Dare to put yourself in luck's path - Barney Mauleverer

0:11He said, well look, if you think you've got something, book a meeting and come up and show me. Literally, I left the trade show then and there and got the yellow pages out and some granola manufacturers in Europe, anywhere, any manufacturer. and found four manufacturers and four factories around Europe put together the Red Bull of granola in their various different formats. And I had samples coming into my office in Dorset. I can't remember which samples came from where. And we went up for a meeting and there was one particular manufacturer that had absolutely nailed it. And the buyer said, that one.

0:47And during the meeting, he ate the whole pack pretty much. And he said, OK, that's it. We'll go for that. And he literally said, I'm going to give you 600 stores and you've got to be ready in 16 weeks. Oh, by the way, what's the brand? And it was, that is how Fuel 10K ended up being born.

1:09Welcome to the Daring Creativity Podcast. A show about daring to forever explore creativity that isn't about chasing shiny perfection. It's about showing up with all your doubts and imperfections and making them count. Becoming more of who you already are. My name is Radim Malinic. I'm a designer, author and eternally curious human being. I'm talking to a broad range of guests who share their stories of small actions that inspired lifetime discoveries, taking one step towards the thing that made them feel most alive. Let me begin this episode with a question. Are you ready to discover what happens when you dare to create?

1:55Today I'm speaking with Barney Malevra, an entrepreneur and champion of businesses that drive meaningful change. He embodies the philosophy of putting yourself in a lax path through curiosity and generalist thinking. In our conversation, we discussed how he didn't follow a linear career plan. Instead, he embraced chaos and uncertainty in his 20s, taking seemingly random jobs that ultimately laid the foundation for his entrepreneurial success. At the core of his philosophy is the belief that entrepreneurs are true risk-takers who deserve recognitions, not the buyers or investors. He advocates for open collaboration, embracing global challenges like population growth as opportunities for innovation.

2:39His current Future of Food initiative reflects the worldview, you creating a platform for entrepreneurs to share knowledge and collectively address industry challenges. It's my pleasure to share with you my conversation with Barney Malevara.

2:57Hey Barney, welcome to the show. How are you doing today? Very good, Radham. Thank you for having me on. This is exciting. You're most welcome. Normally I've got guests who are, what I would say, on the other side of this equation they are normally creatives illustrators designers art directors working with founders like yourself on helping them grow their products design their products whereas you are very much on the other side of the fence actually i call it fence being an entrepreneur creating brands working in an fmcg and actually having a view of where the real stuff is made so i hope to uncover and join quite a few dots so we get a lot of value for our listeners just to show them of how you see it from your side.

3:41But for those who might not have heard of you, and which might be potentially every of my listeners so far, how would you introduce yourself? Yeah, okay. So I have been in food and drink for a very long time. And I describe my experience as being in the trenches of FMCG, complete startup to trying to get somewhere from brand creation to getting product onto supermarket shelves, ultimately trying to get product off supermarket shelves into consumer hands. And I've experienced the full circle of complete startup to exiting, which we did in October, 2023. But there was definitely a bit of a backstory to how on earth all of that happened.

4:26So in a nutshell, food and drink all my life, very passionate about it. I love entrepreneurship and want to now help. the next generation look into the future of where our food system's going. I love that you said I spent my life putting food on the shelves and getting them off the shelves into people's hands. What led you to that career and entrepreneurship? I love this bit because I always refer to this thing called back strategizing. So now that I've got quite far into my journey, I'm 50 years old now, I can look back and say that I meant to do absolutely everything that I did to get me to where I got to.

5:04The truth of the matter is that it was absolute chaos, particularly in the early years. There was very little strategy. There was a lot of searching, but there were certain moments throughout my career that got me into the seat of where I ended up getting to. But a lot of that was about luck and trying to put myself in the path of luck. So trying to put a start point on it, I did A-levels. I went to university. I wasn't particularly good at either of those. And I spent the formative sort of years of my twenties searching. I did so many different jobs. I worked at St. Thomas's Hospital wheeling patients around.

