Building better systems in food & drink- from blockers to breakthroughs

0:14Hello and welcome to the Tomorrow Brands podcast where we explore what it takes to build a brand of tomorrow. I'm your host, Ruth Vittock, and today's guest is Andrew Allen, a former founder turned consultant and entrepreneur in residence at Bidfood. In this episode, we talk risks and retailers, the structural blockers that keep great ideas from scaling, the role of incubators, and what a better system might look like. Hope you enjoy. Thanks for coming on. Before we get into some nice juicy questions I've got for you, it'd be great to hear about your background, how you got to where you are now.

0:45I didn't do any kind of entrepreneur or business for university or degree. I did design, actually. Loved the creative side. Realized very quickly I was terrible at that. So I went to work in advertising in Birmingham. Quickly got the bug. Loved the creativity elements of that. Ended up coming to London and to Kudsey. Long story short, ended up founding an agency. Loved advertising. Loved that side of things and building brands. And that really exposed me to FMCG, actually. A lot of our customers also started to realize that it was perhaps a young man's game. And I was getting a bit frustrated with spending my time working with clients.

1:25It was generally the challenges in a space rather than the leads. And so often it wasn't the strongest clients. And so we would spend ages building an idea and a strategy for them. And then them go, I don't want to do that. And I was like, I want to do this for myself. So I decided to leave, had some ground-up conversations, stepped away, learned lots of lessons about founding businesses, but then moved into food. I had a passion project and I thought, this will be fun. And it went from a bit of fun to my house on the line in nine months because we started a personal guarantee on a building. That was a port-scratching business, Snuffling Pig.

1:58Went from kitchen table to national retailers, national food service, and a big DTC arm, actually. It was a proper ride. I managed to exit that via a secondary, so internally i wanted to go and do something new so i sold my stake had a year or two in kind of consultancy doing some angel investing working with founders and then got interested in plant based ended up initially consulting on commercials into business called biffs which was biff and christa now married couple who were really focused on the junk end of of what junk in style not in substance so it was very clean deck and again we took that from effectively a kitchen table made in a small prep kitchen in East London to an international supply chain and scaled that into national retail, national food service, and actually delivery because of the pandemic.

2:48So rode the full wave of plant-based from boom and bust and felt all of those things. Left there 20, 22, in my 40s, got young kids, can't bootstrap me anymore. So went more back into consultancy. So I kind of sit now at the intersection between corporates and startup thinking. So sometimes that's startup side, helping brands and founders work through how they're going to scale and how they're going to grow properly and how they're going to really engage the bigger players, because often we don't know those things. And the other side, working with corporates to help them engage the innovation and challenges space more.

