Be More Pirate by Sam Conniff Allende | with guest Spencer Gallagher

0:01Sam Conniff Allende:Welcome to Business Book Club, the show where top entrepreneurs break down the most powerful insights from the world's best business books. I'm your host Sam Brown and today we're talking about Be More Pirate by Sam Conniff.

0:17Sam Conniff Allende:In the next 30 minutes, you'll learn why the most successful founders don't follow the rules, they rewrite them. If you feel like you're constantly fighting the way things have always been done, this episode is your permission slip to stop. Be More Pirate is positioned as the manifesto for the modern rebel. Sam Conniff didn't just write this, he lived it. Founding Liberty, an award-winning creative network that proved purpose-led disruption can scale. And joining me is a man who knows exactly what it takes to scale and exit at the highest level. Spencer Gallagher. At 27, Spencer built Blue Halo into a£12 million revenue powerhouse before exiting to gyro.

0:55Sam Conniff Allende:He's the man behind Agencynomics, a book that gave me the financial framework to scale my own agency with confidence. I may well do a solo episode on Agencynomics when I somehow find the time. And now he's back at the helm of an AI-first M &A advisory company, also called Blue Halo. Today, Spencer is breaking down why a book about 18th century pirates is actually the ultimate guide to 21st century agility, culture building, and systemic change. Spencer, thanks for being here. Why did you choose Be More Pirate as the most impactful book that

1:28Spencer Gallagher:you've read? I chose the book because I think it's one of those books that really gets you thinking about avoiding mediocrity. I think in life it's very easy, especially in this new world of AI, to settle for the average of everything. And I think in business, sometimes we have to take a step back and we have to think about things a little bit more creatively and a little a bit more innovatively. I'm excited to get into these lessons that you've brought.

1:56Sam Conniff Allende:Build reputation, not mediocrity. Let's dive into the reputation bit first. What does it mean in the book about building reputation?

2:05Spencer Gallagher:Blackbeard is probably a wonderful example of this. To be really clear here, by the way, this book is covering the golden era of 17th and 18th century pirates. What was very interesting about people like Blackbeard was they would go around on their ships. Of course, they were looting and stealing, so they weren't particularly all good, but they were challenging authority, but they were all doing it under this pirate flag. And the pirate flag, a lot of people thought that pirates went around fighting all the time, but they weren't stupid pirates. They wanted to stay alive and make money. Reputation was really important for them.

2:38Spencer Gallagher:Reputation was all about how can they create a reputation that makes people fearful of them, so they don't attack them, so they don't fight them, so that actually they were left alone. One of the stories from the book is very much around Blackbeard saying they actually don't even know whether he did get involved in any fighting at all because everyone was so scared of him. His personal brand, his stories that were created of him being this massive tyrant just scared everyone away. And so the reputation in today's world might translate into something like the brand for your business or the brand for you as an individual.

3:10Spencer Gallagher:But it's often the storytelling side of your business. What do they say about a brand? Brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room. And I guess it's the same with the personal brand too.

3:22Sam Conniff Allende:They talk about it in the book quite a bit about the pirates being the world's first super brand and the logo of the Jolly Roger. All the pirates, they had their own version of the Jolly Roger, but they all had very similar themes, all the black background and some similar iconography. If you see this Jolly Roger on the horizon, you would feel the fear from all of these stories that were told. So yeah, the world's first super brand. It was over 150 years before Coca-Cola even existed, which is often cited as the world's actual first super brand.

3:50Spencer Gallagher:Yeah, I think when we go on through this podcast, you'll actually see that pirates pioneered and invented a lot of things many hundreds of years ahead of today's society. They really were the pioneers. Do you just want to touch on a couple of those things? Yeah. So pirates invented cocktails. So obviously they were known for the rum, but the scurvy was rife back then. So they would make a concoction of rum and other medicinal herbs that would help prevent scurvy, obviously vitamin C driven. They also are very progressive in terms of same-sex marriage. They had no issues with same-sex marriage, talking 17th, 18th century.

4:29Spencer Gallagher:They had flat organizational structures. They were very progressive in the way that they had insurance policies against injuries. If some people got injured, they had equal pay. These are all things that we're here fighting about in today's world. Everybody got paid a set amount and then the bosses only got paid a fixed amount. They got paid double what everybody else got paid, but it was fixed. That's just some of the things that they pioneered.

