning on, I know what comes next. So I won't hire them. And then the enormity of businesses that don't offer flexibility. And also, again, we work in a bubble. NHS staff don't get to choose whether or not they get to leave for Pilates, or the zero hour retail contract doesn't get to, you don't get flexibility. That's just this economy.

11:25Sedge Beswick: If you can get a job, you stick that job and you see and carry it out. And I think, you know, for me, it's, I have an important role, I think, in championing moms that don't feel heard or that can't speak openly about the fact that their job got terminated when they're on maternity leave or they didn't get the support when they were going through IVF or when their child was sick. Like the expectation is always that the mom will be the person that stays at home. And it's brutal and it's incredibly hard. And I think for me, the thing with having children is like, I still want to work. I still need to work and I get so much validation from working.

12:04Sedge Beswick: So I wasn't going to, you know, shut my laptop with the business and be like, okay, that's me done, that was never an option. And I, as I say, I have no shame in saying I get a lot of validation through, like there's no bigger validation than someone paying you for your skills and your knowledge and the work that you do. And I really want my kids to see me work. So all of those things still play into my drive, but I have no time to waste. So if I was to be truly honest and look back at the time I had when I ran the business, I did a lot of things because I thought being busy meant that I was important or being busy meant that I was doing something and I was building something but being brutal and saying no or delegating or bringing in someone that's better than you that's the thing that's going to drive a higher ROI for the business and that's why now I'm like if it can be an email let it be an email I don't need to meet you I don't I'm like so watertight on like what's important and what is going to drive value for me and ultimately my

13:02Laura Donadio: family let's discuss this a bit more because I feel like when you're a founder there's this big misconception that you're building a business you have to be always on and there has to be that you're working all hours of the day that's something that I'm personally struggling with at the moment it's summer the weather is gorgeous all I want to do at 2 p.m is go out have a glass of wine and obviously we're all working right like we all have to actually like do stuff sometimes but how do you how did you find that balance of like you know shutting down the laptop when you have to but also you know navigating what you're building because you're building so many businesses and so many streams, it is hard and it's a lot of work.

13:39Laura Donadio: Like, how do you delegate? How did you find that balance?

13:42Sedge Beswick: The big difference for me then to now is that I learned what the word boundaries meant. I keep saying, if you want something done, give it to the busiest person in the room or give it to a mom because they have to be so efficient with their time to be able to get things done. And that with me and with boundaries, it is that I want to be able to drop my kids off at nursery for as many days of the week as I possibly can. I want to protect my Fridays at all costs. And I would never say anything like that openly when I run the business because I would always have the fear that maybe a client would think I couldn't handle something else or that I wasn't always there or I wasn't on.

14:18Sedge Beswick: And I've been unbelievably, pleasantly surprised by how forthcoming people are when you actually say, no, this is where and how I work I'm a ninja when it comes to like emails whatsapps that is like again how my brain operates and how I process things like I can't see a whatsapp and not reply to it I was going to say

14:40Laura Donadio: I've never met anyone that replies faster on whatsapp than you I mean I would love to work

14:45Sedge Beswick: out what the problem is there and why I am like that but it's I love to get things done and out of my thought process um so again when I think about the business and when I think about what I do now, I really double down on my strength and my superpower and where I add the most value. And one of those things is I do work really quickly. And that can be a huge strength when you just want to get something done. I used to always say in a board meeting, I'll never come here and ask you if I can do something. I will always have tried it. And then I will tell you what the investment is from a business perspective, because I know if it works or if it doesn't work.

15:20Sedge Beswick: and again I think that piece of just like trial error fail learn like that's also a lot of what motivates me and also when you're doing it for yourself I can do that in the hours that work for me and I would be a complete liar if I didn't say I still work more hours than the average person I have not got that nailed but again I get a lot of joy and a lot of validation from work but I think it comes down to prioritizing. Yes. And I think also that's why I'm such an advocate for working moms is because they don't want to be jumping around and swapping jobs and trying to find that level of flexibility.