3:23And I'd love to know, what is an entrepreneur in residence? It's a good question, given that in food, I think I'm the only one, but in tech, it's pretty common, right? So it's embedding someone who has been my side, who's been a founder and has done that side of things in a corporate. If you're a 10 ,000 person business and people rise through the ranks, the idea of not getting paid, putting it all on the line and doing a 70 hour week just seems ridiculous. but it's why I think we need to have more of it because it amazes me how many decision makers and how many teams have a decision makers who have absolutely no concept of what it's like to build something and yet we all know that to meet these goals we're trying to meet we need the innovation and the challenges and the startups and so that's what my role is so I am entirely certainly at Bidford I am focused on how do we bring that kind of thing into the business and it's an exciting enjoyable occasionally frustrating ride and I think if it wasn't frustrating as a team we'd look at it and say I wasn't looking at the right things because I want to push against the things that are difficult it's a really good point and then a nice way of thinking of it I completely agree with you that sort of entrepreneurial thinking for big business is really hard to embed actually isn't it because it's almost like they're like two absolute polar opposites and they're just not set up structurally to be able to handle it but if you can kind of force that change through it can be super powerful and having that experience that you've got of both sides of the coin rooted in realism hopefully not going to bet the house again now either and what's been a learning process for me as well and just having always been found aside like actually what's in it for me is an entirely valid question it's just when you're a founder and when you're building startups it's just not a question it's like we're all in on this purpose on this aim and then what's in it for me is we're gonna we're gonna go to the moon right maybe we're exit we're building something we're all bought in whereas if you're in a big corporate entity and this is what all of the big retailers are right is that generally it's a career move right you're probably in a role for 18 months two years and so if you're asking someone to take a massive risk and it will reflect badly on them if it doesn't work the what's in it for them is a pretty valid question actually i mean wherever i can i think i probably came a bit true blunt to start with and actually it's about you can take people with you and go to track say look let's try this if this works this is why we're doing it and actually it's been an interesting experience as well I think the biggest difference for me is pace like the pace of sort of startup scale up life versus like big corporate when you're not used to either end it's a very hard adjustment I think when you come in from that like scale up startup mentality the pace of change like you said that like frustrating everything takes longer than you want it to versus scale ups which startups just move at the speed of light and you know that's his own problem rapid growth has his own problems too yeah for sure and startups have to work at that pace because they're under so much pressure as well and like it's i think we move we have to move too fast because everyone's just desperate for validation validation validation and you probably need to be raising money or you're probably burning money because of the nature of our system so you've got to move fast and it does mean that it doesn't mean you always do it the right way and it's saying this at the same time the corporate's like this is how we do things like this is how it works this is how we built a couple of billion pound business and that's entirely relevant as well so well i think there's got to be a balance i see it as it's not my job to throw the baby over the baffle and change everything but having one or two percent change every year that can be really effective certainly for big entities we've got to have a degree of risk and if we don't have a degree of it i think we all lose because the innovation doesn't come i think mpd and you meet a lot of teams that say no they want to be more entrepreneurial with their teams and they're thinking and they're trying to do more innovation network but venture building and innovation in corporates is just hard because the reality is it's honed in by structure and we build it like this and this is what we've got so you don't think like a founder because you've got one you've got a lot access to a lot more data and probably a lot more research but also the risk curve is different so i get involved with some of that as well and how do we sort of help people think more innovatively and just get to think that let's show a bit more insight how a founder would think when it comes to building and thinking of MPD.

7:44Nice so you you mentioned the word system in the net so I would love to get into that you've said before that the biggest issue isn't with buyers it's with systems what do you mean by that? So it's kind of leading on a little bit to that what's in it for me type question I think if we look at how the typical path and i'm not saying this is everyone but i would say if we were to do a bell curve big majority for a founder would be they have an idea particularly their first time into food and they probably spent two or three years learning the same types of lessons that everybody else it's incredibly hard on an idea and trying to get a conversation with a buyer right a key decision maker and food is really broken because we really have like 10 15 key gatekeepers to access to pretty much the entire market in bricks and mortar obviously there is dc but that's a bit that's a bit of a challenge and if our system is geared that that's the game and you're just going to have to send millions of messages and it doesn't serve the buyer well because they're overwhelmed i've seen that on my side i've seen the inbound side of things but it certainly doesn't help a founder because the whole point of being a founder is lean right to work lean and to learn as much as you can as quick as you can and those two people they are absolutely fundamental decision makers if you can't get fake feedback or validation how are you supposed to learn right and that is the problem in that our system at the moment is geared that the pressure's all on everybody's treated the same on the whole it's all the same kind of metrics the pressure's all on maximizing the category yet we're all saying we've got these bigger goals we've got to meet and the two things pull in opposite direction we've got to find ways of just shortening that from starting to getting some validation to get into one of those key gatekeepers if that's going to be the route because we're just churning through founders at the moment and we're churning for investor cash and which is making it harder for investors to come in because sentiments drop in doesn't serve anyone well and that's why i think we've got to think about it and yes there are some buyers are amazing but the reality is they're are only in a role for 18 months, two years, generally, and then they're going to move on.