4:55Sam Conniff Allende:You were touching on a minute ago around building the reputation that actually pirates, they do want to avoid battles. They don't actually want to engage in actual fights because, you know, one reason is this insurance policy. If someone dies or loses a leg, they have to pay out to the family or to the individual. So they embellish their stories and use this flag as a symbol. Let's move on to this not mediocrity element of it. How does that come into play?

5:19Spencer Gallagher:It's very easy in this world to not set yourself apart in any shape or form, especially in business. It's very easy to conform. And conformity can be very dull. If you as a business want to stand out, being mediocre is not the way forwards. So it's about thinking about with your business, how will you stand out from the crowds? How will you build your brands and your company brand, your personal brands? What can you do in your marketing, your advertising, your PR, innovation in your business? What can you do that will build stories that will excite people about your business? And I think that's really the context that I'm trying to get across here is challenging business owners to just take a step back from their business a few times a year and ask yourself, what could you do differently?

6:10Spencer Gallagher:And I was with a client yesterday and they've got a particular target company they want to work with. they've already planning to send in an ice cream van to the offices or that company to give away free ice creams to anyone who works there with branded Soviet napkins to go with it. And also even possibly saying, do you know this person wanted, you know, to talk to and just thinking of funny things. And I've got hundreds of stories like that. I mean, there's a great one with one agency in the north of England who sent out boxes of locked sweets from Amazon. You can get passcoded boxes and then sent it into marketing teams and said, if you want the suites, call my mobile and I'll give you the code number.

6:50Spencer Gallagher:So it's like, how can you apply interesting different approaches to make your brand seem more exciting? Because if you do things like that, then people's perception of your brand is, well, look, aren't you fun? Aren't you going to be good to work with? So there's just a couple of examples there.

7:06Sam Conniff Allende:This standing out thing, it's a great idea when you have these stories of this is what X company and Y company are doing, they sound good. But have you got any tips of how people can get into that frame of mind of coming up with those ideas? For me, it's about authenticity.

7:19Spencer Gallagher:When I was an employee, the people I worked for who were the entrepreneurs, they really inspired me with how they tackled these things. I saw so many wonderful examples of what I'm talking about now. But the biggest thing is, is trying to keep the integrity with it. Like it's one thing to create these stories, but obviously trying to have integrity, watching out for spin and bravado. Don't do things that are lies. There's an ethical side to this. I want to just add in, don't go around saying that you do things you can't do because things will catch up with you. And I think we have been guilty in business.

7:53Spencer Gallagher:I think even now you see it on Instagram of huge amount of false claims all the time by advertisers outside of guidelines about what things to do. So I think it's important that you have an ethical code underneath all of this. So in my day job now, I'm either helping businesses scale up or helping them buy businesses or sell businesses. And then probably the last third chance of my job is to help them reinvent their business and keep them future proof. And so when I'm working with clients to future proof them or to help them with their sustainable growth journey, what I'm doing is I'm telling them to do quarterly fame projects.

8:24Spencer Gallagher:So set a small budget aside. And once a quarter, sit down and come up with an idea. whether you're going to break a world record or you're going to do what I just said like you're going to create some kind of publicity stunt or you're going to use technology in a different way to communicate to people you're going to come up with a creative campaign whatever it is set some time aside each quarter try and create four things a year some things will never see the light of day and some things will don't over complicate them and don't be perfectionist with them because building fame is as much about luck as it is about skill.

9:00Spencer Gallagher:So as much as you can come up with some good ideas, whether or not they really take off, you never really know. But you'll learn lessons continually through this. Just to share with you one thing that happened to me. So when I was a struggling up and coming business, I think I was turning over about quarter of a million. You've read agency nomics. So it's the stage where actually I got my non-exec to come in. I was cause for a million. I wasn't paying myself. I was paying my team first and not me. I had eight employees, if anyone's ever been there. And I was building websites right at the beginning of the website boom.

