How School of Wok Bounced Back from Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose SCREWIN Their Brand

0:00Imagine getting a call from Tesco, Sainsbury's and Waitrose within literally six months and next thing you know you're in 1 ,200 stores tons of distribution points all across the country sounds like an absolute dream right where do I sign this happened to Jeremy Pang Jeremy Pang is the founder of School of Walk in Covent Garden they built this amazing brand a huge YouTube channel then they had a product basically a bao bun kit that was ready to go into into grocery now this episode is so special because their business they really got sunk by grocery and I love the quote wisdom is prevention by charlie munger is listen to people's other mistakes you don't have to make them them them yourself jeremy was super open with what happened with school of walk he's still got an amazing brand he's got amazing business now um in curious crab which is a production company but it really made me sort of think about it's like why why is the industry narrative that we just go into we have to go into grocery to build a brand i'm not saying there's no right or wrong to this it's all nuance but um you know actually do you grow based on your values uh there's tons in this there's tons about how to do strategic partnerships jerry is an amazing deal maker um amazing salesman tons in this what's their victory speech how do you make the buyers look famous what went wrong in grocery talk about um how to do massive deals when you're a tiny brand this is so so important look look what trip did with calm i know tripping our massive but tiny brands doing massive deals um creative strategy got one's business secrets how to absolutely maximize the fuck out of trade shows um loads in this and also jeremy's just a great guy to talk about my favorite thing in the world food glorious food so we talk all about kind of how china chown china chown china town has changed over the years um i absolutely love this episode please leave us a review please share it i hope you enjoy it and um yeah i'm so honestly so grateful you guys listen every week um means the world to me thank you so much

2:04um jerry pang lovely to see you mate finally i feel like i've known you for a long time great to finally meet um i think we're in probably the most wondrous prodigious kind of office space i think i've ever seen for listeners it's a glorious kind of um what kind of house with a massive garden in well the back streets of kennington and i think it's yeah it's absolutely stunning so thank you for 1795 this place is built apparently 1795 what was the like the story with it i think that the next store house is the first sort of proper like townhouse to be built here but i only know this from a week ago because it's the first time i've met one of the residents upstairs who's been here 50 years and he was telling me that this building was built in 1795 and they used to have like local hustings here.

2:54What's hustings? Like a political hustings. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's, yeah, I don't actually know the owner, but he only rents it out, like rents the sort of residential buildings, apartments out to friends and family. I feel like it's the perfect place to cook and be creative with food. It is incredible for that. We've been here for a year um and you know we're filming non-stop which i'm sure we'll get into but it's got a garden the garden outside i took it's gorgeous glorious yeah i call it the mini white house yeah yeah i mean literally it is and downstairs there's loads of people just listening to slow kind of italian jazz cooking uh italian like a whole smogs ball of italian food and i just i've come here out of that very um not palatial is the wrong word but very kind of cathartic walking in i'm like oh this is a nice pace to be in it is a nice pace it's a it's a very different pace to what i've been used to previously but i think you're right it it's it's the space almost lends itself to creativity um I think a wonderful thing yeah and I'm I genuinely am really like happy when I step into this building yeah yeah and I think I mean there's so much we're going to kind of as I said we're super scatty so we'll cross a lot of territory but I think what you said there about the slow pace versus the fast pace and obviously challenge a brand is especially in grocery which we're going to get onto is traditionally fast fast fast fast fast but having some sort of space and slowness to let kind of creativity bubble is i i think a really beautiful thing i think something that all brands could could really benefit from but let's what i want to start with so we're having a coffee outside i was sort of saying to you like how did you get into into the wonderful world of food and uh you're saying you kind of doing spanish and chemical engineering as you do when other people say it to me i i i sort of still 25 years later i suppose spanish and chemical engineering would make you like a mean tapas cook yeah maybe if like or maybe I can build a machine that could make the best tapas in the world whilst like listening to Spanish music I don't know shitting out croquetas all day I reckon I'd make a really good croquetas machine that would be amazing that's a shitting machine so then you went into betting Ladbrokes kind of raised, worked your way up there kind of did your thing at Cordon Bleu and then went to um samsung but then you were saying on the day you got made redundant there on the day of your dad's passing away yeah so your dad's uh burial yes yeah yeah yeah and that was kind of the springboard from the moment of kind of depression to to really catapult you into into food yeah what describe that day like what was the color of your mind on that day obviously it was hell but um yeah so my dad actually passed away in march 2009 and how old were you at that point you don't mind me asking somewhere in my 20s we'll go with that yeah yeah yeah yeah i was 25 and um uh i yeah i was working for samsung in um strategic alliances so i was my my job at that point was essentially building bridges between samsung and other big businesses but we were at the height of the recession 2009 so 2008 back the 2008 global recession and then um in sort of back end of from what i remember back in the 2008 at samsung we got given an ultimatum and this was the whole of European headquarters so I was like my you know my job was for them and the ultimatum was either we get rid of all you or we completely changed the team around and everyone has this one specific sort of reason of still being here and that is that you all got all of you guys from the marketing department for the whole of Europe need to work out how to make money for Samsung without spending a penny um and that was their new internal strategy right and so we all kind of looked at each other and well how is that even possible um but I'm quite I've always been a bit like that anyway to be I quite like that.

7:53I think that is that really like speaks out what most entrepreneurs have to do from day one. Make as much money as possible without spending as well, while spending as little as they possibly can. Sure. And at that point, it was make money without spending anything. So we cut all budgets. We have zero marketing budget for the whole world. But you guys can keep your jobs for now. um and um and that's when i they moved me into sort of strategic alliances because what was interesting was when i was at samsung the few months before that actually my job was mainly sort of marketing assistant basically skivvy i'd do everything yeah and every everything and anything that a samsung boss asked me to do didn't matter what level they were whoever if they were higher than me and samsung they were your boss with you and that's how that company works you know um and so i i'd be you know in the office until like half 10 11 o 'clock at night sort of arranging what type of bmw or mercedes the samsung boss would need for their hotel visit their hotel when they visited the UK you know yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah that's what I did um but then when we moved into they moved me into strategic alliances that the reason for that was that they kind of saw even at a young age that I had this sort of ability to be able to essentially wangle stuff for free uh for them um what were you wangling for free because I just think in a corporate environment is like the wangling for free is kind of the anaesthetist to that but i think where i'm where i'm trying to pull out here is what you said is make as much money as you can without spending spending as less less as you can whatever it was um yeah what were you wangling so simple stuff would be like um point of sale for example so uh if you go if you walk into a shop your point of sale is either your posters is this in like a is this a um like a phones for you or like what yeah yeah you might walk into a car from warehouse or or anything you might have in like standard sort of convenience shops it would be a poster but in a electronic shop or a phone shop these points of sale were like quite big sort of uh freestanding display units that were um you know because it was samsung and electronics it would it might be like fully like 3d or like you know and and all the lighting would be like beautiful and if there was a blue light that like was on that display unit it had to be like the perfect samsung blue you know all that sort of stuff those units might cost uh in those days best part of like like anywhere between 1500 pounds to 3000 pounds for just for one unit and i didn't it wasn't necessarily my job as a marketing assistant to do to get anything uh on a deal but if i had if i managed to do it i would do it because it would impress my bosses yeah yeah right so what's the art to wangling something for free because i think there's lots in that the art uh without giving away all my secrets i think the uh the the the the true art is, is working out what, if there are going to be any benefits to the person you're trying to get something from, that you need to put those benefits in the forefront before thinking about yourself.

11:38The, I love, so I interviewed a deep funny enough for DJ the other week called Will Clark. He's got a podcast. He interviews loads of techno DJs, but he's also got a food page. That's right. And I love music and, And I love seeing, no matter what industry it is, whether it's fucking Samsung phones or getting a deal with Sainsbury's or getting some POS away at Indy or, as you say, like a Samsung display unit. Like the art of wangling is the art of wangling no matter what you're doing. Yeah. And one thing he said is he wangled his way into a record label. Right. So he said, I want, Claude Von Stroke was a big record producer, Dirty Bird label.

12:14And I said, how, I didn't say the art of wangling, I was like, how did you do it? it goes well you've got to think about what do they want what do i want yeah what's the compromise and how do i make it seem like their idea yeah yeah that's really like kind of what you're saying yeah and i think i think maybe in after sort of 20 odd years of doing it i um i care less about what um making them feel like it's their idea and actually i'm more than happy to just give the ideas to them knowing that I've given them the idea like and and and that kind of works it it the sort of it is a very honest approach I think um it's not about manipulating people into doing something for you it's more about actually genuinely being able to offer those things that we know or I know are going to benefit another company or person and so if I don't if I can't find at least three of those benefits, like three benefits, clear benefits to the, the receiver of that, of, of that, you know, whatever service it may be or product, then for me, the conversation is not, not even worth starting.

13:28Like, so, so, and that is actually giving, being able to give them something. It's not all take. That's what I'm saying is that it's very much, okay. hey, I know that if I can give you these sort of three to five big benefits, then if you're willing and open to the discussion, I'd like something back. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I suppose, like, I think the way I, well, what Will said is making it feel like their idea is that does seem quite surreptitious and manipulative. I don't think he means it like that. I just think if you put the three benefits down, they're going to think, well, that is my idea.

14:07And I think it's the same with, I mean, we're kind of really going all over the place here, but with buyers, I mean, I think one of the things in retail is there's two things I apply before, basically any email we used to write, which is what's their victory speech? Right. So when you go and sit with a buyer and say, say you want a gondola end, like, well, what is the buyer? You need to make, and the other one is make your buyer look famous. Right, yeah. do those two things the buyer wants to be famous because they want a job promotion they want to look great and what's their victory speech that's like oh i went to this brand they were asking for this cpi i got them to this and we got we they've given us an extra x in marketing spend it's that again it links back to compromise yeah but i think there's a real salient lesson there in terms of um i didn't think we were going to swim down these channels but in in in the art of challenger brands which is what you said right at the beginning which is make as much money as you can and spend at least as least as you can yeah and and i think it that no matter what business you're in that it's got to be that way because you can't um and especially for challenger brands in like in this you know grocery space it's so and i've listened to a few of your podcasts and you You know, no matter, you know, how experienced someone is, it all boils down to the same thing.

