From Complete Burnout To A £40M Category Leader! Mark Scott | The Leader Mindset

0:00Mark Scott:Are you the bottleneck in your business? Are you the one who's actually stopping and letting it grow? Delighted today to be joined by Mark Scott, founder and no longer CEO of Bella & Juke. A business can only grow as big as the founder decides to grow. That difference between a founder that's built a business and a founder who's built themselves a job. D2C works incredibly well when you've got community. A community is something where when the founder's not around, the conversation continues. you keep those kpis you delegate it to somebody then you don't need to worry about what they're doing figure it out and tell me that's what i'm employing you for your goal is the entrepreneur is to get out the way hiring people who are more competent at what you need them to do within the business than you are as the founder a lot of our wounding from childhood comes into how we run businesses and there is nothing as risk there's just outcomes either this will happen or that'll happen so once you get rid of the stress of risk get rid of the stress of the fear what would you do

0:53Mark Scott:well yeah welcome back to another episode of dc diaries delighted today to be joined by mark scott founder and no longer ceo of bella and juke but we'll come on to that uh further into the episode thank you for joining us mark thank you for having me on loving the powerful background i was just saying i don't think we've had anyone on anyone live from from a gym setting before but definitely a different shade. But yeah, thanks for joining us. Yeah, really excited to get into the sort of story and backstory of Bella and Duke and how you've shaped that business and built it into what is one of the market leaders in the raw pet food space today.

1:35Mark Scott:Really excited. I know you've reached over 40 million in revenue, over 140 employees, but I'd love to, as with every episode, maybe go back to the very start and the beginning and just hear a bit about the backstory of Bella and Duke as a brand and how you, how you got to where you are today. Sure. Um, well, thanks for having me on. Um, yeah, it's, uh, by the way, I have a gym in my house because then I've got no excuse to get my ass in there and do some workout. Uh, when you get over 40, they say lifting weights is more important than anything else. Um, so yeah, it's, it's, um yeah it's interesting how did I start better and Duke um I could take you right back to my childhood traumas and how I had to figure stuff out and unemployable and dyslexic you know I only discovered that when I was 52 um so that made sense a lot of people around me went didn't you know and I'm like no I just thought my brain was different uh so I never kind of fitted in a box so I guess from leaving school I've been running businesses since I was 20 so it's not like one of these overnight successes it's like I've had lots of wins lots of losers and losers and everything in between but better when juke really came out was i was running six businesses about 12 years ago and i completely burnt out completely burnt out and i had to pack it in my nervous system had just completely fried um and i decided to take a year out and annoy my kids so i was probably you know early 40s um and what happened was ollie this tree had fallen down in the front of my garden in one of the storms and i took an axe out every single morning and decided to chop this tree up by hand with the axe of course and um and i was just trying to figure out with my life like what i want to do with the rest of my life because everything i've been doing was about making success and creating money and stuff like that none of it was because i really wanted to do it i was very much following my head not my heart um so i would say whatever i'm going to do next by the time I finish this tree and chopping it up I'll know what I want to do next and in that in that time uh my mate Tony and I who he lived around the corner we actually had four dogs and three of them three of them got cancer all under the age of 10 and I'm just like this is ridiculous at the time as well it was the start of when you probably heard of biohacking everyone's heard of biohacking now but back then it was it's very early days and I started to realize that a lot of my issues were bad nutrition bad exercise not sleeping properly so I'd started working on my own health and just getting fitter and just feeling better feeling like I was 20 again and I hadn't felt like that for a long time especially when you have kids and no sleep so I started on this journey and I realized how how much better I felt and then I looked obviously after the dogs got this these cancers I'm like I never even looked at the dog food so I started looking at those packets and i went this is crazy i just can't believe that they put this stuff into dog food i mean where's the meat for example so i started researching it and tony was actually he was in the human meats sector so i was asking tony i go you know what's this about raw and at first tony was negative i would never feed raw to my dogs but then when we started feeding the raw to our dogs and seeing the difference in them like wow um and i knew somebody who said about a raw dog food business i met them at a pitching event many many years ago and i said oh you know what you should do you should do this on subscription um but they never did it so i thought you know what stuff it um i think i need to do something about this i had my year out was feeling good i went you know what i'm ready for a new challenge so that was the start of bella and duke um and basically what we did ali is we just set up a minimal value product mvp uh we signed up 100 people i think was called raw goodness back then or something like that and we went door knocking and we signed up 100 people on subscription um i printed off the labels i remember doing it thinking i'm ace it design if you saw them and um after 12 i know six months of signing up 100 people we still had 65 went wow this is a really good business um my background before that i should have said it was i was actually used to run door-to-door sales teams when i was 20 up for about seven years so i understood you know subscription models you the charities, how they work and all that.

