Skin + Me: James Mishreki on scaling a UK skincare phenomenon

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0:47Would you have said to Ronaldo in the height of his career, oh, you've made a lot of money. Why don't you stop? To be honest, I never would have guessed that I would have landed in the skincare industry. Ultimately, I think I realized I prefer selling to end consumers. So that's where my heart is. I'd personally suffered from acne when I was a teen in school, nicknamed Pizza Face. First of all, you need to decide, do you want to play to win? If you're committed to being an entrepreneur for good, like I am, I'm never going to stop doing this, your gut and your instincts just get better.

1:25I'm Richard Harpin, and this is the Business Leader Podcast, where we look at the stories and strategies behind modern businesses. Today, my guest is James Mishrecki, the founder and now chair of fast-growing skincare brand Skin & Me, which was launched in 2020. How has he found it scaling a beauty and healthcare brand from the UK and what lessons does he have for other entrepreneurs?

1:56James welcome like me you're a northerner and grew up around Durham in your case and we we both started our entrepreneurial journeys at school tell me about how you started yeah I did indeed first business was selling copied music CDs which was probably quite illegal but I was 13 years old So I got away with it. Next business was I heard that there was an O 'Neill board shorts, which were trendy at the time. One of their factories was closing down. So I got together as much money as I could and I bought as much stock as I could and I sold it to my schoolmates. I was always tinkering with whatever I could find as a way to make money.

2:39And it would normally last a few weeks before teachers stopped me. And did you know then that you're going to be a successful entrepreneur? Well, I always used to say when I was young, I want to be a businessman when I grow up. And I didn't really know much more than that. But because there was no internet at the time, you had the Richard Bransons of the world. Believe it or not, also Donald Trump. These were the figures that would write books that you'd see in Waterstones. So I always knew I'd take a more nontraditional path. But I don't think there was a business person in your family. I think your father was a doctor and you've got a brother who's a doctor.

3:10So where do you think that entrepreneurial instinct came from? Yeah, it's a good question. And I think you either my view is you either have it or you don't. And I just think it's it's in your blood. And I've just always, always wanted to create something myself. I wouldn't be very good if I had a job and worked for someone else. And I think my brother, my dad were a bit more risk averse than me. So they took a traditional path. They also have a bit more patience than me. I couldn't have sat through seven years of medical school. but you did a business degree and then what did you do after that yeah i did a business degree and then i played poker professionally for a couple of years which i guess was my way of delaying i didn't know what type of business to set up and i wasn't plugged into any entrepreneurial ecosystem but i knew how to play poker and i started realizing oh wow people are making a living doing this well when I go to the casino and play I come back with more money than I go with so maybe I can have a crack at this for a career.

4:11So you were successful and what did that tell you about sort of entrepreneurial risk taking and do you need courage to be an entrepreneur do you think? The best learning from poker that translates to to being a founder is that you have to make decisions within complete information and everything also goes against you all the time like doesn't matter how well you show up and play and take your learnings on board your next poker game you're gonna you know it's very good chance the variance will go against you and it's like life as an entrepreneur everything goes wrong all the time and so it really builds a resilience in you so I think it actually prepped me nicely for it so how did you go from professional poker player to skin and me well with the poker I I think I glamorized it when I was in 20 21 years old but ultimately the game had started to become harder to beat online poker had been clamped down on in a lot of American states and the average player would use training sites so they were just getting better and better.

5:09My hopes and dreams, you know, got a bit shattered there and I realized, okay, this, and I'm very glad that I decided against sticking with it for many years. But I then was looking for someone to start a company with. And I started an SEO business and that was keeping me ticking over learning online marketing, just getting immersed in that world. and then ultimately met a co-founder to start a B2B software company with in the Northeast. And we were tinkering with different ideas. The one we settled on was using web crawlers to just scan lots of information online. So the same technology Google uses to index a search engine and find a way to provide value to different businesses.

