Caspar Lee: ‘How I turned attention into business leverage’

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0:41We look forward to seeing you there. With social media, you have a huge opportunity to get a bunch of organic traffic by creating good content. It takes one big video to get a ton of sales. And if no one sees it, no one sees it. It doesn't matter. Go on to the next one quick. You've got to build a team that can take you out of the details. You need to be able to be in the details while having people who can do it when you're not there. Otherwise, you'll just never move forward at that stage.

1:09I'm Richard Harpin, and this is a Business Leader podcast, where we look at the stories and strategies behind modern businesses. Today, my guest is Caspar Lee, a social media influencer on YouTube turned social media entrepreneur, who co-founded Influencer.com, a marketing agency. I wanted to find out from him how he grew his social media following, how he turned views and likes into a business model for others, and what his strategy is for investing in startups. startups.

1:47Casper Lee, welcome to the Business Leader podcast. Great to have you here. And the thing that we've got in common is that we're both now investors in our second or third careers. You got there much, much quicker than me because I had to go through, I think I was 22 years into my home serve journey before I started backing other entrepreneurs with my own money. You were an amazingly successful big following on YouTube. You ran a very successful social media agency and then became an investor and you did it in very few years. Well, I appreciate that. I think, you know, the level in which we're doing these things is slightly different.

2:32I think you're talking billions and I'm talking millions. But in terms of age, yeah, it's been quite a quick route to becoming an investor. But I also think in venture capital at the stage I'm investing at, you do notice a lot of younger people doing that today. And the people we're investing in are even younger than ever. I just got off a call with two co-founders yesterday out in San Francisco. and I didn't want to actually ask them their age but I think they almost look like teenagers. I'm pretty sure they're not because they finished university, had a couple of years at home. How old do you have to be, do you think, to get an investment?

3:08Maybe teenagers is good. Yeah, I think some teenagers are actually getting investments. There's this one guy I know who's an investor and he does invest in teenagers from time to time. So with AI, I think anything's possible. Because I think you started your YouTube career as a teenager, didn't you? You were 17 years old. So when I started, I was living in South Africa. I was a bit of an outcast at school, kind of, you know, try to be cool, but wasn't the most popular kid. And so I thought starting a YouTube channel would be my route to success. And to be honest, it was the opposite. People thought it was kind of silly at the start.

3:45and then eventually after two years of trying every single day and making hundreds and hundreds of videos my account got banned and so this is because someone clicked on my adverts which was basically back in the day when you had ads and if someone clicked on your ads too many times they would ban your account because they think you might be doing that to pay yourself clicks and so when that happened I was like should I quit now I mean I spent all this time doing this and now it's all gone and i realized actually this is opportunities to start again but with all the lessons i'd already learned from the first few years and when i started again i went from zero subscribers to a thousand subscribers within a few weeks and then got to millions subscribers millions of subscribers within a few years and i i moved from south africa and have been a youtuber or was a youtuber for the next kind of 10 years so it was sort of um pivoting the model you'd done two years.

4:39I think you were probably then sort of 19. This was the year 2013. You started again. Did you celebrate when you got to the first million followers? Do you remember? I'm pretty sure I did. I know when I got to 100 ,000 followers, I think I jumped out of an airplane with a parachute, luckily. At 300 ,000, I'm pretty sure I bungee jumped at a million. And I can't actually remember what I did, sadly. I must go look back on my social media to see. I'm sure I had a cake or something. But yeah, it was a crazy journey. And other people that are building businesses and building a YouTube following, what are the lessons that they should learn from you?

5:22I think something I was particularly focused on was collaboration. So I didn't necessarily have this massive talent that it was like, oh, Casper is really good at singing and therefore I'll follow him. it was more like I figured out growth hacks by collaborating with other youtubers and I think being a part of community a community that was really growing together and then I was also fairly consistent with my uploading especially in the early days it's super important to put out as much content as possible without trying to overthink it and then being slightly more creative than other people I think it's become more and more competitive back when I was doing it some people weren't being that creative with their content and were there A couple of creative things that you did that turned you viral that really stood out in those early years?