15:29And that is, if you can't afford to be here, then it's not going to work. And we found that in grocery. Like, we could not afford to be where we were. Yeah. Let's go into this now, then, and we'll get back to how you got into the period with your dad. Yeah, because I think, so to give some, I suppose, context, School of Walk was a cookery school in Covent Garden. yeah you then i swear yeah just paint the picture before you got into the big retail listings um because i think there's a warning sign here for those who are kind of obsessed with getting those tesco waitrose sure sure okay so um if i go back so it does kind of link to when i started school walking i started teaching people in their own homes how to cook chinese food that's how school what started that was September 2009 in 2010 my business partner joined me and we started to grow the event side of the business that grew and then in 2011 back in the 2011 we we decided let's let's go for it let's let's go for bricks and mortar and create a full-on cookery school so by March 2012 we were in Covent Garden and we're still there today so that's 15 years late you know 15 years down the line you know the cookery school is basically this like well-established small institution that sort of owned and still owns the asian cookery space um i'm i'm pretty confident yeah um the it took us about five years so 2012 through to 2017 um for the cookery school to commercially established itself um so to actually break even make a little bit of cash and then how did you get punters through the door uh like how did you get the demand for because you know i i believe i think that in itself's glorious achievement do you mean yeah and it was it really was like i don't think we've ever sat myself and never my my business partner have never really sat and enjoyed that moment for long enough but it it it was very difficult when we first started the first two to three years we had custom we thought we would have loads more customers than we did based on based in covent garden in the middle of london you know we had this great shop front we still do but it's on a quieter street of covent garden and people don't really walk past it yeah so not for sounding like an idiot here but yeah i've never where about St Covent Garden is it?

18:07Two doors down from Oaxaca behind Cootes Bank on Chandos Place so so it's a prime central London location but quiet for central London yes yes yes and because most people walk down Nuro or the shopping streets they don't walk down these little side streets and um so but what we did was um follow the lead of a very very good friend of mine from school actually called Nick Telson who you may or may not have come across who was the co-founder of designmynight.com so also in some way linked to hospitality and um uh and he is all him and I always talk about marketing and he was like jazz you've got to get on you know you've got to get onto your seo um and google and blah blah blah so I kind of follow that lead and we really pushed it but also alongside that I use my what definitely is my strength and forte which is strategic alliances so so we built when you say alliance is that like partnership partnership so sponsorship it's sponsored so I made it my task to partner up with big companies even though we were a company of three people yeah um and the key was exactly what we're talking about was uh using our sort of expertise and professionalism to um fill a gap that big companies didn't have and that was essentially live content in those days it was still same same as today taste of london uh big festival or these sorts of like consumer shows let's say and festivals we would sort of support these big sponsors like aeg or neff samsung in some way in some years in delivering content um on stage for them at these shows for free um but in return i had my asks and so okay so we did that So just to go back, so then when you were saying, so you were basically just to get clarity on this, so say it's the big festival, Samsung are doing something there, you're basically saying to big festival and Samsung, look, we'll come and do the school of work alongside Samsung at this festival, you're working for free, but Samsung are paying big festival.

20:41Samsung paid, it was actually, no, it was AEG paid Taste of London. AEG's. Nine years in a row, AEG is like a, basically AEG, Neff, Bosch, they're all the sort of major appliance brands, like small appliance brands. Hey, with you. Right? Yes, yes, yes. So outside of like Gaggenau and Miele, who are the more high end, I think AEG, Neff, Bosch are the more mass market high end. so that's all you like your microwaves your cookers pots ovens these hobs here you know so um it's the key for me was a combination of um very simple seo and ppc ppc pay-per-click on google yep um so advertising our business through google um uh and uh links with companies who have that have the right strategic targeted audiences for that particular brand of school of walk yep so of course if we if we're linked with appliance brands that are that only manufacture high quality equipment for cooking that's going to work with us yes and so so my job i took it as my job as the marketing director of school of work to create those links and when we have seo and ppc like working a treat through working with the right agencies and learning about it ourselves and then you attach like let's say one weekend's worth of taste of london neph or taste london ag like combo like combo suddenly you've got in five days like we were teaching at those shows we were teaching like 50 people every hour back to back for five days so you'd take 1500 to 2000 people over over the over the the fact over one festival that were perfectly targeted audience for our business.

22:56And that's how we grew our newsletter and our database. I think now, even now, it's still quite niche. You know, the database is like 25 ,000. You know, it's a cleaned up database of 25 ,000 people after 15 years. It's not massive in the grand scheme of things. It's not like social media numbers. but what it is is it's 25 000 very targeted people yeah and and loyal who are loyal ambassadors of our brand and they continue to be even after 15 years yeah so then so then i love this so it's almost the um i don't know if you listen to much or read much by paul graham which is the guy who did y combinator okay yeah like a startup kind of guru he's got loads of interesting lessons by actually um silicon valley okay yeah big big things but we can actually do podcasts about silicon valley lessons for challenger brands with a guy from called chris d who was the ex head of food at harrods really interested in it and he was basically saying some of these lessons for challenger brands and you kind of epitomize these so it's like one you've got to do things that don't scale which is basically hand-to-hand combat which is get like get in 50 people isn't really scalable comparatively to pay-per-click and facebook ads or whatever it was and goo seo but the connection and the depth with those people is huge yes but then so you're doing doing things that don't scale marrying that up sorry offline marrying that up with stuff online right and you get the kind of the perfect storm yeah plus the strategic alliances with the big whoppers yes then it yeah as you say it's the perfect storm i love that and then and then this is applicable to any brand right then you said i had i want to get into the kind of how you um um you how we got to grocery no no no how you wangled these partnership because you said you know i had i had my asks as well like what were your asks in this okay so the first it's 2011 taste of christmas is the first time we ever did a taste show yeah that's the tobacco dock at tobacco dock no no before it was before tobacco docks so they used to do it at the xl which was horrid right it's my least favorite venue around everyone's going around as scrooge mate in the excel i call it the ikea effect because when you walk into ikea after half an hour you don't know what room you're in yeah yeah yeah yeah and and that's what what i feel like in the excel and that's where they used to run it and i that's the only time 2011 christmas it's the only time we ever spent money at a trade show yeah okay so after that i was like you know what neb this is so expensive and here I was the the biggest spender between between Nevin and I my business partner right and he's like Jez I'm so happy you've said that because we can't be spending like six grand a time every time we're at a you know a trade show and that's little that's a little amount of money for a trade show so I said to him like but let's do it we'll do this show but let's see who are sponsoring the stages and it was AEG at that time so we went to Taste of London and but before we signed up to I said to Taste um the organizers I said I won't I'm not going to sign up to this three by three stand uh unless you give me the contacts for AEG uh and they're like why you know and i said yeah i said because i'm pretty sure that if you put me on one of their stages they will sell more product um and they put so they put they put me in touch so they said so they said okay well i tell you what take the stand sign on the line but i will put you in touch they put me in touch and i said to ag look we're really looking forward to come to show we've got our three by three stand literally like right opposite your what they had at that point was a mobile unit so they had a mo what they had they sponsored the main stage and then they had this like mobile sort of van like pop-up van and in that pop-up van they had because i contacted them before they decided to put an induction wok burner into the mobile unit to see what it might do and even to this day they don't really sell that wok burner because who wants a wok burner other than someone like me who wants an induction wok burner in their house sure sure but this is really interesting i did a demo a day during that taste of london on their mobile unit and they said they have never since they they started manufacturing that wok burner they have never had any interest in that wok burner whatsoever but during that show they had every single buyer who watched my my demo asked them about that piece of equipment and so after that it was simple we just grew and grew and grew so the value the value of what partnering with these like say a nef is this yeah i mean we're literally recording on there's a net on a nef right stove right now electric stove yeah is electric stove yeah it's an induction yeah yeah um so the value for you was that you weren't having to pay for the trade shows but you were getting in front of the right people right but then within that same conversation so this is december 2011 we opened school of walks doors in 2012 right and during those three months before opening uh aeg with that conversation basically said what are you doing next and i said well we're actually looking to open the bricks and mortar at some point next year would you guys be interested in getting involved and they were our first major sponsor for the cookery school so they provided all the equipment that was put into the cookery school in covent garden for the first eight years eight years later that whole marketing team changed and where do we move to neff interesting so and and then sponsorship because i mean i'm asking this so yeah for my podcast yeah a few things on this i find fascinating yeah i think um the first is maximizing trade shows i think i think myopically you can look at a trade show and say right it's 3k yeah for the days taste london promised you this much footfall okay well that's one way of looking at it but if you you know and i think make as much money as you can and spend as little as you can right that's the that's the principle of being entrepreneur you can get really loose and creative with how you do that i mean i was just at taste london this summer and i saw mob kitchen right had done a truck with the tv program the bear oh yeah nice nice that's maximizing your your space quite literally like again like who on earth says that partnership should exist but it takes one person with a flight of imagination to think fuck it why doesn't it exist same with you guys and this neff and i think there's a real um i think perfect ted did another darling example of this where they had uh you know like i think a lot even myself would think right we've got a great stand let's turn the music on and we'll give people matcha drinks right they just showed all the different occasions of matches they had matcha slush puppies they had um you know like the ice screen rollers right yeah yeah that which was um which was uh matcha so they're basically just really emboldening the stand yeah way more than a sampling and trial driving activity and i think you can add you're literally adding theater you know people weren't interested yeah adding theater yeah adding so much in that but you know obviously we have the capability of doing that because that is literally what we do day in day out yeah but but like it's not let's say it's not dissimilar to influencer collaborations today but where it I do believe it is very different is that we do put excessive amounts of detail in our thinking towards what we can genuinely offer that brand yep okay so I know I'm it I've got a weird a very eclectic career right so I'm in I've got my fingers in a lot of pies and but also in a lot of different industries within this food industry which are which are you know on one side i've got i'm in hospitality with the cookery school on another side i'm a broadcaster through my tv work but in between that i'm sometimes counted as an influencer through and through i would say i'm more of a traditional marketeer than i am an influencer how would you say the two differ i think my without sort of punishing the modern influencer world like of course i i i i think they differ because there is a level of depth to creative strategy within marketing that i think isn't it's very rarely talked about when it comes to influencer marketing so influence influence the simplest what the simplest influencer marketing for me is a company's got some budget let's say they put five percent of their marketing budget on influencer marketing and they've put it out to their PR agency and said I want the best influences or I am on in who are trending right now today in this space go and go and find them for me pay them five thousand pounds ten thousand pounds fifty thousand pounds a shot uh for a video because i want them and i want their numbers that's what they're paying for when i very rarely get those requests okay what i get is if it for my let's say for my personal instagram account is jerry we know you are a we are but really highly respected in the industry of Asian cooking.