15:58Sedge Beswick: So if you offer a good maternity pay, I'm the first person to say that it can cripple a small business having multiple people on maternity leave at the same time. But equally, if you can get it right and you can look after those women and you can help them with their return to work, you can make sure that they can go and do drop off or pick up or see that school player, whatever it is that they need, they will be loyal and they will stick with that business. They're not going to swap and change and jump around. You won't be back full in those positions. And I think that's just a different way that you can see hiring moms.

16:27Laura Donadio: Something that I'm interested to chat about is finding balance between saying yes, figuring it out later versus saying no and setting your boundaries. Because as a founder, this is very difficult, isn't it? It's figuring out when to say yes, when to say no, when you're building something and you need so much traction for it.

16:45Sedge Beswick: I'm going to massively contradict myself here because saying yes in my career was the thing that allowed me to grow my career very quickly. I sat in meetings I didn't need to be in. I was in email threads I didn't need to be in. I just wanted to be a sponge and I wanted to take in as much as I possibly could. And by being the person that just said yes, I sat in meetings about wireframes for ASOS's app. There was no reason for the social media manager to be there. But I also said yes to running the French social media feeds with a D in my French GCSE because I was like, well, I'm showing that I'm ambitious and I roll my sleeves up and I get stuck in and I'm a team player.

17:19Sedge Beswick: Like, does that help me? But I was just intrigued. I was intrigued by how it all pieced together and how it worked. And I genuinely think that saying yes helped me in my early career. In my later career, I had to learn what to say no to because you can't do everything and you can't be everything to everyone. again to contradict myself further when it comes to running the business my motto was say yes and worry later i had an unbelievable first employee and i put a lot of the success of the business down to a good hire an exceptional hire and i would leave meetings and she'd be like what did you even just sell and i was like it doesn't matter we'll work it out and she would be the person that would go away do the diligence do the calls do the whatever it needed out because i was there's a way.

18:04Sedge Beswick: I know that that is the solution and the right answer for the business. And obviously you bring in what you need supplier wise, freelancers, consultants to make it work. But if that's the right thing for the brand, for the business, my job isn't to make them feel comfortable. My job is to push them out of their comfort zone. That's why they had an agency in the first place.

18:21Laura Donadio: 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 it only take a second it's free but it will mean the world to us it's a tough one right because as i said like when you are growing a business like you also want to say yes to everything but sometimes actually refining what you're saying yes to also help you grow because otherwise you say yes to like this whole range of things and then you spread yourself too thin

18:49Sedge Beswick: and then you have to do all of it and i think when you're in startup mode it is easier to say yes because you don't know what your icp is your ideal client profile you don't know where you're going to operate best yeah but actually so i think i can't remember the years but we had something like 50 clients and when i then looked the clients that were spending the least were the clients that were spending the most of my team's time and my team's resource to get right because whatever five grand to them was a hell of a lot of money whereas five grand to a tier one household brand And it was just part and parcel of the ecosystem.

19:27Sedge Beswick: And so I then did this insane audit with finance of like, what do we do? What do people buy? What are the margins? And actually, we then decided to resign almost 47 % of our client base. And our profitability tripled. You know, our operational margin went through the roof. Because all of a sudden, every single person in the business knew what we did. They knew who we did it for. every time they had a coffee with a friend, when they met a client, everyone was so confident in what it was that we were selling. And I think when you're starting, it's like you're working out what you're selling, but your job as a founder is to make it as easy as possible for people to buy from you.

20:03Sedge Beswick: And when you're not clear on your positioning, when you're not clear on your pricing model, when you're not clear on the person that you're selling to, all of those things get really tricky.