9:53And that, again, is a system because that encourages you to play relatively safe on the whole. So how do we bring in risk and more progressiveness within our system? It's also, to that last point, you know, you say there's 10 to 15 sort of effective gatekeepers and they move around so often. And I've had this happen so many times where you'll be really close to a listing and then the buyer will leave and then you've got to, you go right back to the beginning again and those are real big binary decisions that really affect brands and they're down to one person who's then not even there anymore that is i think such a challenge it is and it's so subjective right it's just that i've and depending on the category you might be working with someone with the greatest respect really junior might have might have only been in buying for a couple years and might have bought hair care before that and then they're like they are fundamentally making the decisions that give you access to if it's someone like tesco it's like 30 of the whole market i did quite a lot of research for a different project on some of the sustainability games and they're front and center that's not games front so they'll be to goals and it's front and center of all the corporate reports you read the tesco corporate report it's absolutely there you can say like we are aiming for these things these are the things we care about but the reality is when you talk to the buyer team it doesn't affect that much like if they could like and so how do we affect that it's big thinking right we've got to be more joined up we've got to find ways i've done little bits in terms of like we've been bid food we've created systems and we've created accelerated programs etc but they're all individually i think we probably need to find a way of just joining things up a bit more collectively which is hard given that everyone who's got shareholders to answer to we expect someone to come up with like the answer independently break their back spending like all their time effort money to attempt to get the attention of one of these gatekeepers and then be like right get in and work it's not joined up enough we need to find ways of briefing out and the problem is as well most founders and i did this as well tend to lead to like the sexiness of brands because it feels really like accessible and then well the problem is it's really hard when you start in and what feels like massively progress it's like oh it's a co-man reality is well you've got no moat there so you don't have a lot of ip is it the right thing to build where actually if we were briefing out challenges more and saying okay we're trying to solve x or y maybe it's ingredient tech maybe you go up the supply chain you could be validated better sooner that's why i think we just need to kind of it's very easy for me to say as an individual consultant but i think the more we can be collaborative on these things and we can take some leadership the better it's going to be for everybody because like we we're just going to burn through a big part of sort of the founder community in london there's a couple of networks i'm fortunate to be involved with and most of it's tech one way or another or they what they're not is f and b i think you say and generally talk to me i wouldn't touch that with a barge and they are right because as soon as you look at that decision process and the curve But if you're building something that's a digital first product, you can be testing and learning very quickly and scaling very quickly and incrementally.

13:05And yet in food, it's just not the case. Do you think something like the Tesco Accelerator, for example, is part of the solution or not? They're all positive. I run one. So I created Open Doors, Bid Food. The board says that, what does this look like? And so we had the buy-in, which I think is super important. it has to have buying from the top level because otherwise it's just going to drop away if the leadership team isn't behind it then it's pretty difficult is that it still comes down to the buyer's decision ultimately that said compared to where we were when i first started out there's almost nothing right and it was just everybody was treated the same at least there if you get in and you're like you've got some progress you're going to get supported it is super positive if you get on it i think we have to take them all in isolation and mine is the same it helps us do progressive things it's not the answer to our big system changes because it's it's a tiny sort of drop in the ocean so let's talk about short-term performance versus longer-term progression because we've we've kind of alluded to that already you've called this one of the great tensions in the industry where have you seen that play out most acutely and what do you think is the cost to innovation i mean it's been pretty relevant in the last couple of weeks that there's been the conversation around W8 Smith and retailers doing sort of pay-to-play models.