5:47I went, this is a really good way of educating people, like a live advert and just telling them about it. And that was basically the start of Better and True. We proved that people wanted it. We proved there was demand. And with education, people got it. And it just made sense. So that was how we got started. Super interesting.

6:05Mark Scott:Quick one before we get back into the episode. Every business spends money to make money. Ads, software, flights, travel, the hundred unavoidable little things to keep the lights on. All that spending every month and none of it comes back to you. It just goes out the door. Incard is a financial platform built for digital businesses and it flips that on its head. They're giving 2 % cash back for your first year on ads, SaaS, travel and everyday business spend. And it's all uncapped. The same money you were spending anyway, except now a slice of it runs back in your account. You also get multi-currency accounts, corporate cards and Shopify, Meta, Stripe and Xero connected in one place.

6:44Mark Scott:a true source of truth. But honestly, you're spending regardless, so you may as well earn on it. Sign up for free. Use the code SWU2K26. Link's in the description. Now back to the episode. Again, it's another example, and I think a lot of the brands are, the best brands that we interview are, is like someone solving a problem that they experience first and then taking it to a broader market. Obviously, it started in 2016, which I would say is very OG in the DTC space. You've been around for not many brands have probably been trading for over 10 years as a DTC business. I know you're much more than a DTC brand now in terms of retail.

7:31Mark Scott:I'm excited to dig into that. But what have been the real key growth inflection points in that journey? how did you approach that first maybe 10 million and what's the growth journey look like from there if you could break it down into some stages maybe I think D2C works incredibly well when you've got community and community is not like a daily base of people that you send emails to I mean that's an audience, that's not a community a community is something where when the founder is not around the conversation continues and often is better than when the founder you know mum and dad are there, the conversations are always better where mum and dad aren't there um so so i uh i started really nailing down and starting to build a community uh facebook groups um and we really had some open conversations they got to see behind the scenes we were talking about all the different things going on my learnings you know as i was learning more and more uh because as you've probably gathered you know i'm not a scientist i'm certainly not a vet um so you have to build you have to build confidence in people they have to trust you and the only way you can do that is this this this gets banded around a lot about being authentic but being authentic is really uncomfortable Ollie it's like you have to tell the good stuff and the bad stuff um and even more just as important is being authentic is being believable and I think this is where things like AI you know fall over as people with a minute they think it's AI it's not believable and that's the mistake people make um but that's another the story so we we started to really double down on the on the community and i remember working literally 24 7 like i was on it answering questions in it doing lives just you know having fun and just really showing behind the scenes and people really got to know is and we had some really good characters in the early days you know just um that we were just riffed and and really engaged with people so i think that was the key to the start of a great foundation for better and duke because we knew we're going to get some pushback.