5:43I worked on the complaints line at Parcel Force. I did a lot of waitering and I did a cocktail bar waiter course, learned lots of whiskeys and cocktails and worked in lots of bars. trying to figure out what it was that kind of got me out of bed. I did a stint in the city. I wore a tie and a suit and walked over London Bridge for about six months and realized quite quick that wasn't really my gig. And there was a moment where I was on holiday with a friend and their husband said, you're obviously pretty frustrated by this whole work life thing. Why don't you come down to Dorset and work for me.

6:22You can live in our house and I'll pay you a hundred pounds a week and you can be my secretary. And I, and it was a bit like that advert that we all go say, would you like to spend a career in a, the city for the rest of your life? And I just said, B straight away, whatever B was. So I said yes to, to this wonderful offer. I had no idea what I'd said yes to. My poor parents were beside themselves thinking I was going to be a merchant banker or something. and I ended up moving down to Dorset and working with a friend who had a factory that was held together by elastic bands and razor blades making garden cloches, plastic garden cloches and my role ended up being selling these things to garden shops and for the very first time I realized that actually I really liked the sort of practical side of something physical that you then go and sell to a shop and then the shop has to look good in the shop for someone to pick it up and pay for it.

7:18So that was my first sort of, not quite FMCG and definitely not food, but my first experience in this sort of thing. We're making something, we're selling it to a shop and someone's going to buy it off a shelf. I have to rewind back by a few steps because everything that you've said when you do it in your 20s made me instantly smile. Because when you said initially, like it was, I was meant to do everything I was doing and it was a chaos. and when you were describing the St. Thomas's Hospital and the complaints line in the bar and so that's six months of city that feels to me like building blocks of an entrepreneur's career there is something about that almost presumed invincibility when you start when you make a first sale when you realize that some of this stuff really works right how did you feel that way?

8:05So do you know I have spoken to lots of young people I've got four kids of my own now all starting to think about what they're going to do for careers and I'm literally like just go and try lots of different things just work in a bank work in a hospital work in hospitality and go and figure out what it is that you enjoy doing and equally what you don't enjoy doing what you think you're good at what you think you're a bit shit at put crosses against stuff because the rest of your life is ahead and it's okay to take a little bit of time to figure it out and so this whole back strategy thing I can now wrap up that parcel of my life and say, well, I meant to do that.

8:43I meant to jump from one job to the next job and work in a factory in Dorset selling garden stuff. But actually it was, as you say, it was the forming of me. I discovered by accident, I suppose, but just in a curious way, what is it that gets me out of bed in the morning and what do I enjoy doing? And I realized that I enjoy being around people. I enjoy physical products. I wasn't that excited about pushing other people's money on spreadsheets in the city, but I can now have an opinion of what all my friends who ended up staying in that industry have. And it just wasn't for me. But I wouldn't have known if I hadn't gone to try stuff out.

9:20And it took me until age 25 to get very lucky. I was working with my friend in Dorset for 18 months. Went around the world. We went to trade shows in Chicago and France and all over the place. and but I realized that the garden industry wasn't a particularly exciting industry for me but I really enjoyed the work that I was doing within it so tick tick to the sort of type of work I was doing and cross against the industry that I'd fallen into and I then decided and this was back in 98 99 so 1998 for those who don't have a calendar that go back that far I it was the era of the internet the internet was just coming out and i was living with a guy who had been working in it and we ended up on the side of my gardening business thing on the side of that set up a website which was a voucher website or coupon a bit like red letter days if you remember red letter days where i would phone up extreme sports or zorbing or tank driving or what have you and say could I get 10 % 20 % off the value of a ticket and I'll sell vouchers to as birthday presents or stag do things to people in London I was still living in Dorset at the time so I knew that I wanted to transition out of the food industry into this sort of extreme sporty sort of world using this voucher business and the idea was to then sell my tickets to all the people I'd met in the city during that time so they're the guys with the money and I was going to create something that they would buy but I realized I needed to be in London for this to actually work and so I gave my notice in to my friend much to his dismay and disappointment although we're now best friends I live in Dorset again and moved to London looking for and I needed a job to pay my rent in London and I was about to enter something called the Shell Livewire competition which was a sort of business plan competition and you win some cash prizes and what have you and the people who won it the year before was this company called Innocent Drinks.

