How to Survive "The Dip" or When to Fail Forward - James Hickson, We Bought Beer, Brand Hackers

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3:22Thank you so much. Hello there people and listeners of the Hungry Podcast. I'm absolutely thrilled to welcome my very good friend James Hickson onto the podcast. James has had a very interesting FMCG career, food and drink career. He was very early days at Innocent, very early days at Brewdog, then actually went on to set up his own beer brand called we brought beer we brought beer fucking hell you had one job to get the intro right we brought beer and he actually closed the business which is something we haven't talked about and we're going to explore today because I think it's really it's really a pertinent a person an important thing to discuss and is now the head of brand hackers at Copy Club and you've lost to be on this podcast numerous times so mate thanks for having us in your wonderful abode no worries thank you for coming down here lovely to see you take the uh hope you're a lovely dog because he's been scaring me shit this all morning uh keeps keeps nice and shim yeah she is quite serious to be fair so so so what i want to start with mate is um i think i think brew dog because you worked under james watt or with james watt and they are like irregardless of all the stuff in the press like he's obviously a very formidable entrepreneur and people listening to this to be formidable entrepreneurs and founders like add some color to your time with him and like what did you pick up through through being in his slipstream because i think you could learn a lot from being around founders and i think i was just listening in the car on the way here to a podcast and they said a brand is is the long shadow of a formidable founder and i like that and you were kind of inish not inish shadow i don't mean that in a in a derogatory way no you're right and i maybe slipstream is quite a nice way to put it actually because everything that you kind of when you're working in a brand like that which is so found the lead you know everything does everything does come from them everything does sort of channel down from them and so you can't help but be influenced one way or another um yeah i was a brew dog i joined in 2012 so they were still at their old place in aberdeen um up near sorry in fraserborough um very northeast coast to scotland um and like an absolute shithole of a of a place like an old industrial estate um nothing kind of going for it but that's where they'd managed to get the business launch get off the ground get their first listings and and when i joined they'd sort of they were in the very early stages of trying to find a new site to move to because they just couldn't produce enough beer i mean so they were definitely at a stage where they'd got over that very difficult first two or three years um but they still were kind of nowhere near where they were well kind of where they are now they had like i think they'd opened three bars at the time i joined and they've now got i think over 50 so it's it was sort of um at quite a nice tipping point quite a nice place to join you know um and i uh you know i joined there just doing doing their sales to be honest in london i emailed james um i was working at innocent at the time and i was really getting to craft beer um more and more sort of as a as a drinker but as a fan as well i was sort of getting to the culture I was reading the blogs.

6:38I was trying to find all the weird and wonderful beers I could everywhere. Well, I just thought, I think I want to work in this sector. And I think if you want to work in that sector in 2012, pretty much the place you go is probably Brewdog. You know, I mean, they weren't the only brewery, of course, at the time, but they were the most prominent and they were the most exciting. And so I emailed James and said, look, I never see your beer anywhere in London. Do you have anyone selling it? If not, you know, can we have a chat? And luckily, James was a big fan of Innocent. So when he saw that on my CV, he said, come up to Aberdeen and let's have a chat.

7:08And so I had a chat with him and it was quite a quick interview process. Describe that first meeting. Because I think you pick up a lot from people, like being around people. I interviewed Jules from Grenade. She'd spent time in Necker Island with Richard Branson. And you can read all his books, like Losing My Virginity, screw it, or fuck it, just do it. whatever it is but like you pick up a lot from just being around someone almost like the ostensibly kind of um things you wouldn't necessarily read in a book or in the press what were some of the things you picked up just from being around him like specific characteristic traits yeah that's a good question um the ones that kind of spring to mind you know i can i can sort of still picture like we're in in this this is their first bar at aberdeen um they've been open about a year um you know sitting on some high stools and there's a few things that i remember one is that he's sort of always on if you know what i mean so okay he's the boss and he's in his bar but like he was sort of you could sort of see his eyes like constantly dining around the bar constantly thinking that table needs clearing or you know there's too much head on that beer or whatever it might be um not in a like he's trying to put people down but he's kind of got that real attention to detail and so he's finding all these different things and sort of we'd be talking then something you know someone might come past it just stop them be like hey uh that looks like they could do with a top up or you know why don't you go over and do that like he's sort of you know he's constantly kind of in the zone which is a good thing I think the attention to detail thing was a really big thing um which I noticed and also I think just the way that um that we chatted you he he didn't have set interview questions it was very informal which is what I'd expect and it was quite kind of hard to read you know kind of how it had gone afterwards but you could kind of tell that he was I guess at this stage particularly hiring for people that he thought I guess could come and do not what he's doing but like he kind of needed people like him to a certain extent and I'm not trying to compare myself to him because actually we're very different in in many ways but he I guess he you know he wanted people who were okay kind of getting stuck in and being entrepreneurial and sort of rolling up their sleeves and all that kind of stuff and so a lot of the kind of questions were um not like i can remember that many of the questions but they're sort of the vibe was you know what are you doing like what do you do how do you know how do you spend your time kind of what what other ventures have you done and i've done a couple of other bits and pieces and this sort of thing so it was just quite an enjoyable chat just sort of you know two people who quite enjoy small business and that kind of thing the there's some like if you're this thing called the principal agent problem which is so say the founders i'm just i've got my airpods pro just to say um uh on the table just to demonstrate this but say you've got the founder here um that's the principal and you have several agents so that and when it when it starts small you've got the core team so they've got a huge vested interest because they've probably got share options as you get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger people do give less of a fuck like let's be just brutally frank the guy working at the bar in abendine does not care as much about brew dog as james watt and it's called the principal agent problem so the further you get away and the bigger you get the harder it is to basically um keep that attention to detail the person who did this the best was julia metcalf at prep like ever prepped for years before they sold you walk in it's a warm customer service it's great customer service they often would give you a free coffee if they fancied it that is that's one brand on one business that has fully solve the principal agent problem but so many brands get to a point where that's really hard where the founder doesn't know every employee and what you said there about him you know being what he's on and almost having the blinkers off to be like okay right how's that beer doing i think there's a lot in that for listeners in terms of well i was trying to piece this together with other guests but one of a few things people have said is is i interviewed a french by a French chef called Frenchy and he goes, as you get bigger, your only job is just to water the DNA, to feed the DNA, to push the DNA into the machine.

11:17And I think there's something in that for listeners or like founders who are listening in terms of once you've got that culture and you've got that DNA, your job almost becomes keeping that culture going. And now look at them, they're fucking huge. I mean, I went to one in Japan. I mean, I have all the things I could have done in Japan. I went to a fucking Brewdog bar, but it's like they've got this omnipresence now as a brand. Yeah, and I think that is right. I've been to the one in Japan. It's very nice. You've been to that? I went to a few years ago. I went to the bar in Tokyo. I was over there and I was just like, I was working at Brewdog at the time.

11:51You were on BizDev. No, I was not. BizDev duties. I was on a strict holiday only. But I was like, I've got to go to a Brewdog, even though it isn't exactly the most Japanese experience. but like i think you're right that that is the hardest thing and i think there's they say some places do well pre-example actually because i think even now um you know the pre-experience is still pretty good it's not like it was but it's still pretty good um i think innocent were pretty good at doing that i would actually say um you know when i was there you know kind of yourselves early on um i was probably 10 years into the journey um and by that time the founders were still there so there was still that dna that was coming down from them they were still very present they would run all the you know every Monday morning meeting they were they were present in the office and all that kind of thing so they they were feeding you down but at the same time you know my interactions mostly were with like you know managers middle managers whatever it might be but you felt it coming down from everyone in there and so I think that they did a very good job of doing that I think a lot of time it comes down to the strength of your brand and your kind of brand ethos and your position and like whether people really understand it so I mean theoretically brew dog have done it very well as well because i mean they've got one of the strongest brand missions and brand kind of values and ethos like you know you may not like it or you may be a bit cynical about it but you can't deny that if people think about brew dog and if someone said what do you think their brand stands for people would they would say oh well it's sort of a punk attitude you know an alternative lifestyle um you know knock you in a fuck whatever it might be and they've been very true to that in everything they've done whether it's the marketing whether it's the um copy on the website whether it's the people that employ in bars um whether it's the causes they they support that all comes out of that it all comes from the founder but then he's kind of instilled it into the brand and i think that's why if you speak to someone in the bar now in i don't know in like wandsworth which is like not a particularly um brew doggy place but they do have a bar there that person will probably is like probably be able to power a lot of the brewed odd lines and we'll be hopefully having a lot of that um that sort of brand dna that's come through i think they have done quite a good job of that um they've had their controversies which has made it possibly a little bit watered down um and i think and with that i think that's kind of that's that's caused some issues around the brand um almost the brand purity of that dna and i guess other ways that you lose it so prep you know it's a good example like now they're owned by some mega hedge fund or whatever they're owned by probably some of that's getting lost because actually who is the person or people really kind of making sure that every single sandwich is going out perfectly every single interaction is friendly and all this sort of thing yeah it's a it's there's something about at some point you've got to sit down and codify your values and know who you are as we're talking about the episode with alex smith and it's a quote i've used it a lot recently by dolly parton which is um find out how you who you are do it on purpose yeah a great like once you actually do that you get that dna going and you know exactly what that that your dna as a brand everything else becomes easier i think for listeners it's it's and any founders and core teams it's going and do that actually earlier on because then you know who to higher then you know which decisions are the right decisions then you know if there's activations on brand if this oh do we want to go into that supermarket or are we doing it because the volumes are there like for example a super premium brand i think candy kittens purposely said no it's aldi because it's not on but they're another great example lucky saint like they have my couple of my mates work for lucky saint they're having huge rip-roaring success luke spent fucking months getting those values down and then i suppose so we've started with some of the big brands at the top you do a lot of work well brand hackers you speak to founders all the time um and you help them on that journey where does that do you see do you see these early stage founders codifying their values in their dna early or is that a pain point or what's the zeitgeist for those guys at the minute yeah i think i think they do i think they kind of know a lot yeah i say i speak to founders every day and i think a lot of them knows they should be doing it but they they they can't kind of get off the the fast moving train and stop and spend the time doing it enough so i think most of them are probably not doing it most of them don't quite know how to do it how to think about it and that's where they you know they might want to work with someone like us or a freelancer or whatever to do a bit of brand strategy but obviously that's That's, you know, that's time, that's cost.