6:05It was more the fact that I was able to convince musicians and actors and so on to be on my channel that I think was different from other creators. I basically approached PR companies and said I'd love to be part of a press junket, and that's how I got my first celebrity interview. And then the PR companies were like, oh, my gosh, these videos are getting tens of millions of views. our normal PR press junket stuff maybe gets a few thousand. And so then I started to build that leverage and I would say, okay, now I've done it in the press junket. Can I actually get them to come to my house? Or can I do a particular type of video that they don't usually do?

6:40And I think this was the first time YouTubers were doing that. Today, social media stars are synonymous with working with celebrities, but back then it was quite unique. You were one of the leaders of that. And so it was a magic model of you building your brand and your following through more famous people well exactly i think i think it was the lesson i learned was building leverage for yourself and that worked as a creator but also in business and not just like begging someone to give you a massive opportunity but slowly slowly and surely every time you step up your own um what you can offer someone else you can then get more and more opportunities um and so yeah it was always a good deal for both parties um and that's why i love doing deals.

7:23A lot of YouTubers then took that following and turned it into monetizing it through building a business. You did that with Influencer. Just talk about how that came about. For sure. I mean, a lot of creators think the perfect business to start is a consumer product because they can sell it to their massive audience. And while I thought that was an interesting idea, I also thought that a B2B business in the space that I understand might be different and also might have a bigger opportunity for me in the long run. So I saw that there were so many creators doing brand deals, which is basically when an advertiser pays to have a message within a piece of content.

8:03And I saw that they weren't being done very well. It was kind of like a cowboyish world where no one knew what to charge, no one knew what the ROI was. So when I met a guy called Ben Jeffries, we decided to go raise some capital and build out a team. And we've been doing that ever since. We now have 180 employees across Amir, the US, and we are one of the larger independents in the space. And it's interesting to see the entire advertising industry now talking about creators. You've been doing that now for eight years. How much did you need to raise at the beginning and how difficult was that? So we actually raised in total about£4 million.

8:42So when you compare that today to today's businesses, it wasn't a lot. compared back to when you started a business. I'm sure it was quite a bit. So, yeah, it was quite difficult. It wasn't like we were like this crazy hype tech company. We weren't in a space that everyone was really excited about. So we really had to start by convincing people within our network. And then eventually we got some institutional capital. But, you know, raising a three million pound Series A is not a massive amount. and since then we haven't raised any more funding because we've been a profitable and growing business ever since.

9:20That's great. And you've still got the same investors or you've bought some of those out? So we still have the same investors at the moment and I think over the next few years we'll look at opportunities to do deals for those people because I think it gets a time in a company's life around eight years where it's like, if you're doing well, can you provide liquidity to your shareholders and to the team and to the founders? Yeah, I think it's always good to be able to pay them out, tidy up the shareholder base. So yeah, if you're listening, everyone, this might be noticed that we'll try and get that done.

9:51And what are the tips for anybody else that's trying to raise their first money? When should they do it? How do they do it? Did you have an advisor? All those sorts of things. Well, it really depends on your skill set. I mean, sometimes raising money before you go out and launch a product is actually better than waiting until you've done it. And sometimes the opposite is true depending on the launch and how that goes um i personally don't believe you know if i were to raise money now i don't always like the idea depending on what stage of getting an advisor if i'm going to raise like seed or pre-seed i think it's best to try and do that without one but then if you go on to raise further rounds or private equity of course advisors or something that you can bring in and what about advising somebody that wants to become an entrepreneur that actually try and get the model up and running maybe copy from somebody else bootstrap it, try and prove something and then push the button on.

10:44100%. Is that sensible? 100%. It does depend on your business, right? Like there's certain hype technology AI businesses that just have to race as fast as possible right now. And then there's businesses that I'm like, why is the first thing you're trying to achieve raising money? Because actually, every time you raise money, you're giving away equity. And so, yeah, I wouldn't celebrate too hard for raising. I would celebrate for like raising as little as possible, even as an investor who understood understands the power of bringing investors on board, I still would advise people to try do that less than maybe it's celebrated on social media.

11:17And what percent of the business did you need to give away for those investors that you brought in? I think in total, my co-founder and I still have the majority of the business over those rounds. I think that's really important, isn't it? Keep control, have the majority shareholding, sell the minimum, but make sure that you're well funded and that you're going to get there and you've got a route to profitability. Yeah, 100%. But then there's also like, you got to also be careful not to, sometimes if you're in a really good position, try and overextend as a founder, I also say is like, yeah, yeah, maybe you could raise 10 million and only give away 1 % of your business.