11:29And I ended up on their website because they were obviously winners from the year before. And I thought, well, they look quite fun, didn't really know what a smoothie was, but wrote a letter to them saying, I'm looking for a part time job. I'm setting up my own thing. Can I come and see you? And have you got a few hours in a week? And I ended up going for a full on interview with Adam, Richard and John from Innocent Drinks, the founders who couldn't quite work out what kind of a person I was because I was looking for a part-time job but I had my own business I wanted to get going and I think they kind of gave me an opportunity that no one else would have done and said okay well why don't you come along and work with us and I was the seventh employee at Innocent Drinks in the year 2000 I call it 07 of course and then i can remember it and innocent then became what it then became and very quickly i realized that actually innocent was the one that was my calling rather than my own internet startup thing and so the the voucher business subsided and i then threw myself innocent drinks so we're going to talk about innocent in just one second but you said for those who haven't got a calendar going that fire was 1999 you mentioned zorbing what is zorbing i think it still exists it's when you get pushed into a big inflatable ball and then someone throws you down a hill and you roll within it yeah don't do it terrible sport head injuries nick injuries your running theme around all of this is not having something that gets you out of bed you've said it quite a few times so you find yourself as the seventh employee of innocent is that quite a sort of early start that it wasn't as big back then or the production wasn't as big like what was the first learnings from them building the company your newfound role there like you're finding yourself back sort of liking the products because again products is another recurring theme in this conversation so far so i love the fact that you went in there and said i'm looking for a job they created almost a role that wasn't there that you made them happen you made don't create what was it like to be in a company that's focused purely on a product that more or less spoke to your soul even though you had to find out what smooth it was oh yeah do you know so what i realized there were two big turning points for me one was about me and i would credit adam ballon my boss there one of the founders of understanding which buttons to press in me to get the very best out of me.

14:09No teacher, no lecturer, no guardian, no parent, no one else had ever figured out me the way he did. And I think he turned me into a kind of, I was at that stage in life also where I just wanted to really roll my sleeves up and get down dirty and learn real quick and get good at something. I think, so that was one big thing that happened in the early days of Innocent. The other big thing was the food industry. The food industry, I would say, is probably one of the best industries, if you're not sure which industry to throw yourself at, because it uses your five senses. It's your taste, your touch, your smell.

14:47Everybody's got to eat. Humanity depends on it. You can say recessions knock out premium products and stuff, but no recession is going to stop you eating food. You can sit at a dinner party table and rather than talk about your job in some insurance company, You can talk animatedly about the different flavors of fruit in a smoothie and whoever's sitting next to you will at least have an opinion whether they like it or not. And so a really good sort of topical product. And on top of that, Innocent was a machine in getting things right. Their product tasted amazing. Their brand was industry-defining, which, of course, I didn't realize at the time.

15:24But looking back at it, they were almost doing B Cor before B Cor happened. they were pushing boundaries that had never been pushed before and I had just assumed that's what everyone else did too until I came out of it but I learned so much in a very short space of time my first job my job title when I first joined was a fruit nut and I was given a cow van a Renu Kangoo van that was dressed up as a Frisian cow with a tail and eyes and a moo horn and black and white body and I was told to go and sell innocent smoothies to anyone that might wear a kilt and so I then drew on a map where people might wear a kilt they didn't have to wear a kilt but they might so off I went in my cow van with a van full of smoothies and went up to Scotland over to Wales over to Ireland down in Cornwall there's a stretch down in Cornwall where the Celtics hang out a bit and northern France there was a little bit there too and I spent my first year selling smoothies to anyone who might wear a kilt.

16:24And through that, learned the whole process of wholesalers and how wholesalers then supply in independent stores and then what products need to look like when they're on shelf and how you merchandise and all the real live. It couldn't have been the, it was the best MBA in how to kind of get a product on shelf. So that was early stuff that was invaluable. As you can see on my face, I've got questions. Why people in kilt? we'll be back after a quick break this episode is brought to you by lax coffee co the first creative speciality coffee company building a platform to shine the light on emerging global talent with a mission to make a positive impact on a creative industry and beyond lax coffee co offers exceptional coffee sourced from around the world through ethical and sustainable practices and you can discover the current range of signature blends and single origins, coffee hardware and accessories, along with exceptional apparel at luxcoffee.co.uk.