16:36Then once it's done, they've got to then make sure it actually sits, you know, doesn't just sort of sit in a drawer and die a death. You know, it's actually then got to be come through and everything they do. And I think when you're very early stage, you're right. That probably is the time to do it, but it's also the time when you're least kind of in a zone to do it. Because, you know, when you're very early stage, you're just like, you just got to make stuff happen. You just got to make sure that you get the bills paid. You just got to be out there. And if you've got a choice between spending, you know, a few days really codifying your brand values, or going out and getting a few listings that are going to pay the bills.

17:06You're going to go with the listings. And particularly with very founder-led brands where the team is very small, like less than 10, they can kind of do that because the founder is literally there in the office or whatever setup they've got day to day. So the values are the founder most of the time. And so they're kind of instilling it in the team by just coming in. And if the way the founder writes an email to a supermarket, buyer is really really like tongue-in-cheek and a bit cheeky or whatever that's that's probably the brand value is going to have some kind of a tone of voice that's quite cheeky and then that will be picked up by the more you know by the team who are sort of seeing that and going okay well this you know my boss is doing this and that feels like probably the right thing probably isn't right for me to send a really formal email you know and you know i probably need to kind of emulate that and then so it does filter down i guess the question is at what level do you need to codify it it's probably actually it's probably before 10 people it's probably when you get to about five people you're it's not because you don't know all those people you're not all standing and sitting in the same office but you are probably then getting to a stage where people are going off and doing their own thing a little bit more and so this it's useful to be able to anchor them back to um to what the kind of values and ethos which i i think is like just such an important thing as well you know like even in ideal world i'd say a brand should do it from from fairly early on like probably from day, the reason I'm sort of slightly hesitant whether it's day zero is because, again, I think Alex mentioned something on that part that he mentioned is sometimes you also learn by being out there.

18:38You've got to feel the shit that you see how it sticks. Yeah, 100%. So it's all very well being like, look, we haven't even launched a product into market but these are our, this is the only thing we're going to stand for and this is the only thing we believe in and all this sort of thing. And then actually you go out there and the market sort of tells you something slightly different. It doesn't mean you change your values. It doesn't mean that the market says, you know, add loads of protectives you do that of course you don't like change your core stuff but you might like want to actually go out there and then work out who you are a little bit within your surroundings i definitely completely agree but i definitely think doing it earlier is better because that so as you're saying the way the founder writes the email that is the principal agent problem like the reason it's not a problem is because the agent i.e.

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to get involved with this stuff it's absolutely insane and it will categorically change your life it's just the sickest platform i use it all the time so so with brand hackers you you speak to these brands i think this word as we were talking about before is like the word hacking not not specifically with brand hackers but the word hacking is quite interesting because there's this whole thing of like growth hack like how do we get on a slipstream to growth is that almost like hackers as if some fucking like nerds hacking a computer system do you know i mean from his bedroom that's like one definition of hack my definition is hack as in like getting a pickaxe and just every single day and knocking and knocking and knocking and getting a lot of lead to find gold what are some of the biggest pain points i don't know it's all on individual basis but what's some of the biggest pain points you see in the brands you speak to and the founders you speak to and like what are some of the ways to solve them what just like general pain points or well like across the brand hackers you speak to so many yeah like what what's the common thing that those brands get not only necessarily get wrong because i think that's that's yeah yeah yeah i don't think anyone's getting wrong or at least if they are it's it's not for lack of trying it's it's more just sort of lack of either knowledge or just or money or time i mean i think the thing we probably hear the most is just it feels like there's a million and one things that they could be doing and they kind of don't know where to start and where to focus so it's um it's sometimes just uh it's it's knowing which part of the different elements of of all the whole business i mean we deal all in the marketing side of things but even from the commercial and marketing side of you know like if you're looking from a sales side which channel should you focus on you know because you could in theory go if you've got a food product you know you can go okay we want to go and try and get grocery we want to try and get a wholesale listing we want to go in indies we want to go into food service but actually that's not really going to be possible you've got to focus on on what you actually can do within the resources you've got and where your products are going to land best and i like you know there's some great brands we work with ireland so i know you um also do a bit work with and and their strategy early on was to go you know very upmarket and go into restaurants and and kind of filter down from there which i think was a really smart strategy um well to answer your go back to what we were saying that that wasn't that wasn't a mistake that was not a mistake but that came from we i remember i first met wolf we were trying to do stuff and they were trying to launch in retail it didn't work and then so back to our point of like you've got to do it early but you've got to throw a lot of shit at the wall they found a slipstream with these restaurants and that worked and then now we're going into the retail side of things yeah but it's um yeah completely so i think it goes back to this do do less better and it's yeah you know with this with our cocoa powder is we had we had the buttons we had the spread we had this cocoa powder which was actually a it's an amazing product but it was built out of we had to we had to get use the cocoa we have we actually have a cocoa farm we had to use it right fuck it we'll build build into a powder that is the product that is flying yeah and we put all this zeal and effort into not saying the others aren't flying because they aren't but um but but actually it's almost like trying to be have your look for the surprising successes is what it is and then double down and it's a really tricky one because it's like there's all this oh this while i'm doing this because it's nuanced it's like yeah you've got to focus but you've actually got to not focus to begin with to know what to focus on yeah really it's like it's the chicken and the egg isn't it yeah i think that's right there's an element that you can always be too clever in that you can you know you could write this great strategy that says i'm only going to focus on this channel this like these two sales channels and i'm only going to focus on these two marketing channels and then actually something comes up over there and you're thinking well i can't do that because um you know my plan says i need to focus over here but actually if you just went and tried something over there you know like say you might find out actually that's that's a whole goldmine that you hadn't even realized was was sitting there so i think like when you're very early on it's probably a case of trying a few different things but being aware that at some point you do want to like focus in on what's working doubling down i think you're right like find what's working then double down it's i think someone is google have got a 70 30 thing uh so it's 70 focus 30 like white swan opportunities that could just you never know where it's going to take you in terms of so so what maybe let's go in dig into an example with brand hackers what's been like a success story there and how did you go in and their growth if that's the right way of saying it yeah i mean it probably is the right way to say i mean i think you know the for us i think we probably look at the the hackers bit in the same way you do um it's definitely not around growth hacks or you know shortcuts um it's much more around sort of like say building a brand but from not very much because a lot of the brands we work with are are working with very light resources both in terms of time money and and people um so in terms of a brand that we've gone in well like how are you building that brand from scratch because of what you're going in and doing.