9:32We're going to get negatives, especially from the vet side, because they were so anti-war at the start. So we had to build trust. And that, I think, that community was a big, big step up for us. And other people tried to do it, but they weren't authentic. They weren't real. They were just doing it because they saw us doing it or trying to mimic it. So that, I think, was one of the biggest things that really drove better educate in the early days and now because we very much don't ask us about it speak to the community and who better is the avids than the people in the community yeah i like your simple

10:07Mark Scott:approach to defining a community of like an audience listens to your community talks to you um you mentioned two things there around authenticity and lives and i think i mean like juxtaposing that against ai which i actually think is like the direction of travel we're seeing content moving right now. It's like, how do you go in a world of AI slop? How do you stand out? How do you connect with people? And you've seen the rise of like live creators, longer form content, more native content that's more authentic. And that seems to be what's cutting through regardless of channel. So definitely feel like you were very early on that wave.

10:51Mark Scott:What do you think you did differently beyond that? anything else beyond just the way you showed up um the amount of transparency that really allowed you to cultivate that better than others i think well one of the things we did is um again i studied a lot of these very successful people um and what was the difference what did they do as they grew and i think having this very focus like this is what we stand for this is our mission this is our purpose uh and and if you can't get that right then you know it's very difficult to make decisions um i think a ceo it's you know your role is to answer the gray questions not the black and white you know they should be just your team can deal with that so i think with with that that that absolute laser focus on where you want to be and what you want to do then the decision making is easy after that so one of the things we said we would never bastardize the product ever we would never put fillers in we would never put stuff in there that wasn't going to add the animal and i did what the jeff bezos did i actually bought a massive dog teddy and cat teddy and i had them out in the board boardroom literally at the end just to remind us that is the customer well we've got two customers we've got the pet parents and we've got the pets um and there was this like is this right for the for the pet at the end of the board table and if it isn't then it's non-negotiable just don't do it that is absolutely no and we've maintained that since day one and i think because that because we never cheapened the product we never put fillers in etc etc i think that just but again built trust so i think probably trust is that that key to it and that comes from being authentic and really knowing where you want to be going forward i don't think um i've ever seen a brand sorry i'm jumping backwards and forwards one of the questions i did in my interviews was always ask people name me a brand that you love yeah a lot of people struggled a A lot of people struggled to give me one.

12:47One person said pot noodles. Obviously, they didn't get the job. But it just shows you, you know, how distance there is between people loving brands now. And I always wanted to be in the love camp of people just love what we do. On the opposite of that, you're also going to get the haters as well, which for me is a good sign because what you don't want to be is beige in the middle. You know, you want people to have an opinion, either rightly or wrongly, you want them to have an opinion. And that, for me, was about that strong brand and that mission.

13:20Mark Scott:Makes a lot of sense. I think early on, some early stage founders may see that mission and spending the time really defining and unifying the business around that as a bit of a waste of time almost. But it's so important as you expand. I feel like community is – you were on the community wave early, right? But I feel like over the last two years, it's become almost like the buzzword. do you see brands just doing it because they feel like they need to do it? You mentioned authentic as something that brands need to be doing in that process. For those founders listening who are trying to build a strong community within the business, what behaviors would you say or what rhythms or what things do they need to be doing in order to actually ensure that lands?

14:10um it may be useful to also hear of a couple of examples of times when you've had to be authentic