17:31You can use the code PODCAST to get 15 % off your first order.

17:43I think this is just the alternative way the innocent guys approach things. It's like you could have said anywhere outside of London, but actually to make it a little bit more fun and topical, and I kind of knew what they meant. They were incredibly strategic. I often kind of would go away on a week's trip or so and come back. And what they had said they were going to do in their business plan at the beginning of the year, they had delivered plus. So they were incredibly good at doing what they said they were going to do. And that was probably one of the other lessons I learned. So here's my question.

18:16When you mentioned business plan, I always think to that quote that business plan is only as good until it meets the customer and everything changes. But you said they did everything in their business plan plus more. So how focused was the operation? Because you said that it was the Adam was the one who pressed the buttons in you that nobody else could have done and has managed to do in the past. And you said at that age, you felt like rolling up your sleeves and I should do some proper work. So how was it that you've seen their vision, their mission, their drive, and as you said, them becoming B Corp almost before B Corp, how focused and observant and mission-wise were they at that time?

19:00Because it, again, 25 years ago, were people as focused as they are now? Or is it just an impression that we're making for ourselves? I think they were quite unique. There were three of them and they covered different areas. Adam sat in the sort of commercial seat so he was my direct boss John was more operational financial and Richard Reid was more creative and so if you draw a sort of linear line of the skills required in startup land you need to know about ops and finance you also need to know about fluffy creative and in the middle you need to be able to pull the whole lot together and make some money and so I think they they were also at X Bain and McKinsey so they were very well trained they were incredibly smart out of Cambridge as well and that's the way they like to do things and interestingly later in life trying to emulate anything that they had done was very difficult because they were just so wired and trained and focused in in what happened and quite interestingly they their early teams that joined when I was there so I was there for five years all of them that they were hiring generalist, entrepreneurial-minded young people who hadn't quite found their own thing yet, on reflection, looking back.

20:19After I left, a few of the others left and then went on to set up their own things themselves. So it was almost like a place to learn how to do it and then go and do it yourself. An incubator of sorts. It's the G word, generalist. And looking at your record so far, you were a generalist. you were looking at obviously you were looking around the corners you were looking like how to add up all of these numbers to get to the equation that adds not equate something which is valuable which actually goes somewhere and generalist and i'm thinking it's always been a good thing to be generalist because you've got your specialist with their talent and they do that one thing over and over again whereas i believe is the generalist that have changed the world you need your specialist but as the people who are looking around the corners.

21:05I think this is a topic I talk a lot about. I wasn't an A grade student, A star, this, that and the other, and I could never really understand why that was so important to be so drivenly academic down one channel. I was always interested in multiple sort of subjects. My A levels were geography, French and maths. I mean, you couldn't get a more diverse mix. and again reflecting back on my career so far and having kids that are coming through, my daughter's 20 and then we have a 19, 18 and a 16-year-old, encouraging them to think beyond just the subjects they're being taught. And this doesn't suit everyone and some people really are specialists and they want to mine into biochemistry or they want to mine into the legal system and you have introverts and extroverts and all sorts of characters and not everyone can be a generalist, otherwise nothing would get done.

21:59But I think it really helped that I was in the sort of commercial seat at Innocent so that the sales end, because you needed to understand about product, you needed to understand about brand, you needed to understand about finance and operations, and you also needed to be able to wrap it all up and explain that to your customer. So I would say that most commercial sales type people, particularly when they're opening new business not necessarily just account management are that they need to be interested in the whole gambit rather than just there being a cog in the bigger thing so generalist versus specialist is a really good subject and it's okay to be a generalist i recognized that i was a generalist very late in life and i wish someone had said to me much earlier in life do you know what it's okay in fact it's a superpower if you know how to use it and i genuinely think that that was a revelation but late 30s 40s suddenly like oh that's why i'm not that good at anything in particular it's okay so you spent five years at innocent and as you said lots of journalists who were part of the same cohort have left and started their own thing because i think you guys got a great education in business and product vision.

23:17After five years, what was the nudge to go and what were you looking for next to do? Yeah, so I ended up coming out of that original role of selling smoothies to anyone who wore kilts to running the UK sales team as we were going into supermarkets. And then my last role in my last year was the European manager. So we were opening out France, Germany, Belgium, and looking at other markets too. And I had always got this thing in me that I did want to do my own thing. I joined Innocent thinking that it was going to be a part-time job because I wanted to run my own thing. I obviously hadn't quite got my business idea kind of grounded properly.