20:11Laura Donadio: And it's also two different things, right? Because there's what you're good at and what you enjoy doing. And I find that sometimes it's finding the right balance with the team of empowering them to do what they're good at but also figure out what they're actually wanting to do and how do you build both of them together into something that then relates to what the industry needs and what the demand i used to say does it do one of our three f's is it fun are the

20:32Sedge Beswick: team going to have a great time working on it is it going to drive us fame so will it get us the visibility to get our yeah or is it going to give us funds is it going to be the thing that means i can pay for headcount and so it wasn't always the sexiest most fun most entertaining most epic day in the office but it's a job so you've got to take the rough with the smooth as well yeah

20:51Laura Donadio: absolutely no one expects you to be 100 happy bunny every hour of the day there will be hours where it gets a bit more you know flat line yeah i think that's fair um i already think that if you can be content in your job and actually you know not have some discaries and feel like you're getting fulfillment from it and it's helping you grow as an individual and you're learning that's really a really good start agree agree you then decided to create a mentoring program what do you see in founders that you mentor that reminds you of yourself so much uh I want everyone

21:24Sedge Beswick: to go and have a good nap I the reason why I launched the mentor program was because I felt like I was hearing so much of the same conversations when I was having like ad hoc calls or the odd email here or there and when I left a lot of people were like ah help me you've been here you've done that you've got the t-shirt you've got it signed and I get a huge amount from mentoring um and equally it's nice I think to have someone in your corner that has been there yeah the soundboard a soundboard therapist it kind of all gets poured into one but I think the main things are and the things I find myself saying on repeat is for yourself up to do the thing that you're really good at you don't have to do everything you have to learn how to delegate and you have to work out what your superpower is and the thing that will drive the most impact for the business and then you also have to work out like what what you want the business to be doing and I didn't set up the business with an exit plan I didn't even set the business with a business plan but it was very much for me every 12 months what's the vision what's the goal what's the target what does everything around that look and I think so many people accidentally fall into running businesses, which is brilliant.

22:40Sedge Beswick: But at some point you have to just pause. What are you building for? And what stage in your life are you building for? Because the easiest thing that I had on paper was to keep going. I had a guaranteed salary. I took wonderful dividends. I knew my team. I knew my clients. I knew my space back to front. But actually the hardest thing to do was to do what I did and start a factory reset. And I think again, when you are in it, it's so hard to just pause and look up for air. What's working? What's what your team want from you? What's the industry saying? And that's the stuff when you don't give yourself that time where you can fall behind.

23:14Laura Donadio: When you were building the agency, who would you have wanted as a mentor?

23:18Sedge Beswick: I mean, I have got one life goal as a mentor for anything and everything, but Whitney Wolfhood. I think she is exceptional. And I really love that when you are in a position where you are essentially forced to quit, she has turned that into her superpower and she's done a full fuck you yeah if you want to knock me down that's fine but I'm going to come back better and bigger exactly exactly and for me her IPO-ing with her daughter in her arms also just rewrote the script

23:50Laura Donadio: of the expectation of working moms if you had to pick one today would it still be her or would you look at someone else I mean it would be her all day long yeah she's my dinner party guest she's my aspirational mentor she's my she's she's the person she's the goals yeah yeah and if not I'll

24:06Sedge Beswick: take Kurt Cobain.

24:08Laura Donadio: I'll go from one extreme to the other. Okay. Have you ever reached out to her?

24:12Sedge Beswick: I thought you were going to say if I reached out to Kurt Cobain, I was going to be like, honey, he's been dead a long time.

24:17Laura Donadio: Okay. Just checking.

24:19Sedge Beswick: But Bumble were a client for a really long time. Okay. What stopped you? If I'm going to outreach to someone, get in touch with something, I want to be a hundred percent set on where and what my... Yeah. And if I don't have that, that like there will be a point in time i'm sure when i'll be like i know the woman for this and i'll be going with such a clear can you help because okay um and you've got to savor that

24:44Laura Donadio: you can't just throw that around loosely yeah yeah i know i hear that like there's a couple of things recently that i was like i'm not clear yet on what i'm asking and what i like what i want to get out of this and i'll wait until i know because there's some chances that you can only like you can only use that card once a hundred percent and that's a one carder yeah I get that okay fair enough um okay so still part of that mentoring program is there a recurring theme that worries you about founders today I know we talked about like delegation and freeing up time and getting perspective but like is there a bigger common thread that you like what I would say is

25:21Sedge Beswick: every founder is so different and what motivates them what keeps them up at night cash flow all of those things are very different and my job is to be very much about the individual and what that individual needs but on one heart part it's never been easier to be a founder we have got all of this access and all of this opportunity claw chat gpt you know notion taskmasters to just streamline. You can launch a site with an emergent, with a lovable within like five seconds. Phenomenal because the amount of money that I have wasted doing the hard stuff that is so easy for someone else. But on the flip side, I think it's never been harder because of the economy, because of cost of living, because of how your customer is, because of everything.

