Viral video to viral brand

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0:41We look forward to seeing you there. The video that had gone viral, the TikTok page that I'd made it on, actually deleted my whole account. Do you think if the video hadn't gone viral, you'd still be on the journey you're on? No. Dragon's Den reached out to me, one of their producers, and I thought everything is going wrong for me. this is the worst possible time to go on Dragon's Den. It was absolutely terrifying. I was in there for three and a half hours. Those three and a half hours I spent with them has done more for me as an entrepreneur, I think. Lucy, welcome to the podcast. So you grew up in Pembrokeshire, Wales.

1:17What was life like growing up for you? It was good. I had a very nice childhood, to be honest. Pembrokeshire It's such a beautiful place. It's more difficult the older you get, I think, especially being a teenager there. It's a very small town, small area. Everyone knows everyone and everything. And a lot of my friends who've grown up in cities just find it inconceivable when I speak to them about it. Because I'm like, oh, yeah, we know everything about everyone within an X mile radius. And, yeah, they find it a bit weird. But, no, it was amazing. You know, my parents, I couldn't be, I've always said if I ever had kids, kids i'd want them to have an upbringing like like i had so yeah really great um but we moved there when i was younger uh i used to my parents spent like 25 years in the south of france oh brilliant but they wanted josh and i to have a bit more of a i don't know they just wanted us they didn't want us growing up in monaco they wanted us to have a different yeah uh experience of life and yeah we've obviously done really well from it so i'm glad yeah i'm glad it's a pretty It's a pretty different upbringing, I would say.

2:21Honestly, people say, what do you mean? They used to live in Monaco and then they moved to Pembrokeshire. And I'm like, I know, it's like two polar ends. Simply so. Yeah, I know, different lifestyles. But I can see why, you know, now that I'm older, I can see why they did it. So, you know, it was really good, though. Nice. We'll get, obviously, to hair syrup shortly. But, you know, were there any entrepreneurial sparks when you were growing up? Anything that kind of, you know, gave you an indication of you'd be where you are today? Yeah, I think everyone, if you ask any of my teachers, perhaps even the ones who weren't so keen on me, they'll all tell you like it's not really come as much of a surprise.

2:59It was definitely in my nature to work for myself and go on. I always wanted a lot from life. So definitely in my nature and hasn't really come as much as a huge surprise that I've pushed the boat out of it and done this. But to be honest, I didn't think I'd do it at such a young age. I talk about it a lot. I remember doing the 16 personalities tests and I got the ENTJ commander personality. And I thought, oh my gosh, this makes so much sense when you read into it. And yeah, so not really a huge surprise to me. It's definitely just kind of fits well within my nature. But like I said, I didn't think I'd do it this young.

3:43I thought I'd follow more of a traditional career route and then get into it later in life. Growing up, did you have any early mentors or people that inspired you that you feel like kind of led you down this path? To be honest, not really. Like people ask me a lot. They say, oh, have you got a family of entrepreneurs? No. Most of my family followed, you know, more of a traditional sort of career path. I didn't have anyone who owned a business, which made it more difficult when I started because I didn't really have anyone to ask or to lean on. But yeah, no, not really in terms of business owners.

4:16I just winged it when I started. That's amazing. And, you know, you went to university, you know, as with a lot of great business stories, you develop this product out of your own personal need and then you start to monetize that. And I guess was there, you know, when you think about hair syrup, when you started it, was there kind of an aha moment, I guess, when you go people actually want this and you follow your dream yeah and I love that that you've just mentioned that the business obviously came out of a need I was at a dinner the other day with um like this initiative called buy woman buy woman built um and it's you know basically a kind of it's a community of of female founders female business owners and we went around the table saying how we started our business why who we are and I honestly I would say about 90 percent of people around that table when it came to me I was one of the last and I said oh we're in Groundhog Day because I'm about to say the same thing I had a problem couldn't find a solution made my own solution made a business out of it so it's that very typical sort of entrepreneurial story um but in terms of the aha moment I always laugh at myself and feel like I'm a really bad business owner and I don't know whether I should even call myself an entrepreneur because I had sort of about 10 little opportunities if you like to seize the moment and monetize hair syrup and I didn't it was like I'd have I'd have a epiphany or I'd have a sign oh you could do this you could do that and I just batted it away batted it away probably about 10 times if I think back um and it was more of a conversation really that sparked me deciding to go for it and a simple comment of when I'd made the video, so obviously we'll go into the backstory, but I'd made the video, it'd gone viral, had all these comments.