14:24And that's all about short-term progress, right? If you hadn't seen that story, it was kind of one of the great unspoken things. I think if you're in the industry, on WhatsApp groups, I saw it probably, I reckon, four or five times a year minimum, someone would be like, I'm new to the industry, I've got an opportunity with W8 Smith. And the feedback being like, you're not going to make any money, the compliance is going to be poor, but if it fits your narrative i can see why you do it and so it was kind of unspoken that like you may not get what you pay for which is ridiculous really isn't it but people would still do it and that's this is a challenge right because go back to that risk kind of conversation show this is low risk to bring it in that you're going to perform so the narrative needs to be there and then if we look at our funding structure at the moment kind of understandably ventures that come back when you're a couple of million quid and you've got two or three retailers well it's kind of what you're raising money to do once you're there like the momentum's coming and you've got it you've got an opportunity and at the moment that's the challenge that we are constantly it's short-term progress constantly and it's much harder for how it's certainly if you're going into grocery to have the linear kind of growth or sort of hockey stick growth you might get in digital products it just means we're always chasing that which doesn't solve serve trying to solve big complex problems well it's like how can i fight for the most attention to get there and it kind of leads us down the path of not trying to solve the biggest challenges on the whole because that's often the stuff that's not going to sell the media time is not something this industry is great at giving right the incubators will at least give you a bit longer we do a year to go and but but the reality is still quite sure if you're trying to change behavior or you're trying to crack a real challenging problem like those things take time and if we put it on a general proviso that you've got to be growing all the time and showing this growth and the two things put in the opposite direction and that's that's certainly a challenge yeah agreed we talk about a lot of marketing as well that short-term performance long term you know the long and the short of it for sure i mean we've seen it in the loads of celeb back brands that we haven't got the depth of it that the states has got in any way shape or form you see where someone with a platform has really gone all in like how kind of it with the turmeric company and a couple of others they've got a couple of ex-professional rugby players doing some drinks things that's very different right you can see there's some real progress being in that and i think it'd be nice if we could have more of that rather than just a short term who can make the most noise and we know what's going to happen right you're going to fly in it's going to almost certainly drop off whereas the guys that spend the time and build it a cumulative effect are going to have a normal value in their brand and hopefully have a better opportunity i think you know there's no such thing as an overnight success in fmcg and even brands that seem to come out of nowhere often they've been plugging away for three five years and they've yeah they've kind of changed sometimes entire formats and kept just kept going but there's and then suddenly they might have this breakthrough moment but there's often years and years mama's the best example i can think of that like tom started in looking at like doing overnight oats in trains so like built a whole model piece put that all together and then to his credit was like this is not the future of pivoting moving to product focus more in the oat and muesli and breakfasts type occasions and then over time ultimately where that business ended up going to the moon was oat milk i think it's a real skill and the kind of learning knowing when to stick and when to twist is those are kind of the pivotal decisions that make the difference in the end so sometimes just picking your lane and like really sticking with it and waiting for your timing to you know the stars to align versus sometimes realizing that something isn't right I mean and you know like Ollie's Olives who are no longer olives they're pretzels you know it's like they were full Ollie's Olives it was like absolutely essential to the brand and then had another product was doing better and pivoted but there's equally you can't flip-flop about the whole time either but knowing you know all these things are easy to say in hindsight but those are the calls that you make that make the big big difference this is the challenge of the founders we too often jump to solutions without actually thinking about are we building the right stuff zoom out park all the stuff like clearly there'll be a supply chain nightmare this week there's all those things there's always something park all of that and zoom out and just just review where you're at and what you're trying to build and are you on the path and like what are your biggest assumptions you're making at the moment and like can we focus on that and because if you can't create the time to think objectively like that yeah you're probably just going to keep going because the hope is what kills everybody right and so finding the time to be a bit more subjective and do it like as you say like you can't be flip flopping around but if i think about i think tom was 14 years into mama by the time he sold it to so in that time it was two or three key pivotal moments that they made and that's part of being a founder right is to as you say to quote my dad loved kenny rogers and the gambler no when to hold them no when to fold them and it's very much the case so let's talk about another expression i've heard he used zombie businesses uh and you've said we don't talk enough about zombie businesses is these are the ones that have low traction but still won't die why do you think this is so common in food and drink one because we make it so bloody hard right and it isn't it is a naturally going to be a hard space because we're one in one out there's no natural white space for you to move into somebody's going to lose when you for you to come in it's not like oh