25:39Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I think when we work with brands, we quite often will come in when there may be maybe sort of three or four or five people. They might have a listing. They might have a bit of DTC going on. So they've built a little foundation. I think what we do quite well as we come in, we kind of build outsourced marketing teams. So we'll put different people in depending on what they need. so they might need someone to have to come in and do some social they might someone to do a bit of trade marketing or they might need someone to come in and do a bit of strategy but one of the things that we i think do well is is we to help the founder and the and the team if they have a team step back a bit and actually get out of the weeds so what we find going back to your pain points thing is a lot of brands come to us and they're just so in the weeds they can't see wood for the trees and they just don't like you know a half an hour conversation i can usually quite clearly see either what they need to do or what they're doing wrong or what they should be doing but they haven't even thought about and that's not because i'm some kind of genius it's just because i'm just hearing them talk about their business and i'm an outside perspective and i'm i'm sitting there at 10 000 feet whereas they're literally on the ground you know firefighting all the different things that go on so i think one of the things actually that we really do for brands is is help them um get that clarity around um their direction and then help make sure that then the things that they are actually spending money time resource on so be it on social be it on um you know in in brand marketing or email marketing or whatever it is um stuff that's actually gonna move the needle and actually get a result as opposed to just trying to do lots of different things i think so that's you know that's that's one of the things we try and do with brands quite often we'll come in and we'll work on um you know quite specific things other times we'll come in and be their their overall brand team and we work with a brand called Ocean Saver who make um uh refills for cleaning products um kitchen sprays and bathroom sprays and that sort of thing so it's all an eco-friendly brand and they're in quite a competitive space you know you've got Method you've got HomeThings you've got um Tesco's own brand you've got um you know quite a lot of competition in that space and when we went in um it felt like they were sort of trying to do trying to be everything to everyone had sort of slightly lost touch with uh who their kind of core custom was they were um had some really great listings but those listings um hadn't really had enough love and so the buyers sort of um you know were wanting to support them but needed a bit of help so we came in and we just sort of oh and their dc side of things had um had got to a stage where it was just really reliant on discounts and so it was kind of damaging the brand and and So we went in and we started off actually by just stepping back and stepping out and just doing some strategy work, both on the DTC side, so on what they're doing on the website, and also on their marketing strategy within retail.

28:33and it you know it it kind of it painted a picture for how they could do less but engage more so engage more with the buyers at Tesco Morrisons do more interesting things at the fixture look at how they could actually activate in store or sort of around store just bring a bit more a bit more thought I suppose to this listing because listing was great like a lot of stores so in terms of volume it's great but then they hadn't sort of done the actual work around that to um to make sure that it you know that it goes off the shelf as it were the i think for people listening to this and it's so many people are in the weeds and i think there's a common kind of prescription is you know don't take three days off in wales go and fucking walk around and you're going to have this space away from the business and you're going to come back with a really you're going to look at it from 10 000 feet and everything's going to change that is amazing most people listening to this can't do that and i think one thing that is really actionable is will chase founder of tyrells is like his quote that i kind of have been using militantly and actually actually militantly is nature fills your mind with freedom and it's like could you block out an hour per day for no phone you know i think it's crazy when people i know we do all the times but you know go on walks and take calls but is there an hour in the day where you can have that freedom is is to create that space when you're not in the weeds completely empathizes like very hard for a solo founder to create that space or like take four days off the business like most people are working seven days a week so that really helps and then back to your kind of codification strategy um is this is what david hyatt said to me i was like how do brands stand out you just pick one word just pick one word that you see so you could almost say so rude health is if we're going to use oat milk like rude health is uh like jubilant as a brand that's very jubilant uh oatly are boisterous for example and then and then you know minor figures are funk like if you were to look at that category but then you've got all this wishy-washy don't miss a disparaging way but like if you look at the category it's quite wishy-washy in the middle so i think some really actual things for listeners is like take a walk and just find your word um it's super helpful well and i think i think in terms of the walk there i think you're like i think actually an hour a day you know going for a wonder or like lying on the sofa and just just taking you know i've been re-watching uh bad men recently and um bad men what's that bad men the um it's all about the um the animatizing yeah i thought you were watching some sort of fucking superhero thing no no no my mad max oh right and um you know there's you know there's a lot of lying on the sofa which is kind of quite odd to see um and i'm not saying this is what they're doing when they lie on the sofa these kind of like the the creative director and and you know the head of accounts and this sort of thing but i think what's interesting is um you know in an age before phones if you want to just lay on the sofa and just let your mind wander you know or you do that on a walk or whatever you do um it doesn't matter if you come out of that and you haven't got some kind of actual thing your mind has just had a bit of a break from being in the weeds and it's done you know it's doing stuff in the background you don't need to worry that at the end of the hour nothing's happened specifically it will be happening in the background and it will come out late so so david olga v in that book that we'll get you to read the confessions of other sizing man um he says i ended up in this is 1963 when there's no fucking phones he's like i purposely take time off for to ride my bike in nature and i do this so the my subconscious comes flooding in with ideas to make my advertising better something like that i don't know i've kind of butchered the quote maybe but it's so fucking true it's so easy i think it's you can get you know even myself i'm trying to do a gazillion things all at once on my wall just just actually pause um where i want to turn to now is is we brought beer um your beer shop and you'd had i think you got three of them like talk to me about the genesis of that so there's kind of three months leading up to that the idea what you're trying to build i was um i was a breed dog and what year was this sorry by the way this is 2013 is probably when I started the idea right so I was um yeah probably yeah 2013 I'd worked at Brudo I'd moved into a random role that I was very underqualified for which was opening their bars so basically my role because they'd had no one else to do it and at the time they didn't have enough beer to sell they just said can you go and look at bar sites in London send me a report back and then it went from just sending a report to suddenly like negotiating the lease and then managing the fit out and working with the architects and all this other um something i've never done before and probably have no intention of doing again um but within that i you know i was sort of i was seeing you know from scratch the the process of of um of opening hospitality venues um and and i'd always i'd always wanted to do my own thing and i'd done a couple of my own things before i'd like done a burrito van for a summer um you know that guy sorry i was no yeah I'm quite hungry on it.

34:03It went pretty well. I think we net-net came out on top. It was always going to be just a summer thing because we weren't ready to quit our jobs. I set up a thing called Ogo and then Peanut Butter Cups, which was a fucking tragedy. I sent you a picture, but I was in Walton on Thames and I had all these peanut butter cups. I don't know what they were. I'd like shoved them with Freddos and Smarties and stuff like that. The real thing about peanut butter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. and I was at this bloke walk past I didn't sell one thing and I had my mum's laundry baskets to put my stock in and I was driving back and I was like driving I had this whole laundry basket it used to be no no no they weren't melting it was freezing cold and I looked at them and I was like fuck it get high on your own supply and started boshing them back and you know that didn't work but I like people who try lots of different things because I think it yeah this one came up because I was innocent a friend of mine we were both I guess entrepreneurial hashtag James's first word was entrepreneur came out of the womb saying it hashtag founder we cared to talk about the things you wanted we cared to talk about wanting to do a business together like a little like a side business we didn't want to quit the job we just wanted to do something on the side and we were talking about at the time Byron Bay cookies were really big and we were going to do Byron Bay cookies yeah you might not remember them you're probably still short trousers at the time i still out now they um basically there was this sort of crazy coffee shelves for having this nice posh jar on the top with these huge like cookies um and byron bay were like the main ones at the time this is 2011 or whatever it was and um i was like we should do cookies and we'll make them every night and then we'll go and sell them in the morning then we'll go to work and it was just the worst most stupid idea ever because it's just really hard work and what do we know about selling cookies and why would anyone buy our cookies and all something luckily my friend said that's a terrible idea let's um but burritos are getting like you know people seem to be quite liking them um they're really nice they're really easy to make um i think his girlfriend at the time was mexican or had some mexican heritage so like you know they she kind of could whip up a really mean burrito um and it coincided with a time when innocent were getting rid of these what they called the dancing grassy vans i think they used to be called which were their original ice cream vans that they had do you ever see those yeah i've seen a picture one yeah yeah so they were the original um ice cream vans these came to festivals and they were basically getting rid of them they were decommissioning them um and so we said to the head of um uh whatever you call it head of vines exactly yeah the one who's in charge who i knew really well i said look can we have one of those vans uh because you're only going to strap it and um we'll rebrand it we'll take all the innocent branding off but we want to leave the grass on and she was like yeah okay that sounds good and again that was like because they're quite entrepreneurial culture so she knew we were going to do something entrepreneurial with it she knew we'd do something quite fun with it and as long as you do some branding off and so if you know if we're burning down the motorway no one was not you could in those things but yeah they were kind of like 40 max 40 tops exactly you know what I mean they'd be lucky to get there and so we took this van which um needed to you know we needed to adjust it slightly so we took it to a place uh that does like catering vans you know the h fans yeah you know all those ones you see on leather lane and then the markets um we took it to a place there and said can you We put some stainless steel cabinets and et cetera, et cetera, in the back of it.