14:19Mark Scott:when maybe it made you feel uncomfortable initially because i think you have to do it both sides right you have to do it for the positives and the negatives yeah i think yeah i mean trust isn't built by never making mistakes it's like you say it's how you deal with those mistakes or and again being authentic i think the key for me and i've always to be honest with because i was never in my head because i wasn't you know dyslexic and stuff i just always felt into things so when i'm talking to you when i'm talking in groups whether i'm at a university talking to students whatever it is i'm always talking from the heart rightly or wrongly i'll get my words mixed up i won't finish sentences but people just don't seem to mind that they go that's just mark and actually they seem to like that because i'm not perfect i'm far from perfect and I will forget things and I'll get things but my heart is where I always go into I go how do I feel about doing this that's always my question does it make me feel better or worse when I was running my other businesses I was just doing it for money I never felt great I was just you know I was doing it to get the kids through school or paying the mortgage so the kids were the motivation really but the minute I started following businesses with my heart the world's just opened up and people just resonate with that and i can't i can't describe it's very difficult i just feel it and then i see people's responses into it and i think even now even with the culture of bella and duke i'm that's the biggest thing i'm proud of is we've got a community on facebook you but you come into the office and there's just as a stronger community there as well so you have to have both and the mismatch happens when you oh we should do this like it's a kpi in the boardroom and it's very difficult like branding to really quantify how valuable that is but the minute you can't put a kpi against it everyone goes oh it's not worth doing oh we should do it but how are we going to manage it and i think that is that's the key is is just people just feel it they don't necessarily know that but they just feel there's something that resonates with them and that's been the change that i've made you know for the last 15 years now it's just I follow my heart.

16:25I do things that really motivate me. So when those tough times come, I can talk from my heart. So we did make mistakes. I mean, you know, when there's an M6 crash and it's got nothing to do with you and the courier company can't get the, you know, 20 tons of food out that day, you have to get out there and know there's going to be some mad people back there, but you just go, look, hands up, things go wrong and we try and eliminate and we move on. So, So, I mean, there's so many different things over the years. I mean, COVID was challenging. We grew from 10 staff to 120 over the COVID period. And, you know, if someone got COVID in the factory or the distribution center, it was shut down.

17:03You know, it was really, really difficult. So we had to have loads of stuff in like that. So we've had, you know, to be honest with you, I can't really remember many, although I know I had lots of them because it's just part of growth. I just expected it. And I always say to entrepreneurs, I'm like, become a mad scientist. like think out of the box and be a scientist you know just crack on learn fast and expect to fail if you're not expecting to fail and you think everything's going to go rosy that is when the reality and your your version reality are going to fall out um so i think that is so super positive and the other thing i talk about often is the duck you know when you see two ducks in the pond and they have a fight and then they fly off the first thing they do is shake they get rid at the adrenaline what they don't do is sit there and go oh that wee bastard i wish i said this and i wish i'd done that and i wish i'd done this and i wish i'd done that and that's what we do as humans and often we we make judgments on the future based on the past even though the past has nothing to do with it so it's learning to let those things go and be more like a duck

18:10Mark Scott:or analogy very very simple to understand analogy i never really thought about ducks in such depth um but i guess what you've just you've spoke through there in terms of authenticity is like really just living living that so it's easy to then show up in that way um nothing feels false nothing feels fake which i think is really powerful and again is something that i'm sure um many founders can can maybe take from take from that that a way to approach things in less of a manufactured manufactured way i guess it's scary it's like i'm no doubt about it you know you know there's many times i'm woken up going i'm gonna have to do the hard thing it is scary so that's normal once you've started you've got to commit to doing it consistently as well right so it's a big like the gym but yeah i wanted to touch i'm really interested to go into some of the ways you've maybe run the business and your role and how that's changed.

19:10Mark Scott:But just before we sort of move into that side, I'd love to hear a bit about, obviously, I guess the product journey and the category journey, you were early in the whole raw dog food, raw pet food space, redefining the category from an ultra process base to where it is today, where I feel like the sophistication of the market around the options that are available for pets from custom raw to there's like a spectrum, right? How did you find that process stepping into a market and trying to do things very differently when there's a real base of incumbents, a real preconception perhaps around what pet food could be, and especially when approaching retail within that space.

20:07Yeah, so retail at the time, we didn't know if Raw would ever get into retail. You know, 10 years ago wasn't something that we thought. There was a couple of brands that did it, but it wasn't huge. Because I don't have a pet food background, I never came in with all these preconceived ideas that you suggested there. Um, and I think that's a real benefit of every business I've started. I've started from shit. Like, you know, what do I need to fix? What, what's, what's not happening out there. And, and to your point about raw, raw has been around a lot longer than highly processed food. Yeah.