6:09And the funny part of this is that the video that had gone viral, the social media TikTok page that I'd made it on, actually deleted my whole account because I was finding it too distracting when TikTok first came out. So the account that had that video doesn't even exist anymore. And I thought so little of it that I deleted my whole account. and I think it was when despite the fact that that account had been deleted people were still taking my name which had been watermarked on the video and were reaching out to me personally and saying oh my gosh you were that girl who made that video I need your help so I thought oh my gosh yeah actually thinking about this I needed something I couldn't find anything so I had to make it so I suppose other people are in the same boat and maybe I could sell it to them and that's how it happened.

7:00That's amazing. So speaking about TikTok, when that video first went viral, how did you feel? Were you shocked? Yeah, 1 million percent. Social media was completely new to me. I had no presence at all online. I didn't really know how to use the app properly. Certainly didn't know how to make a viral video. So yeah, I didn't really know what I was doing and I was just shocked. I didn't think that anyone would care as much as they did. But looking back, now that I know more about content creation I understand that the format of the video that I unintentionally sculpted is the sort of a nice simple formula that if I made a video tomorrow with a similar format it would probably go viral because it's got the pain point it's got the hook it's got the before it's got the after and then it tells you the step by step guide in between so So it's that inevitable.

7:55Well, of course, a video like that would go viral. But at the time, I had no idea I was even doing that. I just thought, oh, I'll make this fun video. And it made chronological sense to me. But I wasn't thinking of it in terms of how can I make this go viral? I was just thinking, oh, it makes sense to set up a story in this way. Do you think if the video hadn't have gone viral, you'd still be on the journey you're on? No, never in a million years. I never, ever would have started. If I'd not made that video, I would never, ever have thought in a million years to start selling the products. I don't think anyway.

8:28I mean, and if I had, it might have been on a really small scale. But it was the TikTok video going viral that made me see the potential of TikTok as a sales platform. And I thought, OK, actually. Yeah, you knew there was an audience there waiting for you. Yeah, rather than having to go out there and find an audience. which you know I could have carried on using them for a year my friends and family could have used them and someone might have said to me oh can I buy a bottle of this to give to my friend but it would have stayed really I think anyway really small scale and I just wouldn't have put any time or effort into it it was when I saw there was a gap in the market and there was an audience just sitting there primed waiting that I thought okay I could do something here but I wouldn't have done it without that viral video.

9:15I love the story too, because you have these, as you described, kind of 10 moments where you could have done something and you chose not to. And then when you eventually get into it, a lot of the business people that we speak to are incredibly stubborn at times. And this is one of the times when you're very stubborn, you order a bunch of supplies and you kind of say to your parents, I'm going to be following my dream of building this business. And the first thing they say is no chance. That's ridiculous. You won't do it. I think they said, You won't be doing this under our roof. Yeah. And then suddenly the stubbornness kicks in.

9:47You go, no, I will show you. I will show everyone. You know what I mean? Is that fair? Million percent. Yeah, no, I am quite a stubborn person. I think a lot of people would describe as that. And I think once I get something in my head, I'm pretty... And I don't know, it wasn't ever, and I really need to stress this when I talk about it to people, because it was never that. If my parents or I had seen the potential in it, or if they'd ever thought, oh, it could turn into this one day, they never, of course, would have tried to stop me. But it wasn't that I had these crazy ambitions where I thought, no, I'm going to build one of the fastest growing briefview brands in the UK and this is going to make millions and this is going to do this.