yeah there's just there's an opportunity other than d to c it's going to be challenging i also think because food is so driven by passion right the amount of times that i'd speak to someone it's quite often i was working in the city i came interested in this type of product or i've always made this product i mean this is this was kind of me i was working advertising grew up on port scratchings because i'm from birmingham and was like i could do that better and that's great brilliant passion problem is it's not really a great way of starting a business you're not sat down and going what is the problem i'm trying to solve who i'm trying to solve it for it's like i love this i'll make this better it sucks you in and as we were just talking about before you know it like you're just fully operational you're just because food is just operation operation operational and yeah you don't have time to really get your head up and then there's nothing that breaks my heart more than when you talk to a founder that's four or five years in isn't paying themselves it's costing them a lot of money every month and the reality is the progress isn't there and now if they're trying to raise money and investors going well where's the curve and then that's the classic case of a zombie startup has raised a fair amount of money and then just flat lines we have quite a few that just just scramble on constantly like they're completely reliant on the founder who's doing all hours god sense is doing everything he's burning out he's not progressing themselves but they do because it's just like almost a pig-headedness and it's the found way of like i can make this work and occasionally that happens but i think we should give ourselves more space to go is this not working should i do something different because that's a power move right to actually go you know what that's not working with pivoted but i started doing more of this as well in mentoring which i find deeply uncomfortable but literally saying you sure you want to do this is this serving you because like otherwise we're complicit in the life it's so challenging and you obviously need pig-headedness because it's part of being a founder and when we go back to why corporates lose in sectors that challenges win there was the whole piece about red stripe doing like a run type thing they pulled it back and it created a bit of comment around why does why does sometimes challenges win and not corporates mpds because often corporates will just be going well this will make any sense we'll pull it and like a founder would just go i'll make it work and you need some of that of course but it has to be tempered and i also think that's why there's a role for good mentors to be like good mentors don't swerve it and just hold to count and go does this serve you because if it doesn't let's go and do something else i did some really early stage mentoring and felt like i was just raining on a lot of parades that's good and it's horrible isn't it because it's not what any of us want to do and this is it again this is why the system's so hard like if you're early stage you don't know what you don't know and sometimes that's great because the energy and enthusiasm will carry you through in places you wouldn't normally touch it but it can also mean that you spent three or four years to be like oh this is never going to work or this is like this this needs scale from day one i am not going to be able to go and raise that money or what and or whatever those things are and so god you do have to rain on a few parades don't you because otherwise you like two or three years of time is not small bit right particularly at peak years that's a huge opportunity cost and so we just need better infrastructure to feed that in the first place can you think of any well-structured food incubators or venture builders at the moment there's carbon 13 for carbon great brilliant i'll pull that together there's loads for tech and there's a couple of others and there's some that are a bit more lightweight but put a load of good talented people in a room with a load of big food problems come and focus on the big problems come together and work that would be a far more progressive way if we could join up some of the retailers and some of the money and go here's some validated problems then the way that we have to work at the moment let's talk about what buyers really want uh as you've sat both sides of the table and you've seen many many a pitch so what actually lands with buys i think we have to caveat it just depends on the buyer like it's been a couple of really great progressive buyers that are like live and breathe their category there's a lady katie green i think she still had things with she was a plant-based buyer when we went to plant-based click she just loved the category she's very red on it it felt like you were talking to a peer in the space i think that's brilliant i think that's what we need you know like you want people to be absolute champions of it i can understand there's also an advantage of having that kind of removed subjective mindset because it's about commercial performance but i do think that helps i mean what i would say is it's been really eye-opening just how overwhelming inbound it is I am not a buyer I make it very clear I'm not a buyer but I'm involved in that process and just the amount of inbound and the amount of inbound that is completely just just not qualified not just hasn't even looked at what you're doing I quite often get something that someone has put the word breaks instead of bid food into it so I've cut and paste it I'm like come on I think succinctness quality of thinking all those kind of things and then the other side of it is the what's in it for me so often you're reading four or five pages on the story and it doesn't help it's like be the category expert have a great a great just nugget that is like this is how i'm helping you and if you've got a rate of sales story brilliant i mean that's harder to to get when you start to but then it's like okay know those wider goals know the things they might be interested in if it's a decarbonization thing and you know it's a retailer cares about that it's like how i'm going to do that because incrementality which is what everyone's looking for can take more than one view.