37:21And we decided, let's see if we can get six festivals. That was our plan. We didn't want to do the market, or at least we thought we might want to do the markets. We wanted to test out first. So we kind of, you know, applied to a load of festivals. Most of them said no because it's really hard to get in. And once you're in, you're in. But, you know, unless someone doesn't take up their slot next year, it's very hard. Yeah. But we managed to get, I think, five. And the first one we ever did was T4 on the beach. don't know if you remember t4 um which is like the quite a big i mean it's not a sort of glass degree festival but it's it's quite a big festival by um by the standards of what we were looking to do bearing in mind we'd never once made a burrito for anyone other than ourselves and had no idea how we were going to do it um so we sort of just threw ourselves in there and it was it was good i mean i think we ended up yeah doing these four festivals sold lots of burritos managed to you know have quite a good time not poison anyone and at the end of the summer we then sold the van and we sold it on to this guy who had a still like a meatballs thing called the bowler and he actually went on to be quite successful and released a cookbook and stuff so i think like that van ended up having the second life which is quite nice anyway so i had the uh you know i knew i wanted to do something and so when i was opening these bars for brew dog i was thinking like what do i want to do i think it's i think i want to do something in the beer space because i that was definitely where my passion was at the time but i'd seen how difficult it is open a bar how expensive of it is how many things can go roll and also how difficult it is to stand out and the reason you know brew dog could do it because they had this very strong brand and they had this kind of nationwide distribution on their products and a big um social media following so they opened the bar it was usually full from day one but i could tell that for most people opening a bar is like you open it and then you've actually like it's a slog the whole time so i decided not to open a bar then i thought about opening a brewery and at a time like london was booming with breweries i I think we were up to like nearly 70 or 80 from literally from about three, about five years ago.

39:16Like it was an acceleration. And I looked at that and thought, I'm not sure I want to be like brewery number 72 in London. Cause again, it'd be very hard to stand out, very hard to do something different. And also just, you know, I don't want to do loads of hard work and brewing is mostly 80 % cleaning and it's, it's a slog. Um, and so I was trying to think of what in the beer world, what was it that was kind of missing? because there's tons of bars, tons of breweries, so it isn't those. But I realized actually buying beer to take away and drink at home was a really bad experience. So a bad experience for a couple of reasons.

39:48One is that there weren't many places to do it. I think at the time, this was 2013, there was probably less than 10 shops in London where you go. They're all dotted around. And they tended to be run by quite eccentric men. And you'd go in and it would be unfriendly. They wouldn't say hello. They'd be dark. They'd be dingy. The range wouldn't be very good. it wouldn't be cold. If you wanted to get some help in terms of what you were, you know, what type of beers to choose, they would kind of begrudgingly come and help you, but just sort of the vibe wasn't very nice. It's too hipster almost. Actually not.

40:20In a weird way, it was pre-hipster. It was almost... This wee knows his stuff, wee. Come on. It was almost that sort of, it was almost still a little bit stuck in the sort of the old like real ale type thing of just a bit sort of fusty. So when I went into these shops, I was... Fusty? Yeah, a bit fusty, you know? Yeah, yeah. That's like a nice nuance of rusty i like yeah and i was all right because i i knew what i was doing for beer so if i went into it into a beer shop i didn't need the help but if you were you know if you were one of these you know young upstarts just getting into craft beer and you're sort of keen to move off perineum and move on something else you're just being put off by this experience because it just wasn't very friendly and it wasn't very nice so i decided look i want to set up a shop i want to i want to sell good craft beer but the difference here is i want to bring over like an american mentality to service so I want service to be everything I want it to be the most friendly beer shop I want it to be the most open uh colorful bright and I mean literally colorful like we you know we painted it yellow and pink and this sort of them you know I want this to appeal to women as much as it is men oh you know if people come in with their buggies we'll be welcoming to them um and and just sort of always like look at everything that beer shop is now and do the opposite and um and that's when I opened the first one in um in Ballum in 2014 which was like quite lucky as well I mean Ballum was a great town but again in 2014 it was a great town then uh but we caught it just as the wave was up and coming up and coming like we were on Hilder Street we were probably the third maybe the fourth good business and there's now about 12 to 15 good businesses so like we were the first but we were we were quite early and that was pure by coincidence I don't take any credit for that um but then we you know we kind of rode this wave of hildger street where there's this little market street on ballot in ballon which is where you've got like the best brunch places you've got outdoor seating you've got this kind of very like villagey vibe where everyone's out about and rustling around there's got a little market there and it's just it's a bit like um broadway market in in east london um and so we were kind of lucky to find a nice a nice site there um and also lucky the landlord actually took a punt on us because you know i showed him the business plan and told him what he wanted to do and he said yeah okay you know what i i could get probably more money from an estate agent but ballum doesn't need another estate agent like let's give this a go and i think we kind of you know we paid him back by by you know by doing a doing a good job and and adding something to the street and so that was it really it was kind of but the key thing is going back to your thing around like the oatmeal thing of of pick your word you know if we were to pick our word i'd probably say friendly i was gonna say i thought it'd be banned to me yeah plenty of bands as always but um it was friendly and it was sort of it was like do something like find your point of difference and then lean into it and our point of difference was you know was just that the fact that when people came in the second they came in we'd welcome them and then maybe like five seconds later we'd go over and have a chat with them and it wasn't robotic we just kind of go over and chat with them and also and we were very unjudgmental and I would say from about 2015-16 that's when the slightly more hipster thing came in and I don't want to disparage all the beer shops I think are pretty good these days but there is definitely an element of sort of if you're not going in and knowing the latest imperial sour then are you even worth talking to and I think we were very much the opposite, we welcomed the Peroni drinkers who were just moving on from Peroni into Beaver Town Neckort or whatever it might be because that's that's kind of the key thing hey guys quick one the biggest festival in challenge of food and drink is heading and coming very very soon bread and jam is literally at the glass and brief for food and drink brands is so banging they're in the eighth year everyone's going to be there it's going to be a great time i'm actually doing a live podcast with the wonderful giles brooke 18th 19th of july business design center in islington london you've got to grab a ticket there's opportunities to do huge pitches meet the right buyers ocado selfridges tesco sainsbury so much more and it's just good crack it's great fun and if you want a ticket head to breadandjamfest.com but i'll also put a link in the show notes so please do yourself a favor and grab yourself a ticket it's as as rory sutherland says it's hips raise the ceiling and chains raise the floor and it's you need the hipsters and not less i don't know why i mean hipster i mean like the obtuse type hipster yeah i mean like the you know friendly hipsters to push the boundaries and i actually remember it because you had the other one opposite the plow in um in uh that part of london that freaks me out is it battersea is it where the fuck is it it's like in the middle of everything when people say clapham's battersea i'm like yeah yeah like um but i remember it vividly because i would when i was doing the cheese job i would drive passed in oh that's really interesting remarkable as that seth goding says something's got to be remarkable yeah and i never went in but like yeah that's all you know never spend any fucking money but you know yeah i'll tell you it's remarkable but it's so so that's interesting and then going back to this principal agent problem i know granted was three sites but three sites is still you know three times more than one site how did you ensure like the team and and that feeling of friendly was manifested yeah yeah i mean i think like i suppose it starts with who you hire so i would only hire people i hired people for for personality not beer knowledge was the first thing so like someone could have come in with loads more beer knowledge but if they were a bit of a wanker then didn't really want to employ them yeah i'd much rather have someone i mean my first manager who became massive biggie but like before he before he joined he'd never really drunk craft beer much he was still drinking fosters and that kind of thing and then but he was just like the perfect person to run this place and then as soon as he got into craft beer he got really into it and he was like you know within a month he was like the most knowledgeable person um but you because you can teach that but you can't teach personality you can't teach charisma you can't teach friendliness you can't teach like um not being a snob you can't teach that kind of stuff and so that's the first thing is just hire good people who you actually would want a you want your customers to interact with and that you'd want to hang around with i guess um and then the other thing is just make sure that i was really militant on i was the attention to detail um in some areas of my life i'm very bad with attention to detail but when it came to these shops that i'd walk in and i'd see like there's a bottle out of place i'd be like can you move that or if they were like unloading crates into the fridge it's like can we make sure that we're leaving the cardboard out the back even though it's more inconvenient it doesn't look good if you're sort of unloading loads of boxes and there's loads of cardboard everywhere because if a customer comes in it just looks messy and it just ruins the aesthetic and obviously when you're shopping shopping is an overall experience and it's everything from the look and the feel it's the welcome it's the way everything's set out it's the temperature the smells all that sort of stuff and you can control some of them but you can't control all of them but the stuff you can control got to so i'd come in i'll be like move those boxes to the back or make sure that's clean or can you move that or whatever i'm not saying i just boss everyone around and certainly i try and do it myself as to do with your eyes mate you just look at a box and go mate that thing's fucking moving the old big boys in town uh yeah but i think that helps because if they kind of see that stuff's important you know then then that's going to help in terms of of making sure that just is seen through so then so you're not having to do it on the third time you're coming in you're not having to do that i'm not doing it because they're worried coming in they don't know when i'm coming here just because they've realized okay that's important to the overall experience therefore i'm going to make sure that you know i do that and then they will then filter that down to new people they're hiring like it's the whole danny mayor thing of moving the soul if you heard of that so it's quite a few guests have talked about danny may so there's restful yeah i'm aware danny is great yeah he's got this thing of like what leadership is is the salt's out of place your job as leader is to put it back in the middle of the table and you do that everyday repetition until people know what perfect is yeah and it's a really good uh yeah i think Analogy, ornology, metaphor, whatever.