20:40Mark Scott:True. So, yeah, 8.7 million species on planet earth eat raw. 8.7 million it's only just humans and the domesticated animals that we feed that eat highly processed food and my simple question was which species have all the chronic diseases i'm not a scientist but i figured that shit out you know so i had the confidence that mother nature pretty much knew what she was doing and all the the you know the oh this and that um about food stuff like that you know that was flying around you know with raw i just it just didn't make sense to me so i had to follow that gut feeling um and i think so that's why i was super confident about what we were doing um was so when i got up you know i was just i've just always been confident about i just go it just makes total sense you know when when i get rid of all that and all the first principle thinking yeah yeah get rid of the noise um and if you're a trader you do exactly the same the news is over there and the charts are here watch the charts um so i think when when it came to to to raw i was always just super confident that people are going to see results and like the community that's exactly what happened is people said oh my my dog was like this or that and it had itchy skin and then two weeks on wow what a difference already made so i'm like well there's your proof you know i can say as much as one but get your dog on it or your cat on it for a couple of weeks and see the difference now there is obviously there's always cases on the edges always but the vast majority you know it was absolutely amazing for them and that's what just kept me going just going just seeing people saying what a difference in my cat and in my dog and that that that that proof every single day coming in and that's what the community helped us as well as a business but wow people are just so like amazed by it and i think the other thing going back to the community and growing this this category was the amount of referrals i've never had a business where people would say oh i met somebody randomly in the park and i don't know if they were talking about dog jobbies or whatever but they somehow just go on and said oh have you tried better in duke and so we got the network effect and that and the network effect for a dc business is the number one game changer so i don't know if you've heard the death curve before yeah in terms of cost acquisition so the the death curse basically you you no matter how much marketing you've got you grow and grow and grow until you're flatline and if you have more money it might go because you can you can afford a bigger cac but at some point you've got the death curve so basically you lose the same amount of customers as you get the only way to get past the death curve is to have a referral rate do you remember covid times when they had the r number and if it was above one it was bad if it was below one it was good but for a ddc business like compounding effect right exactly the network effect so what happens is if you've got a referral rate greater than one you've got a growing business that's going to continue to grow so i think that was always our focus is how can we get more people to recommend this and again simple just build a really good community that's engaging make sure that people really love the food and we get our points across and they feel good about talking about better and due because you don't want to recommend something if you aren't confident in it but at the same time you want to recommend something that you know is really good you're really confident behind it and you're going to look like an edge until your friends are fondly so that's the difference can imagine that's super impactful and important in this category where it's over the last five to 10 years been flooded with funding and competition and cpas on average have increased by god knows how much percent um having that like residual base of what are like free free new customers really from having a great product stripping that out would probably have such an impact just on the on the retail point because i'm interested to to hear a bit about that early stage of that journey because i guess you were you were relatively early into the category you were redefining what it meant within a retail context to what pet food meant in a retail context where it had become very dominated by processed food.

24:59It'd be interesting just to hear about if you can remember back to how those conversations went

25:05Mark Scott:and anything that founders who are maybe doing similar, like redefining a category within a retail space where there's not been incumbents or where the incumbents are just so far behind what the proposition they're bringing to market. Anything that may be useful for them to take away? So one thing I should get straight as well, Ollie, is basically the Raw has been around a lot longer than what we have. So the Raw category has been around and there's brands that have been doing it a lot longer. But no one came in and probably believed that they could make it a major category and a real disruptor in the industry.

25:40And I think I came in with, there's an amazing product and we want to disrupt this industry because it needs disrupted. And you're right, because anything that lives in a bag that you can have in your utility room that you keep opening and closing for three months and think it's okay, it's not. And also the point of, I think education was a huge part of what we did. again imagine if you were eating i don't know a cereal for breakfast lunch and dinner the same one seven days a week like how do you think you would feel how do you think your gut biome feel and and stuff so when i explained it in simple terms because i like to explain things like a seven year old because i can get that myself you know it's just that simple understanding of you know You never eat the same things when you're in nature, so why would we do it now?