33:02Yeah, yeah, yeah. So whether it, we're not, what we're not, we don't want to pay you money to just put stuff on your Instagram account because A, we know we're not going to get that many views from it. And B, it's not, that's not what we stand for. What we stand for is integrity in this space. So, for example, USA Rice, I did a whole load of videos for them at the beginning of last year. And it was a long conversation because that's what they came to me about. And they said, we're tiny. Like, no one knows who we are. We're just an association. Big in some ways, but tiny in other ways. And we're here to talk about rice that comes from one particular country.

33:49um what we want to know is why this rice not it's just good but how to use this stuff you know like you want to see we want to hear the education of it and we want we know that our audience need to be educated about it and so what is it that you can do to help me do that that was that's the question you know so i could okay well is it trade you want to talk to is it consumers you want to talk to and then we go into that detail and we work it backwards from there as to what then the deliverables may be from a marketing sense and I do believe that that level of detail is marketing strategy through and through it's not just sort of one end or a tiny percentage of what a marketing strategy is so you almost think of it as the full funnel that's how I do with the podcast sponsorship it's because i mean i'm learning loads about yeah because obviously i mean we're doing stuff together in the future right sure but it's what you said is like you had your asks and benefits for me i had vice versa we met in the middle now we're going to do stuff right right and it worked and we're both win-win we're both happy days yeah um but i see it with the sponsorship as well it's like where you get top top of the funnel views and from like a very niche audience one um and then two further down the funnel where it gets the conversion as well like i can help you convert by whether that's through an introduction or something like that like that's but i'm trying to maybe be a bit more strategic with how i package this up actually i think the conversion very rarely comes into it yeah because i don't unless unless you're a sales personal department that's that's the sales department's job marketing is there to support that conversion yeah i don't believe it necessarily i think it can that the creativity around whether it's one particular campaign or the creative thinking around strategy gets completely stamped on if numbers are the only thing you're thinking about yes is there an example of like is there an example where you think of like creative marketing strategy like the exeler of that like it could be with something you've done or i went to i went to a um a talk uh around cultural relevance um i made a note of that actually yeah that sounds really interesting um at anthropology over economics or something yeah yeah anthropology over economics and and there was the um head of marketing for william grant and sons um William Grunton's son.

36:37Drinks company. Yeah. She used to be the head of marketing for Red Bull. Amazing. And Red Bull came up time and time again in that conversation. Yeah. That's the epitome of it for me. Like, if you look at that, like what they've done, when you think Red Bull today, like from a marketing point of view, what comes to your mind? Well, just that fucking jumping off the moon. off the moon divers jumping off cliffs um like people jumping off planes yeah nothing to do with the drink yeah I'm just trying to think like not playing devil not playing devil's advocate here but like teasing this around with you is they've got huge budgets so they can do that but how would you do it as a linking this back to like as a brand who's got fuck all money like basically because you did it I do think it's possible I think it's possible I mean again we've got a niche audience but school of walking itself has now what 525 000 subscribers on youtube and 45 million plus views across the channel and that is is none of that is viral like that is the key for me is that none of it is viral those 525 000 people are genuine engaged ambassadors of our brand that's taken me and the team seven and a half years to build on youtube now the the key for that for us was always looking at quality of content and engagement not worrying about whether we hit a million views on a video so that's what i'm applying with my youtube now right i'm just i'm learning loads from you mate because i'm like i'm not i'm just looking at the total watch time right because the views may be fuck all right i may get 70 views on a video but if that video has got that podcast i should say you know there's let's i'm trying to don't know what the numbers are but say there's like 15 hours worth of views that means whoever has watched it has stuck around and they're they're a diehard fan and as you say like the likelihood of i think asian cookery is slightly different to like very niche challenger brand of course but it is so it's like i may never be able to get to hopefully you know the hundred to five hundred thousand right yeah and i'm cool with that but as long as that watch time is going up then that's all i care if you've got 10 000 people listening to you are dotting in and out of the same podcast for an hour like i do yeah yeah you know i i i couldn't sit in and then watch like your rory Sutherland podcast for three hours but I've dotted in and out like every few weeks for like five minutes of it you know that's the but but I'm doing that and I've spoke you know I'm speaking to the reason why we're talking now is because I speak to other founders in the industry who are also listening and you probably don't even know they're listening yeah the key thing is is that if you if you understand how to own that niche and you constantly look to better the quality of your ownership of that niche yeah then i i'm a big believer that that at some point you will find that success and and although we have had our failures like we did in grocery and we can talk about that but and but the but the the key for me is that once you've got that traction you then can always come back to your your incredibly engaged audience to find where you need to go next like to ask them you know or like just we put videos out on youtube it's almost that our audience don't like you know that quote which is like revenue is vanity something else uh profit is sanity it's like top line views is vanity and like engagement is sanity and i think there's similar parallels to that yeah like you know it's i think there's loads in that so just on the youtube yes how in terms of the yes so i think one thing uh i think it needs a lot of work but I think it's getting there is, you know, to begin with, it was a fucking shit house.

40:53It was a shit show. My podcast, the YouTube side of things. Yeah. But, you know, we've now got a proper introduction. We've just hit that, like that 1000 fan, 1000 subscribers, which is, I mean, I've got your YouTube back behind you, mate. But I just said to you. Mate, you don't get the next one until you hit a million. Okay. So you get the first one at 100 ,000 and then you've got from 100 ,000, you've got another 900 ,000 to hit. yeah that's super inspirational but but the um but i mean because i just you know when you go on that when you've got two subscribers you just think a thousand i'm like i was like i will be kind of doing naughty things the day that happens yeah um and it happened funny enough on the weekend so it's very serendipitous this timing but and then so i believe the content is good um i believe the the introduction's good the packaging and the branding and thumbnails are great what's all the other shit yeah to begin to get to grow it like what is because i don't i think it's the same whether it's youtube or any other social media channel the key is consistency yeah um so a consistency in quality uh a consistency in like your thumbnails and what you put out there uh and uh which I'm personally terrible at with my own Instagram because I don't give it the time and place but with YouTube for sure we were very particular about that and frequency depending on the platform yeah so if you're gonna go out once a week then you pick your day and you put it out at the same time every week yeah yeah um and the same applies to if it like it's i i look at it this way it's like tiktok is like here in terms of like engagement but like up here in terms of like viewing figures yeah yeah and reach then you've got instagram and then you've got youtube and then you've got tv right yeah and funnily enough i'm in those top that what i see is my top two spaces which might be very different to a more classic influencer who might put tiktok and instagram and then go down yeah that's what i've that's what i've got in my sponsorship deck I know you've seen it it's like it's like the you know like I don't know that quadrant almost and it's like awareness and engagement TikTok's right on that bottom corner but then a podcast even more so than TV in terms of the engagement it's because you're basically why I love a value of a podcast as I was listening to someone saying this is that for a really engaged fan you're basically walking around in someone's head all the time if they're getting on the train which means like I think someone said you pick a podcast based I feel like I know Joe Rogan I've never met I've never even been to Austin but I've listened to so much of his podcast that I think I know him I can understand that but I'm not a big podcast listener until more recently actually I started to listen to yours my wife's a big podcast listener and some really close friends literally don't stop going on about these podcasts that they're listening to but I can see why people get hooked on podcasts because you're right like you're doing it when you're walking on your commute like on your commute to work yeah um or you might be walking through the park and want to kind of focus on something but not necessarily like be fully invested every minute of that of that chat and i think and tv is an interesting one because like and this is like really clear comparison and this is useful for anyone any challenger band any brand at all is that when my itv show came out in 2022 we were hitting um like six it was on average in a weekend 600 000 views um per weekend for 10 weekends in a row on that particular show but the way they count views on tv are incredibly different to the way a tiktok view is counted so for the one hour episode shows on tv you would only get a one count if that person had watched the tv show for 30 minutes plus that's so interesting whereas a tiktok is lit could literally be a split second right what are you going to learn about any any one any person or brand in that split second versus 30 minutes yeah there's i i talk about i wrote the thing on this about brand depth versus brand um brand awareness a lot of people talk about brand awareness like we need to get our npr s score up like who knows about us in the country which i think is important at some point on say say you're a brand like big brand yeah you know then you need to really worry about getting the average brand awareness when you're a small brand you need to build brand depth which is you going to those neff trade shows and saying right i'm gonna literally show you how to cook some noodles or stir fry like that is that's that connection you can get and as you say like people are so maniacally obsessed with the one second clip and the million views but there's no depth there and you see a lot of these tiktokers who can't make money because right yeah there's where's the depth like you're doing a silly breakdance mate ain't gonna make any well the the depth is going to come from a lot of thought and experience you know it's not something that you pick up overnight I'm not saying that all TikTokers and influencers aren't going to be able to make it but it's a very very crowded space and it's difficult to understand what is actually required of you like and actually like within my trade let's say for the last 15 years being in in this industry for a fairly long time and actually in most cases having the opportunity to be quite near the top of each part of the industry I found it fascinating watching other people in in those spaces do what they do for example in the tv world it's incredibly daunting to do what I do but when I sit and watch other presenters like you know even people within the same space like ken hom or gok one like gok and gok is an incredible presenter he is so good at what he does what makes yeah because like you've as you said you you're in the top stratosphere of the you're on sunday brunch on sunday yeah right yeah yeah yeah but like that's the top stratosphere right what makes like what makes a fucking good presenter like what is so good about gok one why is he why is he so good he he knows himself he's comfortable within himself but what's more important is he really knows his audience like yeah and he's got numerous businesses but he's so good at flitting as well isn't he the dj he's got his glasses business he's got the fashion business you know numerous different businesses of which he might focus more on one or the other depending on where he is in life but the but the key that the real inspiration for me looking at like Gok he's a good he's a good friend you know you look at him and you go gosh he really knows how to and it's not just switch it on but he really knows how to like be true to himself around what audience he's talking to yeah at that moment in time yeah it might change like we do we all know each other from the golden chopsticks awards which is an Asian restaurant you know the Asian restaurant awards right and between us you know I'm on the judging panel with you know Ken Hom, Fuchsia Dunlop or the like sort of you know I call it the Knights of the Chinese Food Roundtable sort of thing you know it's like okay we're there we congregate once a year we're there we're comfortable having chats with each other around what each other are doing or whatever but like gok presents those awards and he literally owns that room yeah you know but he makes everyone in the room feel included how in your opinion i think it's just a genuine warmth like so so so it's like it's an award ceremony but there's no pretense yeah we're there we all know we're there to have a big party and celebrate the industry and so that's therefore what his job is, is to make sure that we all celebrate it, right?

