Espresso: I was ready to kill myself, but like a Phoneix Rose from the Ashes - Matt Kelly

0:06you talked about that time in 21 when the business went tits up and I think there's two quotes you said you said i was ready to fucking kill myself as which is what you said on one podcast talking about that period and another podcast you said i was like a phoenix from the ashes and grow and like rose from the ashes and i think that will give a lot of people listening to this podcast power to realize that now when you're when you're fucked on the floor you can get back up and you can keep going and they're never going to have to go through what you went through but just to give some context like what happened with with the sign business and how did it go pete tong and then we'll get on to how you you rose from the ashes yeah i mean very long story short went from doing like a million quid a month in sales from my kitchen entirely bootstrapped profitable going great but probably like a lot of businesses in 2020 because it was a 2020 when it grew and i was also running my my jewelry business at the same time so i had two businesses collectively doing about 1.2 million a month in revenue when i was 24 so like i hadn't raised a single penny of investment so going pretty well um yeah the long story short the neon one went tits up because a supplier ran off with loads of money they got paid up front essentially had gone bankrupt in the background because of covid and i hadn't had hadn't done my due diligence and had paid them too much money and very complicated supply chains were making b2b signs basically it was all sold online but you know most our customers were barbershops like people that wanted custom stuff so everything was made to order massive area the very complicated product huge shipping costs yeah so that very quickly went from having like over a million quid in the bank to being insolvent and not being able to pay fucking creditors and loads of orders disappeared you know talking three million quids worth of orders that didn't get delivered during peak season q4 while i had a primetime tv ad campaign slot with itb because we did a love island campaign a love island collaboration campaign so you kind of have to laugh at it now because it was absurdly big given I was the only shareholder and had a team of people in the Philippines.

2:10I just thought it was normal because that's all I'd ever really known. It was like scaling online businesses. But that one just went too big, too quick, and was built on pretty rocky foundations in hindsight. I didn't have any experience or expertise around me because, yeah, then I dropped out of uni and just started building shit on my laptop. So, yeah, very quickly, I would call it a real-life MBA and learning how to deal with a business when it goes tits up and bringing in the fucking administrators and doing the process properly and customers getting their money back ultimately at the expense of my equity and mental health and then I worked for six months with the business that bought that business on a salary for the first time in my life a nice salary granted but a big like a big pay cut from what I was used to I guess and then at the end of that period decided fuck this I want to do my own thing again sold my equity and that for a bit of money and then that was September 2021 and for the first time I had a blank slate first time since I dropped out of uni I was like I don't actually have anything to work on right now so I started a podcast and started building this brand around that time but it was incredibly rough and I'd be lying if I said I was actually over it even now like I still have fucking therapy going over that because there's still a lot that I haven't probably come to peace with to be honest um because it was financial fuckery which I think is definitely worse when you don't come from money and you've worked your ass off for five years prior to get to the position to even be able to do that in the first place i didn't have any money given to me ever do not come from silver spoon background which to be completely honest a lot of founders do i find particularly in the consumer product space in london naming no names but yeah and then it was also just social media abuse like i was getting death threats for like three months i had to change my phone number i just had to move where i lived it got that bad like i had the daily mail at my door threatening to expose me as a fraud even though the absolute opposite was the truth had lost like over a million quid and didn't know how to pay back creditors that I had taken on debts from to try and solve the problems.

4:08So yeah, pretty rough. And yeah, I definitely still have PTSD now, like about the shit people said to me and made me feel like, and ever since then, I've probably been incredibly paranoid about the internet and what can go wrong, but it's also given me a very thick skin and I don't really think anything stresses me that much anymore because it's like fuck it I got through 2021 when I was two and a half stone heavier broke up with my ex-girlfriend probably because of the fucking shell of my former self that that made me become and even now I think there's a lot of talk about entrepreneurship it's about failure you know fall down get up again but like how many people saying that I've ever actually experienced a failure and I'm not talking about you can't get the business off the ground because you're shit of selling stuff I mean building a massive business and then having it go wrong that's an actual failure not like oh i can't sell my fucking crisp brand to tesco i've put three grand into it boo that's just you don't know what you're doing but failure when there's half a million instagram followers you've got two million quid in secured creditors you know literally sending you letters and you've got fucking a dedicated facebook group with pictures of you as a child in because you've got some nutters on the internet that somehow think that's okay because they didn't get their product in time for christmas so yeah it was a a brutal combination of just like online abuse and financial fuckery and you know i'm long long past that business now and i've started another one everyone tells me how successful it is but yeah there's a lot of pain that i've gone through just in entrepreneurship in general which every founder does but also that business going wildly wrong and then having to start again from scratch and yeah it wasn't easy to dust myself off from that and go again and i think i think my self-confidence has been eternally damaged from that if i'm honest but obviously i've just yeah i've managed to get up and do it again and i think i've got a much better business now but it's much fucking harder to start dc brand now than it was even two three years ago and i can say that because i was doing it two three years ago and i was objectively worse than what i'm doing but it was way easier and i grew way quicker but you know a lot of investors i speak to and so on tell me how amazing i'm doing now but i don't believe them because I was doing two, three times the numbers back when I was 24, which is also something I'll probably never get over until I scale this business to 10 times what I've done in the past.