9:31Spencer Gallagher:And he said to me, Spencer, who is it that needs to buy websites? And I was like, well, you know, anyone forming a company needs to buy a website. And he said, well, where do people register companies? And I went, well, Companies House. And he said, well, what if everyone that registered the company in the UK saw a letter from you first before Companies House saying, you've got the company now why don't you get a domain name and a website and a brand to go with it so i went away and we looked up and obviously companies house back then they sold a cd-rom and that cd-rom contained all of the data from last year's company registrations so what we did was went on the website and we realized that they published all of the companies that were registered before they sent a letter out so we wrote a little agent back in the day robot we well ahead of our time, go in every day to Companies House website, and it would take the name of the company, and then it would go to a printer, print a letter out, look up the domain names for that company limited name, and then send it out first class, which would get there about a week before a Companies House letter would get to them.

10:32Spencer Gallagher:So the first letter that any company got between 2003 and 2002 and 2005 was basically from us. And that was a real pirate idea there, because we just thought, how can we do something differently? How can we get to it? What can we do? And we solved that problem. Let's move on to lesson number two. Reinvent the status quo. Tell me a little bit about how pirates reinvented the status quo. I'm not sure if any of your other readers have talked about a book called Reinventing Organizations by Frederick Lallou. So Reinventing Organizations talks about the history of organizational charts. And actually, if you go back in history, it was pretty much the church and the military that originally created the organizational structures that we have today.

11:17Spencer Gallagher:So if you think about the pirates, most of them were ex-Navy. The Royal Navy had very strict hierarchy. They weren't actually offering things like insurance, equal pay. It was a very brutally unfair place to work. And so the pirates pivoted away into this flat organizational structure. They reinvented the way that the ship leadership would work in a way that it would appeal to everyone and to build better crews, to build better teams. And so a good example of reinventing the status quo is not settling for a normal hierarchical business structure, but looking at ways that you could challenge that.

11:55Spencer Gallagher:Just because people do things in a certain way doesn't make it right. Sometimes you have to challenge the status quo.

12:02Sam Conniff Allende:One of the moments where he's talking about this in the book that really hit it on for me was when they were talking about pirate radio. I think he starts one of the chapters actually with the original pirate material song.

12:12Spencer Gallagher:Radio Caroline, Radio Luxembourg were, when I was very young, before BBC One, BBC was playing classical music. Think Radio 4, think the news and the weather shipping forecast. But there was all this pop music. So two separate stations took boats out into the North Sea, just outside of the regulated licensing frequency zones for radio, and broadcasted pop tunes. And actually, it forced the BBC to realise that there was a demand for this. Really, we wouldn't have popular music through BBC if it wasn't for the pirate radio stations of Radio Carolina and Radio Luxembourg.

12:50Sam Conniff Allende:They say in the book that the BBC actually launched, I think, four radio stations within a couple of years and directly in response to this. Yeah.

12:57Spencer Gallagher:And if you look at the other side of things, piracy was a big problem at the end of the 90s. Everyone was ripping CDs onto their MP3 players. And the record industry was losing control of royalties, of money. And then iTunes came in and said, look, we've got a way to fix this. We'll make a regulated platform. They did a deal with all of the music publications. And so they started to find a way to almost reinvent the way that was to stop the pricing. And of course, then Napster came out that people remember Napster and there was file sharing. The MP3 market was clearly a demand. People wanted to carry tunes around with them that wasn't on a radio or a cassette or even a mini disc player back then to be able to have it in digital format.

13:39Spencer Gallagher:But the market hadn't caught up with the demand. And so, yeah, some great examples there of how pirates and pirating has kind of pioneered. In fact, one of the other great books I read over the years is called The Victorian internet. When I first built my agency, it was the beginning of the dot-com boom. And the Victorian internet talked about the telegraph system. And it talked about the fact that actually all new things start the same way. You'll have people having affairs over telegram system. There were people cheating on gambling over the telegraph system. It happens that way. And I think equally, the internet in the early days became this way where it would almost have illicit ways.

14:19Spencer Gallagher:And of course, eventually all systems get regulated.

14:21Sam Conniff Allende:We're not really talking about pirates breaking the law. It's more like pushing the boundaries of what's kind of possible. And then sometimes law has to kind of catch up with it and everything. Which companies do you see that are doing it really well at the moment, pushing these boundaries and reinventing the status quo?