11:55But if that's the case, there's going to be far greater pressure on you to deliver because you also have to deliver an outcome for the investors. So it has to be this delicate balance. And then in terms of running the influencer business, what are the things that you've learned along the way? And maybe how did you split the roles between you and your co-founder? I think I read you were the chief vision officer. So I've never been full time just at Influencer, but I spent so much time across all the businesses that it feels like more than full time. But officially, Ben is the line manager to the exec team.

12:28he's the CEO and as chief vision officer it's my job to think about tomorrow it's my job to open doors it's my job really around big marketing opportunities and creator opportunities with an influencer so you're sort of working on the business while your chief exec is working in the business and running it is that a yeah but but at the same time we really cross over and Ben also does working on the business and and sometimes I have to jump in for him to help work within the business but i think as a ceo i'm not we're not co-ceos um but i do think as a ceo it's important to work on the business as you say and i think the fact that ben's always had me has allowed us to kind of do both from the start even before we've had the exec team that we needed to be able to do that and then talk about the exec team and how you recruited them and how many people in the team and what what lessons you've learned from that casper yeah so um we've we've been around for eight years, so we've had a number of different people in the team.

13:27Right now, we have a CFO, we have a mere president, a US president, Ben and myself, but we've had a number of different roles and responsibilities within that team. I think in terms of the sorts of people that we've tried to hire in the past that haven't necessarily worked out has been people from massive companies that you're like, oh my gosh, I can't believe I'm hiring someone from this company who's so successful over there and you think they can come into a hundred person business and and achieve the same results and it's just not the case they really sometimes struggle without those massive structures that they're used to and i think it's the uh the cultural fit isn't it you need people that are working in medium-sized businesses that have been really successful that are entrepreneurial not big company person that then wants to hire a load of other people to do their work or bring in management consultants.

14:17A hundred percent. And you're hearing about big companies now talking like this. Like, you know, you hear people like Mark Zuckerberg saying he doesn't want layers and layers of management. And so you're starting to see that. But I think it's really, truly hard for people from big businesses to truly understand how much random stuff you have to end up picking up on within a company like ours and how important it is for you to understand every single bit of the business that you're involved in rather than relying on the team below you. How easy was it, and maybe it was Ben rather than you, to have those difficult conversations with people that you knew?

14:52We've recruited the wrong person, not the right cultural fit, they've got to go. We tend to take too long to have those conversations, but did you bite the bullet and tackle them early or not? So there's been times where we have taken too long, and then there's been times where we've been good at it. I think we've never regretted having the conversation for both parties. I think sometimes, obviously, those conversations can be really difficult. But years later, you meet up with a person and they're like thriving where they're at now. And there was usually a really good reason we hired that person.

15:23They're very smart people, especially if we're hiring them into that team. But sometimes it just doesn't work. So we've always regretted, I think, waiting a bit too long in terms of how we have those conversations. They're never easy. I think also the fact that Ben is still in his 20s and we're having conversations with people who are far more experienced than us does make it tricky. from just kind of a seniority point of view. I just think, but over time, he has gone very good. And I'll be honest, I rely heavily on Ben in that kind of stuff because it's not my job to come in and have those conversations.

15:53What do you think is the future for the influencer and ambassador market? And how's your business going to sort of react to that? The future is going to change dramatically with AI. Content now can be created by machines and the machines can also look like people. And with the new Sora app, it's hard to distinguish what's going on. Is this a real person or not? So I think UGC content, which is user-generated content, which relies on people that don't necessarily have a big following or they haven't built up a reputation for expertise in a field, that is more easily replaced by AI because when you're on TikTok and you're scrolling through, You don't even know who the person is, and maybe they're saying something nice about a product, and you don't even care if it's AI necessarily.

16:42Maybe one day they'll force you to care because we'll bring in legislation. But when it comes to creators who've built an audience, who are experts at something, and maybe someone is, I don't know, a professional runner, and they talk about the shoes they love running in, you can't kind of get that from AI because AI doesn't actually run. So that sort of creator, I think, is going to be even more important in the future. So how do you play in those lessons with many companies today that are suffering because their SEO content is diminished, taken over by AI summaries and any guidance there? You can't use the same playbook that you used before.