5:46And we tried different ideas. And the one we settled on was pricing information. So businesses like John Lewis would pay us money to track the price of KitchenAid Artisan Mixer in comparison to House of Fraser at the time and Lakeland and Amazon. And we'd tell them they've launched a promotion and John Lewis had a never knowingly undersold promise at the time. So we helped them stick to that. From there, I decided ultimately that business had a pretty low barrier to entry. So there was lots of, you either had enterprise players that raised a lot of money, which we didn't do, Or you started to have an emergence of bedroom operators in countries like Russia, where there were very technical individuals.

6:29They'd spin up a load of web crawlers and they'd start to price undercut us. And so the market was just a challenging one to build a real moat around. Did you manage to sell that business before you moved on? Yeah. Yeah. So I sold out all of my equity before I moved. Well, I actually stepped out of the business and took a bit of a risk there before I'd sold my equity. I sold my equity about a year after leaving. So that gave me a better cushion even to try to figure out what's next. I knew what I wanted to do next was go into a bigger market, go into a space where I felt I could build a moat and also team up with very experienced individuals.

7:08And also, I tried the bootstrapping route for seven years. I thought, OK, it'd be fun to try accelerating the path to product market fit and growth with raising capital. all. So to be honest, I never would have guessed that I would have landed in the skincare industry. But ultimately, I think I realized I prefer B2C businesses. I prefer selling to end consumers than I do the long sale cycle of B2B. So that's where my heart is. I also developed a bit of a, you know, a bit of a love for just making real products that you can touch. I've always liked design and been fascinated by it. And so I ended up with my co-founder at the time, tinkering with various ideas in consumer goods.

7:53And we got to know the skincare market pretty well, because a friend of ours is a private equity partner at a fund that has a big footprint in the beauty industry. They own Space NK and companies like that. And I got fascinated by in the skincare industry. I mean, you know, huge market, growing at a very fast pace, really high gross margins, low return rate, high average order values. And that, you know, that just sort of opened our minds to the industry. And I'd personally suffered from acne when I was a teen in school, nicknamed Pizza Face. There's always one boy in school every year. Do you think that helps having a personal need or affinity with the product?

8:36Yeah, I think it helps. I don't think it's absolutely essential, but I think it's definitely better. And for me, if I'm going to invest in a company and the founders been through the personal problem that the company solves, I view it as a more backable founder and business fit. so yeah that that was really the the the interest in the industry and then you know we knew that personalization was becoming a trend in skincare but it didn't really mean all that much people had different quizzes on websites and it would just funnel you to whatever product they wanted you to buy and so me and my my co-founder at the time we we set up a um we said okay let's test how how valuable people view personalization so we set up this online service called Mr.

9:23and Mrs. Oliver and we'd ask people loads of questions about their skin I recruited a load of skincare specialists by walking into Debenhams and so on and talking to the the skincare support staff and we would match the consultation that people had filled in with the person that we'd hired from a store and they would create a report and then we'd send some products to that person And what we learned was, I mean, we ran it for a month or two and spent a lot of money on acquiring customers and sending out stock. Terrible business model, but it did teach us one really valuable learning that we translated into Skin and Me, ultimately, which is that personal touch from a human being that reviews your skin, your information, your photographs, then giving you recommendations that people place a lot of value on.

10:11It's a real golden nugget of insight and reinforces the importance of market research. Yeah, 100%. And you know all too well, you can make assumptions, but the customer ultimately tells you what's right. And so, yeah, we set that up. And the reason it was a terrible business model is we're just shipping people third-party branded stock. And so we couldn't compete with the big skincare retailers. But we then retreated and thought, okay, we've got this learning. How can we pair this personalization that people really value with a business model and a product that really benefits the customer better than what they're getting at the moment?

10:53And so we spent a lot of time looking at different ideas. And I guess the thing that just really blew us away is the skincare market is 140 billion pounds, but it has 55 % customer dissatisfaction. so the products people are spending all this money on an increasing amount of money on they're not delivering and so we ultimately figured out that well the there is a category of of treatments for your skin that are proven to work in decades of clinical trials and their prescription grade ingredients so you can't buy them in a high street store on oxford street but they are proven to deliver superior results to those products.