26:31I think it's all right. I think I've seen disruptions. Airlines is an easy one, isn't it? You've got the Ryanairs, the EasyJets. They completely disrupted the whole market, and that came from the States as well, budget airlines. And their whole model is about sweating the asset, is get bums on seats, get the flight in and out, and it's priced accordingly. we were all about quality and customer intimacy so how can we make sure we've got the right product for the right pet so once we decided we're a customer intimate business all those decisions were very much focused on those customer intimacy questions you know how how do we make the customer feel really close to better and judging the brand um and and i think also because of that if someone ever said something negative and it's going to your previous question actually quite often as CEO, I never had to answer those questions because the community backed us up.

27:26And that for me was like the gold. That's just like, you can't make that stuff up. When you've got one negative comment and 60 people or 50 people are replying completely contradicting it, is that not the best way for a brand to be delivered? So I think that was the key. I'm not sure if I totally answered your question there. It was a good answer.

27:48Mark Scott:good answer quick one before we get back into the episode every business spends money to make money ads software flights travel the hundred unavoidable little things to keep the lights on all that spending every month and none of it comes back to you it just goes out the door incard is a financial platform built for digital businesses and it flips that on its head they're giving two percent cash back for your first year on ads sass travel and everyday business spend and it's all uncapped. The same money you were spending anyway, except now a slice of it runs back in your account. You also get multi-currency accounts, corporate cards, and Shopify, Meta, Stripe, and Xero connected in one place.

28:29Mark Scott:A true source of truth. But honestly, you're spending regardless, so you may as well earn on it. Sign up for free. Use the code SWU2K26. Link's in the description. Now back to the episode. Yeah, definitely. I see that on and even from our perspective on ads, like the brands that have that diehard customer base where if someone calls them out for something, they get about 50 replies and it just massively helps performance because of that engagement. I think it's super, super important.

29:04Mark Scott:So obviously, you started as an EC brand, got into retail and then I noticed that, and from looking into the business in 2024, you kind of expanded the proposition. So moving away from just a food brand into that next phase of like full pet wellbeing, I guess it'd be great to hear a bit about what drove that decision-making and where you see like the, maybe the next 10 years of the business in terms of strategic approach to the category. Yeah, no, it's interesting. And Ali, I should have said at the start, we've always been a pet wellness business. Always. That was one of the things I said we're a pet wellness business but it starts with food doesn't it because if you don't get the nutrients right it doesn't matter how hard you work train or do all the other stuff take supplements if you've got continuous inflammation going on your body you're just going to hit chronic disease um so the pet wellness started with what goes into the body um but yes i mean there's chemicals everywhere there's dirty water there's plastics i mean it's bad enough for us as humans so i think that clear vision was so important at the start.

30:09So all these questions that come after that are really, really easy to answer. But also I think on that as well, if you're an entrepreneur and you're building a business, your goal as the entrepreneur is wanting to get out of the way and allow great people that you've recruited to do those jobs. And when it came to retail or anything else that we expanded in, I just had to hold the vision. I just had to go, this is where we want to get to. does that motivate you do you want to be part of a business that's mission-led that wants to change you know the pet food industry and she just attracted such great people who are total loyal and love pets and stuff like that so i'm like great now here's the direction make the boat faster you go and figure it out i don't have all the answers i just know i want to get over there and i want to grow it and and i think in the future is can we continue to grow this category can we continue to grow internationally which we've started now um the retail is interesting because you know in some places like london you don't have big freezers so just that that ability to supply people with small freezers so they can you know buy a couple of packets on the way home or whatever so that's a huge reason for us to do the uh the old retail part of it um and our products are slightly different than retails as well so it's been interesting but i think the reason so many retailers i hope that's not your house um um i think the reason so many retailers really wanted is um in is because we had such a strong online brand and i think it's it gives them credence it gives us credence um you know we've done a lot of tv advertisements over the years so just people got to know the brand and as you're walking past you know what i was i didn't want to buy a four kilo box but i'll buy a couple of trays and try it and bang we've got a new new customer so it meant entry to for the consumer it was a lot easier as well you're just really removing those barriers to entry i guess it's just distribute yeah just another point of