10:27It was just something that I wanted to do. And it's not that I was blinded by or pushed by the thought of, oh, I can make all this money, I can do this, I can make a big brand. no it was just this thing inside me and like you said maybe it's a stubbornness of someone tells you well no you can't and you think well no I want to um in the kind of least spoiled brat way possible but yeah no that that is what happened um and they said not under our roof they just felt that they'd put and we all laugh about it now and it's been a huge learning curve like my mum works in the business now my dad's he's always like we always film him and put him on the social media and stuff and they're a big part of it now but it's been a really big learning curve for all of us individually all of us as a family because to go against you know what your parents spend years and years well they dedicate especially my parents they literally devoted their whole lives pretty much to make sure that josh and i was successful like my brother's a professional rugby player and you know the the things my dad did like every driving him two hours to training and coming home going to work the next day they they devote their whole lives to making us successful and for me I was more on the academic side you know I really wanted to I wanted to go to a really top uni I wanted to do this they spent a lot of money on tutoring and they just put a lot into it and for me and we know we we were at a disadvantage in some ways because you know I wanted to go to Oxbridge but we weren't at a private school we didn't have the same access to resources that you know a lot of the people who I was competing against would have had access to so my parents had to work that little bit harder and then when I just came out and said oh I'm going to start selling hair oils when I was at the last leg of the race they were they would have perceived it as such a big risk and a big gamble and also look what we've put in you're just getting distracted now because you've been working so hard at something for so long and I get a bit bored and you're looking for the next shiny thing yeah stay on track stay focused um is it was where they were coming from which again is completely understandable because it's so different in 2025 if someone came to me now it's not so ridiculous now to say because people you've got stories like mine and you've got people who've done it before and you've got kind of examples and people that you can look at and say well they did it so I dare say if a 20 year old went to their parents now and said oh I'm going to start a beauty brand I'm going to start a hair brand the parents would have probably heard about the stories from like me and would say oh great go for it good idea but we didn't have those we didn't have those sort of case studies to refer to and say yeah but look mum this person did it we were the first person doing it on the platform so we didn't have any idea it was a complete punt and a stab in the dark and nobody really knew what was going to come out of it and like said they just saw as risk risk risk um with no little very little reward except from oh at least you might enjoy it a little bit but that just didn't seem like enough of a reason for them So you started with very little capital.

13:41How did you manage the early days of the business with cash flow and production? I love words like, well, I'm actually doing a business course at the moment. And it's so funny because I'm learning about all of this stuff probably five years too late. But realizing that I actually implemented a lot of these strategies without even realizing it at the time. um so I've always been very very good with cash flow um unintentionally which is strange because I'm not of a finance background I'm not particularly keen on anything to do with numbers um but for me it was always really important that we kept again we kept costs low and we never ever over ordered anything so even from the really really early days and we still thought I mean it's different now because we're going through a stage of growth but right at the beginning I think uh I said I was willing to put however much it was and people there's loads of different figures that float around and you know I've said different things in different interviews but I'm not actually 100 % sure to be honest how much it costs me um but say it was 300 quid or whatever it was or maybe even less than that it was probably less and my thought process around this was if I can sell 10 bottles then I've made my money back on supplies and it okay it might have cost me a little bit in setup at fees but that was a little bit of something I was willing to sacrifice but I started with those 10 bottles and then I remember just being really gradual and intentional about it when I would think okay if I order 30 bottles it takes it down from you know you were buying I was buying these empty plastic bottles and they might have cost three pound each or whatever they were at the time and then I thought okay but if I buy 30 then I get 30 pence off the empty plastic bottle so I thought okay that seems like a calculated risk but I was really careful about it you know I did like I said 10 at a time and then 20 and then 30 and then I remember the first time I ordered a box of 100 and that just felt like wow yeah insane but um I never spent so much that I felt that I was putting myself or the business at huge risk um and again it's different now because we're in a bit of a period of both but even now I've still got that mindset about me of I like to you know pinch the pennies and just play it play it safe um and you know touch wood so far it's worked well but yeah I didn't have a strategy or a mentor or anyone saying to me this is how cash flow works Lucy and you need to make sure that you've got this much in reserve and three months worth of no I just had to eyeball it and I had to use my common sense really but I think it's made me a better entrepreneur so I'm quite I'm quite glad glad of it now looking back great that's amazing we mentioned in the intro you made it onto the list uh the Sunday Times hundred list of the fastest growing companies in the UK.