11:35So that sent us then down a path of figuring out, can we pair these prescription-grade products with a personalised service that we know people value, which would A, set us apart from the competition, but B, deliver much better performance to end customers? Yeah, really clever. And that then becomes your USP versus anybody else because it's quite a crowded market, isn't it, skincare? care yeah it's hyper competitive it's always going to be and i think for us you know we didn't have an interest in playing the i mean some brands are just they're built on it's all very emotional brand marketing and it's all um big advertising and um you know there's a celebrity that's fronting the whole brand and that's not a game that we were set up to to win against and was there any Any competitor or any business that you looked at for inspiration or that you copied and then improved on what they were doing?

12:32Well, we saw a lot of other businesses doing this in other categories. So there was a personalized dog food company called Tails.com at the time, which had done really well. And other companies like Graze.com and Dollar Shave Club and Harry's, you know, they'd all built these personalization like engines and D2C funnels. Taking that model and learning and applying it to a new sector. Exactly. So how long did it take you to take the learning of personalization with the prescription-grade products and put that together so that you're ready to go to market? Yeah, it took a while, over a year, because, you know, I would say this is a good case of complex coordination, which is the same approach that people say that Apple took to building the iPhone.

13:20They didn't actually invent anything. All the technology existed. They just had to pull it all together. In our case, we had to figure out stuff that was totally new to us. We had to understand this regulated category that we were relatively new to. So we had to recruit very experienced individuals. We had to build a pharmacy, which was new to us at the time, build a factory and understand what are the right prescribing flows to set up to deliver the best patient outcomes. So our first step was to recruit a consultant dermatologist. At the time, there was only 650 in the UK. So we wrote, the way that we are often recruiting is going through our network, going through LinkedIn, does not work for dermatologists.

14:04So we wrote a handwritten letter to 250 of those 650. We ultimately landed our first consultant dermatologist, Dr. Ben Esdale, who still works with us today. and he really helped us understand the space better, added credibility to the team, of course. And that was a bit of a snowball effect because we then brought some more dermatologists on board. But yeah, it was a complex journey. I would say that, you know, one of the, if I just talk a bit about the path that we went down, originally we were going to go out and raise half a million pounds and build an MVP. and we didn't succeed in raising that round.

14:45We actually got offered 200 ,000 by one angel investor and I don't quite know how we did it, but we ended up turning it down. Obviously, some of the terms didn't quite work for us, but it was hard to turn it down when we had no other money on the table. But if we hadn't turned that down, we wouldn't have then retreated and formed a new plan, which is ultimately what set us up for success. And what was the difference in that second plan compared to the first one where you didn't manage to raise that half million pounds? Well, we retreated. We brought on an angel. So we met this angel investor who had built and sold three subscription businesses himself, all vertically integrated.

15:22And he helped us understand how he thought the business model was fantastic. It was basically proven to work because we're not reinventing the wheel. We're taking proven medicines. We're just delivering it to the customer in a way that's novel. So he felt that we should really set up the business to win from the get-go. So what we did is we retreated. We brought that investor on board in a small round just to get him actively involved. And we spent about nine months recruiting some key personnel for the business and building the brand and making a five-year model that was very rigorously stress tested.

16:00and even going as far as mapping out the factory and doing the capacity modelling there. So that meant when we went back out to raise the money, we went and asked for 10 times more this time, for£5 million, and we ended up getting eight. And it just showed the power of having the right team behind the right vision and as much planning done as possible really just set us up for a better, a more compelling... And was this original investor almost a mentor for bringing a lot of help and advice, not just that initial money. Yeah, absolutely. I think for me it was really an inflection point in my learning in business.

16:37I'd been running a company for seven, eight years by that point, but I hadn't seen it from his perspective, which was, no, let's do this once and do it right. And at the time we were considering partnering with a third-party pharmacy and factory and so on. And we did go to see some of them, but ultimately we just didn't have the confidence that they could deliver the volume that we needed and the scalability that we needed. So he helped us. Obviously, I didn't know anything about building a factory at the time, certainly not a highly efficient one. So, yeah, that really just levelled up. I think his insight is incredibly unique, specific knowledge that, yeah, dramatically increased our chances of succeeding.