49:16Even though he has to be the loud mouth in the room, he's there waiting for someone from one of the tables to jump up and dance with him. You know, that's one of the beauties of like watching people present like that. I'm not that type of character, you know, but I know that naturally I'm lucky enough to be good at presenting what I present but if you know I've had in the past you know opportunities to do shows like dancing on ice but I've said no because it's not me you know like so like it's and that then like trickles down into everything you do in business no matter what like so we failed in grocery but when we went into what we where we did succeed in grocery was we stayed true to ourselves grocery for you from playing it back yeah was like the opportunity to go go on dancing on ice like it sounds fucking great you know massive viewership yeah but then actually you're like bambi on ice when you get into into into the grocery yeah stratosphere yeah and that's a great summary mate because it really we were we got in to tesco's injuries waitrose uh within less than a year of starting that grocery project the reason why we got into those three major multiples was not because we had the right product or what and also not because we were ready but we got in because of our brand yeah so this is let's we're gonna keep we're gonna get there by just all this context building super important so you've got people to to the school of walk you've now grown the audience on youtube yeah um that business the school of walk is a healthy business at this stage yeah yeah yeah because and then what so what is the the step one two three to grocery like what's the product who calls you first sure what what was imagine it's like i can imagine sainsbury's being like yeah look i'm fucking dancing on ice you're like right you're glistening top on you know getting ready to the razzle dazzle in those days i probably would have said yes yeah and um look 2016 17 i'd say nev and i were at a stage where we pretty much had maybe one to two years of like hey this is going really well uh with the cookery school you know just the covary school yeah and and you know our classes are i think at that time at that stage maybe 60 70 capacity it was bit it was getting busy and um we sort of thought about it and let's say we were having our first business marriage seven year itch so it was like do we just carry as we are or are we hungry for more yeah yeah yeah um bang on your podcast there and and and and we we both agreed that we wanted more and the reason why we wanted more was because why was more grocery versus more cookery schools so no it was a com it was conversation of okay What is more for School of Work?

52:36Yeah. Is it, do we open more cookery schools? Or do we do something completely different that we feel is more scalable from a, that may well at some point give us some sort of exit? Okay. Which when we start, when I started School of Work, I had no inkling that it would A, get as big as it has. and B, I would ever even think of selling it because I thought I might just start a cookery thing that would be in people's homes for a few years and I might make a little wage for myself. That's what I really thought. But once I'd realised the sort of opportunity that just the name itself has given us, School of Rock.

53:19Is it based on School of Rock? Well, yeah, it comes from that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe. It says what it does on its end. Fucking good name. And it's got, you know, and there's a pun to it. so it's like okay great this is like Romeo in yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I'll never come up with a better business name right yeah my editor um I we bought a new editor on for the podcast and I saw we're doing this just to check out this channel School of Walking he's like dude that's the best name I've ever heard right yeah and it's great and it works and and and so we thought okay look we've got to push this we've got to make it work and if we're going to do it it's all about the brand and so let's how do we think we're going to grow the brand and we decided YouTube was the right way because YouTube is the best place for a brand to do it like to grow an audience to grow a how-to audience for cheap um you know because people go onto YouTube wanting to learn something that's really why people go there so we did that and then once we did that and we started to see that working then we were like okay this could be a lot bigger than what it is now we still think that we still think that school of work has this opportunity to be huge absolutely huge at the moment it's pretty much scaled that back down to one little cookery school in central london in a road that no one knows and a youtube channel really yeah but and we have a walk range and that goes well but it's had its ups and downs and currently through going through a bit of a slump you know so you you look at that and you go okay what is it that's going to grow and then that's the point when I went back to my group of you know or my peers looking at my links and my network and went who is it who do I know from the past that knows this industry and that's So Max Reese joined us.

55:20So Max and I were on the same graduate scheme at Labrooks PLC. Oh, jokes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was the first year intake. He was the second year intake. But as soon as I left Labrooks, which was quite early on, after about sort of 18 months, the second person to leave that grad scheme was Max. and he moved straight over to goo and he was part of the founding team of goo amazing yeah max has always been interested in food but he went down a different route the grocery route to to where where i went and him and i kind of followed each other's paths for the first few years of me starting school of work and then as he moved into metcalf skinny popcorn and he ended up being the MD of Metcalf's before they sold to Kettle him and I started talking so he then said Jez I think you guys would make an amazing mark in in grocery like you know can I convince you and then I put it to Nev and Nev has always been wanting to do something like that anyway because he always thought things like how what clock and you know all those sort of fun little educational terms that we'd brought up you know and trademarked in in with school of walk within the school of branding he was like we've got to be able to make something more commercially viable and scalable with this brand um and uh and then we put our heads together and we thought you know what like max you know maybe maybe you're right so did max come in as like a partner or so max bought in small percentage and then we um uh and at that point he hadn't started the curators yet so if you don't know like if you know the curators like obviously now no ed very well yeah ed is ed's great and the two of them i met ed even before we started sort of max kept brought in with school of walk um but at the same time as starting the curators he basically became one of our shareholders yeah okay and then and this point there's no call from one of the big four supermarkets no well interestingly we had dabbled with them but on a licensing deal in 2015 and 16.

57:41so it's like their own range we did it through a a distributor called petty wood uh this is interesting on the benefits thing uh in hindsight we did it and it didn't work and it was with a range of noodle meal kits so you had a pouch of noodles a pouch of sauce and um or a couple of a marinade and a pouch of stir fry sauce essentially um and we got a range through Pettywood into Tesco that was on the shelves in Tesco for 18 months we were tiny little players we didn't know we were and we're so far removed from that product even being made where it was made out in Thailand and how it was made we had no clue how to play in that space whatsoever which is why when we when Max and I and Nev started talking about this grocery sort of doing it in-house and growing a grocery brand properly we thought yeah okay you know what this time around we should we should take it in-house and do it like any other challenger brand but you haven't raised money at this point you're funding it through the cookery school We raised a bit of cash with personal investors like Max and Ben Marsden, our other shareholder.

59:13But outside of that, since that day, we've not taken any other cash in. Cool. And then what were the SKUs you created? How many? So we created this. So within six months of us starting. Are you OK with that? Yeah, I don't think it's. Yeah, it'll be fine. yeah with within six months of us starting the school of what um grocery project we um tesco got were interested yeah at that point we knew we were going to create some stir fry kits