17:20And there are a number of startups that have started now to try to help guide people and say, these are the things you should be doing. But, yeah, it's ultimately about creating content on the Internet, having people think and talk about you in positive ways. there's so many data points that AI takes from that you've just got to be out there and I think it's a big opportunity for some of the best companies to rise to the top and also not just big companies I've discovered so many small service providers through AI that I struggle to find on Google And just a little bit more about how the business will continue to grow any mergers and acquisitions on the horizon or any more countries that you're going to get into And one that I have to ask is, have you got an American running your U.S.

18:03business or not? We have an American running our U.S. business. Is that good? That's great. Okay, good. She's incredible. Shout out to Jenny. And yeah, you're right. I think I know exactly what you're saying there. And it works so well. In terms of M &A, you're seeing lots of M &A in our space. The big holding companies are buying up some of the independent players. I think there's a huge opportunity to be an independent specialist. because as these big companies buy up the specialists, a lot of the specialism gets diluted, especially, like, I think talent that work at Influencer don't necessarily like the idea of working at a big hold group.

18:39So I think there's a huge opportunity for us. I mean, you haven't bought anything yet, but maybe that's something on the horizon. Well, maybe you can give us some advice and some capital to go and do that. But no, so that's something that is on the horizon. We're always talking to partners about opportunities around that kind of stuff. And yeah, you're going to see some stuff in the space. And any other exciting geographies that are worth looking at? How much of the business model do you change if you're going into a different country? So, yeah, we're in the MENA region. We do a lot of work in Saudi.

19:10And the business model is different. Like the payment terms are different. The sorts of clients we're working for over there are usually government-related clients talking about the country internationally versus private business in the U.S. and the ways in which you do business over there, how long things take to get signed off versus, say, the U.S. is completely different. It's something we've got experience in, we've been doing since 2019. And then in terms of other opportunities, yeah, we're doing stuff in Europe. I think Europe has got a lot of opportunities still. I know there's been some kind of negativity about the slowness of Europe, but I think there's a huge opportunity in this creative space.

19:49And also, as a South African originally, I'd love to build an office out there because there's so much great talent there who can also help service some of the work we're doing in different markets. It's a big offshoring capital, isn't it? South Africa, particularly around with the increasing costs of employing people in the UK, you can get 60 % savings by hiring in South Africa. And the way we look at it is, yes, obviously it's going to cost less, but then it also allows us to not only save money, but for the same amount of money, maybe elevate the seniority of the talent that we're hiring. Ultimately, costs are super important.

20:27But as a business, we're focused purely on how do we deliver the best service for our clients. And as margins get squeezed, you're right, going to places like South Africa can be great, especially when the talent pool understand the space as well as they do there. What's been the biggest key to the success of Influencer in the eight years that the business has been going? I think just our tenacity and the fact that we're super agile. You know, sometimes businesses that get to our scale lose a bit of the entrepreneurial spirit. And we definitely have that because my partner and I are annoyingly entrepreneurial.

21:04And so I think that's been a big part of it. and then also managing to convince really good people to come and join us. And that's at all layers of the business. And we're super proud of the team we have today. And the size of the business today, turnover-wise, you talked about, I think, 180 people, which is really, really big. But sales of how much? We're approaching the 100 million revenue mark. Great. And what would be the biggest mistake that you made looking back on the business so far? The biggest mistake, I think it goes back to what we were speaking about earlier, is taking too long to make difficult decisions when it comes to people-related issues.

21:43I think culture is something that is so important. It comes, I think, mostly from the people you hire. Obviously, you can have your company values that help you hire, but if you're not hiring the right people and you're not making the difficult decisions at the right time, the debt that you can build up in culture can be a lot harder than other parts of the business. A key part of building Influencer is that you knew how to do influencing and YouTube. And a lot of people now, they've got a business, and maybe it's a product or service business, and they're saying, now we want to grow the business by building a personal brand and starting to build a YouTube presence.