17:22And you talked about vertical integration and in this case that means that you wanted to be the manufacturer as well as sort of putting the products together and the formulations. Just talk about why that was important, James. Yeah, well, I think ultimately for any business, really, the more you can have under your roof, the better in general. It's just expensive and hard to do that. In this case, we felt like if we could have as much control over all of everything from making the product to packaging it to personalizing it and shipping it out to the customer, we could go from, if we partnered with third parties, maybe we could like add a 2x to the customer experience compared to what they got today.

18:04We felt if we did it all in-house, we could honestly 10x it. And ultimately, and there are other benefits, obviously, I mean, building it in-house, having a dedicated facility that just is designed around our business model meant that we could get better efficiencies, we could improve our gross margin and that ultimately helped us grow better and added a motor around the business. But for us, we knew that we wanted to have this real level up when it comes to personalization. And if you think about until we sort of reset the bar, you would go to see a GP, you've got a six month wait quite often to then see a dermatologist, you might get prescribed something generic you get given that little piece of green paper from the pharmacist with your details on it and we said okay well how about we you know tear all that up and we just completely rebuild this and so we we we looked at what were the pain points well one thing is if you get a topical treatment from a doctor unlike um oral treatments where they're in a blister pack and you can track days of the week.

19:14With topicals, you don't really know how much to use. And we realized that was a concern of customers. So we wanted to design a bespoke dispensing system, and we called it the Daily Doser, and some of our brilliant engineers created it. Great name. Yeah, yeah, it's an awesome name. It's amazing how many people refer to it as that. So that was a great decision. It took a lot of work for the engineers, but things like that, we wouldn't have been able to do if we partnered with someone else because we then had to build custom machinery in order to fill those daily doses. And once we had the daily dose of filled, we thought, well, we don't want to put that little green piece of paper in the package.

19:51We want to be able to write your name on the bottle. And so we literally laser etch your name into the metal. So you get it and you open it and people are like, wow, this is so different to what I've seen before. And I think that level of, obviously we needed to have the right team and the right plan to raise enough money to give us the comfort that we could spend time investing in all this stuff before we'd even launched but it all it all came together nicely and then talk a little bit more about the the business model because i as i understand it this is a um a membership model yeah so in order for people to get good results they need consistency they need a personalized treatment plan and they need to stick to it and they should be using it on a daily basis.

20:38And so it was really important for us to set this up as a subscription service so that people, you know, if you leave it to people to remember to come back and get the next, well, they might've left a week or two between treatments and that would just lead to less good results. So customers come to our site, they, if they've seen an advert or been onto our Instagram bio, they've probably picked up a promo code and they get the first month heavily discounted and that's been great for us and the reason is nothing speaks more volumes for a customer than if you get the product and you try it and you see results so the power of the the trial exactly yeah it's been around since um the early days of you know estee lauder used to pioneer free sampling in in in the beauty industry and yeah it's been it's been awesome for us So people get that and then they kick into a subscription and we build a personalized regime for them and it just it gets shipped out every month for them.

21:36We've launched some other products since then that people can add if they want. But, yeah, that's that's the core business model. And typically what's the sort of monthly subscription price? It's around£25 is what your average customer is paying. And how do you decide upon that price? Is it based upon cost plus or you're working out what the customer would pay or versus competitors? Yeah, a whole range, really. I mean, the skincare market has everything from number seven to Augustinus beta. And we wanted to pick a price point that would enable us to reach the largest group of customers that could afford to stay retained for the maximum amount of time so that they would actually see results.