59:56but and possibly the bow kit but we didn't know what it was going to look like and how we were going to do it. So Tesco came in really early on, way too early in hindsight. And they basically said, we love your brand so much. We want product from you. What does it look like? We didn't have any prototypes, anything. And we said, okay, give us some time. We'll bring you some product to have a look at. they said okay we'll give you some time but not much yeah and i think from memory we had about six weeks to come up with some product that we would sell to tesco for them to put on shelf and that point we were in we had consultants and sales consultants in um inventor brand uh helping us with the sales like sort of building this strategy the sales strategy for grocery and they were i think part of the the the sort of hard learning for me was that some reason there seems to be this massive fear of buyers in the industry and i even today i cannot see why like yeah it's i think it's what's interesting i suppose you're at an advantage because you had the cookery school going really well yeah but this is what i'm thinking because i think a lot of brands is as like you could actually kind of be a bit more bolshy with a buyer being like well i've actually already got a successful business that whereas i think a small brand who's their base someone said to me like a buyer a brand's early stage founders livelihood is in the hands of a buyer yeah no i and i wasn't dissimilar to that i was definitely in that space like okay but but even with the school of walks sort of backing because it is still our livelihood you know nev and i had to like outside of the the the initial investment you know we had to put our houses on the line for this you know like you know so until very recently that's still been a big thing hanging over my head like i can't move house without this going well you know like yeah um so i i was definitely in that same court as all these other founders but why weren't you scared of buyers enough because i'm like this will help a lot of people yeah yeah but i was never scared of buyers because for me whether they make whether you make the sale to them or not if your product doesn't trickle through you're going to lose that money yeah yeah yeah okay because the way because the way the industry works a like if you're using co-packers and co-manufacturers you're tied into quantities uh or minimum volumes uh most goods in our world are perishable so they have a shelf life you have to move forwards in a way that in a with in a way with buyers where it's almost like they need to know what the shelf life is but outside of the shelf life it's your problem like so once you know if you've got 75 000 units sitting in a warehouse somewhere that they've told you to buy to fulfill their possible sales of five or ten units per week per shop then you need to be able to facilitate that right so you've got to put the investment in whatsoever like no matter what happens you've got to put the investment in it's not going to come from even if you have the distribution like we did a thousand two hundred stores spread across three multiples we were like in stock like you know 150 000 products in stock out like out in debt so so you look at it that way and you go right what if if i'm to look back at it and do it again like why did we take on the industry's fear of buyers i'm not saying i wasn't scared of buyers at that point in time but if i had the choice i wouldn't take on the industry's narrative of these buyers are the be all and end all of whatever you must do like and and that's how we were almost trained into this industry on for the first year of being in the industry to be just to be able to fulfill the ask of the biggest multiple that was our biggest mistake in 2018 was that we tesco said this is amazing you guys are amazing you guys are going to easily hit minimum of three units per shot per week on and spread across what was the product sorry at this point uh three stir fry kits and two uh no three stir fry kits and one bao kit flavor so make your own bao bun kit you get is the meat in that or is it like no you would you had a sachet of like quick rise flour yeah um uh a pickling salt and a uh a marinade and a stir fry sauce yeah all for three pound 50 and also i suppose bao back in 2018 i mean now now bao's on a lot of menus yes but like then it was a very new avant-garde it's a grocery brought their frozen boughs out a year after we brought out make your own bough bin bun kits out yeah and and and mns and all the supermarkets brought their frozen versions out of like ready-made dim sum or boughs yeah a year after that yeah so i'd like to think that actually and i'm pretty sure we were the instigators of that type of product in a supermarket in in the western supermarket sure but but what we didn't have was the pocket the deep deep enough pockets to be able to transition ourselves quickly to compete with the likes of itzu and mns yeah so so and also with from a product perspective we knew that very quickly within a year or so we knew that we had the wrong product on the market we were we we got sort of uh sort of blinded into the meal kit space where actually in meal kits it's incredibly hard to make any any margin here how is it how come well because you can think that each product had three or four different packs inside so it's the packaging where the money a carton box yeah it's the one trying to work out because the is it of which there were different formats of ingredients inside each one of those pouches yeah so if there's a flour bag and a sauce bag you need a different machine for a flour bag versus a sauce bag yes yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah that's what i'm saying it's basically the packaging that costs the series that's what adds it all up yeah yeah and i suppose you need it in a for it to be to stand out on shelf you need it in a specific format right so i don't know if anyone's tried to put like almost like a recipe um box and like almost like a tube yeah you just put it in one thing but you know what i mean that you still need to no wait no they did in in the end i think mns started doing that with the tubes but or not a tube like a cylinder yeah but um or you might get those little nor like um stock tubes in like you know a cylinder of the same of the same size pack sources and they've obviously done all of their they've got all the money and the know-how and the expertise to to be able to create those packs like straight off the bat but for us as a tiny little challenge brand a small company we didn't do we didn't know that we were just creating stuff you know we'll go oh okay well what if we the pack look like this or what if the pack look like that but what we don't know is when you make 150 000 of them that each one of them is going to squash the other pack and then they're going to have 50 yield you know um i mean we were like at the start of doing the tesco job you know we i think the first order was 12 000 packs the 12 000 packs it with but what that really was was 48 000 separate packages that went into 12 000 boxes right yeah yeah of which we had to convince a co-manufacturer to produce this stuff specific to the recipes that we'd developed yeah so it's getting complicated before you've even jumped in it was mightily complicated in the end those 12 000 packs the first ones that went to tesco this is fascinating like in hindsight incredibly stressful when we're in it i could it's like it was like my i never know call it our pickling weekend sort of thing but we basically had one factory doing all of the like packing of the flour and pickling salts another factory uh in i remember at that time holland in netherlands uh producing the sauce pots those sauce pots were being sent to the factory in kent who were making up the flour sachets and the pickling salts they agreed with us that they would invest in the machinery for this powder packing um back like these sachets but so they invested in it but what they didn't do was invest in the training of that machine and they basically just put a whole staff working yeah and understanding how this new machine works they've never done it before so this is two weeks before we were due to deliver the product to to tesco um the they were having problem with this new machine didn't know how how to work it and every single flower pack and pickling salt pack had holes in the packaging like in the seal they wouldn't seal properly and so i said to the i I called the CEO up of the manufacturing facility and he said, oh, I'm on holiday.

1:10:52Oh, fucking hell. Yeah, yeah, yeah. When it rains, it falls. And I'm sure everyone has these issues. So I was like, right. Are you okay for me to go straight into the factory and take charge of this project? Because it needs to be done. And he was like, yeah, fine. You can do it because I trust you. You're going to get what you need done and just whatever you need from my team, just tell him. I went in and the whole team. country kent right yeah none of the team knew how to work this machine so i had a look at the manual and my engineering like something had to come from somewhere so i was like right at least i understand how to read process and that is literally individually reading every single line in a manual in a manual always helps so i read every single line in the manual and then Then I was like, said to Nev, I was like, Nev, I really need you.

1:11:47We're going to need to work this out ourselves. And over the next two weeks, we're going to have to work out how we can get this stuff over here packaged, sealed before it can then get labeled. But the labeling machine wasn't working either. So we had to take it over to a labeling machine over in Essex. And we ended up calling, like doing a whole lot of research. and within a couple of days I found some experts in this particular type of machine they're the only experts of for powder packing machines in the UK who I managed to convince to come down on a consultancy basis for two days and they came down for two days at the beginning of that and between him the consultant and myself we then wrote a standard operating procedure for this new machine so i wrote this like 38 page document on how to use a powder packing machine that i'd never even seen in my life before we did that and we managed to get a like 90 yield but what that meant was the 10 of packs that weren't properly sealed we had to manually look for so we looked through god 48 000 packs in three and a half days and we were never and i were still doing that in the um labeling man uh warehouse uh the uh three days before i went to tesco and we were knee deep in pickling salts by the end of it wild mate such an amazing story how many in terms of the there's two there's three things that i'm picking up from you mate which i think are really fucking interesting so one and this is julian metcalf has this ability and i think you have it as well is to hold simplicity in complexity it's a paradox but like right i think it may be your engineering background but like as you talked about being in media influencer uh cookery school hospitality at one point grocery range incredibly complex things but you can see simplicity in it same thing like i i would i mean i i don't follow any instructions like the i've got like yeah yeah yeah i'm just like i'll fucking figure out a way to do it like yeah but just but i just sometimes i just i just i don't know what it is but like i can even as a kid i couldn't follow any instructions i'll just do it my own way um but i think there's a real go get a discipline in what you've just done there and i think it will help a lot of people um in terms of just rolling your sleeves up and getting it done yeah but then i also see this ability and then so there's there's two things i'm picking up there but then also this ability to uh go and get deals done because you got given linking this back to making as much money as you can with spending as little money as you can yeah yeah when you were going and you weren't scared of the buyers how did you go and get a deal where i would love to know how you structured that in terms of this we'll offer you this but we need these asks how do we win how do you win yeah that's that's much harder yeah it's much much harder with um with grocery buyers yep uh and and especially the the big ones um uh because really i think it's the only time in business i've ever felt sort of held over a barrel like you can't you on the one hand like no matter where we were in the space and i and i do think this is kind of almost like an industry norm that shouldn't be a norm contracting isn't really a thing into the very last second as in getting the contract on the right like yeah you know going we so we we wouldn't get you know from the from the buyers or grocery we wouldn't get a contract a written contract until an order comes through really yeah you know of course you've got all the formal setup of being a supplier and all that but that doesn't really mean anything until you've made that first sale right and then on the other on the other side with where you know especially if you're co-manufacturing or co-packing even anything like that as a small supplier or as a small buyer of of you know and a tiny company doing really small orders it we struggled to get anything from our manufacturers that said this is what we're going to do for you yeah so then sort of going back to your sort of question on like how we could how we could ask for something from the buyers it was very one way it wasn't it was very much like you need to give us this and but they that's that they'd promise you the thousand stores right so right at this stage so tesco i think they started at like uh maybe 350 stores uh which soon became all of the um mate all of the the extras the big ones yeah um because obviously our product is was ambient aisle um a you know world not world foods it was mainstream world foods that's what they called it at that point yeah so it wasn't um the world foods brands we were next to the blue dragons and the shallwoods of the world okay yeah um which again was weird for a for a non-existent for a challenger brand that didn't exist the day before to then have a listing in 350 stores next to the biggest players in the industry at that time it wasn't that wasn't really the done thing yeah but i'm just trying to go like if we go back as i say to 2018 is it's i kind of to kind of try and empathize with the opposition as it's like in terms of dancing on ice analogy right yeah it's like you've made you've they've promised you x number of stores which is fucking loads yeah you're on the cusp as i say now bow's pretty ubiquitous right back then it wasn't so it's a very intensive product you've built a strong brand yeah like it seems like you're going to kind of go out and ice skate and do loads of fucking twirls and shit like that but then what actually happened once you've gone onto the ice or gone into store which has forced you to like be as i said like bambi so one is positioning next to a massive whopper brand yeah what else went wrong and this is what else went wrong yeah because then you've got it so just again for context so you've got how many what are the other stores right okay so we went to 350 tesco's very quickly after that waitrose wanted a piece of it right so waitrose obviously like tesco yeah and and and also our sales people were doing the right job and that is trying to get us into stores right yeah um and so did you have you'd hired a team at this point we hired a an external team right um sales team so we had an account manager who was dealing with all the buyers and that account manager what in essence actually going back a little the account manager is probably more fearful of the buyers than i was but we let her lead it so it's like okay lead lead lead you know what you're doing we we haven't got a clue like we really didn't didn't have a clue so we were following that lead and we went she said waitress is keen i was like okay let's bend over backwards for waitress what we learned with waitress was that even though let's say from a consumer perspective they're seen as the uh this sort of almost ultimate like supermarket like that really cares for the small supplier whatever actually where they were the most hardball like yeah they wanted is that because you were in tesco before do you reckon i think that's just the way they are like that from what from my experience is it's it's it's all about what what the margin that is it's all about your they have a base margin which they'll agree with you i think ours is like 41 but with a guaranteed annual spend on marketing yeah of like something like 25 grand a year yeah for a tiny company that's a lot of money yeah obviously in comparison into blue dragon it's not okay but you put like so that it ended up being like 46 margin for waitrose on where we whereas we're on a 40 a 39 or 40 margin with with tesco and what margin were you making on that product uh all park 28 yeah yeah um outside of um media spend yeah outside of discounted times.