22:23What advice would you have for those people? I think it's a great idea. I think with social media, you have a huge opportunity to get a bunch of organic traffic by creating good content. And I think that it's easier to create good content for a business when you're an individual and you're showing a personality. And so be that the founder, but it could also be someone within the company. It doesn't always have to be the founder. I think that obviously for the business, it's less risky to put all your eggs in someone else's basket. But yeah, it's just such a huge opportunity, especially with the way the algorithm on TikTok and Instagram work today.

23:00It's like anyone can get a massive viral hit and it takes one big video to potentially get a ton of sales. So you can't be leaving that on the table. So let's say that we've got hypothetically a founder that's got a product business, whether that's, let's call it a beauty business. They've got it to 10 million of revenue, looking at how they grow it to 100 million, like your influencer business. And they want to do it because they recognize people buy from people. How do they start off on YouTube and which other social media channels? and are they going to get an agency involved or hire somebody onto the payroll?

23:44What are the building blocks, Casper? Yeah, I will ask so many more questions to be able to answer that correctly. But ultimately, I think if you have no experience editing and making content, I think bringing on someone who can do both and not hiring a massive team, but like an individual person who's responsible for filming and editing the content, they are quite unicorn-like these days because so many people want to do this. But when you get someone who knows what they're doing. In high demand. In high demand, exactly. So if you have a person who can actually do that, that's great. Then the other thing is the content.

24:14Now, a lot of people want to outsource ideas to other people. And when you do that and they're just like brainstorming for an hour and then they get paid, I don't find that you get the best ideas. I think you just have to be really interested in YouTube and the space that you're creating content for and spend a lot of time doing ideation for yourself and maybe bringing in friends and partners. But you have to be responsible for the ideas. ideas are coming from just looking at other people's YouTube channels and copying. Exactly. I'd say a better word is being inspired. But yeah, 100%, you can't just, you know, do...

24:50I mean, you can. You can technically create something brand new from scratch that no one's ever done before, but it's difficult. So I find that what's already doing well, what can you contribute to that conversation? And being really realistic about how little people actually care about you and your business. Like that's the number one thing people need to remember. It is so hard to compete for views these days. So if you make it all about yourself and all about your business and about things people don't necessarily already care about, you're going to struggle. Whereas if you can attach your content to something they actually care about, then you have a great chance of the algorithm picking it up and sending it to way more people.

25:26And how do you then pick which social media platform and then what sort of way of communicating, whether it's pictures and headlines or videos. I think it's a lot of A-B testing because everyone's going to have a different criteria of success. I do think TikTok and Instagram are slightly easier to start off on than YouTube, but if you can get YouTube pumping, that's like the holy grail because you then really own that relationship. That's a longer relationship, similar to podcasting. People invest more time into that. But yeah, if you want to use things like trial reels, I recommend that. So trial reels is a new feature on Instagram that allows you to A-B test content.

26:10So say we make a piece of content now and I edit it in five different ways. I can put all those pieces of content on trial reels. It doesn't go out to any of my followers. I see which one does the best and then I release that as a piece of content. So there's lots of smart things you can do. And I love the fact that on social media like TikTok and Instagram, you can just release stuff. And if no one sees it, no one sees it. It doesn't matter. Go on to the next one quick. test, learn, repeat, A-B testing, and that's the research. Exactly. And similar to investing, don't worry about every single video on social media performing well.

26:40Just worry about the fact that you've done 10, one's done extremely well, three do okay, and the rest flop. The I word, investing. Good lead into creator ventures. And just tell us, Casper, how you got into your investment career. So I was approached by a company called Dash, which is a drinks company that is incredible. And they came to me on LinkedIn and asked if I would be interested in investing. I didn't really understand being an angel and how that worked at the time. So I reached out to my cousin, Sasha, who was just finishing at Harvard. He was starting a job in private equity and he knows this stuff.

27:21So he gave me some thoughts and together we decided to invest. We also brought in a few other creators into the deal. We all invested directly. We didn't take any fees for the deal. We just wanted to bring more creators to the company so it could become more successful potentially. After that deal, we did another one called Faceit, which then within two years sold for 1.5 billion as part of a merger of which they were worth 500 million. So that was a very quick one. We did a few other deals like Wild Deodorant, which has now gone on to sell to Unilever. And these were just watching their TV advertising last night.

