The Truth Behind Exiting Your Brand For Millions - 22 Lessons from Fuel10k Founder

0:00And what did they say when you had that didn't to them? What were you saying to them? The message was we are deadly serious. I've always had the mantra that it ain't a deal till the second order is paid for. Oh, yes. If you're confident, your team's confident that we're growing this puppy, don't keep thinking about exiting your business because it starts boiling the karma in the business when you're trying to pitch to a buyer at a supermarket. And you will sit in front of that buyer and almost instantly you know whether the meeting's going to go well or not. Regardless of anything, you haven't even opened up your laptop or anything.

0:31and I think trying to predict that and doing your research on who you're about to sit in front of was pretty key

0:42Barney, thank you so much for doing this mate it's been a long time coming we've sort of talked and I think crossed paths numerous times namely at the food exchange I've always wanted to do this so thank you and super grateful for having us in your amazing home I'm incredibly grateful and excited for this very cool, thanks for having me Dan I think the last time I had this was probably in a police cell somewhere oh really? we can't go down oh yeah sorry, for listeners I've brought my new toy and I get kind of very excited when I buy new toys and it's a massive fuck off light thing that's sort of piercing down on us oh by the way we have a swear jar this time which Dan's not used to that was the first swear, I've only got four things to put in it i'll just i'll just say fuck fuck fuck so it's all done then um but yeah what i'd love to start with i think when we spoke on the phone a few weeks ago or a couple of months ago before you done the future of food thing is we were talking about the uh exit of of fuel 10k and um you said to me that you went for for dinner with one of these guys and you want to sort of look in the white of his eyes and say like is this actually going ahead i'd love to know what sort of happened at that dinner if you can disclose that um what was where was it was it sunny was it you know was it sunshine was it winter and yeah talk us through that moment because i think i think there's these moments in the brand building journey where things can kind of hang by a thread and i'd love to talk me through that yeah i think it probably needs a little bit of context um as to how we got there um so uh fuel 10k we launched in 2012 yep um and in 2022 uh we had an approach um uh by premier foods uh which i'm allowed to say um and we got quite far into the negotiation over the summer of 2022 um uh however as we got to the end of the summer the inflationary environment was was becoming quite a quite a big issue for most brands in FMCG and I think that was the reason why they then turn around to us and said look we're actually gonna drop this thank you very much but we're concerned that you might not make it through or the numbers might not be quite what we think they are so we'd like to just leave this for a bit bit longer um much to our disappointment yeah describe that feeling because i think it's as giles said the other week there's more deals 95 deals don't get done you be surprised that many get down the line and then it gets and like it's just that sort of feels like your guts falling through your ass kind of moment like describe that i think i've always been quite sort of um i don't know what the word is um sort of open-minded to this we've all we always had plan plan a plan a was our plan to carry on and do the best we were going to do um and this was this was probably the most serious approach that we'd had we'd had previous approaches before so i suppose we were slightly hardened to it i think the thing that was frustrating about this one was that it taken up quite a lot of our summer holidays um and we were feeling quite exhausted and with this tidal wave of inflationary cost of living stuff coming at us um we were quite looking forward to some sort of help or a break should there be some sort of event um so um i think you have to be quite hardened to all of this and never count your chickens if that's the saying um besides we weren't actually for sale we hadn't put ourselves up for sale our numbers weren't set up for sale um uh so when you say your numbers weren't set up for sale so we were we were investing in growth so we weren't EBITDA strong particularly we had quite a lot of stuff to untangle because we had another company called Fresh Marketing which helped us get fuel out of the blocks.

4:47Fresh Marketing was an export business and it gave us some income to be able to make plenty of mistakes as we started creating our own brand which allowed us to avoid having to fundraise throughout the whole journey pretty much we did take on some eis um in about year seven um but i think um we learned so much through that process that 2022 process about ourselves and perhaps the dd that we needed to to straighten ourselves out so then what what do you learn what have you you what have you learned about yourself that's the context so then that's 2022 and then i think 2023 you've gone where have you gone for where is this dinner by the way just i love restaurants yeah yeah just to set the scene paint the picture it was up in um can i come back to that i will remember um i can't remember the name of it um french italian it was all a bit of a blur frankly really interesting somewhere very nice yeah with with quite impactful interesting people um but so fast forward to march 2023 um by which time we'd got over it all plan a was well underway we were tidying ourselves up we had started thinking about maybe looking at doing a process an exit or sale process in 2024 but nothing sort of concrete but we had a call from Premier again in March and that was a well we've heard on the grapevine you might be maybe looking can we have another look and it was at that point where it's like well how do I know we're not going to have lose another summer um so your original question i wanted to see the whites of their eyes and know that i wasn't going to waste my team's time again and what did they say when you had that dinner to them what were you saying to them the message was we are deadly serious yeah of course you know there might be things that make it fall over during due diligence and what have you but but the intention was there and that's that's what i was looking for and as you walked away from that dinner as you're hopping in a cab like what is the sort of thoughts in your head because you'd had that period before where you said you'd been hardened and you said you were kind of open to it but what was different this time well i think i think if i'm really honest i was reasonably numb about it um i've always had the um mantra that uh it ain't a deal till the second order is paid for oh yes which is quite a nice one you tell your sales people you know they got their first order from tesco but are they going to order again and are they going to pay for it um so you know it ain't it ain't a thing until it's a thing um and that's probably quite a good mindset to enter these sorts of things um yeah i got stung the other day with a with a sponsorship deal i thought was game set match pass me the oranges and then it you know you tell your friends i'm i get well way too excited so i'm sort of like it's all done yeah i've jinxed it go down the what's it the darrell arms down the road and have a few beers but it's premature um and then you you said so 2022 to and then that next second luncheon or dinner wherever it was you cleared yourself up you had to clear the business up but what was the due diligence you had to do to get to to get fuel tank or fuel tank into shape to then exit because i think that's really interesting that that time period from 22 to the eventual exit which was march 23 but i'm assuming that meeting was before the no the eventual exit was october 23 october 23 so the meeting was march so okay with you yeah it took from March to October to then get to the end.