1:20:59I forget what they're calling there. So was that, yeah. You know, four times a year you have to discount your product. That's what no one talks about as well. So there's four times a year you have to discount your product, but margin maintain the sale to the supermarket. Yeah. So that 40 % or 46 % you still have to give to the supermarket. And then to actually make that promo work. So if I actually look at our 28 % margin, but then spread it across the year with our four times a year in every single multiple um so that's 12 times a year with three multiples yeah yeah yeah 12 times a year that's not even including your your fucking spend on to drive people to store so your social media your promos your gondor ends all that shit it's like the mind boggles as to how anyone even wants to go into the space like also the other thing on miss is like the cost of business which the cost of businesses increases as so say you make 40 % in year one right you're waitrose's new shiny toy yes they're gonna be able to they'll be like oh we'll give you a gondola end we'll give you this spec we'll give you a front of the store gets to year two okay we'll give you a little bit less we want a bit more money out of you year five it's like they're you're not a challenger brand anymore like no you've got to fucking pay to play but interesting so between the three so we had sainsbury's waitrose tesco yeah we had in total by end of year one of sales we had a thousand two hundred stores big distribution everyone was asking us how the hell did you do that that's wild yeah i want to be there and we were going shit why are we here yeah yeah yeah yeah like what have we done to ourselves it's a poison chalice isn't it really like it's uh it really was for us it was because we were spending we were losing the best part of 100 grand a year easily like and that was that on the marketing or was that on the cost of cost a total cost and but maybe more than that probably more like close to close to 150k a year um for three years we were on the shelves and we struggled we really struggled not just professionally but mentally um it was exhausting and i would say that actually until very recently between myself and my business partner nev we were so exhausted by itself like ourselves we're exhausted by ourselves and each other having to go through that process but the the beauty like coming back to i think one of your questions was like how did we start to get into those and get that distribution was max is honestly like one of the most pragmatic calm patient people i know and so eloquent with the way that he describes business and his experience within this world this grocery world and and he's sort of handheld us all the way through although not necessarily being like involved in the day-to-day and that helped us to get the distribution it helped us to do all the things that we'd had set out to do as business partners to sort of try and grow this potential opportunity and we did do that so in some ways we did succeed but from a financial perspective and an operational perspective we didn't but i don't know if that makes sense at all but it was it was like this patience what i've learned what i'm trying to say i think is what i've learned from it is that between myself and my business partners like what we've all gathered from it is that we're all still business partners today and we we've we've learned to be incredibly patient with each other because you have to be there's no other way forwards especially if you're a challenger brand in what is highly highly competitive space owned in the for the most part by companies conglomerates who have billions to spend yeah yeah yeah yeah it's interesting because it's it's groceries a lot of brands are built in grocery um i just think it's i mean i've done so many of these podcasts right i think it's one of those things that it's both wrong and right i think i believe some things can be both right and wrong so for example uh don't give up right yeah can be can be right so don't give up if like if you're that if you're actually really close to the thing you want to do don't fucking give up but if i'm you know i'm five foot fucking six i should give up trying to be a tennis player a basketball player or a swimmer like it's just ain't gonna happen sometimes you need to have a bit of you know puddles of pragmatism here and i think with grocery it's it's kind of the same it's like you absolutely need grocery to build a huge brand so many people have said that's been the podcast right brands are built with grocery partners but then someone like ben branson who built seed lip says i don't want to build a business based on four four big players that i kind of have no control in yeah yeah and i think ultimately the nuance is in the middle it's like well maybe don't give school of walk a thousand stars off the boot maybe give them another one i don't understand why readers don't do this maybe give them you know like innocent started with 20 stores right let them walk yeah let them get back to the ice skating analogy let them fucking have a little go on the like mini go around yeah right and then let them go yeah and then i think everyone who says like you can't build a brand unless you're in grocery well most of these people have built brands for a long time so they've been in it for you know eight nine ten years and they've got the muscle to throw at grocery right yeah yeah you're literally like bambi on ice if you're going into a thousand stores off the off the jump yeah and you're right and and and with that analogy you know with bambi on ice and with we were trying to do our 12s but we pretty much fell down at at the first hurdle and was what was the and and broke our backs over it like you know and and that and that was so was it the rate of sale that wasn't working or was it your stress levels or every part of it wasn't working it by the end of it by and of course like covid hit in 2020 interestingly what was really fascinating was what the tesco buyers thought our our stir-fry kits would go through the roof they barely even started so we took the stir-fry kits off the market and the only product that stayed on the market for those three years was the bao bun kit we then brought out the gyoza make your own gyoza kit this is like really niche stuff in mainstream supermarkets that at one point were selling naturally three units per shot per week in the first six months of business and i was like oh that's interesting that like that's showing there's something here showing some promise of course then it's who brought out the ready-made bows um in frozen and then from there yes yeah i think i think and it's who is a i mean i've interviewed julian like his his thinking's he's a genius um and i think it kind of goes back to what we were saying before we we hit record unfortunately in a lot of categories there can only there can only be one to two to three winners and if you're up against someone who's you know it's like having me you know a slight porker doing 100 meters versus fucking insane bomb only one person's gonna win that yeah i mean i watch the the muscle and the steroids and the and they're willing to go at it and i think do you think retrospect's a wonderful thing but do you think if you'd gone into pre so it wasn't a kit it was like a school of walk gyoza yeah i actually think that i i actually think that with school of walk the only real place in grocery is ingredients like actual ingredients because you got to look at what our brand does and what our ethos of the brand is you know it's learn laugh eat yeah you know and the learn is number one because it's school of walk yeah and it's educational so the educational side of school of walk I believe needs to be at the heart of what we do whatever whatever happens I love that's really um bold what you've said there because you know a lot of people say linked to your values right but actually sticking to them and also retrospects wonderful thing but it's like it has to link into what you're trying we were trying to do that with the kits yeah that's why the kit makes but but but the kits were almost too niche within the supermarket world you know meal kits yeah you look at the ones that have succeeded spice taylor being the probably number one they did incredibly well and they got out at the right time what's the moment you when you say to is it nev i said that right what's that your business partner's name nev nev sorry yeah um what's the point when you just say you know you pour yourself a cup of tea or we have a pint you just say right let's go back to the drawing board uh even when covid hit early 2020 we knew we it wasn't right for us yeah uh and we but we i mean i personally in the first lockdown was completely stunned at the loss that our hospitality business was making like you know we were pretty much down 90 percent um so i took a bit of time off furloughed myself and then but when we came back in the whole discussion between never night between then and the beginning of or end of 2020 was how are we going to get out of this like and where where and when are we going to cut our losses and we started at that point early 2020 you just said to the retailers look this is not happening anymore we first started looking at how we could sell off all our stock uh at like anything for anything yeah and then and nev did a great job of that and then um uh and then we looked at how we could you know just to recuperate as much cost as possible whilst then informing the retailers about exit.

1:31:26I'm just checking this. What's the... I want to move into Asian cookery now. Yeah, yeah. That's something that fascinates me. So, I mean, there's a whole panoply of wonderful pan-Asian ingredient recipes on your YouTube. And, yeah, I think I'm so grateful to speak to you, mate, because I think you did that program with Joe Swash, which was going around. Oh, yeah, yeah. What are some of the craziest things that you've learned about kind of specifically Asian cuisine? Yeah. Most people wouldn't understand. And maybe that could be a story from your travels or like. Yeah, that's a big question. I think the Asian cuisine has been in the UK and in the Western world for generations.