23:59And I also genuinely didn't have the skills for it either. but I felt after five years at Innocent my time was if I didn't do it soon I was going to start getting caught up in I'd got married we got a mortgage first kid on the way there was a moment where if I didn't get on with it I was it was going to become more and more difficult to start my own business but I never really meant to leave Innocent I'd spotted an opportunity within the lifecycle of that brand building where the founders were looking at a potential US launch using Starbucks as their lead customer. And Starbucks was growing very rapidly back then, and that would have got them really motoring.

24:43I then pitched to my boss, Adam, saying, well, look, can I have France? France is a really tough market. I don't know why the French don't get what a smoothie is I was completely blinded by the I could not understand why people wouldn't buy smoothies it was just the best products so I had blind faith that I could convert the French finally and he was going really you want to do that and I said well look you're going to focus on America I'm the European guy actually if I just took France off you and I'll act as agent I'll be your agent in France I want to build a little team but I want to be able to do other brands as well which was a little bit contentious because you then step out of the family of Innocent into this kind of weird place where you think you're running your own business but your boss is still your main customer so that was quite an interesting move but Innocent was my first customer for a year France was our target market and I set up a company called Fresh Marketing which was all about trying to help challenger brands in the UK they weren't called challenger brands back then they were called new brands launched into the french market we had a little office in paris i spoke very rubbish french i used to talk a lot about les tendances which are the trends we used to talk about the triangle sandwich having a go at the baguette all that sort of stuff french didn't find any of it funny and spent a very long time trying to get innocent going in france and we did we launched it into monoprix into casino into carfour a lot of the food service places and in the meantime the american thing for the innocent guys subsided the starbucks buyer left or something happened where it didn't happen and adam then turned his attention back to europe and his first call was hey barney what's this thing you're doing in france again can we have another look at it and i think at that point it became really clear that france was going to cost quite a lot of money to get going and that isn't an agent job that needs to be an in-house job so we dutifully shook hands and i handed back the business to them but had taken on brands like eat natural cereal bars and forest feast and burt's chips and there were a handful of others as well that we were with naked bar which ended up selling for grizzly and later in their kind of journey but yeah the handover the move from innocent drinks to fresh marketing was definitely an emotional one and it was at that point i realized that i'd just stepped off a firstly a rocket ship and secondly a very special place and experience and again all my friends and my parents were beside themselves going what are you doing but i needed to do this i didn't really have much more of a plan than we're going to represent brands and try and get them into international markets again i think it just proves the fact that you want to get out of your bed for the right reason because in hindsight yes you step off a rocket ship but you kind of build your own rocket ship these were the beginnings of your next rocket ship because where was the way the story heads it heads in the right direction has been a rider and the right reason i was living in london i was on the 5 a.m euro start frequently and because i was far cheaper than any of the other ones and for me even back then so i must have been 20 nearly 30 30 years old at that time with a one kid and a mortgage in London.

28:06And we wanted to move back down to Dorset. And actually, that wouldn't have happened if I stayed in employment in London. So that was one of the drivers. But the other was just wanting to be my own captain, as it were. And I saw an opportunity which I thought was credible, helping brands launch overseas. And so export then became a very big part of my life for the next 20-something years, and even today. And again, this was all about people culture society food habits and then you've got all the underlying sort of pricing logistics labeling etc which i was just fascinated by and spent many a year at a trade show around the world and touched many sort of brilliant brands in along the way and learned from them too so this is that generalist thing again multiple brands and what have you exactly well let's talk about your rocket ship that you've built because you've i know the story of how you got to build your next well but how to build your food product and you started with something then the question was about something else you adapted you changed obviously what you end up with the product that it was and the brand that you built and exited a couple of years ago wasn't the first idea that you had yeah so in true strategic fashion we recognized quite far into our fresh marketing journey that we weren't creating anything of real value we were a middleman we were an agent we were distributor we were creating value for the brands we were working with but not for ourselves but that was kind of okay for us the next part of the journey was actually how do we how do we create our own product brand that we can build real value into and experience that journey of complete startup and take it as far as we can.