22:19and also set us up with a business model that meant we could continue to fund growth and reach more people. And so it was a lot of debates as a team, a lot of market analysis and even price testing. We've done like testing at different price levels. And I think ultimately, if you look at the value proposition, you know, for around£25, you're getting something from the comfort of your own home. You're getting access to a dermatology team. You're getting something that's made just for you sent in the post arrives at your letterbox a few days later you can contact our team anytime if you go to see a derm on the nhs you might wait half a year even longer actually at the moment and you can't exactly whatsapp them to ask them questions along the way and so you know we get a lot of customers telling us how um yeah how fair reasonable and good value for money it is and and i think we take a lot of pride in that the business grew really fast but you what you did take on some additional investment, I think.

23:19Yeah, we did. So I think we were about two and a half years into the business and we took some additional growth capital on from our primarily from our lead investor, Octopus Ventures. And, you know, the business is a very capital efficient business model. And so, you know, we've, yeah, we've raised in total just over 18 million pounds. But how much of the equity did you need to give away for that? good question i think in the very first round we sold around 30 percent and in the next round we sold uh more like six to seven percent and how does an entrepreneur know and how did you know whether this should be a bootstrap business like your sas software business previously or that you should go out and raise serious money and and go quicker i think some businesses just don't stand a chance of winning.

24:16Well, first of all, you need to decide, do you want to play to win? And if so, if you're in an industry like we were, well, there's a lot of capex required to build a factory. You need a lot of... We had over 20 people before we even launched. And we needed engineers, we needed pharmacists, we needed dermatologists and marketers and a whole range of people in order to deliver that 10x improvement on the customer experience. Did that worry you? Did you have to have courage to sort of hire that number of people from the beginning? It was all very new to me. I mean, I'd spent seven years in the Northeast building a company where we would only hire more people if we're hitting our targets, we can hire another person.

25:01So it was, yeah, it was all very intense, I remember, because we went from nothing to 8 million in the bank to, okay, we've got to hire all these people, we want to launch in six months, we've got to build a factory. There was a lot of decisions to make. But I think back to, you know, the earlier question around poker, I think for me, I don't, I probably have a different framing on risk as what your average person does. And I think most entrepreneurs need to. So yeah, obviously, if things start to go wrong, and you're burning money, and you're not getting close to revenue, you're going to be going out begging for money with not much leverage but it luckily all came together in this case.

25:41And the business started online but you're now stocked in outlets like Boots. Tell me about that decision and how that came about. Yeah so this was an interesting decision because unlike most brands that you see in Boots we can't sell on the shelf our core digital product which is a prescription-grade treatment. And the reason for that is it's completely made for you, and it's also got prescription ingredients, so you can't have an 18-year-old individual walk in there and just take it off a shelf. But what we learned from talking to a lot of customers and realizing just how much demand there was in retail stores in the UK was that there is still latent demand in the market for people to get access to our approach of products where you pick based on skin goal and skin type, something, you know, a treatment for you that you use at night, a cleanser, a moisturizer.

26:40So we did a lot of research. We spoke to a lot of customers and ultimately designed this range, which we're very proud of, which is now listed in Boots nationally and is performing very well. And it's a really nice compliment, you know, building the brand. Some people that have maybe seen ads about us but haven't tried us. They can try our products in Boots and then they can get also made aware of our service online which is called Skin and Me Pro where if they want to switch their treatment cream that they bought in Boots to a prescription grade one they can level up. Have you proved that when you got into a particular branch of Boots that being in there did then generate more online B2C business direct or not?

27:25I think it's hard to attribute that directly. I think since we launched in Boots, we've been on our biggest growth curve collectively in the business since inception, really. So much like when you're running out-of-home ads, you can attribute to a degree, but it's very hard to point it directly. but yeah I think overall for us it's um it's just great to have hundreds more physical distribution points of awareness across the country so omni-channel really important could you ever envisage that you would have your own skincare clinics or not no that's a good question yeah I think ultimately the there's so many ways that we could continue to get closer and closer to the customer.

28:11We've definitely kicked about ideas like that, doing pop-ups where, you know, people can come and meet our team. We've done those as sort of one-offs, but having a fixed location, I definitely wouldn't rule it out. There's something very appealing to me about having your own branded store, right? I mean, every time I walk in an Apple store, I think what it must have been like for Steve Jobs to go in there. So I think that, yeah, I think, going to market through third-party retail partners makes sense. In time, I would love the idea of being able to get closer. And what's stopping you doing that right now?