25:50It can just purely be commercial incrementality. Great, like getting more people into a category or getting them to buy more. But it could be around the carbon goals that they might have, or it might be around, they might have other schemes. But you've got to focus on that and not spend the first 10 minutes telling us about your backstory because quite frankly, they don't care. It's a nice reason to believe, but it's not going to get you on shelf. So second question, which you may have already answered then, is what should founders stop doing in those meetings? well one start with the big thing that is before them rather than he's like i quite often see decks that would be probably much better investor decks being used in retail to say because i do think that has a lot of value with investor decks and that when you're invested you are buying into the person and the founder story and the founder's motivation is critical if it's a founder-led business still you've got to take them on a you've got to take them on a journey to like someone who's perhaps new to the category to understand the problem the category you're positioning that your story your journey because they're buying into you specifically particularly early stage i think later stage you you frame it more about this is a rocket ship and you're gonna you're gonna miss that but that like and they buy and they've got 15 it's just it's not what they're there to do it's like know that category know the space like the bid food catalogs are online i can count one hand the amount of calls i've had where someone's actually looked at the range and said well this is your space like the same with retailers going not that you might get an answer but if you go and look at the fixture and kind of planogram it and work out where you're fit and where are you within their tiers and understand all of that space and use their language like that's going to be a much better piece than spending a lot of time just talking about yourself and then what else do they stop doing i think the other side this is a broader thing less towards buyers i think just don't entirely focus on retail being the only answer we look at some of the most successful brands of of late and it's the ones that just their digital footprints just been excellent perfect ted or freya or even bulbin right their digital footprint is just incredible and that that is the kind of stuff buys love right because it's just it's like it helps them make famous and you're on a bandwagon and off you go and that's the noise so i think that's the thing i think we need to do more of is focus in the right areas well the other thing that does is if you use it early stage to validate test learn find out about your consumer knowing that your retail consumer will end up being slightly different in in all likelihood from a dtc consumer but you can still use it as a massive sort of open feedback loop for sure which like we said hard to do when you go straight into retail you don't get yeah and i think i think bigger bigger brands could do more of that as well like given some of the things that you do like there's still you can still test and learn right again if tech and i used to teach an mba we would like learn as much as you can spend as little as you can you don't need to make even have the product if you can get a buying signal if you can get a commit to buy you can get a feeling it is harder when it comes to snap brands and those kind of things i mean look you're saying great example i imagine that's now dropped off because they're everywhere but for a period like you used to see those boxes it was a distinct asset that blue it's just a perfect kind of product for that space so i think we need to do more of that as well so we've talked about the kind of problems and the way the system is broken in many ways so put you on the spot and start to ask you about fixing it you'd have to all the answers right now but if you could fix one thing so you know you're deeply embedded in the ecosystem you've got with brands retailers suppliers investors if you could redesign one piece of that startup to scale up journey where would you start i see that's a very good question i mean i so a more achievable a less blue sky thinking is i think we need to create a venture builder in this space one way or another like we need to have a space where we can get talented founders big ideas and bring key gatekeepers and finance together an early stage validate and go a vast majority of those are still going to fail right But they've got the best opportunity because at the moment we make it so hard to catch a fair wind to have that opportunity.

