How to manage imposter syndrome as a founder, Ella McKay, FATSO

0:00Lots of people glamorise startups. the weird and wonderful world of chocolate, which has a lot of darkness in it as well. Ex-colleagues of mine will all tell you project management is not my skill set. It's very human to just do the things that you love. I think that's almost how I approach those moments of insecurity. There are much worse things to eat than there is barred chocolate, I'll tell you that. Welcome to How to Start Up, the podcast that ties into stories of startups and scale-ups told directly by the founders. I'm Juliet Fallowfield, founder of PR and podcasting consultancy, Fallowfield & Mason.

0:36In today's episode, we're joined by Ella Mackay, founder of Fatso, the unapologetically bold, brilliant and beautiful chocolate brand that's shaking up the confectionery world. Fatso is making chocolate fun again and behind the humour and bold branding as a founder, learning in real time how to grow a company while navigating motherhood, lean budgets, imposter syndrome and the ever-changing culture of work. Keep listening to hear how Ella managed her imposter thoughts, how she's turned limited resources into a major visibility, and learning how to prioritize both sales as well as operations without burning out in the process.

1:11Thank you so much, Ella, for coming on How to Start Up Today. Before we get into all things inner critic, imposter syndrome, I would love you to talk a bit about the brand that you've started. I'm Ella. My background was big corporate marketing, brand management. I studied marketing at university. I went down the big blue chip route so I learned from some of the very best in the business and yeah I was as I would sort of call it classically trained in that space much like you know yourself but I always had this entrepreneurial instinct and itch so there was always quite a lot of laughter in every job that I did where no one ever quite knew what to do with me because I was always trying to change things so I was trying to change a process or challenge it even from very entry-level roles.

1:56By the time I left, I was doing many different things and wearing quite a lot of different hats. So I think it was always innate in me to start something on my own and run businesses. It's also in the blood. My mum runs a successful business herself. So that's me. And Fatso is one of my absolute favourites. And it's my firstborn child, as I call it. And it was born out of basically sheer frustration that dark chocolate as a food, because I'm also a massive foodie, and I'm very passionate about, but dark chocolate was becoming like boring and this thing that was healthy and permissible and basically a rubbish choice when you wanted to have some chocolate.

2:38And that's just not what chocolate is meant to be about, period. So we, me and my co-founders, both all shared this frustration and decided to stop whinging and maybe we could do something about it with our skill sets and our backgrounds and our contacts. So off I went learning a lot more about the weird and wonderful world of chocolate which has a lot of darkness in it as well. Not just a pun but and Fatso was born just out of an idea that chocolate is there to be enjoyed and should be celebrated in whatever form but it can also be done well and right and ethically and with integrity. Congratulations because the brand and the product are fun, joyful, wonderful, humorous and pleasurable and calling it Fatso I just think is absolutely fucking brilliant.

3:29Where did that name come from? We always knew we wanted to be unapologetically us and Fatso was born out of this idea that this is meant to be you know it's like a chunky bar chocolate and all this thin apologetic crap and it was full of inclusions and it was about living life to the fullest and eating if you wanted to sit and eat a whole bar that's okay like sometimes that's okay so fatso just encompassed the way of life a rhetoric of life that we believed in yeah that tongue-in-cheek and also that chocolate has connotation people like oh you're eating chocolate but actually go for it enjoy it take that moment there are much worse things to eat than there is bar and chocolate I'll tell you that.

4:09And so you started in 2022 with yourself and how many co-founders were there? There's three of us so 2022 is when we launched actually it was a 2020 lockdown idea you know in in that those weird and wonderful moments that you had but my co's they run other businesses it was our joint idea but they've been extremely supportive and basically it was sort of early 2022 we decided actually I'm going to quit the day job and really push this forward and see what I can do with it and see if we can make it big and brilliant and everything we think it could be. And they continue to do their own thing, but they support me wholeheartedly.