48:22Not even metaphor. The other Danny Meyer quote I really like, by the way, which I try to instill as well, is I want to totally butcher it, of course. Did you read his book? No, I didn't read his book. But, you know, I tend to do to the right people. Yes. No, I heard this quote. It's from his book, though. Trust is consistency over time or something like that. It's like consistency times time equals trust. and so again that can relate to your employees but also to your customers so the customers who keep coming back to your restaurant or your shop is if you are consistently delivering a good service over an extended period of time then you end up with trust and trust is one of the most important things you need from a customer because that's one of the reasons why they'll choose you over again.

49:10Well brand is a promise so I think if you put that together brand equals promise times what was your one? consistency times time we might need to get a math teacher and organise the algebra on that but like if a brand is a promise then you'll if you do that so like with the podcast mine's every Monday exactly and even if I have to do like those solo ones which I'm probably going to have to do in the next couple of weeks because stuff's going on like I've got to do it and I think I think it's a you keep that promise as you break that promise it's so so you have your first shop in balum you open it balum's beginning to become all the rage maybe not all the rage but like it's becoming better and it's going well and so how long was it going well for because i do want to talk about when you had to shut it because it's not something we've talked about yet on the podcast and what that felt like but you're obviously off to the off to the races yeah we opened in uh we opened in summer 2014 in balham and i would say within about six months i'd already started looking for site number two one of the things i did when i started the business was i never wanted it to be a one-site business which was all good and bad like probably in in in the grand scheme of things that was probably a mistake because as a one-site business a beer shop is a really great lifestyle um because you you know because you're basically spending every day just talking about beer to people who love beer drinking good beer and you can probably um you know 40 50 grand a year just as like as the as the owner manager um which isn't a bad thing right it's not what i wanted to do because what i wanted to do was try and build a a mini chain of beers i wanted to kind of do the odd bins of beer or majestic of beer because no one had really done that.

51:03There's loads of wine chains, loads of them, both good and bad. I mean, at the time, I was really obsessed with Bottle of Posse. I don't know if you remember that. I don't think there's still going. There might be. But they'd done wine shops really, really nicely. And they were on about six, I think, at the time. I thought, like, someone needs to do that for beer, and it's going to be me. And so I sort of instinctively, sorry, from the off, always thought, okay, number one is to sort of test the model, but then I want to open number two and number three, and et cetera, et cetera. and so i um i was sort of looking from about sort of six months in for the next site um found that which is the one onst john's hill with clapham junction um and and opened that one about a year just over a year after the first one so that 2016 2015 opened that one because i was doing cheese was 2016 so that was yeah yeah so then we opened that one and that one was a bit bit of a bigger shop uh we had a tasting room upstairs uh we had a garden out the back and it was more of a kind of on-site drinking place still not a pub but definitely had more on site we could do bigger and better events so we did like um chef's tables and things like that which are really fun so we had a huge table with like seat 15 people so we'd get brewers in to do talks we'd get um we did this thing with a local restaurant where the chef would literally like cook up a five-course meal we'd pair it with different beers and it was like literally like you know it's a chef table because he's right there at the end of it that was fun so we had all the and we did like garden parties so we kind of took what we'd done originally in quite a small store made it a bit more interesting in the second store and that was quite fun and then we and then again i was like all right what's the next store so like not we don't have to tell me exact numbers but just it's in so what like the finances like what money you bring in at that point because i think yeah you're one of my fucking good mates we can talk about that but like you know there may be someone i know i know loads of restaurants open it um listen to this or you may be doing a street stall uh business there's a business in nettle market called pockets i mean they're almost the anethesis to what you did one one product one stall they make fuck loads of money but like that's what option a option b is to scale so like you've got this other stall going you're doing the chef's tables the parties like what money are you out or what revenues if you don't mind no yeah that's fine no so i think we're probably doing about 250 grand a year in balham probably about 200 in clapham and then what are the rents on those places so rent rent in ballon was 20 the rent in clapham was 17 so like in theory these is that is that not like is it not like that now or is it is it more expected well ballon is still what it is i mean we we sold it somewhere and obviously they they the rents is kind of where it's at but it's the next time they have to review that rent it's gonna be much much bigger i think and then the reason we actually ended up closing the clapham one is because our lease ran out and the landlord wanted to double the rent um which wouldn't have worked as from business so we were probably like and then you know and then we opened in tooting in 2016 which was because an opportunity came up in tooting market which was an area i'd kind of wanted to get into it's in tooting market and a friend of mine had opened um brickwood coffee in there um because he had one on ballon so we got some do you know you're the guy who did brickwood yeah joke that'll be good i'd like to interview yeah yeah he'd be good yeah he's done loads of us pretty yeah yeah so we got to know each other from ballon uh to both on he opened in hilda street a few months after i did and then And he opened in two markets.

54:20He's like, you should come and open here. It'd be good for you guys. So I kind of got on the waiting list. And when that came up, it was probably a bit sooner than we wanted, but I was like, fuck it, let's do it. So we managed to open that one, which was very small. But at the time, so we probably ended up with like three sites that were probably doing collectively six, seven hundred grand a year in terms of revenue. Total each. Total, sorry. Yeah, yeah. But not making much money. Really? And that was the problem. And the problem was, is I didn't realise it at the time. because I wasn't sort of, I just wasn't over the numbers enough.

54:51And so we managed to get a loan from the bank in order to open the second one. The third one we managed to do, a bit from cash flow and a bit from just like, we just sort of straight together. It was also a much cheaper one because it was so small, the one in Teetan. But we kind of managed to get these three stores open. So on the outside, everyone's like, these guys are absolutely killing it. They're growing really fast, like three stores in under two years, you know, and we're on the lookout for more and all this sort of thing. and you know on a top line level the revenue is pretty good but the margin is quite low on craft beer so we're struggling to get above 40 percent margin just on the actual like gross margin then you've got labor costs which are quite high just because you need people to serve right you need quite a few people and you're open quite long hours and then the rents which the rents weren't crazy by some standards but like still you know it's still a big fixed cost and electricity and you know this sort of thing and so you look at the end of it and you go very very little profit it at the end of it um and you know and just cash flow just a bit all over the place so like by the end of about by probably middle of 2017 it was a bit of a basket case to be honest um would that feel like when you've put your like you've worked your bollocks off because that's exactly yeah that's what i did is you're one of those chill people i know quite imagine you getting very stressed i get stressed super easy no i think i think in some ways the fact i don't get very stressed is probably like almost a problem is because it probably it it probably didn't flag soon enough with me it was a bit like you know because the way it manifests is you sort of you've got lots of suppliers that you're basically overdue on their bills but you're still ordering from them and it's it's very much like this cycle so you'll you'll pay them you might pay them 45 days late because they say look we're not gonna send you the next order unless you pay like fine i'll move some money from here to there or whatever it's kind of like jenga you're juggling all these different suppliers that you owe money to and you're not deliberately trying not to pay them it's just you're just you know you're moving really fast you're ordering quite a lot of beer there's three sites operating you've got lots of staff and you know and you'll sort of pay the person he probably shouts loudest and it's kind of like you know you assume at some point there's some money coming out of it at some point because we must do like we're taking in loads of money surely we must be at some point there'll be some money at the end of it and actually i think that the problem with not understanding finances properly is something can look like something on paper but actually it's what's in the bank and what so and so i'd say we've got to a stage where we relied on the goodwill of of suppliers a lot um and it wasn't like we you know they they you know they no one was going bust because of us um and i think a lot of um uh pubs and bars and restaurants you know they're in a similar position but actually it was sort of an uncomfortable situation to be in where we sort of owed people money and it's like you know i didn't want to be in that situation um and at that stage actually that's when we merged with another business so So I got to know the owner of another beer store chain who had three stores called the Beer Boutique.