29:57So let's try and do that. Wouldn't it be brilliant if collectively we could get together some key players and it probably needs a degree of government and we can align on four or five areas that we say are absolutely fundamental and say collectively we'll have a different margin expectation for those products and we will make some space available. right because if still at the moment it's 40 margin you know our system is on scale the 40 margin for the retailer is not going to be mirrored to the other side it's just paid for by the startup and that's not progressive as a system wouldn't it be amazing if we could go okay for a couple of key areas this is what we're going to do wouldn't it be brilliant if we can have some kind of engagement on that kind of space and then it would encourage founders to go and build into that area because it just creates clear signals of like, well, if we go after that, there's a better opportunity.

30:50So that is something I would love to see happen, accompanied by some mandated kind of clear space for people to go after. So it's not ultimately down to a buyer going, well, I don't want to remove that big corporate product that's chucking 30 grand a year at marketing spend at me because that just looks badly at me. This is what we talk about at BidFeed and it's why I wanted to make it a decentralized process to what came in for OpenDoors. So if you send to a buyer and bring in progression and take a chance on the innovation, but if it doesn't work, it's on your head. That's not fair, does it?

31:25It doesn't work. If a commitment from the top, here's four or five areas and you can change every year. We've come together collectively as a BRC or whatever comes together. And we are going to say, here's some space, here's some juice. That to me would be great signals and things would move much faster. if all of that happened you might get more like seasoned industry professionals founding businesses because most people who work in the industry and have done for a long time if you ask them would you do your own thing they're like absolutely not so it's a very hard way to make money but that maybe if if what you just suggested blue sky thinking happened that then you might get more of that and then that might make a difference i don't know like we said there's a kind of balance between naivety being a useful thing because it is really hard but also you know if you if you brought in someone with like decades you don't get many older founders for a start there are a few but they tend to be younger than 30 because they've got the end very certain and of a very certain demographic let's be fair on the whole on the whole which which does really bother me and i know there's been like stuff growing awareness of that and the grocer did a big piece on it about how you know but that is also a problem isn't it like the risk involved and you know you need probably the capital and the security to be able to take that risk that you're we're losing out on talent either from different you know backgrounds or just from talent 100 like us like it's a great like i i don't think it's a sweeping statement to say i would be a far better founder now than i was 10 years ago like just because learned all that stuff but i'm 40 44 blimey so i get to the point i'm old enough that i have to think about it that like it's like it's not my risk right i've got two young kids and all those things and like fundamentally as you say we just churn through so we end up with this very tight section of on the whole it's not that again if you look at bell curve it kind of lends to a certain demographic that can afford to take that risk and to do those things that might have a fallback plan and those kind of areas wouldn't it be brilliant if you had those kind of areas because one it might encourage more investment into the space from corporates and go okay you might be able to put someone who's got the ridiculous first-time founder energy, pair them, because co-founders are great, create teams, bring that together and create that system, because it would be brilliant.

34:02I love when I meet a founder and I think, I've really got something on that. I'd love to work with you on those things. That's great. And it would be great if you could just create enough of a better ecosystem to bring that together. I'm going to do a quick fire round now before we finish up. Favourite brand at the moment? I love Citizens of Soil. There's a brand that has fixed a system and also just done a brilliant execution job. And it's really tasty. Brand you wish you'd founded? I'm slightly biased because I know the team, but I think Holy Moly is great. I think it's just so nailed on a consumer problem, really well executed, good products.

34:45It's great. One thing you wish every founder knew about buyers?

34:53I think the timeframes it's going to take, because if you don't know that, you might go into something that you actually don't have the time actually in your life to go and do. If you told a founder, it's going to take you five years before you get any traction, that's a pretty big frame to like, do I want to do this? And I think that would be a great answer. Trap you've fallen into yourself as a founder, your founder past. Certainly the naivety piece. This will be great. we'll expect the first email to land with the big buyer and before you know it be a major retailers it's just not the case is it best piece of advice you were ever given yeah you i think that you never really know when you're having a good day or a bad day because those things shape it you can have a day when it feels like and i've had a few of these in my time where you're literally in teeters and then in a year's time with hindsight you think that's probably the best thing that could have happened i have never heard that and i absolutely love it that is great advice so thank you for sharing that and finally last question that we ask everybody who comes on the pod in your opinion what makes a brand of tomorrow progression me like meeting one of our bigger aims and a really boring fundamental level of resource like there's just too many founders trying to do this with no money and not like trying to raise money and like there's a badge about bootstrapping and I believe in it and done some of that but it's very very hard to move at speed in this space and I think that's something we need to everyone needs to be aware of.

36:33Nice thanks so much for coming on Andrew. Thank you for having me.