16:43I guess for a little bit of context, just for those, you know, maybe watching or listening, could you just tell us a little bit about the company, the size, employees and things like that? Yeah. So we're, I think we're still, I think we might even still be considered a small business last year, but I'm not sure about this year. So we finished on 5 million in 2024. That was our turnover and made it onto Sunday times 100 faster growing companies 24 slash 25 and we got to number 13 which was obviously amazing um and then this year then we are well we'd projected 6.5 million but because of various things that have happened this year um that's now gone up and we're predicting projecting between 10 to 12 million in 2025 but again subject to uh certain agreements and sales going through so we'll see but that's what we're projecting and we've got quite a big team in our warehouse in Pembrokeshire in southwest Wales um so we've taken on a couple of new members of staff recently so we've got about 16 full-time members of staff um and yeah we outsource quite a lot of stuff thing because it's difficult in Pembrokeshire and you know a lot of the roles that we we hire and stuff they're quite specific and so it can be difficult to get what we want we'd love to have everything in-house like that's like my ideal but um it's been difficult with hiring capacity so right well that's amazing congrats thank you really exciting what would you say has aided the business the most at the moment is it um word of mouth social media so it used to be mainly social media we still are definitely a kind of social first brand but this year we've dipped our toes into all sorts of different marketing strategies we've done a lot of in-person events we've done a lot of kind of public media activations obviously I went on Dragon's Den and I think we've moved slightly away from just being a TikTok brand or just a social media brand And now we've got a lot of people who either say, oh, I saw you on Dragon's Den or they say, oh, I've heard about this.

19:05My colleague uses it. So it's been a really nice transition, actually, for us to go from just being, oh, I saw that on TikTok to now, oh, a friend of mine told me about that. Or this person told me about that. Or more notably, oh, I saw that in the press because we've had so much press coverage this year. So many podcasts. I speak at a lot of events. you know I spoke at two events last Friday so we're super super busy with all of that sort of public in person activation stuff and it's been nice you know because social media can be can have its ups and downs and there's nothing like a bit of real life connection so it's been a nice transition for us but difficult to get used to because I'm I've for five years you know I've been pretty much glued behind a screen and haven't really done much face-to-face stuff yeah uh but yeah no it's worked really well for the brand that's great before we get into dragon's den um when you were naming hair syrup were you thinking ahead already about seo because it really is the perfect name for if you're wanting to search for hair syrup or anything you're going to be the first name that pops up on google no i didn't know i don't think i knew what seo was when i first started um certainly wasn't being that strategic i'd love to i'd love to take credit for it but no I just thought my a lot of my decisions at the beginning of the business especially when it came to branding if you can even call it branding what I did in the early days was just down to creative intuition and I knew it was obviously a hair oil but I remember playing around with names and thinking the word oil is not overly appealing especially in well whenever I started it 2020 um it doesn't have the best of connotations and I remember thinking the products that I was making and if even if you look at them now they're quite thick and viscous compared to a lot of hair oils that you get on the market which would be quite watery um and quite thin so I thought it looks more like I remember thinking oh it looks like when I was pouring I thought it looks like golden syrup yeah and then I thought oh syrup sounds nicer than oil it has a kind of nostalgic sweeter richer I don't know feel to it and it had a nice ring to it I thought hair syrup yeah and I one of the only smart things I did when I actually started the business I think was I actually did go and check it wasn't trademarked and it wasn't it's really shocking actually that it wasn't I know I could not and I couldn't actually believe it I was remember I'm thinking how's no one thought this before they hadn't so uh I trademarked it I think it cost me however much it cost me but yeah no I was really glad because I see it all the time with businesses I know personally three people that this has happened to where they started beauty brands and we all started them pretty much at the same time you know 2020 lockdown and it's yeah three girls I know it's happened to um and another one I think is in the process of having it happen to them where you started this business five years ago thought it would be this tiny little thing in your bedroom that no one would ever know or care about suddenly it's a big business and you're viral and then you're having you're being sued basically for copyright and it's that and it happens so many people and it's it's a really difficult one because now I'm on the other side of the fence where I have to protect my IP um and I see people all the time I don't obviously deal with any of it but you know I see reports at the end of the month where oh you know we had to send this to this person but it's really sad because if you look at it from you know friends mine's perspectives they didn't know what they were making they didn't know what they were building they didn't know that more than 50 people would ever even know about it no matter that they'd be having this big name and then there'd be trademark issues because they were selling in wherever and someone else was also selling there and it was yeah so I'm yeah that was a bit of a blessing for me really absolutely but easily done you know easily it can easily go the other way so hard for people yeah yeah um i want to talk about the dragon's den appearance um so you recorded the episode in 2024 um you were asking for 190 000 pounds for three percent of your company before we get into any of kind of what happened in the episode um how did that opportunity come about?