57:39They still go in? They're not. So they were one of the early beer shops. They opened in 2010, so a few years before us. And then a new owner came in and bought them in 2015, and he opened two stores. So they'd ended up with three stores. We were three stores. And we got chatting and said, listen, if we put our three stores and three stores together, something will be the biggest beer shop chain in London. Hopefully, there's some economies of scale. actually I reckon this is how we could start to grow this let's do a merger so we did a merger um just can't think of the office of the acquisition very very corporate actually it was a bit of a nightmare because it was just like doing the merger just ended up costing so much money just in lawyers fees you know they just love it and so we ended up um doing that so suddenly we had six doors across two separate businesses but all apart the same parent company and then I ran that business he sort of took a step back um because he had a background in finance so he didn't really want to be day-to-day operational anyway um and then for so for about two years we had six stores and the idea was to try and um open more but it just it just got too difficult basically just there just wasn't enough money difficult so just like so we had we had a couple of stores that were loss making and we're like that's all right we can turn that around we'll get the economies of scale you know we'll start ordering pallets and the margin will go from 40 to 50 to somewhere around 55 60 percent and um and it turned out we were just wrong like most so most breweries didn't do big orders and big discounts so there were like two like brew um uh sorry four pure and beaver town if you bought pallets they'd give you a bit of a discount but not even that much but they would because they could do it most breweries were like look i can't even produce enough beer to service my existing accounts why would i want to send you a pallet at discount like what's the point i'm like you know you might as well pay full price so suddenly we're like oh shit and if you do that across um and because we were selling so many different breweries we didn't have any really as much weight as we thought we did with any of them so you think oh well i've got six stores mate and they're like yeah but you're buying so many different beers you're only really buying 10 cases from me whereas if we were if we were a restaurant group with six restaurants and we decided we were going to list one beer and it's peroni suddenly that's a lot of volume and that's a good conversation but if you're selling if you're basically your usp is that you sell those different beers so we couldn't just sell one bit otherwise we wouldn't exist because no one would come to us so our usp is we have to sell loads of different beers and constantly changing and always have new beers therefore you don't have any any clout to go give me a discount and so suddenly we're like shit we've kind of made a bit of a miscalculation there so that's that then there were a couple of rents that we were hoping to get down that we couldn't get down and they they started to kind of stifle us and then i kept thinking the supermarkets wouldn't get into craft beer which when i look back is really really naive but when i was in the moment in 2017 when did when did the supermarkets well like about then like but like they were so shit beforehand i mean literally you'd go into tesco and you could get punk ipa Okay.

1:01:06and then just a load of old man beers really passionate about craft beer and he took their craft beer range and made it really quite good and it still is and then morrison's did the same thing and waitress the same was like shit we've been left behind so then they had to catch up they took their time but then they caught up and suddenly you go in you can buy for three pounds a beer that we were selling for six quid that we couldn't even buy in for three quid and tesco was selling it for three quid and after time what happens there is you don't you don't die overnight but what happens is everyone who was spending 40 quid with you is suddenly spending 15 on their core beers in tesco on the beaver town and then they're only coming to you for a few specials so their basket goes from 40 quid down to 10 quid and then you end up just kind of like almost like i guess death by a thousand cuts so slowly slowly slowly your revenue is just going down and down and down your margin hasn't managed to go up you know your fixed costs are the same because you still got your rent still got your staff costs and that's where we i think that's probably what did it for us basically there's a great lesson in there for brands who start within because you were ultimately you were an indie shopkeeper or an indie beer you see it from your side and one thing that really fucks me off is when brands go into the indies they show them all the love and then the big boys come knocking and they just completely neglect them and it's like you know there's got to be some sort of indie indie love town we had that with money life this is a really hard thing because you'd have these breweries and as soon as they go to the supermarket they would they would be all sheepish and say hey it doesn't mean we're not the love of you guys we'll do specials for you and you know they'll be they'll only take in a core range and we'll still have loads of stuff for you but you kind of just know that like you're like okay one's gone in oh then another one oh i didn't expect them to go in oh and then they've gone in and then as soon as one of them starts like one of them sold yeah beaver town sold to heilakin and then another one sells and you can kind of just see the writing on the wall and what it means is like it doesn't mean you can't run a beer shop like there's a great beer shop business if you just want to be an owner operator but running a chain of them yeah is very very difficult now let's not say it's impossible like clapton craft who we sold the ballum shop to in uh 2020 they they still seem to be doing it and they've managed you know they're up to about seven or eight stores and they seem to be doing it well from what i can tell um and and so but what they've done is they diversified our beer so they sell a lot of spirits from a lot of wine and we never did that and that was a mistake.

1:03:32Like you look back and there's so many easy mistakes that we could have avoided. What other ones? Well I said so not diversifying out just beer was a mistake. Like for a while we didn't even sell cider. I mean we were that like militant. Jesus Christ. Then we got cider then we tried a bit of wine and we didn't do it properly. What's your favourite craft beer? Sorry my 80s kicking in now. That's alright. It's hard to tell. I mean I don't even know anymore because they just change so much. You're just so done with it mate. For a while it was like I would always say the Colonel IPA because it was just such a classic beer.

1:03:59But I think my palate's changed a lot now. And I think it's, yeah, I'm not even sure I could tell you. But that's the mistakes. No, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I think not diversifying our range was a big mistake. The biggest mistake overall was just not understanding the finances. And this is why whenever someone says to me now, what would you give advice to a founder if you set it up now? I'm just saying, just understand finances. If it needs to, go on a mini little course and really understand like how you you know what pnl means what cash flow statement means and all that sort of thing i still don't really understand them like if i was gonna if i was gonna set up a new business i think i'd probably take that time to redo it or or partner with someone who does so you find a co-founder who does or find a very very good bookkeeper or accountant and my problem was my first accountant i had was really really bad and um and by the time i got a half decent one it was always too late something so that's the big one i find out because obviously cash flow kills you right it's like if you run out of cash you run out of cash that's what john from biome was on about is he was like we thought our own p &l and i'm being like mate when they thought of doing an excel spreadsheet to like i'd rather just ask you now rather you gotta piss up with tim specs that's what i mean but the it yeah but it's but again it's credence to me like not credence but it's a lesson for me is in terms of getting all over those numbers well also it's like that thing i can't remember who this quote is from but you know i know you like a quote it's like um you die very very slowly and then all at once um or and you're nice and cheery today mate yeah actually i think the quote is um sorry i think it's actually related to businesses a business doesn't go bankrupt overnight it goes bankrupt very very slowly and then all of a sudden yeah so what happens is actually you're kind of going bankrupt for quite a while but you can kind of keep it going because you've got supplier credit and you've got like oh a big wind came in so we got a bit of cash in but but really like the sort of the trend is downwards and then and then the the very suddenly thing is when someone basically pulls the plug so that often it's hmrc sometimes it might be a supplier just saying no you're not having anything or it might be i'm taking you to go none of this actually happened to us we kind of pre-empted this so going back to your thing around like what happens the beer boutique so we ended up with this this situation where we had two brands we brought beer in the beer boutique um two two separate limited companies but owned by the same people and the beer boutique side of things we just couldn't get to work so we got to this way just their stores are just sort of like declined in sales where were those they were in putney wandsworth and tunbridge wells and i think the like for whatever reason they you know they'd had a couple of things like a weight trays opened up opposite one of them another competitor came in um and the rents were higher so so when you had dips in sales it hurt more because the fixed costs were higher and so we were basically we we were on the cusp of converting the one in Putney into a completely different concept.