28:50Or is it about in business that you need to prioritise things and do it in a strict order? Or could you get on and test your own store? Right now, we're seeing so much growth in the core business, and we're reaching a lot more people and making a lot more impact that way. So for us, it's not top of the agenda right now we've just uh well i say just about 11 10 11 months ago now launched a new brand called hair and me so we've got skin in me we have renew in me which is an anti-aging focused personalized brand and we now have hair and me and that has been i mean exploding it's grown even faster in its first uh first year than skin and me and so that's really where we're putting a lot of our focus and we're building the current brands we're exploring international expansion very soon.

29:40And then we're also considering new categories because we view this as a, we call it a digital health platform. And we ultimately want to be the leading platform in the whole of Europe. And at the top, we have this and me brand, we have skin and me, hair and me, and there's a lot of other categories within health that we feel we could move into, that we could offer a personalized treatment. And again, go back to that 10x improvement on the customer experience. And just talk about International and that opportunity because that sounds really exciting. It does and it's funny in the early days of Skin and Me we thought we were going to launch International in the first year and we even built some tech to support multi-language so we've invested time into this.

30:27If I'm honest I think we grossly underestimated just how complex that is and also how much of a distraction it could have caused to the whole market and the core business before we were ready to move. Real relief to hear that because I think too many businesses go and think we're going to take over the world and do it too quickly when they're giving away lots of easier opportunities in our home country. Yeah, for sure. I think we just got, we were, I mean, we hit£10 million ARR pretty quickly in our first year And we were just, yeah, it was so clear that we shouldn't be diverting resources and moving abroad.

31:03I think now that we've got, you know, four plus years of learnings and optimizations of our funnel, what works, what doesn't work, the product range, the skin conditions that we treat and so on. We're in such a better position to now, OK, look at a new market. Obviously, there's differences in culture and buying habits and so on. But we just feel a lot more confidence in what we'd be exporting. And when you do do it, what will the business model look like? How different to what you're doing in the UK? Any thoughts on where you might go first? Yeah, we find some of the European markets very appealing.

31:42People say that if you crack Germany, then you can kind of crack any European market. so that's definitely one that we'd love to move into. I think the business model would stay largely the same. It doesn't make sense to not be subscription and prescription so all of that will stay the same. It just might look a bit different and talk a bit differently because you've got to meet those customers where they are.

32:10And with all this going on, it sounds like you've only just started and yet the business is doing well in excess of 40 million of revenue. Why did you decide to step up to chairman from founder and chief exec? Yeah, I've been on a bit of a journey myself as a sort of founder CEO and used to always think that, oh, I have to do the whole journey as CEO. And I think ultimately I've realised along the way what I'm very good at and what I'm not good at. I think what I'm good at is, you know, coming up with an idea, validating it, pulling together a really credible team behind that vision, incentivizing and structuring the team, bringing capital on board to set up the resources and the team for success, potentially being that CEO in the early days.

33:03but ultimately I think the skill set needed to run the business day to day is a slightly different skill set to my sweet spot. And if you look at Skin and Me, you know, one of the co-founders we brought in just before we launched was a guy called Horatio, who's now our CEO today. And he's been, yeah, fantastic CEO, much better than I would have been at the journey we've been on the last few years. And I think that's really taught me, okay, so why don't I stick to what I'm good at? and then enable the right CEO. And I'm trying to apply that to another business now. So I'm in the process of gearing up to launch the next company, which is basically using that same model.

33:46Yeah, and come on and talk about what you are doing now. And there is the life supplies business. And I think other things that you're doing as well. Yeah, so one business that I've started after Skin Me is called Life Supplies. it's a eco-friendly focused personal care brand so you know with the business we we you know wanted to be able to give people a way of buying personal care products without using so much plastic we got to market we got to multi-million pound revenues in our first year the business was performing well um and continues to perform well you know a lot of subscribers they're incredibly loyal.