23:28So Dragon's Den reached out to me, one of their producers, and I would never have applied off my own back. I'd had a really difficult year in 2024. The business had had quite a difficult year. Well, the first half of it anyway. And I felt like I'd arrived at a little bit of a crossroads. I was going through a really difficult time and I didn't think I was cut out for owning a business. I think everyone who does it goes through these stages and I thought everything is going wrong for me. And it genuinely was everything that could go wrong just seemed to be going wrong. And I just seemed to be, yeah, and it was really difficult.

24:12And when Dragon's Den emailed me, you'd have thought then that I might have thought, oh, well, everything else is going wrong. So it's probably not the best idea to take up this opportunity. But I'd got to a point of sort of beyond despair where anything just felt like something's got to give here. And something's, I've got to have my lucky break is what I genuinely remember thinking. And I thought, okay, why not? I'm going to say yes. And a few people around me said, you're absolutely mad. Why would you go on the show? You've got all this and that going on in the business. You've had this happen this year.

24:49That happened. this is the worst possible time to go on Dragon's Den. And I thought, well, yeah, but it felt like there was, again, I run my business and a lot of my life, to be honest, off gut feeling. And I had a gut feeling around it. You know, a lot of people say, how did you make that decision? How did you do this? And a lot of the time you just kind of know instinctively with things. And I just said, whatever comes of it, I think this is going to be a good opportunity and I've got a good feeling about it. and then I agreed to go on and there's a lot of due diligence that they do beforehand so you've got to do a lot of you've got to send them a lot of paperwork a lot of documentation which I found really difficult to be honest because I was trying to run this business like I said it was a bit of yeah there was a lot going on at that time so I was trying to manage the business and then they were emailing me they were like Lucy we need this we need this we need that you know you have to do dbs checks and all of that sort of stuff which sounds really simple but when you're already over over bad with stuff so then anyway i managed to get through it and um i remember explaining to them one day i said look i know that some people come on the show and they're spending six months prepping for it because they you know need the investment or for whatever reason um but i said i'm right in the thick of running a business right now so it's a little bit different for me it's not like I can dedicate a portion of my time to this so I was learning my scripts you know driving up the day before I was sat in the car and I was trying to learn this pitch trying to learn my numbers and do this and do that and then um woke up the morning of and I'm not a particularly I don't really get stage fright and I'm a pretty confident person but I was really nervous the morning of, too nervous and I don't know, something just felt a bit, not off, but I was scared.

26:51And people don't realise how Dragon's Down actually happens or how it works really and a lot of people said to me, oh, you've sort of ruined it for me now because a lot of people think it's filmed live. Right. Yeah, and I was like, no, I filmed this like nine months ago or whatever it was. But yeah, so we went up, spent the whole day there. And you're just waiting, really, and get your makeup done, hair done. And then I went on stage and that's when it all occurred. That's sort of when it all happened. So when the lift doors opened and you came face to face with the dragons, first of all, was that your first time seeing them when the doors opened?

27:31And how did you feel when you walked out? Yeah, so you're not allowed any contact with any of the dragons. and I'm pretty sure if you've had contact with them prior to the show, that's also a big no-no. Interesting. That's my understanding anyway. But yeah, never seen any of them, met any of them, spoken to anyone and we were kept really strictly separate from them. So it would be like, oh, the dragons are in this part of the building so you're not allowed in that part of the building for the next two hours. So yeah, the doors opened and it was absolutely terrifying and anyone who tells you it isn't, I don't know what to say to them because it is terrifying and yeah the doors opened and they were all sitting there and there's loads of people you have like a big audience as well behind the dragon oh really?

28:16yeah yeah so it's like a proper set up and you're just standing on stage and it's hot so you've got about a million lights on you and then you just go then and I was in there for three and a half hours yeah standing on the stage so it's intense yeah I mean for those who haven't seen the episode So Tuca Suleiman ends up making you an offer. He basically says, I'll give you what you came in for, the 190 ,000 for 3 % on the condition you pay it back within three months. And you take a little bit of time to think about it. And then essentially the dragons kind of say, this is not the best shout for you.