1:32:15Right. For decades and decades. um and for some reason it's taken this long to sort of to become trendy sure yeah and actually even when i started school walk teaching people in their own homes 2009 it wasn't really talked about you know chinese food wasn't talked about at all like street food wasn't really a thing in the UK back then uh and and it was in the US but not in the UK and and then when I started it I thought okay this might work interestingly when I first started the business it was um it only took six months or in 2009 for school of walk customers like who were who I was teaching in their own homes for 50 of those customers to come from google so when i first started i thought 100 of this business was going to be word of mouth but what i found was that over 50 of the of my customers in the first six months were searching for how do i cook chinese food basically yeah and so at that point it was Chinese food was like the leader in Asian cuisine and then when we opened the doors in 2012 it was um still Chinese food because we opened the door and we were offering different types of Asian cuisine from the start but none of our Thai classes Japanese classes Korean classes were selling at all but our Chinese classes the wok classes were the first ones to become sold out of course our name's school of walks so it's easier to sell that right but but what we this is really interesting from a sort of data perspective and trend perspective is that we it's almost like with the number of customers we have like 12 000 people go through school walks doors a year now that's that's our our customer base at the cookery school how much of that's repeat actually versus new probably not that much actually yeah yeah like like no no that's in the repeat customers i'm guessing about 20 yeah right okay yeah um but mostly new customers amazing yeah and that like the the process of by which that physical process of them walking through the door or booking onto a specific type of cuisine class because they're still all our classes are still split by cuisine that is literally like a working focus group of what's happening in the industry because we would know if thai classes were or if thai food was becoming popular from our thai classes filling up it's mad though like i think with looking at the restaurants now is the two things have changed in the last so just give some so i think 2011 someone said to me it's the founder of pizza pilgrims didn't say this to me said on the podcast 2011 was like 1962 for food was like 1962 was for music was for food 1962 beatles yeah summer of love the beatles rolling stones all these people 2011 you have um pizza pilgrims you have byron burger you have honest burger you have street food becoming big you have the birth of social media 2011 2012 so basically this whole food revolution bubbled up and yeah and then bow london is 2012 yeah yeah so exactly yeah yeah it's not wild how it took stats so if you look at the early adopters of bow london 2012 yeah yeah 2018 six years that's the adoption curve right and we knew that like we were living that this was wild as you were literally like the fucking tentacles into right and and about silent we were quiet like this tiny little business knowing seeing just from our like at that point we were probably only like five six thousand customers a year but that five six thousand customers a year were telling us what what the industry was going to do and then i suppose this one i mean these are just my kind of stabs in the dark here but like i feel like thai foods now having a renaissance i.e from this typical kind yeah yeah you know that you know the thai like you know like kill regional foods are coming up like so yeah the chinese regional foods started doing that through sichuan food whatever now you look at chinatown today versus chinatown 15 years ago completely different like we've got paint a picture of how it's different yeah 15 years ago Chinatown London was 99 % Cantonese cuisine okay what's can't like food from southern China one dong province like or Hong Kong based you know that sort of southern Chinese food the sweet and sour porks of the world the crispy chili beefs of the world they're good they're black bean beefs right when and the chow mains now like but then when you and then when you move through in segments of five years and five years and five years from 15 years ago you I could I could see that change because we used to we were doing tours in Chinatown in 2012 that would we'd come back and cook the food that we'd pick up from Chinatown and we'd stop in restaurants at that point obviously there was a there was a big change in Chinatown London a few years back and actually Shaftesbury plc who own most of the buildings there are also our landlords they called us up and and said Jeremy do you mind coming in for a meeting because we're changing this whole of Chinatown in the next two or three years and we wouldn't mind some advice and I was like well what advice do you want from me like sick you know and like well you know from I'm pretty sure you know from your customers what's where what's moving like what like what where you know what we should perhaps be looking at and i said sure i'll have a meeting and we we were like there going oh maybe we could look for a bigger premises or something like that in chinatown they were like no way can you afford these premises in chinatown how much are they roughly i mean one of the bigger ones might go for a million pound a year and like but like the the those like the only companies that can afford that type of premises are really companies back from china itself you know so the big mainland chinese what are the big ones in china because i've been to dumpling legend like heidi lao or jin uh um jin li those those come those restaurants are big restaurant groups come from china okay so and of course they then offer more regional cuisines are they like a sort of fucking nando's are Chinese that sounds really yeah I mean you're talking like literally like some of them might be like 800 to 900 restaurants strong okay so they can they can afford the million quid of course okay yeah yeah okay I'm with you with you right and so so but here as a consumer you would never know that yeah yeah you'd think that's just a completely new Chinese restaurant yeah that's why it's genius yeah yeah so they have those but of course then they have the pockets of little independents that they might then do a deal with and give them a space to like create this sort of almost gentrified Chinatown which is what we have today you know you can go to Chinatown now you can pick up a djembing like a like a Taiwanese pancake or on the street you know and even the bakeries are much more modern or you go down Lyle Street and you've suddenly got like Beijing you know Beijing food you've got newer you've got speedboat bar in Chinatown you my best mate knows Lukey Farrell very well yeah because I mean that the food there is just fucking extraordinary I mean it blew my arsehole to smithereens because it's just like it's so spicy right yeah yeah same but it's it's wonderfully delicious but the the finding of that is interesting because you there we're living and breathing that and we're going oh our customers know this food because they're going to these particular restaurants and then they're coming to us to learn how to perhaps mimic that at home or make it even better or less or more healthy or whatever it might be yeah yeah it's why like you literally all have fingers in the in the kind of in the asian zeitgeist um the in in london in the uk what is the difference between like pretend i'm like a three-year-old which i am sometimes but like say i'm a three-year-old what's the difference between the approach to cooking in say korean thai chinese or cantonese um and korean like yeah okay yes similarities first off i think there's a lot of influence between all of them so from one from one culture to another there's a huge amount of influence and that is the same i think the same applies to all food yeah what would you say so so for example in obviously chine the chinese culture being the biggest population uh out of all of them and the let's say from even like emperor times in china there was always this sort of thing of like we're going to conquer the world and uh therefore travel is part of that so they're going to move around and they'll take take what they know around with them and obviously with Chinese culture it's predominantly the technique of cooking is stir frying or doing something with a wok you know and that would that might make up like 70 80 percent of the way someone cooks at home for sure but then and that wok or that stir fry will translate into Korean, Japanese, Southeast Asian cuisine.

1:42:28Even if in Thailand, quite often, a pad thai isn't cooked in a wok. It might be cooked more in a frying pan or a chef's pan or a flat pan. It's still being stir-fried in exactly the same way as you would be in a wok. You're moving it around and you're using this high heat. So that translates to all of them. But then deep frying, for example, that was apparently invented in the US. So that sort of deep frying in oil, like in vats of oil, would have at some point in history moved over to Asia. You know, and so, but it's a significant part of all of the Asian cuisines, deep frying. That story is similar to Freya was telling me about that from Fix8, who does the kombucha brand.

1:43:24Yep. So kombucha started in China. She kind of got into it when she was at uni working in China, went to the US, US blowed it up, and went back to China. And that's why I think, I mean, someone said to me, the world is a village, but it fucking is. It happens all the time. And it's not just happened in the modern world. It's happened in all our history. Silk Road, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And you look at the spice trade, right? So you go, okay, you might be in Macau, where it's very prominent that there's Portuguese influence in Macanese food. Macau. Macau is right next, on the headland, right next to Hong Kong, but attached to China.

1:44:03Portuguese... So the Portuguese travelled through Asia, through Hong Kong, got to Macau, stopped there, and then tried to invade China from there. Well, apparently there's, so I thought, I asked this as morbidly embarrassing on a Tuk Tuk tour around Lisbon. Right. And basically, I'd read somewhere that the Portuguese had a lot of influence in Japan. Right. And I thought, you know, origato, thank you, and obrigado. I thought that was the thing, and the guy was like, you're an idiot. But apparently, the one word that there is, there's a lot of words you can go online of Portuguese influence that have gone into Japanese cuisine.

1:44:42And tempura is one. So tempura is actually apparently a Portuguese word or tempura or some shit like that. Okay, okay, maybe, yeah. Deep fried, yeah. Which has then gone over to... But if you go on Google, I mean, I wasn't going to pronounce them. I'm not going to do it now. But there's a list of words that Portuguese has influenced on Japanese, which is crazy. Yeah, well, there's no coincidence that a Japanese souffle cheesecake looks like a baked French or like European cheesecake, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. yeah that those those influences are literally from one culture back to the other and back again like in hong kong like people don't realize that the like i wrote you know a whole book on hong kong you know and that hong kong diner sort of experience is like predominantly influenced from the west to hong kong people and chefs so like after the second world war in the 1950s it was like there was a lot more westerners in hong kong than they were before and so they just stay there yeah so they stayed there so these establishments these hong kong establishments start and restaurateurs started to open these little cafes that they believed were their versions of western food so that they can make more business what's what's the time mix i'm Half three.

1:46:06Yeah, I've got a, you've got to go to an event tonight, but it's fine. Mate, it's so interesting how, like, yeah, just how, the other example of this, obviously, is the banh mi, which is kind of the French colonialism, when they were trying to invade Vietnam, and you get basically the best sarni of all fucking time. Yeah, which eventually ends up being one of the national dishes, or like pad thai, the national Thai dish, is a really new dish in like irrelevantly you know it's like it's it wasn't really a thai dish it was made up for foreigners coming to thailand and a dish that the thai people like thought these foreigners would like to eat yeah you know the sound do you know the sandwich was created right yeah the earl of sandwich was a gambler his name was the earl of sandwich okay He was a gambler and he didn't want to go and eat.

1:47:04I'd love to have a name like that. I've always wanted to be called Jeremy Dumpling. That'd be so good. I once called my name Pan Dope. I don't know why, but it was his fucking nose. But anyway, he basically wanted something that he could scoff his face down and get on the gambling table again. They put it in between two pieces of bread. Sandwich was creating the other sandwich. But it's interesting how these things kind of all blend into one. So then you were saying just back to the differences between the four or five different cuisines. So, you know, Japanese, Cantonese, Thai, Korean. Vietnamese.