32:04Mark Scott:distribution another option for them to purchase i think that i think that's how i think very simply about sales channels is just you want to show up in as many places someone can buy you as possible but then you want to advertise in the place that's going to be the highest return on your capital to make sense for the reasons that you explained that retail was a big push. With that expansion to, well, with the more recent expansion of offering, I guess, maybe not vision, you've had that vision of being that full well-being brand from the very start, but you've obviously expanded more from an offering perspective in the more recent times.

32:42Mark Scott:What did drive that, and how have you seen that translate to maybe like commercial outcome? Was it motivated through a... We want to drive LTV and therefore we want to do this. Or was it more just continuing to embody that goal from a mission perspective that drove that decision? My previous sales, marketing, driving, managing, CEO kind of businesses, yes, I would have been LTV driven. Now I'm like, is this the right thing for the pet? And the LTV will take care of itself. So ever since I've done that, let's just deliver an unbelievable product, keep the pricing right and just keep delivering above what people above and beyond and i think you know i learned this from bulletproof i don't know if you know dave asprey he was one of the founders the godfathers of you know um yeah biohacking and i whenever he spoke and he was on podcasts i mean he was an uncomfortable person to watch sometimes but he did it uh but he was so geeky about all the products that i just went if he's recommending it i trust him i trust him to have made those decisions and done all the research.

33:46And I think that's where people realize where we are. There's nothing we will add to our products that will, you know, that people won't know that we've really done our research, really looked into it. I mean, sometimes we're, you know, we could have gone cheap option. I mean, salmon oil is a classic, you know, you could have done salmon oil, but actually the more we read about it, the more we learned about it. And this could be a mistake or not. It's just evolving that we've learned that, you know, A lot of these salmon farms are fed crappy grains and da-da-da-da-da, and that can cause inflammation.

34:15So we moved to different types of oils, not because it was cheaper, it was more expensive, but it was just the right thing to do. So that's the difference. And I think a lot of what happens with these brands when they get bored and stuff, they just get bastardized or they go, how can we improve the bottom line rather than going, how can we improve our service? So that's why the culture and the principles, everything at Bella and Duke was so important from the start and having that clarity. I guess I'm coming back to when you start a business, have you got a clarity of where you want to be? And you learn and you improve, you adapt, but you stick to that vision.

34:52And that's all we've done at Bella and Duke.

34:54Mark Scott:Yeah, you've got that clarity of vision, then you've got that authenticity and the way you show up to consumers that then creates the trust. And then the trust allows you to create a commercial outcome because they will buy more things from you, I guess, from a simple... Bingo! Yeah, very first principles again, but it makes a lot of sense. I'm really interested to get into some of the sort of your roles and CEO point. I guess maybe one final question on the brand is like, what do you see maybe the next three to four to five years in this category looking like? Have you got any bold bets for pets in general?