28:52And Tuca eventually pulls it back. And even going into everything you've said, everything going into this experience, it sounds almost like you've got the devil and the angel on your shoulder. You're kind of like, I love this business. but I also hate this business because it's just there's so much going wrong I guess when that when you walk back into the lift what's going through your mind at this stage because it's very easy to go like well this is the cherry on top this business stuff it I'm packing it all in obviously you're set here talking about it so that's not what happened but you know take us into your mindset at that time yeah no that's exactly how I felt um I I did feel exactly like that I thought this is a sign this is the cherry on top they don't like it I shouldn't be doing this that's exactly how I felt and I think it's also worth noting that when I went into the den because I had so much going on and because I'd been through the business had been through you know really a really kind of tumultuous period anything felt like a good offer at the time and I saw the dragons and they knew that this is how I saw them and you know I remember Peter Jones said to me he was like I even if I did come on board Lucy I'm not here I want you to understand that I'm not here to save you or run your business for you he said you know I'm here to I'm here as an investor and they said you know I think you've come in with the mindset that we're the answer to your troubles and I said yeah that's exactly what I thought and they were like honestly they those three and a half hours I spent with them has done more for me as an entrepreneur I think than because I just didn't it didn't feel like it at the time but on high in hindsight I can see how much that did for me but that is what I saw them as I saw them as these guardian angels who were just gonna come in and I felt like when dragon's den came knocking I thought oh yes I don't know what I'm doing and this is all going wrong oh great Stephen Bartlett Peter Jones Deborah a medium they know what to do yeah they've done this for years they can just come in and help me and do something because I don't know what to do uh and they knew that I was in that position which is ironically really ironic really because with Tuka's offer that is sort of what he was offering I mean a lot of it gets cut out but it's not unusual for mentors to take equity out in in return for mentorship that's not unusual anyway so whenever I was like why did you say no blah blah and i was like well it wasn't the world's and this is this has been hotly debated i don't know if you guys have seen you know some of the conversations that's been had around it but a lot of people it's been hotly debated and some people are like that was actually quite a decent offer um but then of course you get into the the questions then of well how much time would i have been given for that which of course what everyone doesn't realize either is that you come out of dragon's den and it's not oh i'll shake your hand and sign seal delivered it takes months and months for those agreements to actually go through go through so i was like well so i was like well you know of course how much time would i be getting what would i you know what what would three percent look like is that three percent of a working week like all of the all of these questions um but yeah I just went in there looking for someone to save me and it's actually turned out that genuinely the person to save me has been myself which is so cliched but so true and they were really clear with me the dragons and I know we you know go on about them a lot on social media and they probably you know get annoyed by it but on you know the way I feel towards them is that And they said to me, I can't remember, I think it was Peter or Stephen, because their words really stuck with me as well, the two of them.

32:50And I think it was Peter maybe said to me, I think you've got so much potential as an entrepreneur. I'm so excited to see where you'll be in five, ten years. And he said, if I take away this learning opportunity from you, because I can see that what you want from me is someone to just tell you what to do and what the right thing is. And he said, I'm so much more excited with the prospect of leaving this with you and seeing what you do with it. And then where you're going to go from there, because I think it'll be better for you as an entrepreneur. And I think you're going to, they were all adamant, which I don't really know how I feel about, but they were adamant.

33:24They said, hair syrup's your first of many, and you're going to go off and do amazing, massive things. and if we bail you out of this one it's not going to be very good for your character so I want to see you I want you to take this rejection and take this step back set back and see where you can go from it um and yeah hopefully because I mean these are like you mentioned these are like three hours recording so what we're seeing is a very very small snippet of that and there's a few moments where you've been grilled on certain things to do with business dividends etc and you you were quite good at being like, I don't fully understand it.

34:04Because there were a lot of people who could actually end up being like, oh, yeah, and then just kind of blag their way into something that's incredibly incorrect. But you were quite open to be like, you know, I don't I don't know everything about this. I'm that's why I'm here. I want to learn and things like that. But, you know, that's easier said than done. That always kind of been your mindset that you know what you know, you don't know what you don't know. One million percent. And I think that I'm good at faking it when I need to why would you try and but why would you go into a room with people like that who I feel I can learn so much from and pretend to know something that I don't or pretend to be an expert in something when obviously I'm like I'm here asking you for help and I always thought the people who do really badly on Dragon's Den tend to be those people who are arrogant and who go in there thinking and then the dragon saying well what you need us for then yeah um but yeah that was a really interesting one and again it was one of the most talked about parts but again you didn't see most of actually what happened there and the question around dividends was never that I didn't know what a dividend was because of course I do like that's just ridiculous but the question really was not what what is a dividend although we made out on social media that that was what it was because people found it funny.