34:24We've launched the world's first fully compostable packaging for toothpaste and saved over a million toothpaste tubes from going to landfill. There has been, interestingly, a bit of a movement away from sustainability. Like it was a very hot topic when we launched. Now people, they would rather something be sustainable, but not at the expense of cost, right? And so that's been like quite a shift for us and so that business continues to have a lot of impact and we're very proud of what we've built. I think yeah I think a learning for me personally has been with Life Supplies we kind of I well I tried something different to what I learned at Skin and Me.

35:10Skin and Me is a very specific you have a problem and we're going to provide you a solution. You have acne, we'll clear acne, and that's what you're paying us for. With Life Supplies, we got into hair care, body care, skin care, but all of the products were a bit less problem solution driven, which means you're going up against the big guys with their huge budgets. And because we're using sustainable packaging, we didn't have economies of scale either. So it just made it challenging to build a big company fast. What I'm doing next is getting back into that sweet spot of consumer health category.

35:50The current solutions don't work perfectly. So we've developed something that is superior. This next business that I'm launching soon is it's a 41 billion pound consumer health category dominated by a major incumbent. And their technology is 20 years old. So what we've done is we've recruited some of their ex-scientists that basically helped design their technology. and we've been beavering away to develop a superior technology. So that's what we're gearing up to take to market. And I think from a marketing perspective, it's so much clearer to me now how we'll win over customers compared to what we tried with Life Supplies.

36:26And that's almost a pivot, isn't it, from Life Supplies or saying, well, we'll just sort of not put a big focus on continuing to grow that one so much and go elsewhere. Was that a brave decision to make? because many entrepreneurs would just slog it out and keep going? Yeah, I think there are some characteristics that you just get better and better at as an entrepreneur. And so I now find it increasingly easy to walk away from sunk costs. I'm still not perfect at it because I'm a human and I get emotionally tied to, oh, we're nurturing this baby. We want to put it out into the world. But I think it became increasingly clear that we built something of value.

37:10We've got subscribers that love it, but it's not going to change the world because we've kind of got the evidence. So let's be pragmatic here. What could we move into next? And yeah, I'd say it was quite hard to come to terms with at first, but once you know how it is, as a founder, you make your mind up, get on with it. It's old news.

37:37so if we wind the clock forward 10 years james where do you where do you think you'll be then wow i think uh i'd like to spend some time in the u.s building a company there at some point i why well you know i'm not long back from spending time over there actually i was in san francisco and I find it, look, I'm a city guy. I love being in cities where there's just a lot of action and innovation and ambition. And I find that when I go to the US, first of all, it's so quick and easy to get plugged into the network of the people that are literally changing the world. And I find it so inspiring. And it's just so easy to explore, like doing deals with people and setting something up.

38:27People don't beat around the bush. Why do we find it harder here, do you think, in the UK? I think we're just a bit... I mean, look, we've had a stable, reliable economy for a while. The US is good at growing theirs, but it's all been growing fast. And I think the difference in attitude is a bit more conservatism and risk aversion here. Over there, it's go for it, make stuff happen. And I mean, crikey, you go to San Francisco and you go to some events and dinners and you just feel it. It's just kind of worlds apart. For those other entrepreneurs that are building mid-sized businesses and want to become the next large companies here in the UK, what would your two or three bits of advice looking back at what you've achieved so far, James?

39:15Yeah, I think that, you know, your outcome is driven by who you surround yourself by. so I think in my very first business I didn't surround myself by incredibly ambitious proven individuals in my next business I did and that rubbed off on me I would also say that for me a real inflection point was realizing what I'm good at and not being precious about what I'm not good at and it's so liberating you can convince yourself that oh I have to be good at everything as a founder and CEO when you accept that that isn't what you need to be You can then bring in the right CEO or you can pad the right people around you if you want to stay CEO.

39:57But, you know, you need to recognize that in order to cross that chasm, I would say. Rip up performance reviews and stop focusing on the things that we're really bad at and encourage people to focus on the couple of big strengths. Is that absolutely that's the way forward? Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I guess I'd also say the thing that I try to pride myself on getting better and better at is only focusing on the things that matter. I know that's so cliche to say, but you just see so many entrepreneurs that work. I mean, even a year or two ago, I can think, oh, I worked on this project and that project.