27:57Amazing. And I think really good. Yeah. So that was all part of us doing it as angels. And so we call that our Fund Zero. And we had pretty quick distributions and good IRR. And so we went on to raise a$20 million Fund One. And this time, it wasn't just a syndicate of creators. This time, it was myself and Sasha raising money from institutional investors, LPs, high net worths. And how easy was that? And what was the process to go about raising that money? It was really tough. We had people in the very beginning who said that they would love to back it and they kind of convinced us to do it. And then you had, you know, 10 meetings with these people and they didn't end up doing it.

28:37But I think we had something really compelling, which was the fact that we had already done this ourselves. This wasn't just us saying we're going to have a good fund. I also think the combination between Sasha and myself, Sasha having his incredible background in investing, working at Uber, obviously very intelligent, going to Oxford and Harvard and all that. And then you had me, this more entrepreneurial creator. It was an interesting story to investors. And I think they could see that we had access to deal flow that a lot of other investors weren't necessarily getting access to because consumer companies really want to understand social media.

29:08And we were helping them understand that because this is their number one marketing opportunity. So, yeah, once we eventually closed that fund. How many meetings and what was the timescale from going out and having your first potential investor meeting to closing the first fundraising? I think it was probably about, I can't remember, maybe under a year. And how many yeses that yes I'm going to invest and how many no's? When you count up all the people we met, I mean, yeah, mostly no's for sure. I can't remember the exact amount, but it wasn't easy. It wasn't easy. And that's what made us think that the next fundraising would be just as hard, but actually it ended up not being, which was really good.

29:55Because you were continuing to build your track record, you got some more successes under your belt. Exactly. We had a very good fund one, and it's still performing, as you know, some of the businesses, and that really helped. And then we also got some really great investors early on to believe in us. New institutional LPs. It's kind of weird in this world. It's not the best, in my opinion. But when you have really good names investing in you, other people all of a sudden go, that's exciting. Sheep. Other people will follow. And if they have, then I better invest as well. It's really interesting how that works.

30:31And not only from a fund perspective. I'm not saying that's the only reason we raise money, by the way. I think we have incredible fund. And I hope everyone wanted, you know, I think they all made a good decision, but it really did help getting those early names. And also, to be honest, the number one thing actually ended up being referencing. And the amount of time investors, especially institutional investors, spent referencing our founders was incredible. They had to do so many calls for us, these founders. And it really made me realize how important it was every single time we had done something for them throughout the years, what they remembered and what they would say to these people.

31:05So I think that's the lesson I took is like how much people at that stage rely on what others think about you and how important your personal brand is as a fund. And then let's go back and talk about it from the how do you find the right entrepreneurs and the right businesses to invest in? We invest in consumer internet businesses. Usually there's a very technical founder or two co-founders. We think that's really important. It really depends on the business because it's just myself and Sasha. we don't necessarily have this overly corporate structure where we have to get an entire team to agree we just really understand what we think good looks like um and and we've had enough experience investing in companies over the last kind of five years um to to learn from those and and learn from each time we make a mistake and improve on it and what are the what are the key bits of learning yeah i mean yeah one of the the lessons we learned uh was around they don't have to perfect the product and the angle in which they're attacking from the start.

32:11If they're really good founders, that can come. There was a business that we, in the very early stage, weren't sure about why they were going after that market. We were a little bit too obsessed with that. And to be honest, they realized very quickly because they're great founders. So that's one thing. But at the same time, in consumer, you can't also just buy into the fact that if someone's a great founder, they're going to make it. Because consumers don't care about who the founders are. They care a lot less than in B2B, right? Yep. And so it is a delicate balance. When you learn a lesson like that, don't over-index next time either because you end up doing everything.

32:49But first and foremost, you're investing in the founder because if they haven't got the model quite right, they can pivot, copy, and eventually will find the right model. Most of the time. What percent of the time would you estimate? Well, when I say most of the time, you hope around 50 % of the time at least. But you never know. I mean, it really depends how early we're going. We usually go very early pre-seed now. And it's pretty high risk, isn't it? It's too high risk for me. In my investment business, then businesses need to be making between a million and five million pounds of EBITDA. and then I think, well, they've sort of proved themselves and now we want to help them to grow faster.