6:28So I've definitely got a massive chip on my shoulder to outdo my previous self, but it's just doing it in a much harder market. Quick one, guys. Espresso's got a brand new sponsor, Unleashed. Unleashed is inventory management software that talks directly to your finance and econ software. We use Unleashed daily at Ireland. I bloody love it. We've got our admin time in half. saving approximately 30k a year why use it save money save headaches save stress get granular clarity on your margins know where your stock is don't miss availability look your favorite brands literally use unleashed as their backbone candy kittens tiny rebel trick always religiously look there's a link in the show notes please feel free to book a call with josh and his wonderful sales team at unleashed they're amazing even nothing comes of it and even better news you'll get your first month free if you reference hungry thank you what you said there's super powerful and i think you're right like failure getting not getting as chris brand into tesco is not is not a failure like that's just a a knock is all it is but i think i've everyone i've interviewed this is a serious failure that has had like is people are trying to assassinate your character i think is what i've i've garnered yeah what you said i was ready to fucking kill myself like what was the worst specific moment during that hell period and what was the steps you took to like to be the phoenix from the ashes do you know what i mean because i think that will help a lot of people who aren't going to go through anything anywhere near as hard as what you've gone through i think there's like two two periods i can remember where i think it's like rock bottom and they're very different one of them was when i just knew i knew i knew it was kind of irreparable and i would ultimately lose the business and i was probably in like February 2021 and that was also around the time where I was literally having had to change my phone number because people were calling me a scammer and all this shit so it's pretty difficult to deal with but you just have to fucking get up and deal with it and then I think the second most difficult period was when I found myself in like October 2021 I actually think I have a video on my phone of me just filming it and being like this is the worst period of my life but I'll probably get past it whether I'll ever post that video anywhere I don't know but I'd just broken up my ex-girlfriend which by the way was never going to work anyway like I don't regret that but at the time it was fucking miserable because we were living together and so on so you know my business has disappeared I'm back to square one I'm like two and a half stone heavier than I was now or previous because I just became a fat fuck in hindsight so just pleasure eating um stress eating so yeah but probably that um they jump out was like two times where I just thought fuck this this is really difficult and especially when you have nothing to work on but then that's when I ultimately started working on the next thing and then I got into like running and that really helped me end up running a really quick marathon and that became like this good story that I put on my YouTube and so on probably need another challenge like that because that definitely helped me get out I actually feel like I'm in a bit of a secondary rut right now to be honest maybe we can speak about that but yeah um I started working on the brand and I just literally wrote down like what do I want to do next I'm obviously going to start something because that's all I've ever known like i would literally rather jump off a bridge than work for someone else as dramatic as that sounds but it's literally how my mind works because it's all i've ever known i think any true founder would say that and mean it not just for dramatic effect um but yeah then i guess i just fucking did it again came up with an idea and worked on it and made it reality which is a lot more work than it sounds saying that but the fundamentals are i decided what i was going to do and just started working on it and it became a real product quite quickly.

10:06And then I started growing the business because I guess I knew how to grow a D2C business particularly. So I'd done it three times before at that point. Thank you so, so much for listening. It honestly means the world to me. I hope you enjoyed your morning coffee and go and have an amazing day. Let's be having you. If you want the fun episode, it will be in the show notes. A link will be in the show notes, the full episode. Thank you so much. Please leave friends as well. It means the world to me. the the the the the