26:10Sedge Beswick: not to get into politics it it's really tough and that can obviously create and especially if you were trading pre the last 18 months two years you most people have gone through where like well this is what i know now what the hell is this and that roller coaster the big thing is not operating and making big decisions when you're at the highs or the lows how do you make sure that you've like just taking a beat and that you make those big decisions when you are operating in that medium. If you were to start your career today, what would you do? Something totally different because I don't believe that anyone leaving school right now should get into social.

26:53Sedge Beswick: You know, three years ago, I'd say four years ago, become a producer because everything is going towards series, episodic, long form, short form. That is an exciting space and an interesting space to be. Right now, if I was to launch a business tomorrow, it would be around TikTok shop about live commerce. And actually three, four years ago, and I was still running the business, I was telling clients, this is what's coming. This is where you need to be. And I think from a, with my creator hat on, there's a huge opportunity to become a presenter, to be able to present for businesses, for brands in that live commerce space.

27:26Sedge Beswick: I think from a brand's perspective, like what is your TikTok shop strategy? What's your YouTube shop strategy you might not put that into action immediately but you've got to be prepared you've got to be planned you can't be the brand in six seven months time going well actually can you help me because I think I'm ready to start doing creators on TikTok you've already lost out the algorithm is behind and so my big thing is always like what's coming and how do you get early into it and that's essentially how I felt my entire career I was I had no one when I launched when I left uni and went into social media that I could look up to and say what do you do here how do we do this how do we make this work because i was one of very few people that were working in

28:02Laura Donadio: social and kind of winging it on the go i was pitching live selling on dtc four years ago and i was so proud i think this is such a cool idea it's gonna be great and then it didn't pick

28:11Sedge Beswick: up but then tiktok shop obviously did and i was like it's the same as qr codes i worked at three god how many years ago 12 13 years ago and everything was like what's our in every store let's add a qr code you can discover more you can find out more no one used them it was like the the store manager and now you can't go anywhere without there being a qr code where you can read the menu whether you can pay the bill whether you can go and discover more so like timing is everything but your job as a brand as a business just get ready yeah yeah absolutely okay thank

28:43Laura Donadio: you we're gonna go into a quick fire oh wow okay um are you ready i think so least glamorous part of growth in one word um exhaustion okay feel free to elaborate now you said one word yeah yeah

29:00Sedge Beswick: but now the word you can go for it i think we really romanticize glamorize being a founder you get to see that i've brushed my hair that i've got makeup on i'm here doing a podcast on a monday evening but the realities are that i'm actually not at home with my kids doing their bed and bath time that i'm not going to get home actually i'm eating a single thing today because i've just been running around there is you don't talk about that stuff and you don't talk and i think every founder within a degree and within the right spaces or the right one-to-one conversations needs to talk more openly about the realities of running a business the sleepless nights because of cash flow the client that never paid the right debt you've had to write off and i think that's the exhaustion because it's the mental load there is always something to do there is always something to think about and that's always there at the corner of your mind as well like it never shuts down

29:51Laura Donadio: yeah and then you also know that you want to enjoy life and it's finding the balance of like

29:55Sedge Beswick: have all these things to do but also like i want to i want to have fun yeah correct the one at 2

30:02Laura Donadio: p.m it will always come back um no one can see what's in my cup

30:09Laura Donadio: finished a sentence i felt most out of my depth when pregnant for me when i was so when

30:16Sedge Beswick: I was pregnant I was between the US and the UK so I was exhausted I was operating two well three because I was in LA New York and London three different time zones my team in the UK was scaling rapidly my client base was scaling rapidly all of those things seem and sound very sexy and wonderful and brilliant but I was pregnant I couldn't tell anyone obviously that I was pregnant until I was 12 weeks and I was going through a private equity deal first world problems I was renovating a house at the same time, there was just like, there was no capacity left to give. And I'd never been pregnant before.