29:54We were lucky enough to have built quite a good distribution business through fresh marketing. So that became our incubator for testing a whole load of ideas. And my first stupid, ridiculous idea was flavored popcorn. There was a brand in the US called Oogie's that was doing parmesan pesto flavored popcorn and a variety of other things. And I asked for samples on the premise that we might help them launch in Europe, which was a bit mischievous, I suppose. But they sent me this massive box of samples and they were amazing. They were brilliant. It's like we don't have this in the UK. And so I then said about what factories could possibly make this product for us.

30:37and most popcorn in this UK is cinema popcorn sweet and salty and there were factories that pumped out that stuff in massive big bags. We were able to convince a company to have a go at it and our biggest mistake was to choose air-popped popcorn over oil-popped popcorn back then because we thought air-popped, much healthier, lower calories, etc. But it just didn't taste as good as the oil-popped stuff and it went a bit soggy when the bag opened and oh my God, we went through so many. iterations of that we launched that at exactly the same time as metcalf julian metcalf who founded pret he'd sold that for gazillions and got into flavored popcorn and there was metcalf skinny popcorn so and he was using the oil base and calling it skinny popcorn which was frustrating but with his weight and might and brand and name he was able to beat us into every retailer that year and there was a catalogue of errors where our factory then got bought by a bigger company who then said we're not going to make anyone else's brand we're just going to stick to the cinema popcorn so we then had to go and find another manufacturer and by that time lots of other people launched into flavoured popcorn you could buy a popcorn machine on a credit card you could put it in your back garden and make popcorn and put flavouring on it and we were just too late to pick it up so that was our first sort of foray into own brand and it was expensive and hard and emotional and we were still running fresh marketing in parallel to this but not to be put off too much we then tried a whole iteration of other things when coconut water was getting going we saw the trend in america we looked there for inspiration we took a bit too long to launch our product which was made in a factory in Austria, Upper Mountain, where coconut trees don't grow.

32:28We had so many issues with this product. The first production, because the product was created at altitude, the bottles panelled, the paneling is when they get sucked in, which made the shrink wrap label around the bottle buckle, and it just happened to buckle on the barcode, so none of the barcodes scanned. so we then had to manually put a barcode sticker on all of the whole thing was disaster anyway we pulled that one quite quickly we got we did a long life yogurt drink with a brand called i am super beans i am super uh which was a project actually with tetrapack they were trying to bring in their tetra recart to take on the heinz baked bean tin um and we worked very closely with them the only factory in Europe was in Italy that could use this machinery we created the brand got it on the shelves of Asda and Sainsbury's only for a little thing called Brexit to happen our margins destroyed and the whole project fell apart which was emotional we wanted to crisp brand because Burt's Crisps who we'd built up over the years took it all back in house and they happened to be our biggest brand yet we had a pretty good view of what flavors and products and customers would want a crisp brand internationally.

33:46So we launched a brand called True Spirit in Belgium. And again, that was at the same time as I Am Super. So we had quite a few projects happening at the same time, trying to launch multiple brands at the same time. Talk about being a generalist. It's all strategic, by the way. All of this is strategic. And Brexit, yeah, got the better of that one too. And then the fuel thing came about. I believe somebody came to you with a question because you were promoting a popcorn at a trade show or some kind of event. And somebody says, this is all good and well, but I'm looking for the Red Bull of breakfast cereal.

34:19I think that's what you told me. And by the way, I didn't know all of these little brands that you try to, because I felt like, well, maybe there was just one thing. And then it led to another and then to another. Little did I know there was about another 15 products. My theory was that, because I didn't know what the next thing was, and because we had so much energy and we kind of figured out that you could pre-sell stuff. And if a supermarket said yes, then you could work extremely quickly to then create the product and the packaging for it all to be put together. I think our record was 16 weeks from you're on shelf in 16 weeks.