4:45Given that you have got this beautiful, successful company, I'm sure it wasn't all plain sailing. What would you say were the major challenges that you faced from the idea through to launch through to today? Just, I would say we're still in those early days. So there's challenges every day. And also it's a lot because I've got a small team now but at the beginning I was pretty much on my own so you're relying on lots of external people that are helping you pull it together but you're the centre point and look ex-colleagues of mine will all tell you project management is not my skill set I am not process driven I live in this wonderfully chaotic world I can be organised but I'm just I'm not wired that way necessarily but then you're leaning into your strengths you know what you're good at and also being honest with what you're not good at which I think a lot lot of people when they start businesses like I have to be good at everything it's impossible and it's unrealistic and it's not sustainable how have you managed that kind of need to be process driven but not being process driven I think because of the experience I'd had before and obviously just any way you're always learning you learn that the bits that you're not naturally good at by being aware of them you then give them more time when you know you need to pull on that string so that's really important it's not to to acknowledge your weaknesses don't really like what i mean the things that you're not best at and if it's really acknowledge that they're important and if there's no one else there that can support you to do that then you just have to dig a bit deeper it's very human to just do the things that you love and to focus on the things that you like doing and i say this to my team all the time but sometimes you just got to do the stuff you don't want to do because that's how businesses operate and grow and ask for help my partner Mr.

6:32Fetso not in business my partner in life father of my child he is the opposite he's extremely organized and very good and process driven and so he's been a great support because he can help me and see my blind spots and you can draw into people around you as well I love what you said that some days you just have to dig a bit deeper I was talking to our guests on the previous episode about a similar thing that yes you've created this job for yourself and you've made it up and friends who are on PAYE working for other businesses like oh you're so lucky you've got the usual endless holiday whatever but you can still have a bad day at work when you've created your brand or your business and there's a lot of staring down an abyss of unknown there's no security, you're doing something that's probably not been done before, you're doing it because you're passionate because you're solving a problem that you've identified and there's a gap in the market and you are convinced that it needs to be solved.

7:29But how have you managed that? And some people call it imposter syndrome. It's probably more, well, we know that it should be called imposter experience because you can't be diagnosed with the syndrome. It's a feeling, it's not a diagnosis, but it doesn't make it any less loud in your head and it can pull the rug from underneath you so how have you managed your say confidence through this whole five years i'm quite fortunate because i'm self-aware enough maybe that's not the right word i'm quite comfortable with my feelings whether they're good or bad i'm quite comfortable being vulnerable and i'm quite comfortable when i'm feeling secure i don't know where that comes from i've grown up in a very open family where we talked about our feelings which I'm very fortunate to have so I think being comfortable with vulnerability really helps because you almost accept them into the room it's a bit like if you're I don't know at a party and there's someone that you don't particularly like or who's spoiling it or whatever you can let it ruin your night or you can just ignore them or you can just acknowledge them, accept that they're there and not let them affect how your experience is.

8:43And I think that's almost how I approach those moments of insecurity where I just tell myself, this is how I'm feeling today and I'll sit with it and I'll let it come and I'll let it do its feeling. But I also acknowledge it might not be rational, but if it's there tomorrow, maybe I'll give it a bit more attention. If it's there the next day, maybe I'll talk about it with someone to unpick that and see how if it is something there and to be honest I haven't had anything that's gone on longer than the point of talking to someone which is a good thing because it means that nine times out of ten it's something that's just I'm creating myself not something that's created out of anything rational or what really how the outside world sees it I'm really lucky that I've got and I've met some amazing mentors who are both best friends or ex-bosses or colleagues who all still I surround myself with and I draw in their experiences as well.

9:46That's a really good point that support network Rachel Harris in her episode recently said how lonely it is running a business and you look at her Instagram you're like she's killing it it's amazing she's built this business so quickly she's got such a happy team she said no one says how the more successful you are, the more lonely it can become. And for you, you say you've surrounded yourself with mentors and the support network. How have you gone out and appointed those? Is it a proactive decision or have you just woken up and gone, God, I'm really lucky I've got these people in my life? It's definitely not been a conscious thing, but I think being naturally an extrovert actually works in my favour because I get my energy from people and conversation.

10:25Yeah, you're talking to someone that started a podcast at the same time as a business. So I'm with you. Yeah, exactly. And I don't take that extroverted side of me for granted because it just means that I've naturally built that network, probably very unconsciously. But when I've got a challenge or if there's something on my mind, my instinct is to talk about it, not internalize it. So inherently, I'll pick up the phone and be like, oh, that person was telling me about that thing. And so they might be able to help me with that or that person's now in that position at that company, which seems like they'd have very similar challenges or so I can pit because I'm basically just a chatterbox.