30:49Sedge Beswick: And I had also never been setting up a US business before, and I'd never been renovating a house before. So it was all of these like first, and they were so enormous. And when I started my private equity process, I was told from so many different people, you will drop the ball, you will drop the ball, you will drop the ball. And I'm like, bitch, I'm a high Virgo energy over here. Like, I'm on top of this stuff. And I was on top of my emails. I was on top of my WhatsApps, but I was doing 10 % of my job everywhere, trying to keep everyone else happy. And I thought when I told everyone I was pregnant at 12 weeks, which again, not to, just to give the straight talking, it cost me over a grand just to get a scan in New York because I didn't have healthcare in the US.

31:28Sedge Beswick: But I really wanted to be transparent with the buyers that I was pregnant. I could hide it on a Zoom screen. You couldn't see my belly. Just eating loads in the US as you should. You should always eat a lot in the US. exactly exactly gotta go to joe's and so yeah the big thing for me was i want to operate with honesty with integrity and i want to know that the people that are buying me also

31:51Laura Donadio: will uphold the same values but there was an immense amount of stress yeah not telling people

31:58Sedge Beswick: that i was pregnant and working across these different time zones and doing all of these hours and i didn't realize that sleeping four hours which wasn't normal yeah like i had horrendous pain in my rib cage I was going to an osteopath all day every day um yeah and I just thought you know why not throw in a baby and that would be really easy um so yeah that was my harshest hardest reality what about your most expensive lesson and how much it cost I think my most expensive lesson when running the business was not bringing in operational support sooner because for me, the way I ran the business was every bomb on seat equated to 150 grand's worth of GP.

32:39Sedge Beswick: And so I could very easily see how the business would scale and how the business would grow. And I then struggled with, well, how does HR sit? How does finance director sit? And again, when doing the deal, actually having a full-time, very experienced FD would have been incredibly helpful to be able to have a very grown-up HR person that all of a sudden, a lot of the problems didn't have to come to me, that the policies could constantly be updated. It's not a one thing, but it was a magnitude of things where actually having that operational support sooner that was invested embedded into the business, I think would have had a significant impact on the offer.

33:18Sedge Beswick: And the offer was still fantastic and sexy, but yeah. Fair.

33:23Laura Donadio: One person who gave you the best piece of advice, who and what it was?

33:29Sedge Beswick: I had a boss when I worked at Red Bull when I was 18 called Leanne and this sticks with me and I live by it all day every day if you can do it in five minutes just get it done don't write it on a to-do list don't feel overwhelmed don't come to this enormous gigantic things that you can do if you want to book a restaurant just book it if you want to reply to your mate just reply instantly and it was drummed into me at such a young age that it's really stuck with me and I advocate

33:58Laura Donadio: for so many people to just do the five-minute rule fair enough no audience no network a thousand

34:05Sedge Beswick: pounds in the bank what's your first move I wouldn't I think when I think about the different things that I do now maybe it's because I enjoy it but I really like thinking about the brand thinking about how it shows up how it looks how it would enter the world i think we've got so so many brands have got lost in this performance but you need the two in tandem people have to know your why and especially when we live in this ai boom that we're in right now we will have the same access to the same stuff we're pumping in the same we are getting the same output and the most important thing is the human element your view your experiences and how you bring that to life through brand is the reason why people will stick around i actually have never been worried

34:50Laura Donadio: about ai one second and i hear so many people but what about ai what about ai i'm like no humans more than not like literally all day every time's over um you lose everything tomorrow who's your

35:02Sedge Beswick: first call my dad why because he is the calmest person that i have ever probably met but a very calming influence on me and is very good at I'm a I can be quite an emotionally charged person I get high emotion and then I level out and so throughout my entire life he has been the person that I'm like this just happened and it's like okay we'll break it down and then in five minutes I'm like oh what's next um and so yeah there's a very yin to my yang we'll call it I love that we started by asking you what you're known for what do you want to be known for i want to be known for being people's champion and hero and helping other people to succeed in business