34:55What's the brand? Literally, we'll go away and try and create a brand. But yes, we were at a show in London called Britain's Next Top Model with our popcorn brand. We were dressed up and the brand was called Diva Popcorn. and they had three hulking men on this stand at the most ridiculous show i don't know what the buyer was actually doing at that show but we could see that they had a tesco badge and and he said don't worry i don't buy popcorn and stuff and we asked well what do you buy and he said well i'm the breakfast buyer at tesco and just here for inspiration quite like your brand and we got talking to him and he said we asked him what's going on in breakfast and are there any anything any opportunities and he said yeah i'm trying to find the red bull of granola granola is the only category growing at the moment and energy is a big thing obviously outside of the category i want to try and bring energy into the category and we said well what if we found you the product and had a really good brand would you consider having a chat to us and he said well look if you think you've got something book a meeting then come up and show me and literally i left the trade show then and there and got the yellow pages out and granola manufacturers in europe anywhere any manufacturer and found four manufacturers told them that we already had 600 stores guaranteed from tesco said that we've already spoken to bear grills about putting his face on the pack or and if it's not bear it'll be jamie oliver or someone like that and four factories around europe put together the red bull of granola in their various different formats and i had samples coming into my office in Dorset.

36:36I can't remember which samples came from where. And we went up for a meeting and there was one particular manufacturer that had absolutely nailed it. And the buyer said, that one. And during the meeting, he ate the whole pack pretty much. And he said, okay, that's it. We'll go for that. And he literally said, I'm going to give you 600 stores and you've got to be ready in 16 weeks. Oh, by the way, what's the brand? And that is how Fuel 10K ended up being born as you're speaking like my head is literally popping over so many questions because what you're displaying here from the experience is often what far in my opinion and from my experience from the branding side what is what people get wrong they want to be as ready as possible have the product ready beautiful like okay now we go and ready to sell to someone whereas you're like you didn't have anything as you said like how would you pre-sell something like how do you sell a concept and then work out how to do it so on on my side of things it works from here to there whereas you're working from there to here does it make sense like there's the whole different mentality so this is a really important bit which i have now put into various sort of anecdotes and nuggets but i think that so few founders really think about the alternative perspective actually the perspective of who who's going to buy your product rather than so a lot of sales people go into meetings and say we've got great flavors and the pricing exists and the best selling that and we're a b core and what have you but very rarely do they put themselves on the other side of the table so if you're sat with i don't know the sainsbury's buyer what's going through the sainsbury's buyer's head right now they're going well I need to sell more per square inch of shelf space than my predecessor I want needs to be more profitable I want to get my bonus and I want my boss to give me a promotion that's what they're thinking and this becomes very personal and you go okay so if you start your meeting with that buyer saying hey I think I've got a way of helping you get a bigger bonus this year you immediately start tapping into the way that they are thinking and they might find that a bit weird but you qualify it with look we can now demonstrate that we're bringing new consumers into the category at a much better margin than i don't know kellogg's wheat mix whatever and it was a little bit like that startup it was the buyer saying this is what i want rather than me saying this is what i've got will you buy it and so you're morphing yourself into the recipient or the buyer of the project and i think that sort of empathy is a really valuable thing to share with anyone a lot of designers do this where they've got beautiful designs but who's it for who's going to buy my product it's like why didn't you ask them because that's quite an easy question first what you're describing is that logic of the sale will happen when you're listening because as you said lots of designers will come with a ready-made sort of solution they will come with idea like maybe you should have to send out without having a foggiest clue about what the brand needs or what the buyer needs or what is the buyer's motivations because i remember you and i had a conversation in the past about the fact that you were approached by design agencies or creative agencies going hey we would like to work with you and you're like you don't know my pain points like you don't know what i need i don't need a prettier packaging i've got my issues maybe somewhere completely different but this logic of the sale happens when you're listening goes to the fact that you listen to a buyer from tesco's he wanted the red bull of granola then you did your bits the way you did it going from there to here you watched him the heat a whole bowl of cereal going this is good we actually hit that visualization of 600 stores and that's how he started building your brand i mean it's absolutely brilliant because as i say i'm like i've got guests on the show who are working in the other direction and i think from the founders and the creators we meet halfway through hopefully somewhere halfway point and we get the work done but i just love the way that you had a totally different logic and that's how you made your progress i also think there's something about in that branding piece i might have mentioned this before but you know a lot of brandy type people talk about the demographics their target demographics or their sweet spot demographics in terms of wealth and age and what have you but if you put prince charles and the late aussie osborne onto that profile they're probably both as wealthy as each other the same age yet you would probably speak to them slightly differently through branding and so so it's psychographics it's it's the need state that these people want so what kind of people are they that what's what mobilizes motivates the consumer rather than their defined sort of what you learn in geography a level population flows and trends it's about what's going on in their head so i think it's quite interesting but we've we got to the happy point of launching into 600 stores without a brand literally on powerpoint and i for some reason had this image in my head of this guy standing on a pile of granola silhouette of a guy and quite energizing energetic sort of call out and put it into PowerPoint.