11:08Well, a problem shared is a problem halved. Like you never regret a conversation. And hence why I did start the podcast, because I wanted to learn from other founders what to do now, next or never, because I was like, I don't know what to do. but same thing I find if I work from home too much I start going a little bit into my head and the minute I go to a co-working office and you have a chat with someone and it's just a kind touch of flavor towards that problem it's just shared and it takes the sting out of it takes the weight out of it and it can dispel it going actually that's not a problem after all or it sparks new ideas or other ways to solve it I think that the art in it though and probably something I have really learned is it's a fine balance between gaining and the support network information ideas just sharing the problem but then not doing that so much on one single thing where you then are like whoa too many options now I don't know what to do and you're sort of like doing headlights now I don't now I can't move so it's learning to sit with your problem and that's why I say you do the kind of is it there day one sit with it if it's there day two maybe you'll talk about it and going on a bit of a journey with something that is on your mind because otherwise you're just asking too many people but if you've had a moment to sit with it you'll think about who is the right person to share this with who might bring the most value back to that and it's almost like therapy with mentors because you've got the answer already inside you you just need someone to help bring it out of you and often the conversation is like ah light bulb and I think that's where entrepreneurship is so interesting and that you identified in yourself so early that it was probably inevitable you were going to do your own business because you're constantly unpicking things and picking up pebbles and reforming things and changing stuff there's no better environment to do that than in your own business where you have to start everything from scratch and question everything and ask so many questions and this is a hard question to ask you as an extrovert but what would you advise an introvert to do if they're not an extrovert in terms of that support network?

13:11I think understand as an introvert, because introverts naturally, I think, get energy from taking time on their own and sitting with things and just being able to process themselves. They don't draw necessarily the same energy. So I would just advise anybody, introvert or extrovert, to maybe dig in a little bit as to where they find value from outside and then lean in to that. So for an introvert, it might just be one mentor that they find. It doesn't have to be lots of different people. It might just be someone that is really good at listening because there are very few people that are really good at listening.

13:55So finding that one person in your life that actively listens, digests, processes what you've said, and then can bring genuine value for you to then process, digest. You know, you might even find another introvert that might be more helpful because they will be able to process in a similar way to you, whereas extroverts wouldn't. Yeah. Since you've launched the brand, you've navigated early motherhood having a baby a year ago, 14 months ago. Can you talk about what it's been really like to build a business and run one with no maternity leave and that mum guilt along the way? If I'm really honest, when I just had Harper, I wasn't really building.

14:38When I was building a child, I was growing him, keeping him alive. But there was a slowdown in momentum. And that's natural. I have a really wonderful team. But when you are a small team and you're the person driving everything, things do. when you take that person out, things inevitably peter out. So they kept the lights on and they did a brilliant job, but it wasn't growing at the speed or there wasn't a lot of momentum behind things and there wasn't a lot of structure. Well, as the founder, you are irreplaceable in that sense as well. It's not like you could have got a mat cover in. No, exactly.