35:33Mark Scott:obviously you kind of see pets somewhat follow human behavior in weird ways in like a supplement biohacking like health perspective um certainly feels like we're seeing a lot more pet supplements from our perspective we're just seeing more businesses come through our pipeline for pet subs especially in the last two years but anything beyond that that you think is going to be a big trend i mean if you eat proper food i mean when did we need supplements we didn't need it like necessarily 100 years ago because we ate properly we ate fresh we ate the whole animal we ate you know what grew in the garden what the local farmers built you know so the reason a lot of these supplements are out there is because the lack of nutrition is going in the first place and i think as more and more um uh science comes out and we're doing research and there's more research i know the helizinki university and stuff have done loads of research um even if you add supplements in can you guarantee it's going to be absorbed because it's not in the natural state you know these are all the things that we don't know always we know the answers um so i just know myself that if i just eat right i don't have to take supplements you know if i go outside and i'm in the sun a lot apart from scotland you know in the winter it's a bit darker i get a vitamin d's and all this kind of stuff so this is like real real important but mother nature really knows what it does so i think as as the category continues to grow as science keeps following it up as humans we realize that we've got to go back to eating fresh homemade foods rather than highly processed stuff i think that just feeds into the pet world because you go well you're doing it for you and your family and stuff but why aren't you doing it for your furry family as well so it's just it's just pointing fingers from there we're saying that we should be natural we say we should be avoiding highly processed foods yet we're still doing it to our pets uh but more and more people of switching on this.

37:25Mark Scott:Yeah, it was really interesting. I went to, do you know Health with an F? Yes, I know Health with an F, yes. Yeah, yeah. Went to their event in London. They had like a conference where Andrew Huberman, Rhonda Patrick, a few of the big US names spoke around wellness as a category and the trends. And the whole theme of the weekend was anti-optimization. it's like going back to the basics of sleep diet um stress very very yeah stress management um varied varied consumption of fruit and veg like offline analog living and i feel like that's going to be a big trend especially for maybe like the upper class of society it feels like the next of 10 to 15 years is that whole offline analog trend that seems to already be rearing its head in certain parts of the US specifically.

38:26Well, as a founder, you'll probably have a few strong views, as you're probably not surprised. But, you know, our NHS is knackered, and the only way to fix the NHS is for us to stop eating shite. You know, it's as simple as that. We're looking for pills and tablets and potions, but look, just feed the body right for most people. and you take the burden. But we don't do that because there's too much money in breaking people and fixing them, you know, and that's the challenge you've got. But I think along with social, people are tricking on. I know my kids are way more savvy about what they do. They don't drink as much now, do they, kids generally?

39:04So I think it's slowly feeding through. So I think it's really good. I think the category will just benefit because of more and more people waking up to the fact that we have to take care of our own health therefore we have to take care of our own pet's health because if you're on a waiting list for x y and z for three years you may not survive but if you cannot have to go on that waiting list until in the first place then you know that isn't that isn't that golden 100 just so switching gears um really wanted to

39:35Mark Scott:i know i know you've got some some strong opinions around the role of of you ceos and founders within businesses that they set up. And I guess good context for everybody listening would be probably to just run through a bit about your journey. I know you deliberately stepped away as CEO from Bella and Duke at around $40 million in revenue. It was actually just over$30 million when I stepped down. Just over$30? Yeah. Well, yeah, it'd be great to hear a bit about that decision, what drove it. I'm sure there was some maybe some apprehension before you made the leap and then a bit about how you think that's supported the business and yourself I guess as a secondary to that or a primary to that Yeah I think a business can only grow as big as the founder decides to grow so I see a lot of businesses capped or failed because the CEO stroke founder just didn't get out of the way um so i'm a fire star i love figuring stuff out i love just getting in there and sorting it out and looking how can i optimize it and stuff like that um and i know it's really difficult when you're somebody who goes out there makes things happen to you don't make things happen anymore and you allow other people to make things happen so quite often when i'm mentoring mentor in entrepreneurs and stuff i'm like are you the bottleneck in your business are you the one who's actually stopping letting it grow because one you'll just piss people off who are working with you because they'll be like everything's got to go through that person just quickly on that how do you you mentioned men so i'm keen to get on to that point as well but like how would you if you're a founder listening to this and you you've got a question in your head hearing that like am i the bottleneck what are some signals that maybe you can tune into to realize that um um go way holdy