41:53And that was then translated into packaging to try and meet the deadline. And I always loved the word fuel because fuel was, again, energy. So the brand originally was called Fuel on its own, which of course we couldn't trademark. And we sent a press release to the buyer saying, would you mind, can we have a quote? And he said, well, have you got the branding? Let's have a look. Because he was as excited about it as we were. we sent him a box from the production line and he said ah do you mind if we don't mention my name on this press release we were like oh dear we hit the 600 stores but very quickly we had a call saying this is a disaster it's not working the branding's rubbish product's good but i'm afraid we're going to have to pull out of this and after much begging we said look could you can just give us 200 stores take us down to 200 stores and we've got this new brand we've got this new look and feel we just didn't have enough time to reflect and think about it and we met we had met a guy who had worked at relentless energy who helped create the fuel your 10 000 hours brand with lots of depth about 10 000 hours being the number of hours it takes to become perfect at your craft whatever it is and he said you're in a sea of yellows and blues on on the shelves in breakfast why don't we go black let's be a black brown we'll really stand out just because of that we had that our logo became fuel your thing thousand hours written out like that and then over time we shrunk it down to fuel 10k such a convoluted journey looking back at it you should see this lineup of packaging that we did over time that was a journey in itself but the buyer agreed to that gave us 200 stores then we started appealing to a very unique kind of consumer that wasn't buying kellogg's or weekabix or jordans or what have you and then that was the starting blocks of fuel 10k done and from there we grew we moved into porridge we moved into drinks and what have you let me ask you a question because i mean it's a great story and i think yeah there was a d word it was a disaster there's a quite a few recurring themes i've got on this podcast and some of them is a rejection or let's say failure or a disaster we can actually add to the same category how did you guys feel because obviously again it shows your relentless adaptability or like not thinking like okay this could be potentially the end of the road but you made it not you just made it a chapter and you learn from that and you built on top of it so how did you deal with the fact that luckily what you had in the box was good but the man standing on a granola with the powerpoint design was exactly helping you to conquer that yeah genuinely we were a test i was to test and learn all my life and i think what really helps again get you out of bed when you're doing stuff like this and you hit massive rejection and disasters is what the alternative looks like if you don't get it right And the older you become, the more deeply unemployable you think you are.

45:03And with more kids arriving on the scene and you kind of go, well, if that didn't work, let's try this and let's try that and let's try this. And so I think the personal motivations helped a lot. And I think you'll be a bit careful that you're not flogging a dead horse and you just keep relentlessly making mistakes. And maybe you're not the right guy for this. but I just knew that we had something and it was worth just going that one more time just one more time until luckily we we cracked something having had so much rejection and failure of all the other brands as well and meanwhile fresh marketing was kind of keeping us afloat so we knew we had a bit of a we could always slip back to that everything really did fall apart but we were so keen or keen and yeah wanting to create our own thing what you created was your rocket ship you built it up it was successful and you exited that business not that long ago and you started writing your next chapter the next chapter is now which is the future of food it's your how would you describe it future of food is your organization competition movement community well i think that the one little bit in between fuel and the next part was we haven't talked nearly enough about team and i had a business partner on fresh marketing i had a third business partner on on fuel 10k we hired really smart specialists in enroll and i spent quite a long time really trying to understand what motivated those people to want to be even more than they could give and for anybody listening in on this crazy story it literally without the people and the engaged people around me it wouldn't and none of it would have happened but luckily in october 23 we sold fuel 10k pretty successfully to premier foods everyone on that fuel 10k journey who had been with us for a reasonable amount of time benefited i think significantly from that sale too and Alex, my business partner, and I stepped off on the following day after signing.