15:12Even if I'd wanted to, we couldn't have afforded to. So the honest answer is I didn't really. It was just chaos. But that's part of the fun of it. I just saw it as another challenge and it was a wonderful thing having him I definitely have moments of guilt and you know we had to do things like we had someone like a nanny that is amazing and wonderful and I love her to bits but she had to come in and help because I couldn't have done it otherwise I couldn't have gone to work but leaving your six-month-old with someone that isn't his mother or father is hard but you do it and I think he will be a better more rounded inspired I hope individual for it it's really hard I've interviewed a lot of female founders you say this is like you cannot be in two places at once it's physically impossible and you're only going to burn yourself out so being honest and vulnerable about that as well I think is so so crucial for your success and if you go down the hole everything goes down so you have to look after yourself really well you've achieved a great deal on such a small budget how do you approach making the maximum impact of the minimal spend because everything comes down to cash flow and then revenue oh yeah i know i think a lot of it is in relationships and drawing on the relationships that you've nurtured before during and could potentially nurture moving forward for me it's about finding the right people to partner with so even if it's a big I don't know take an example working with a small creative agency on something I don't know packaging design or whatever it might be and it's about going okay well being really upfront I don't have any money but you obviously if you like the brand and you're into it and you share in this ambition this idea if you can do something or we can do something together and we can figure out how we can make the most out of what the limited amount I do have actually if they make that sort of investment then we'll grow together because then if that works or you know and as the business grows which we are then there'll be a little bit more in the future so I think you just find people that kind of want to grow with you and see you do well I'm getting you see a lot and maybe the world is changing I hope the world is changing but it's just not always about grabbing making more money we didn't start fatso to make loads and loads of money we don't have our conversations solely because there's the managing the pin i'll keep making sure that you're running a sustainable business and you can grow it the benefit of the people within it and so we can get more chocolate in mouths and all of that stuff but it's just not always about it has to be more than just the bottom line and i know that so many particularly in retail you know it sort of makes me sad when it's like yeah we love the brand and we think it'd be a great fit and or but either way i need like a 55 margin and i'm like but why why do you need that you've set this sort of mark and what that means is you're just you're only squeezing other people for that that's all that's happening and you know we're actually having quite a lot of conversation about that internally at the moment I'm trying to encourage our sales team it's okay to walk away it's okay to walk away point because we don't want to work with people that ultimately will see your business offer for the benefit of theirs that's not business absolutely it's managing a small budget because coming on the other side of the fence you're in a brand-based business I'm in a service-based business the number of times we've come down to budget and money and people like oh but we really want to work with you but we have no money and I find that kind of like but I'm running a business and it's the thing that sort of not angers me the most but it's what are we having a conversation for and if they're not prepared to offer equity or there's got to be some return there's got to be some incentive and we have a pro bono budget for time for clients we're a b court we want to give back but we still have to have our own cash flow to survive so like when you say work together with say a creative agency what does that look like it would just be that yeah it's not to say that they would invest or undercut or not make any money it's more just okay I'm always really up front with people so I would never need a conversation down the garden path and then they say okay yeah we'd love to do all that and that's going to cost you 100 grand and then I say I've got two I would always say this is what I've got what can you do for that and then it's about exactly it being frank and transparent I think when we've become a cropper it's we share the deck with the outline and spectrum of our pricing people are yeah sure we still want to have a conversation there we do send a questionnaire and then they come back oh yeah no we actually don't have any money at all it's like well why you're wasting your time as well as ours but if you're being upfront about what budget you do have and I think that's such good advice for founders go in with a very tight brief and a budget I think I put something on LinkedIn recently saying no budget no problem we'll just charge you for the initial calls that we have because you can't tell me how much you've got probably means you don't have any at all and therefore we'd love to have a conversation with you but unless you've got actual skin in the game it's so tricky especially when you're starting a business because budgets are so tight and they're really precious and you want to externalize money in the right places I have come across though quite often they're particularly founders that have had backgrounds in big companies or corporates I mean this is quite a few years ago but I remember talking to a founder who had yeah worked in big corporates in marketing and then had this idea for I think it was a skincare brand.

20:56And she had a pot of money that she had put towards launching it. But she was spending an absolute fortune on briefing big agencies who were doing favours. They weren't charging top dollar. But there were so many things that I was there like, but why don't you do that yourself? That's such a sort of mindset of I used to sit in the chair where I just wrote briefs and put out lots of different agencies to come back on the case. But actually, if I put my mind to it, what can you do for yourself? For example, with a creative agency, if the value is in help us come to a really great idea, then take the idea, but go and execute it yourself.