40:33What was I doing? I just didn't move the needle. And so I'm better and better and better at, okay, what are the two to three things that will move the only needles that matter? And everything else goes on the not to do list. Exactly. Very difficult for entrepreneurs. How did you train yourself and give yourself the discipline to be able to do that? Well, I'm now 39 and I've been doing this for a while. And so I think a lot of trial and error. But, you know, I think over time, if you're committed to being an entrepreneur for good, like I am, I'm never going to stop doing this. Your gut and your instincts just get better.

41:08and you know all too well, if you're working on something and you have that feeling in your stomach like, why am I doing this? This doesn't ladder up to what we've said is the only thing that matters. So just throw it in the bin. And once you get comfortable just deleting stuff and you realize the business doesn't break if you delete stuff, even if you've committed to it, even if you've told your team, we're going to do this, no one leaves if you say we've changed our direction and this is why. So yeah, I think more people just need to focus on what matters and delete 80 to 90 percent of what they're working on and a final tip for success um try stuff learn fail fast and iterate that's all i've done in my career and i'm sure it's the same for you i talk about uh persistence pays you talk james about rejection training yeah i've i've found in my career that if you force yourself to get rejected and learn to enjoy it, that's the key.

42:07Once you start to enjoy and want rejection, it's so powerful and you become unstoppable basically because it used to hold me back when I was a bit younger. But then I realized, well, if you flip your mindset into every time you get rejected, that's a win. That's what you're looking for. And you want to notch up your first hundred rejections as quickly as possible, whether it's raising money or trying to recruit partners or land sales, whatever it might be. And then if you get a yes, it's a bonus. But if you want the rejection because, well, when you get to 100 and then 1 ,000, that is 100 or 1 ,000 more learnings, opportunities to improve and get better.

42:42If you frame it that way, then ironically, the more rejections you get through, you're actually less likely to get rejected because you've got more experience. And it just makes you more resilient. Sounds like lying on a bed of nails. Yeah, I guess so. I mean, it's not nice being rejected, but I mean, you've been in business your whole career and you learn to realize it's not that big of a deal. And I think if you know that rejection isn't rejection, that you can get there eventually. That's the important bit, isn't it? Yeah. My learning and being an entrepreneur for me and the people around me that have been in the game since they left university or whatever.

43:22if you stick at it and you keep making better decisions over time but you do not give up you will be successful and all my friends that have got it into this without exception they've got varying degrees of success but they they have all made it work eventually how have you managed to get a balance between working really hard and then uh home life i would say i shouldn't be a thought leader on this because um i've i love my work i love what i do even when i'm not quote unquote working i'm thinking about work and the biggest problems and new ideas and i've come to realize it's impossible to switch that off so i i haven't had that much of a divide between the two you have to have a purpose like what are you working towards and do you get satisfaction from that.

44:12So if so, working at it a lot, that's good because you're enjoying it. But what's also important? Well, nurturing great relationships and your family and your friends and your closest people. And so that is the one area that I'd say this year in particular, I'm forcing myself to not compromise on and just make sure I'm building up a bank of memories because memories pay a memory dividend in the future with my closest people. But yeah, the way I often look at the the work-life balance thing is, you know, people say, oh, why do, you know, entrepreneurs work so hard? Or you've made all this money, but you're still working.

44:45It's like, well, would you have said to Ronaldo in the height of his career, oh, you've made a lot of money, why don't you stop? He loves it. It's not just about, it's the thrill of like your purpose and what you enjoy doing every day. So yeah, I still work every day, but I'm trying to, yeah, keep friends, family and important relationships at the forefront. you've been listening to me Richard Harpin speaking to James Mishrecchi founder of Skin and Me for the business leader podcast please do rate and subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts we do two episodes every week and if you visit our business leader website you can sign up to our weekly newsletter to get more content like this and find out opportunities for your business

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