33:34100%. We do make a lot of investments, though, in each fund, so you hopefully bring down some of that risk. But, yeah, every time you're investing in a company that is either just starting or has recently started, you're taking out a lot of risk, especially in a venture-backed type business because these are businesses that you're hoping will go on to be worth billions. you're not just hoping for like a 10 million dollar outcome so there's a lot of risk and hopefully more reward because you said number two is the uh the consumer bit and whether there's a market there and what the consumer thinks what sort of what what can you do as an investor to sort of interrogate that and part of your um learning and due diligence before you make the investment yeah so there's you know a number of things you can look at when it comes to um you What's the customer acquisition cost?

34:24What's the lifetime value of these customers? When they do an advert on social media, especially the organic stuff, how much does that contribute? You can go into a lot of depth and you can do that more early on in consumer, which is quite nice. You have sometimes the opportunity to do that. Sasha, coming from private equity, knows how to interrogate a business. But then at the same time, you've also got to be very careful not to look for perfection. Because if you look for perfection at seed or pre-seed, you're never going to find it. And if you do, you're going to pay for it. And it probably doesn't exist because no one's raising a seed with a perfect company.

35:02How important is the brand or seeing that there could be a brand developed and back to that sort of building a brand behind the person or building the brand behind the consumer products? Yeah, it's very important. I mean, Beehive, I think, is a good example. It's a newsletter platform that we led the seed of. And Tyler, the CEO, built a personal brand alongside Beehive building its own brand. And I think the amount of user acquisition they've managed to get from that has been great. But I also want to state that sometimes in the influencer marketing world and on social media, people can overstate how important it is.

35:38It's also super important to have really good paid media. It's also really important that people actually like your product and tell their friends about it. Those sorts of things are actually even more important, that social media can accelerate stuff, but without that, it doesn't work. Can I ask which are your top couple of investments that you've sold a few? So we did a company called Runner, which sold to Strava. Again, that was a very fast outcome and very, very excited for Dom and the team. They did such a great job, and it was so cool to see them sell to a company that shares their vision.

36:14We've also invested in a company called Practica, which has gone on to raise a lot of money, and they're acquiring customers very quickly now. It's incredible, and they're doing really well. We also invested in Eleven Labs, which is now recently raised at a$6 billion valuation. And, I mean, it's incredible to see what those guys have gone on to do, from when they started so recently to becoming a European huge, huge business has been awesome. How often are you providing advice to those portfolio companies? Is it show or is it tell? And how do you stop yourself from getting too involved? Yeah, we definitely try not to get too involved unless they want it.

36:55As early investors in businesses, we like for people to feel like they can come to us for anything. We won't judge them. where like just they're really scrappy, helpful partners. I generally focus on the advice around marketing and growth. I will also help from the entrepreneurial side of things. But Sasha is super helpful when it comes to the kind of financial advice and if they're going on to raise more capital or they need to hire a CFO or whatever. But yeah, we get all sorts of requests. And I think that's the one thing about, you know, building a network and doing things for a long time. It allows you to do things so much quicker for other people.

37:31And that's usually what they come to us for. I was like, I need something really quick. Because there's always somebody out there that can provide a bit of advice. How important is coaching and mentoring and or having a peer group? Did you have any of those, Kaspers? You rapidly develop your business career? Yeah, I didn't have like an official mentor that I sat down with on a weekly basis. I think my mentors are my co-founders in a way. And I think we mentor each other and we get better at what the other person is better at by spending a lot of time together. but it's something I think I would like to look at because I've heard some incredible success stories from that.

38:09And a professional coach, have you ever tried having one of those or not? I have for a little bit and look, it's helpful. It's helpful. I find it, yeah, I think it's something I should look at doing but I haven't kept it up recently. And one of the things that I look back at my Potts and Gamble career and say, 12 graduates all new to Newcastle, all working on different brands and we learned from each other. And it was an amazing peer group. And I missed that as an entrepreneur. Felt pretty lonely, even though I had a board of directors. And one of the reasons why I'm business leader today, key part of our growth program for our business leader members is nine other founders and chief execs.

38:52They meet eight times a year with a facilitator coach. And I think that's a great part of the model. Yeah, no, I love that. I mean, I'd love to come to that. that sounds exciting and great. I think that, yeah, it's so helpful just to be able to talk through your problems. Also, sometimes with someone who isn't necessarily in the business itself. And also sometimes with someone who has a completely different perspective, even if they're not necessarily an expert in that field, they can provide you with something really helpful that someone who is maybe an expert might overlook. What's next on your career horizon?