21:35It doesn't matter if it's not super slick, John Lewis level ad polish, because that's not what you're about. You're not there yet. Just do what you can. Shoot on iPhone. I mean, Apple built their business on being able to shoot everything on iphone so do that and don't be so i was gonna say precious about it it's not the right word but you cannot be perfect to start with you have to just start and get going and iterate and then learn as you go and you test and learn and work out what works and what doesn't for you when you're looking at building this brand obviously you need to sell the chocolate how have you in those early days how did you know when to focus on sales versus operations I actually learned that in a different business I was consulting for a small before just before we went all in on FACTO I was getting like more of a consultative role for a SME and that business focused a lot on operations and ultimately it did you know it should have been focusing on sales and it was really hard to shift the mindset for ops and manufacturing and getting the product absolutely everything tip top versus sales all the investment all the salaries seemed to go into ops so when we started building out the team it was absolutely sales first so it was our first hire our second hire then our third then was in like brand content with a bit of e-commerce so sales always wins because ops even finance they're all extraordinarily important but my rule is basically we can also do those bits I can be doing the ops everyone should be a salesperson in some form so for example in our weekly meetings our team meetings every week everyone has to bring a new stockist idea with a contact detail and a bit of information as to why they think it could be a good fit just so everyone's always in that mindset that we are here to sell chocolate like more chocolate in mouths that is our mission and without sales you don't need an ops team if you have no sales exactly their support functions and they support the delivery of sales so i don't have an ops person i am the ops person how did you learn to sell or how do you teach your team how to sell it's something i always say i was like oh i'm not very good at selling but then my sales team was like well but you do because you're look what you've achieved i think it's maybe different as a founder co-founder because you're selling without thinking really you're just talking passionately about your business how did you identify your first hire as a good salesperson to support fatso what qualities did they have that stood out to you just energy and passion for the brand and i do role plays in my interviews so they they have to do a role playing where they'll basically pitch to a new potential customer and then they might have a challenge which is oh this customer ordered from us more than six months ago they've not been responding they have a problem with price point so I do a bit of an objection handle test as well so you get quite a decent read on obviously how prepared they've come how much research they've done I don't expect them to be absolute experts but I expect them to have read enough on the website and be able to talk about the brand so yeah it's that really it's how they show up I I don't.

24:55It's a very gut instinct for me hiring. Yeah. A lot of founders have said this, that you can do the groundwork and all the maths and all the spreadsheets, but actually your intuition, your gut feeling is so crucial for making decisions. And I was going to ask, from a startup perspective, it's quite hard for new brands to attract top talent. How did you get the right people into your business, given that you might not have been a proven success story at that stage? lots of people glamorize startups so actually easier than you think because you get a lot of people saying oh yeah i want to work in startup you know how great no and that's the first thing when people say that to me i'm like why what do you think working for a startup is like and that is a big read on the question because if it's just oh i just want to be able to influence and make decisions and I want to be part of creating and just being my own bot all this stuff I'm like uh-huh and what about all on the other side where actually you're coming in as a sales role but you also have to process the orders you have to tell me where stock is at you have to follow down orders that haven't been delivered you have to oh order the toilet roll for the office because we've run out all of these things that are non-glamorous bits and don't just happen around you it's actually picking out the ones that genuinely are built for startup that is the hard bit i did the last three hires i have used a recruiter who specializes in recruiting for challenger brands so they have a lower slightly lower fee so it's more accessible for small businesses and they target people that have been from startup to scale up so they've got a really nice pool of people that kind of have had experience in that sort of startup space or scaled up space rather than big.

26:48So they're not coming in green and being like, I know you said I had to get my hands dirty, but this dirty? It's that when I used to work at Chanel, people were like, oh my goodness, you work at Chanel. I'm like, I pack boxes. I'm in PR for a beauty brand. I pack a lot of boxes and I'm in a warehouse half the time, but it's Chanel. I'm like, no, no, no. People don't like the bubble being burst, which is what's quite funny about the startup world as well, because everyone thinks it's this wonderful oh it's all vcs and funding and i don't know whatever so something that we do is have a question from our previous guest for our next guest and the previous guest was candice who founded studio 88 it's a pilates studio in birmingham and she is celebrating her first birthday in november and has opened her second studio six months later and has very much been running with i didn't realize it was going to be this successful and it's wonderful to see but her question for you was given what you know now what would you have done differently if you had to start it all over again?

27:43The thing is I try and live life a little bit no regrets I don't like having regrets I don't like to reflect on things and think oh I would have done that differently because I think if you had done it differently you wouldn't have had the learning that you've had having done it that way you know I'm a real believer in that no one is ever an expert so I guess my answer to that question is nothing because I wouldn't want not to have learned anything that I have. And what would your question be for the next guest? Oh, so I have to give a little bit of context on this. My worst habit is like I'm quite a busy person.

28:24So I thrive and I get the most shit done when I'm in a bit of free for chaos and I've got much to do, even though there's probably things on that list that I've got to do now that I could have done a week ago when I didn't have all the other things to do. So I call it my best worst habit. So my question to the next person is what's your best worst habit and how has it helped you in your business? If you'd like to contact Ella, you can find all her details in the show notes, along with a recap for the advice that she has so kindly shared.