35:27But the question was really, how am I getting my money back? And also, what are your exit plans? And I didn't have one. I didn't, up until two weeks before I went on Dragon's Den, I was cleaning the warehouse, packing orders, on the ground 60 hours a week, managing staff timesheets. The business looks very different now to what it did when I went on there. But when they were saying to me, well how much do you want to sell it for and when do you want to sell it so when am I getting my money back and what's going to be our return of investment if I'd been able to stand there and confidently say I have a plan which obviously I would be able to now I have a plan in three years time I want to sell the business for X amount or I want to buy all of my investors out for X amount like whatever it is that would have been okay but I didn't understand how I didn't even I knew what an exit strategy was but I didn't have one.

36:24And I didn't understand the sort of interest that I'd have in being acquired. Like I didn't know any of this. And it really annoys me when people get, you know, kind of, again, and I know that people just love to feel that they've got some sort of, oh, I know more than you in a belittling way. But I really, I never pretend to be anything other than just a 24-year-old girl who had started this business a little bit by accident a few years before, had done pretty well, but I don't know what the future holds. And I didn't know. And the big thing that they worried about as well was that I was, you know, saying, oh, I'd like to do this and I'd like to do that.

37:04And they said, well, where does that leave me and my money? Because what if you just decide that you've got bored of this and you want to do something different, you want to do something else? And it was all completely, totally valid. And the business was not in a, and I was not in a place to take investment there. you know like i said now it's completely different but back then i didn't know i didn't even know what i'd use the money for they said to me what you're going to use the money for and i said um i don't know because i just didn't know and that's okay you know but yeah i didn't know at the time so uh but yeah that's that's always been me i just think to be open and honest and um thing is if you try and get smarty with them and say this and say that they'll just absolutely wipe the floor with you anyway and there's six of them six of them and one of you so you're not going in there to to blow your chest up you're going in there to ask them for money and ask them for guidance so so why would you go you know why would you question their intelligence sort of thing yeah of course um so on the show you mentioned the importance of mentorship and finding a mentor to help you scale have you since found a mentor for yourself and how did you go about finding the right person yes I have a business mentor actually he's great how did I meet him uh it do you know it's actually I think I'm probably gonna have to take a few years to like even reflect on what's changed in the last 12 months because my life and the business is just so different um when did I meet my mentor I think it was about it must have been about a year ago last summer um no probably about yeah about maybe last September so not that long after Dragon's Den and I met him he was recommended to me through I was given a um a kind of growth I was put on this accelerated growth program because I was a Warwick alumni so I got I got my business got put on this course and we got a lot of free support consultancy and I think he got recommended to me through them but I've I didn't know anyone and again people find this really difficult to believe but I did not know anyone this time last year I was a nobody really like I didn't know anyone didn't have any friends in business really didn't know anyone in high places at all and it's really been since my since I became the sole director well my mum's come on board as a director since but you know once I started running the business just by myself and I was forced into that position and I was like, okay, and I didn't have, you know, another director to kind of lean on and say, well, what do you think?

39:48Because you can get very insular. I think if you've got a co-founder or an early days director, you get very reliant and you don't look outwards. You just lean into each other to get advice and support. So when I didn't have that anymore, it forced me to look around me and god when i looked around me i thought hello where what have i been doing so yeah i've got i've got tons of incredible people like i know some some really cool experienced people now um and again it come through it came as a result of a period of hardship and thinking despair and thinking how am i going to do this but then realizing oh my gosh it kind of comes back to what you were saying before where it almost feels like there's this barrier to entry with business it's this big intimidating thing but actually if you've got people around you that you can ask you know questions that people may get snobby about why don't you know this and all this kind of stuff it's actually great to have that person around you with that community around you that you can just be like I just want to bounce this idea off you it's not this big amorphous thing no one can access but it's actually this thing where it's like it's lonely being a CEO I need to talk to someone about stuff that I can't talk to the people in my business about.