39:24So you're still involved in Influencer. Yeah. You're running a very successful now investment business. Anything else that's in the medium or long term? Yeah, so I also have a talent management company called MVE, which we now represent about 100 creators. And I love being able to not only learn from them, but also provide them with some of the experiences I've gone through and lessons. And I really enjoy helping that next generation. How does the business model work there? So that's like a pure talent management business. So we provide services, 360 degree services from career building, IP development, brand work, bookings, all sorts of things like a traditional talent agency.

40:07And, you know, we're actually our partner in that business is WME, who are a massive agency group. So it's just basically for a new generation and understanding like how IP works today and how to build a career today. How do you then split your time between all those business activities and home life and making sure that you've got some sort of balance? It's not always easy. It's week by week, really. Like some weeks will be really, really busy and other weeks I'll have a bit more time. I do try and place holders in my diary to allow myself just to work because there's so much meeting and talking.

40:42And when I'm dealing with all of this different stuff that it's hard to also get stuff done. and then I also have a lot of ideas that come to me and I know I don't have much time to do them now so I'll just write them down and when I have a spare second, I'll work on them. But something I've realized quite recently that I'd love to talk about a little bit is how I've spent the last kind of 10 years every waking moment doing stuff as soon as I have a second so that could be waiting for you to arrive or on the tube and while that helps me become very efficient, I've also noticed that it's really impacted my ability to think about issues properly.

41:20And so I'm also now trying to give myself space to just be and be bored sometimes. And I'm finding that the ideas that I'm getting and the thoughts I'm having about the issues are becoming a lot easier to deal with. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. Yeah, I think it's the four quadrant time management model. And there's a box there that is important, but not urgent. and that would be maybe going and listening into a call centre, some of the calls from customers. If you're a retailer, getting in store, observing customers, talking to them and you think really important to do and you can get to Friday afternoon and think, oh, I haven't done that because I've been firefighting, I've been doing the urgent and important, but then I've been doing the not urgent, not important, which is constantly checking emails, phone messages.

42:14And I do think you've got to allocate some thinking time. Yeah. When you talk about like constant firefighting, that is what it feels like to be at a company, especially when you're running one. And I think one of the things we've done is brought in this kind of rocks stuff. I don't know if you've heard about the EOS, Entrepreneurial Operating System. And it's for us to have like five rocks that no matter what this quarter, we need to focus on. And even if that means we're going to drop some sand along the way, we've got to make sure these things happen. And that's something as a business, every single person has, and we found been very helpful.

42:46I also think having a support team, a small team of people that can help you to be more effective. So a PA, chief of staff, maybe somebody that's focusing on strategy, so that they can be helping you to get more out of your working week. could you could you develop your team and hire a few more people to help you do you think casper it's it's a really good point i mean i've got an incredible ea um at influence and we've got a great great pa at creative ventures but a personal team is not something i've done i kind of personally manage that and so it's an interesting thought but um yeah it could it's something i i should definitely look at you haven't been doing much posting on youtube recently is that something that deliberate decision uh will you get back to that at some stage in the future it's it's something that i didn't know i was quitting at the time uh i just decided to take a break and um um it turned into years and years and i'm kind of proud that i left it on a high and i kind of i'm the kind of person who'd rather leave it there than try suck all the juice out um i do think that one day i will create more content in terms of long-form content and if that sits on YouTube or across social media, so be it.

44:00But I'm not sure if it will go on that channel. I'm really proud of what I built there. Casper, I've got one final question. That is, you've built businesses, you've invested in them. What's your biggest single tip for a chief exec or founder that's trying to scale a mid-sized business to become one of the large UK companies? You've got to build a team that can take you out of the details, but that doesn't mean you need to become a manager of managers that just means you need to be able to be in the details while having people who can do it when you're not there so important to dip back into it as you need to but let people run the day-to-day yeah you can't it can't all rely on you otherwise you'll just never move forward at that stage you've been listening to me Richard Harpin speaking to Casper Lee for the business leader podcast please do rate and subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts.

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