1:06:49We were going to turn it into an all-day brunch, coffee place where people would come out, use it as a co-work space, and then in the evening, it would be a beer bar. We went quite far down the line. We drew up a plan for it. We did the finances. We got an architect to do the designs for it. We looked at it. We were like, okay, probably going to need to spend a couple of hundred grand doing this. is this going to save the business like it could do like there was a chance like oh you turn it around it's a whole new concept great brilliant and that just like you know great idea and then maybe we roll this out as a new concept but then we're like but it might not do and if it doesn't it's going to bring the whole thing down and we had this unique structure where we had these two different limited companies so we could close one without closing the other and at the it kind of literally came to the 11th hour where we just looked at it and going are we going to be able to do that are we gonna be the best people to operate this all-day brunch and beer bar whilst trying to operate five other beer shops and there's only two of us and then a load of part-time staff and we just thought no i don't think we are so like let's just kind of bite the bullet now before it gets too far down the line and we've you know owe loads of people money and that sort of thing so that's what we did we put the beer boutique into administration basically closed half of that business also that's a half the overall business so we're left with just the three we brought beer shops um and that was really difficult just because it's a difficult decision had to make people redundant which is so i'm trying because i say you're such a chill bloke but like it's really what are the voices in your head at this point like this it's a few like this i was thinking about this it's like you've got you've got a few things that you'll work out what's holding you back right it's the best thing i did was a guy a guy who we're working with recommended i read the dip by seth godin you read that i heard a lot about it it's very good book it's not specifically about closing the business it's about when to fail basically that choosing when is the time to say i'm going to quit basically he says uh you know people generally win in life by quitting a lot is one of his quotes and the point is he's like he's knowing when to quit and what he says is you go into this stage with anything that you're doing where you you'll enter the dip and the dip is where you saw you've got it off the ground but then it's you know and you've got you know things seem to be working but it's getting quite hard and you you kind of end up in this dip you've got to decide whether or not you're gonna work really hard to get through the dip and whether or not you're going to be the best able to come out of the dip um and if you come out of the dip the rewards are really big so like if you're the one who's consistently there so this podcast is a great example right if you if you do a podcast most people give up after 10 episodes if you're still there episode 180 you've got through the dip because the hardest bit is like no one's listening am i still going to do this episode 11 12 13 right you know that you've been through that right when you're on episode 118 and you've got 100 000 downloads per episode or whatever it is you've come out of the dip and actually you're in probably the one percent of people who went through and so the rewards are really big because suddenly you're a big podcast and there's a big audience and you can do all this stuff um which is really great it's quite a like winner takes all type thing not just podcasts but just generally yeah yeah but if you don't think you're going to get through and you're not going to be the best and all this sort of thing then you're better off actually just quitting rather than carrying on and so when it came to this thing we're like are we going to get through the dip with this beer boutique thing are we going to manage to get out the other side and if we do are we going to be the best are we going to be the best brunch bars is we're going to be the place everyone wants to come to are we going to manage to like turn everything around that it's basically been struggling for four or five years and we just looked at us i don't think we are so we should we should stop now rather than trying to get through it so that was one thing another thing was just like the other things that you're facing with so like why am i not closing this is it like sense of pride is it a sense of I don't want to like feel like a failure you know so that's what I'm trying to get to yeah like and ultimately is it I don't want to let people down is it I'm scared literally I'm scared to make people redundant is it I'm embarrassed when I go to a party and they say what happens to your shopping party oh I have to close it down and it's all those things like that's what it is I was speaking to a family the other day actually who closed the business down and he was saying the same thing he was like I kind of knew in my heart of hearts I should have shut this down six months ago and the reason I didn't were all kind of just sort of the wrong reasons but like kind of fairly understandable but quite the wrong reasons it was those things like you know oh what if but but really it's more like actually i don't you know i built something and i'm and i don't want to give up on it yet even though i should do or you know i like the status of being an entrepreneur i don't want to have to say i failed and now i've got a job all those sorts of things but they're the wrong reasons yeah but mate like that's there's so much in that for for people listening to this because it's i completely get the dip bit piece like there was so for literally i was thinking about this in the day i can see it on the graph for the first year and a half like basically two years not pretty much no one listens and then now it's started to kick off right but there's that whole period and it's just like what is like why am i keep like just banging my head against the wall um so i kind of get that whole that whole piece of like just keep pushing and it will kind of keep hacking as we're going back to just keep hacking every day but then there's all this there's a lot of shame i think we're such pessimistic sardonic twats in our country whereby we're like you know in america's are saying did that forecast america they're like oh my god like you know setting up like it's amazing like yeah i'll keep like you know it's this whole like yeah thing whereas we're just oh yeah he's failed like we actually yeah yeah probably like get off on it a bit yeah so what does it feel like when you go to the first dinner party well what does it feel like when you shut the doors um well what's what does that think there's a i think there's a bit of a sense of relief because it's like the hardest thing with anything when you've got a big decision to make is indecisions really hard so like making the decision is there is an element of relief or at least i've made decision you probably have some doubt but you you know um but for us when we did it we kind of had to there was more of a thing of like okay well that's closed but not but don't worry so reassuring the team and you know and the investors like don't worry we're not about to kind of go under and then that was when the clapham lease came up and and the landlobbers has been very difficult because they wanted to sell the property so then suddenly we ended up closing clapham which was quite unexpected uh and people were like oh shit these guys are going down the pan and that's when you start to get the kind of you know this like rumors in you know it's a small industry it's like oh, you guys, you know, it's sort of, oh, it's a shame to see you guys go.

1:13:13And we're like, well, hang on, we're not closing down. We have to close down some of our stuff and we'll be open about that. But this was a lease issue. And you're almost like, you're almost just trying to like counter the narrative that things are going bad. Because actually weirdly there is like, you know, I really believe in momentum as a sort of like invisible force. Yeah. And so when we were opening site number three, the momentum was driving us. you know people were in this very small bubble of craft beer people were talking about us people were buzzing about us people loved us they were like you know um it just felt like oh you know it's so good to see these guys really doing well and then as soon as it goes the other way the force works in the in the opposite direction so then you kind of always got to counter that that potential narrative because that's when you don't get the best uh people joining you or maybe the breweries don't want to give you the latest release because they're thinking oh you know these guys are on their way out sort of thing so then you kind of got to be really clear like no no we're here we're still here we just we've had a few setbacks and we've got to close this but generally like nothing else has changed we've still got solid business still believing what we're doing and all this sort of thing probably like an element of me in the back of my mind thinking that isn't true i don't necessarily still believe it like i did five years ago but at the same time what else am i going to do you know and it's like if and it's just 2019 how are you trying to change the narrative you just sat outside the store going we're not shut mate yeah just like this old mad man walking up and down you know battle of high roads battle of high road in my in my socks you know it's like come back no i think it ain't over till it's over boy i think it's just i think it's just doing business as usual and just like i suppose it's not doing business as usual no i think it's not it's not letting the other things go so like you know we used to send out an email every single thursday and it's like making sure that that still went out every single thursday and we're still as good as it ever was i see you know making sure that you know our instagram feed doesn't dry up or things that you can kind of like lose a bit of motivation for but actually then if you start to do that then then you're starting to really kind of just you're starting to let little things go and then if you let the little things go then ultimately it's a bit of a downward spiral so we kind of carried on like that for a while then in in 2020 so just before like sort of pre-covid and not not actually to do with covid um i'd sort of decided that i was like it was just getting harder and harder like the trends were just like downwards in terms of sales and um and the competition was bigger and the supermarkets were more aggressive and the breweries didn't care about us anymore and all this sort of thing so at that stage i kind of put some feelers out to try and sell um either the whole business or just sell the ballum store because the ballum store was one that was the best performing store but had the most kind of like baggage because it had a proper lease and a lot of time left on the lease whereas Tutin is much more of a like in and out type thing.

1:16:05You still got the one in Tutin? Still got the one in Tutin. And so the one in Ballam managed to find a buyer and then literally like the about three days before we were supposed to sign this is late March lockdown it's announced. So the buyer naturally says I think we'll just like hold out a little bit and just see what's going to happen here. And I was like yeah that makes sense I wouldn't do any different. And then we had lockdown and we closed the stores. And at this stage, I'm just thinking, okay, well, maybe this is just the natural death of this business, right? Maybe like you remember at the start of lockdown, it didn't feel like anything would ever reopen.

1:16:38It felt like this is probably it for a while. Like retail's dead, pubs are dead. There's a new world we live in where everyone like, you know, has allocated shopping at Tesco. It's hideous. You know what I mean? Actually, it didn't turn out to be that, but it felt like that at the time. And so I very much went into the mindset of, okay, cool. that I'm going to, you know, we'll keep going in whatever capacity we can during lockdown and during COVID, which was a bit open-close, open-close, doing some home deliveries. But when they came back and said, look, we still want to buy it, I was still up for selling the lease because I just couldn't see a world where retail was something I wanted to be in just because it just looked so hard.

1:17:14To be honest, that was quite good. I mean, we didn't sell it for loads of money. It wasn't like it was great, I've exited and I'm rich. But it was like I've kind of got out. without losing my trousers i'm now not on the hook for a lease which is like got five years left and actually you know what like we sold it to clapton craft and they came in and did a really good job and so for the people of balham the good people of balham they ended up with it with sort of an invigorated experience like a beer shop still but with you know with a new fitter and with wine and spirits and a sort of a bit more energy because i'll tell you what i i was just so tired or so.

1:17:53It goes back to the principal agent problem. If the principal's got no energy, then the agent's not going to have to. Then you'll send your... Exactly. My energy had gone. I think it had gone by day. So would you say you were burnt out? Again, I'm asking who's the most chilled bloke I know. Do you know what I mean? I can't like... It's hard to say because I wouldn't say I was burnt out in the sense of, you know, there was sort of no like sort of big thing. But I think I'd sort of... I suppose I was burnt out in the sense of I'd sort of got a bit fed up which reminds me of that Alan Partridge bit where he describes himself as clinically fed up I wouldn't say I was clinically fed up but like I was I was just a bit done with like the industry I was a bit done with being hammered by the supermarkets I was a bit done with like Sounds like you're clinically fed up The thing with retail is the same with hospitality right it's just like you know you can be having like whatever week and then the toilet will break and you'll have to get a plumber in and they'll charge you 300 quid and you go I just didn't need that do you know what i mean yeah yeah yeah yeah like you don't get that in some businesses you know the tech business or whatever you know um and i just kind of was a bit done with physical retail and i got a bit i think i got disillusioned probably and a bit cynical and then when people come to me like hey i'm thinking of opening this thing and you've got some advice for me i find myself saying to them yeah i don't do it and i was like oh that's that's a shit thing just well do you remember i was like to you i was like oh i'm gonna probably open a hungry cafe and co-working space and uh mr clinically fed up fucking piss on that phrase quickly quickly no no no no but i like that mate but um there's a lot in that for people listening to this because the dip is real every business goes for the dip like on every single business goes for the dip i suppose my first kind of where i want to pull at is is if someone is thinking is having those thoughts of i'm just getting disillusioned with this I've created this thing, this entity that is kind of part of me, which is as a founder, you almost, you know, so many people have sat opposite me and said that, you know, the business is my third kid or fourth kid, like, you know, and as Stephen King's got a quote, he's the writer, which is, you've got to kill your babies, and it's quite a fucking dark way of saying it, but it's like, sometimes you've got the things you love, you've got to let go.