41:03Yeah, I think the biggest thing I've learned this year that I didn't know anything about, again, this time last year is delegating tasks. So I didn't have like an SLT this time last year, which is insane because the business was doing, you know, four, I don't even know, four million or something. Who doesn't have an SLT with the four million pound business? Well, me apparently. But I just thought, oh no, it's a KR manager. And because there were two of us at the time it was just sort of like okay you do your thing I'll do mine and we did manage it but nowhere near you couldn't have scaled like that um but I didn't know what I wanted to scale to or anything but yeah now I've got like we're looking at you know taking on you know we want a head of marketing fractional fd like we've got so many different things that we want to bring into the business and people and it's really made me understand the value of having really good people around you when you need to take a step out of the business and just having these people like I've got people in my business who I can ask any question to like I've got one guy who works for me James like you can just ask him anything about anything and he knows the answer to it it can be about finances about operations and even if he doesn't he'll have a really educated guess and before that it was just kind of me in my own brain so yeah it's it's really beneficial that's good so what did the next five years look like for hair syrup well I've got certain milestones that I want to reach in the next 12 months so we've got some quite specific plans around international expansion we've done a lot of what we can do in the UK in terms of brand awareness we need to drill down more into new customer acquisition within the uk because we've still got a lot of potential even here um but the uk is difficult one because like i said a lot of people know about us but it's how we're taking a customer and converting them yeah and taking someone who's aware and turning you know turning them into someone who's buying um so we're looking into that within the UK but in terms of focusing on brand awareness marketing we've started to move into international markets so we're being very intentional there we're using a mix of like b2b distributors and I've got um a guy who heads my sales for me and he's extremely experienced in the beauty industry um and knows all the different distributors and all of that stuff again whereas if you'd asked me 12 months ago I probably wouldn't have even known what a beauty distributor is I would have said well I don't know what that is um but yeah so that's kind of what we're doing now and we're trying to again being very careful with our cash reserve but we want to move into the US market in 2026 but we want we did Europe first or in the midst of doing Europe first because it's closer it's easier and it's less costly um so we're hoping that in 2026 we'll get a big b2b agreement probably go exclusive with one of a partner out there and see how it goes and that would change the business entirely of course if we if we were to do that so um that's kind of the plans and then once i get to the end of next year when we've done all of that i'll have a better idea of what my next steps are but at the minute we're just focusing on recreating what we've done in the UK in different territories amazing that's so exciting watch this space um we always finish the podcast with a couple of quick fire questions for you so the first one if you were to hope host a dinner party featuring five leaders from the world of sport business music anything fictional, real, dead, alive who would you pick?

44:57I am so bad at questions like this Oh, I tell you who I'd love to meet I'd love to meet Michelle Obama She's so cool Oh, I'd love to meet Hayley Bieber I had a feeling you'd say that Just because of what she, just because of her Yeah, the recent exit to ALF, I'd like Hayley Bieber would be a cool one Everyone's going to be fuming, you could meet anyone Dead or alive, she's Hayley Bieber There's loads of people. I don't know. There's too many. It's all right. It could be two people at this table. Well, hopefully this one doesn't stump you. Probably will. What's one fact about you that we can't find out online?

45:33Well, I used to have a really bad phobia of sharks. Okay. Used to? Yeah. Have you shed that weight? Yes, I have. How did you do that? What made it go away? Exposure therapy. Oh, God. I forced myself to look at... So every time you'd go on my Instagram feed, this is... Nobody would know this apart from Lucy Palmer. actually she knew this but you go on my instagram feed and on my explore page it would be a full feed of sharks and it was really weird because when i met my boyfriend and i followed him on instagram for the first time it felt like this really weird moment of something because on his pinned his first pinned photo on his instagram was a shark from when he went shark it was meant to be i couldn't believe it i thought that is the of all the strange things that happened to me and I was trying to explain to him how weird it was and he was just looking at me and I was like, okay, well, you're probably never going to go out with me again.

46:27This is really odd that you have a shark on your page. So yeah, that is something that no one would know about me. You've been listening to the Business Leader Podcast with Lucy McPhee and me, Josh Dornbrack. For more business masterclasses and case studies, please check out businessleader.co.uk.

46:52The Business Leader Summit 2026 is set to be bigger, bolder and more ambitious than ever. Don't just watch Britain's growth story unfold, be part of it. Secure your ticket today by visiting the events section of the Business Leader website and using the code BLPODCAST, all uppercase. It's your chance to join the leaders who are shaping the future of business.