14:34Spencer Gallagher:The biggest one, you know, at time recording this podcast will be OpenClaw. OpenClaw launched the end of January. Everyone's building AI tools or trying to, but there's a huge amount of automation being set up. But a true agentic autonomous automation has been lacking and OpenClaw suddenly builds this framework, which enables you to create agents that are effectively fully autonomous, which sounds quite dangerous. So you have to put certain guardrails up. But now what's happened is because they launched this product and very quickly OpenAI bought them, We're now seeing all of the other AI platforms now releasing their versions or their interpretations of it.

15:14Spencer Gallagher:So again, it's still happening. But actually, I always say to people that the next big thing, the next big company probably doesn't exist right now. If you look at OpenAI, really, it feels like it came from nowhere to be as big as it was. I used to say this line, the Internet's a great leveler. I think today, AI is a great leveler. If you're a small business embracing AI, you're going to be in a better place to compete with a larger company that's got a much larger workforce to evolve, to move, to shift, to train, to educate. So, yeah, I think the next big thing, watch out for it. But I think there's lots of opportunity right now.

15:50Spencer Gallagher:Excuse the pun. But I think there is an ocean of opportunities right now for all of us to be a little bit more pirate. And yes, of course, bending the rules, twisting the rules, breaking them, innovating creatively. but obviously not breaking laws, challenging them potentially, you know, but not doing anything illegal.

16:08Sam Conniff Allende:Let's talk a little bit about how you've implemented this in your current workflow and your current businesses, this kind of reinventing the status quo, because we've been touching on AI being this great level. If someone wants legal advice, you can upload a contract to ChatGPT and it can explain actually what this legal speak means. I imagine that there's a similar parallel in M &A advisory that you can get quite a lot of good advice now from using Gemini? How are you using these new tools to stay ahead of the curve then?

16:35Spencer Gallagher:Let's talk about reinventing the status quo, because I think 10, 15 years ago, we said every business was a media business. That's how everyone started to speak. Today, every business really is a tech business. I saw a sandwich shop in Brooklyn last week where you can send your agent to go and buy the sandwich at lunchtime. It doesn't we need the website, she needs to connect to the butcher shop to place the order and get it delivered. Ultimately, every business needs to be thinking about themselves as a tech business, whether you're a live event business and you're human to human marketing. Underneath everything, there are ways that technology will improve the way your business operates.

17:11Spencer Gallagher:But I think I want to start by saying, not necessarily just AI, but every business should be looking at their now, next and future. And this is what I've tried to live by since I started. And Because when I started a business in 1999, it was the beginning of the dot-com boom. It actually crashed in 2000, 2001, and it was a difficult place to be for a couple of years. But understanding your business is now, next, and future will help you future-proof what you're doing. Whilst most of your clients might be in the now, understanding the next, which is probably 10 % of your billings, and maybe the future, which is 5 % of your billings, is important because it helps you demonstrate to your customers that you can future-proof their lives or their business, depending on what your company.

17:52Spencer Gallagher:So the first thing is, I think it's important to have an intention to focus on the now, next and future so that you don't get commoditized or you don't get disrupted. Because I think there's a real fear of that. We saw a lot of that happen, didn't we, with the banks? You know how some had the Revolut and the Monzos. They suddenly reinvented and disrupted the market because they're quicker, more agile to be able to create the tools that people needed before the banks were too big a beast to try and move all of their systems and think about the GDPR and the ISOs and all the other rules they've got to think about and work to.

18:22Spencer Gallagher:The second is, how have we implemented it? My journey started in 2017, but honestly, 2023, when OpenAI really came out and we started to see the large language models work. The first thing is, is that domain authority is still quite important at this stage. So if you're a writer, then you can use AI to write really well. If you're a photographer, you can probably prompt beautiful photography. For me, as an ex-web developer, I can probably use some of the AI development tools better than most other people would. So if you're a lawyer and you're using it, it's going to help you more because you understand law.

18:58Spencer Gallagher:If it hallucinates or gives you wrong information, you'll know it, whereas lay people don't. And that's why everyone's been talking about AI slot, because the moment I start designing logos on AI is the moment everything looks terrible, right? Because I'm not a creative designer in that way. I think it's important that we recognize our own authority, our own skills, and how can we apply them to AI. But reality is, is that agents have become autonomous now. And actually, it is possible for highly repetitive tasks that we all do day in, day out to be replaced. And the most people probably listen to this now are probably using AI on a daily basis to ask questions, to solve problems, to rewrite emails and letters, maybe solve spreadsheet challenges.