1:20:10How does, what does, if someone's in that situation, what would you advise them to do? Um, well, I guess it, yeah, it slightly depends on whether they're in, like, one of the things I guess it depends on is, if you did do that, like, what are the, like, what are the effects? So does it mean, like, making people redundant? Does it mean owing people money or whatever it is? If you can do it in a clean way, though, in a way that isn't going to, like, have a huge knock-on effect, and it's just, it just feels like, you know, the time has come, then I think you've got to just actually say, is this the best use of my time?

1:20:44because you've got like a limited amount of time you know in your working life and you're going to spend it doing something and actually is do you think if you spend another five years doing x y and z is it going to make you happy is it going to result in something that's actually going to be materially worth anything is it something you're going to be proud of or actually is it just going to be five more years of struggle and all sort of thing and i think it's like anything right it could be the same with relationships it's like sometimes you you don't really know when you're in it because you're not really you're sort of so in it with the weeds but it's worth taking that step back if you're starting to feel disillusioned enough like say like i would be where if someone said to me i want to open a physical premises and i said don't do it's the worst thing ever that's probably quite a good signal that's like oh maybe i'm not really enjoying running a physical retail business and so it's like if you're hearing little signals you know in in various different uh ways it probably is worth looking at okay what's my way out here and the way out is you know it's ideally a sell to someone but it's probably not that realistically so then it's probably like how can i wind this down in a way that is going to be best for everyone involved be it staff be it suppliers and be me you know and there are ways to do that you can wind it as well i think if you kind of shoot if you go early enough that you make the decision and you've worked out okay i've got cash to pay everyone i owe so no one's going to be out of pocket i've got enough time that i can give the staff like three months notice so they've got time to find something else you know the worst thing is when you get to a point and it's an overnight thing so i think that is probably the that's probably the more usual situation but if you can avoid that if you can kind of get clear that this is the right thing to do then you can kind of do a more gradual wind down and then actually what it ends up being is like yeah it didn't work out but you know what i did my best by that's yeah that's such like it didn't work out i did my best it's such a good mindset because i think a lot of i mean if i was to have to shut down the business i'd i would you know i've got too much sort of pride in things and i and i'm so sensitive that i would take it really fucking personally but i can walk to a dinner party and be like oh yeah you know just shut down hungry i'd probably be sat there fucking scoffing my face with canapes hiding in the toilet do you mean where'd i yeah yeah yeah i'm still hungry mate can I can I can I can I

1:23:04I don't know how many dinner parties you go to a year but like what was your first surprisingly few actually first like yeah like where they first have to tell people yeah yeah because I think that's a lot a lot of it is pride and shame are kind of two sides of the same coin ultimately yeah I think I think so I think it definitely it's definitely hard sort of doing that first time when you're telling someone oh you had six stores right yeah well actually i've only got one now oh right what happened and usually everyone's a bit like they don't really because you know being british they don't really actually ask yeah oh okay cool cool you know whereas if it was i reckon if they're america but oh what happened tell me everything why even one of those five stores right and that'd be pretty more interesting um and so yeah i just i think that but what you realize also is that the first time you tell someone it's kind of like you've got it off your chest and then it becomes easier and easier but like the first time you are kind of building up your mind like are they going to think really badly of me and this sort of thing and actually you realize that it's not that big a deal it in in terms of like in their life they're like oh that's actually a real shame i always enjoyed seeing your updates on facebook or whatever it is easy now mate easy now mate my space yeah um but uh you know you know what are you going to do next type thing they're kind of actually they're not going fuck you're a loser mate probably tried that and then you failed actually probably what they're thinking is like good on you for trying it and it's a real shame that didn't work out and they're probably in their head they're already thinking of the reasons it didn't work out and they're probably already blaming the supermarkets or blaming you know i mean like they're almost because they're on your side yeah yeah yeah and i think you don't think that but but actually most people um they have no ulterior mode and they don't have your inner voice saying you fuck this up all they're hearing is oh that's a real shame a friend of mine started something which is really good and he really tried hard with it and hasn't worked out and i'm just more i'm now more interested in like what's he going to do next like you know is he allowed his feet and how can I help or whatever it might be and then so and then the other thing is back to this pride shame piece is going back into a job and I don't know why this is but there's like this whole fucking romanticism with the founder being a founder yeah I agree and there's a romanticism about like it sort of surreptitiously scurries through like oh I'm the founder like if you're at a trade show I'm the founder yeah and it's oh I am the fucking a founder it's like i'm christopher fucking columbus you know what i mean it's like i found it found it over there but um it's it just that is just a thing it's like if you're the founder there's more gravitas and you know like we we with with islands what i will bring the founder to of course to meet because there's more gravitas yeah so you've gone from founder to into a job which is amazing that was amazing copy club's amazing l's amazing but like how do you go through that transition because there'll be people listening to this who may be on a walk having that space out as we talked about beginning thinking do i really want to do this business yeah how do you transition and that is one of the hard things actually because i think it's like it's it's stupid but it's understandable and everyone does it including myself is that like when you are at a party and you've talked to a friend and like what do you do you're like oh i'm a founder or i started this business like that is a sense of pride because most people don't do that right it's quite unusual particularly in this country most people don't do that most people get a job and work in accounts exactly and um so and people are always like oh that's cool that's interesting like there is a kudos you know and so i think um there is this sense of like now i'm an employee i'm not a founder i'm an employee and that doesn't feel as good and it's true like it doesn't feel as good and like you say i landed on my feet because you know the person i went to work for you know is great it's been on your podcast many times and i mean it's like a very kind of um allows me to to sort of do my thing and sort of knows that i've still got this business on the side and still have this sort of founder mindset so she's sort of um you know i suppose it's kind of nurtured that and kind of almost like made that quite a soft landing but then also then also there's a lot of value for lottie and the team because it's like you've got almost two founders like there's there's actually i think people listening to this my mate manish um who actually went for beers with him had a business called holy moly um which he folded he's very open about it but it's like actually well then really fucking employable yeah well this is the funny thing the guy i was mentioning earlier was was manisha's up um and we were saying one of the hardest things though is you are employable but you're also don't quite know what you should be doing so he's got a finance background so he had a bit of a step up on me whereas my background was a bit mixed there's A bit of sales, a bit of marketing.

1:27:38Burritos. You know what I mean? A bit of entrepreneurial stuff. Hashtag business, what else do you recommend, mate? And then I kind of was like, did the business, which was a retail business. So I did lots of different stuff, but also was running a retail chain. And so when I was applying for, I didn't really know what to apply for. So I kind of thought, well, probably when I ended up in marketing in some capacity, because that's my forte and that's what I enjoy most. but I wasn't like as qualified as a brand manager who just done the png thing even though I'd run my own business but like they would you know they could be like 28 but more qualified than I am at 38 having run a business for 10 years and so I was a bit sort of that was actually the hard thing not knowing what to go for and that's why I like stumbled into this job and it worked out really well um but then you're right like being a founder has really helped me in this role because part of the job I do now is running brand hackers is just talking to founders all the time so when i speak to them i can kind of understand where they're coming from to a certain extent i can talk to them like i'm basically a bit of a you know startup geek as well so i like just understanding their business and talking to them about their business which helps and i think um you know it's been a big asset in this particular job because this job is working for founder-led brands i'm not sure it would be that much of an asset if my job was to predominantly sell like printers printers yeah to like middle managers at big companies i'll be like yeah yeah i ran a business and they'd be like i don't give a fuck tell me how many pages this prints out i think in our industry we're so lucky that it is so everyone helps each other out massively and i think if there is somebody who wants to quit well nothing well the insidious and failure sorry failure and quit are such insidious words but it's like if someone wants to you know don't one doesn't want to go through the dip or it's like dipping out in for the right reasons and i think we are lucky in this industry that everyone will help each other yeah i think i'd add to that is that i would speak to lots of people so like i spoke to a few people do you have anything what else was on those cards well not i'm sorry on the card on the tables oh it's not the cards sorry mate i know i mean i i mean i spoke to people um sort of when I didn't really know what I was doing.