1:47:41Yeah, Vietnamese. Yeah, there's a whole like, what do you think is the hardest to cook is maybe the best question for that. I'm a bit like the chef from Ratatouille in the sense that nothing should be hard to cook. and that if you know how to eat you know how to cook what's the art to eating well uh

1:48:06understanding balance of flavor so and texture so if if you've got a well-balanced meal whether it's one plate of food like a roast dinner or a whole table of food like a chinese or asian meal if you hit the right balance between flavor texture and color then you will automatically want to eat more of that meal how important is color in because i read somewhere that you eat with your eyes first and then yeah colorism is is hugely important but it's not the be all and end all of a good meal and and the same applies to to texture because it's more about the balance of those things than in in asian cuisine than it is like oh i don't like black food for example like what if if i have in an asian meal if i have one dish that is particularly dark and blackish in color then i must have something that is bright red in color and maybe more naturally green in color yeah to balance out the black yeah does that make sense and then the same applies to texture so texture is like like we i think we're talking about texture more in western cuisines than we ever have why possibly because especially within the foodie audience everything's more readily available um but the the key thing is i think there's still uh a slight sort of void between what a western palette sees as good texture versus what an asian palette sees as good texture what's to describe the difference the difference is that an asian in asian balance of texture we're looking for like an experience of every single possible type of texture you can imagine in your mouth and that includes like sliminess or like what might be seen as like gooey or gloopy or like when we talk about melt something that's melt in the mouth the word in cantonese is wah i talk about it quite a lot it's like it doesn't mean just melt in the mouth it means like like super super super melt in the mouth yeah yeah yeah that's another thing is the japanese have words that we just don't have and the japanese and chinese are very similar in that sense what i would say that the japanese are better at marketing their food words than chinese are what are some words in those is in those languages that you've learned that like because i remember i think there was one word they've got a word which means walking through a field of flowers in a woods as the sun's rising they've got they've got a fucking word for that so camilla from camilla from rude health lived in japan okay yeah we were talking about this we were saying that you know there's um the english language is actually quite limited with how many words we can use to describe what we're feeling and obviously there's other languages like japan that have more words to pick at what are some of the craziest words in those languages you know but in chinese it's much more literal okay so it's not as like abstract as that japanese is quite yeah i would say the japanese are quite abstract with that i think which is why i think they're better at marketing you know because because the the creativities they're around just these descriptive words within chinese like explanations or descriptions are very literal so as i was saying like that word wah is like it really is like this is so so so melt in the mouth but literally so that's what it means you describe wah so is that why it's called wagyu or is that no no no that's japanese that's japanese sorry sorry sorry what what in cantonese means super super super melt in the mouth mad yeah yeah and and if you say that like if you know i when i was growing up and i'd say my chinese is actually terrible but like if i would say that as a kid to one of my uncles who like in you know it's almost like they give me that look of like pride of like yeah you really know what you're talking about you know like that's sort of like is there any other words in the um vocabulary that uh which you wouldn't get to describe food to the like to the westernized palate do you know what i mean yeah there's one there's like um uh i don't even know if i say it properly in Chinese but I'll try it like ching ding which is like uh like like steamed in the most cleansing possible way that's so amazing it's like there's the fact there's a fucking word yeah yeah I just I think that's so fast and and and what when someone says that and you let's say you're drinking a soup that is like a steamed soup because we have that it's like what you call double brought double steamed or something that double broiled i don't know um and and you basically got a hot soup that is cooked over steam and so it creates like and you might have all your bits in that stock that's making that bone broth um which is essentially just stock right the chinese have been doing that for thousands of years and it's like but if you cook something like that you get this like really what you call like almost like when you inhale that soup you automatically feel better yeah that's like that's so much great hangover product called that yeah yeah yeah yeah like i saw something on instagram of like a post rave like the english have just said it in the most like just banal way basically but it's um yeah i think that's really interesting what so one thing i'm picking up from you mate is this ability to hold simplicity and complexity um which a few people i've spoken to have that kind of superpower i think it's this shit loads going on but you can sort of you know work your way through it what dish would you say describes the way your brain works well it's a simple simple but complex well like that's me saying that but like if you were to say okay this is the way my brain works I mean I think mine probably is shepherd's pie mate I think I think like anything like um I think you know once a year I think most Brits will be able to sort of um sort of empathize with with the same feeling is you have that like uh the roast dinner conundrum when you're cooking your Christmas dinner and then you know if you talk about like um shows like the bear and that that episode i don't even watched it you know it's a bear the at the bear episode with the the mum cooking the christmas dinner i mean i it was so stressful watching that episode i had to watch it in like four or five parts and i think a lot of people can get extremely overwhelmed by just something as simple as cooking a roast dinner in my mind it should be simple and in asian cooking the similarities to that uh it's you know it's not it could be a whole table of food but the easiest sort of context to put it in if it was one plate is perhaps a malaysian like nasi lemak which is a coconut rice dish where in malaysia you have these like little stands or stores you know where they wrap each component up into a little takeaway bag including the curry or whatever and you'd have a coconut rice you'd have a curry you'd have something deep fried you had your vegetable like curry and then maybe a sort of more salad-y vegetable you'd have a boiled egg that might be deep fried as well uh and then you'd have a homemade sambal the malaysian chili sauce you know you're talking like six or seven components to that one dish that if you were served that dish in a restaurant it would all be on one plate not just again not dissimilar to a roast dinner so if you're cooking something like that the end product of that looks incredibly be a beautiful and be uh like it can look quite simple you know it's like rice and curry but the components to it are everything's a different texture flavor color there's crunch on the and to be able to do all that and everything taste right together takes some thinking and and planning um and that's perhaps where my engineering brain comes in it's like it's it really is not like food really is no different to that it's process yeah how yeah so you talked about strategic creativity at the beginning or creative strategy right yeah yeah how would you say uh cooking has informed either engineering and or your marketing like how are those two things related i know you briefly touched on it just then yeah i think creative strategy is a really interesting thing because I don't think it's necessarily thought about that much.

1:58:07What's your definition of it first? I think my definition is that... creativity by itself can be endless but creative strategy or putting structure to creativity should have an end point yeah that's that's a darling example as in um i think rick rubin is the record producer okay he produced got a great book called the creative you're much better reading all this stuff than i am yeah yeah creative act really good book okay basically so he he did um adele he did red hot chili peppers he did beastie boys he's done fucking everyone right he's the greatest music producer of all time he's got a gorgeous book on creativity and he basically says creativity is like an endless source and this is with the song this is with songwriting but i think everything's linked just like food everything is linked right um so like to like launch into this is the creative act is endless yes this strategy is when you say right it has to stop now and you have to ship it out into the world and i think that's the same with business because you could you could fucking funny around with creative marketing ideas all day long right yeah yeah yeah right yeah so then how do you i get the creativity bit but then how do you house it or imprison it in some sort of strategy to actually get the thing moving do you know what i mean i think i i think if it's break it up my the way my mind works is that uh with every single let's say creative project you might be or every single project you work on has space for creativity but it and and you need to allow that space at at almost every stage within the project but if you wait the space or the mass of space for that creative like far bigger at the beginning of a project and each stage you move to the next you you're whittling down more structure and strategy to hold the project together then by the end of the project you might still have a small amount of space for creativity but not too much that you go often on the wrong tangent that's that's as i said that is holding simplicity in complexity creativity and constraint is that's my definition i think that's you playing it back to me yes yeah yeah so you might go 80 space at the very beginning let's have whatever it takes like half a day one day 10 days three months 10 years whatever it might what it whatever it takes for that beginning, like that first creative space for you to just allow you to put everything on the table that comes to your mind.

2:01:17The next space is, right, we know what we like from that creative think tank. How do we then hone in on what we want from that? Or like, what do we want from that? and then how do we then hone in on it yeah is there an example of this which you've applied probably the simplest example is what i do now with curious crowd productions with the with the production company because yeah i should go into that because i think we haven't we haven't even touched on to that because you've pivoted now into curious crowd right right yeah i just yeah my mind is yeah you've got across like that like pincers

2:02:01exactly yeah and and that was the first so curious crowd productions is is is our film production house we're specialist in food drink and travel brands so and primarily back uh sort of middle of 2020 uh we launched it uh and you know it's been running for four years of which i'd say we've had two years of solid business outside of covid um and we launched curious crowd productions off the back of the school what youtube success um mainly because when we were in the grocery world with school of walk a lot of our friends in the industry challenger brands like the curators uh capsicana done very well odd pods not sure if you know them they're in sainsbury's with um uh kind of free flowing free pouring like um pouches of like um uh beans and uh chickpeas and things yeah and then like here with delicious magazine we started producing video for all these other businesses and what we do is we essentially produce digital content primarily for these brands but because of my links with tv the tv world we now are moving quite quickly into producing our own like tv shows and you are you owning that niche of foods we really are yeah as in do you think because like i suppose my question for you is if you've got the kit yeah like what's stopping you and you know how to film stuff we could film anything yeah just get a thing why did you not try and go yeah in in the last four years we we've flit in and out of doing little jobs for other in other industries but on the website and even from a day-to-day sales perspective i i literally almost like 100 focus on food drink and travel because i the way i see is that we are experts in food drink and travel and experts in production now and so when you combine the two that's a really strong again you've got links target audience uh for for this business and we've got links and the links trusts we've already built that trust over the last 15 years yeah yeah and so so with that going back to the creativity question each project is bespoke you know it doesn't matter how i try my try to package something up it won't work in this particular industry because you might come to me with your own brand or capsicona might come to me with what they've got and they might be working on a they're working on a very specific strategy commercial strategy that they've been discussing internally between let's say 10 of them before they sold up you know for years you know so they understand their brand and their commercial strategy through and through what they don't necessarily understand is how to um uh visual visualize that um to the consumer yeah and when i say consumer it's actually not just consumer we're talking buyers or trade marketing a lot of our commercial um projects are driven by I trade marketing before consumer marketing.

2:05:34And that's interesting. That is very interesting. Why the fuck is that? We are not a production, we are not a freelance content creator. We are a production house specialist in food, drink and travel. So you all go to, so say, I'm just trying to think of, because I've thought about potentially not, but to say with a podcast, I've thought about doing another podcast. Yeah. But then almost having hung, so um what do you know jamie lang from candy kit yes yeah yeah he's got jam pop production right yeah he basically he's the star of each podcast right like he stars on the show yeah but then he um sorry he's the host of each podcast he then has like four shows underneath that one jam pop productions right this is it but then he's got the same sort of thing so you're going into it like we're not doing a fucking right here's a here's a here's how to make a you know s'mores brownie no no you know and we might do that for some clients but actually what we are really about is taking a marketing or commercial strategy from a customer or client working with them on that like what do they where they want to get in the next 12 months and And sort of discussing with them how we might approach the creative thinking around bringing that to life through video.