8:23And what was the due diligence and polishing you had to do? So there was some entanglement with the fresh marketing business because that had been the incubator, I suppose, of Fuel 10K way back when. We had some shared staffing between the two businesses, particularly back office. We also realised that actually there were quite a few things that we hadn't prepared ourselves for properly. I'm a bit closer to you if you can. Yeah, just that. There we go. Like that? Yeah, perfect. I think we'd recognised that there were some areas that we needed to tighten up on, particularly around how we were self-reporting to ourselves on our P &L, on our forecasting and what have you.

9:12And I think one of the best things that we did, and I remember someone saying to me, the best thing you can do is get an expert in the fields that you you're feeling light on um and we brought in a cfo um who had actually just been through an exit process um with the spice tailor uh to premier foods and uh he was leaving premier foods and and we invited him to come and join the gang um to join our plan a so this was before the march thing um so he thought he was coming to join an exciting journey. It was an exciting journey, but perhaps not the one he thought he was going to join. And he became a very valuable asset to just tidying up everything that we needed to do.

9:55From all the paperwork, to the trademarks, the contracts, all the things that a big business, a listed business like Premier would need, we had no idea. So without going into all the detail there's a lot yeah and what were some of the unforeseen challenges where as you went through that like that you think could really help people at some point like as you said you instead of like clearing up having to clear and polish things up you know six months six months away from the second go at it if there's brands who can start thinking of stuff now to say that when so they almost they don't have to the miss it's almost like standing on the shoulders of giants right you've you've been there done that got got the pot of gold how what should would people be focusing on now so they don't have to go through it yeah it's really good question so um since since exiting I stepped off as did my business partner Alex Madison and the rest of the team stayed to run it through and they they they should stay to March 24 so we exited in October to end of October they stay to the end of March so they can pick up their bonus and and of course they could leave beforehand if they wanted to um and some chose to stay on and uh and what have you so um to to answer your question since then um i've spoken to many founders um in the food industry um of all shapes and sizes um and some some of these founders uh believe that they're getting close to a potential exit themselves um i think many people should continue along the plan a mindset um just to find the plan a mindset quickly carry on building your business and do the best you can yeah so if you're confident your team's confident that we're growing this this puppy um don't keep thinking about exiting your business because it starts boiling the the karma in the business um so plan a is a really good way of setting your mindset for it but what i would say to brands that are probably nearing just got over this various hurdles or or what i like to call waypoints um of of building a business that could one day sell what would you say that's one of those waypoints so i think i think revenue um so if you're getting near or over sort of 10 million or so yep um in positive ebitda um and you've got a proposition that you know you could multiply the growth of so a lot of businesses want to buy your business because they want to grow it even more um if you're selling to private equity they they go well how do we 3x this uh and then when we sell it how are they going to 3x it so have you got have you got a proposition that has that that growth in it that's a really nuanced interesting point because i think do you know libby for piper she said that as well I probably got it from her it's interesting how you think you're thinking about how can they then flip it on for another 3X which I thought was fascinating so what was that model where you could go to Premier and say right how are Premier going to 3X it so I think that's a really interesting thing to think about almost trying to reverse engineer it back and we'll get on to retrospective strategizing didn't that's a fascinating subject it's the answer to everything and you're always right yeah um so um actually if i carry on the the line of speaking to founders the way that i describe it is imagine you've just exited who did you exit to and who were the other suitors when when you were actually exiting to and why did they buy you what was the reason for it so just put yourself in that position uh from their perspective why did they buy you and also you're in the future now looking backwards at your business that's maybe two or three years younger and that gives you a really nice way of going okay i now understand that in premier's case they didn't have much in breakfast they just um skipped in with ambrosia porridge pots um so they they they didn't have anything in breakfast which is a big big category um they also didn't have a a brand that was pushing the protein message quite like ours.

14:22They also didn't have brands that lent towards the consumers that we were appealing to. So there are three big, chunky things there, let alone the rockets they could put behind UK retail, let alone the international opportunities that they'd be able to open up in due course as well. But the key there was breakfast is big, protein's a lasting trend, And these consumers are younger consumers that we can grow old with. And so there's a long longevity in it. And with that brand, can we take it across into other categories? They manufacture pretty much everything that they do. What other things could we do with brand Fuel 10K?

15:01So actually quite an exciting proposition from their point of view. And I didn't really appreciate all of that when we kind of rationalized it all afterwards. It's such a beautiful point in that, and this is based on a conversation with Giles a couple of weeks ago, but you've really sort of blossomed the point. And I wrote about this in my newsletter, it was like, a product market fit, i.e. is your brand working and getting to the right consumer through retail, is not the same as brand exit fit. which is what you basically talked about there. Brand exit fit for Premier is, you know, they want something with, they don't have much cereal, they've only got Ambrioso.

15:42They want to hit the... Ambrosia. Oh, is that how you say it? Yeah, yeah, Ambrosia, whatever the fuck it is. And then Ambrioso and protein. And then also, as you say, you think it expands all the categories. That's a great example of brand exit fit. um the the example giles gave of with innocent is like innocent went into these protein pots sorry veg pots because there was a whole government sort of macro trend towards five five years having um five year days so initially it was all right get a juice that's two veg pot that's three all in one a darling example of product market fit and apparently it was saying quite well according to giles but then when it went when they came to say it's a coca-cola coca like we don't want to buy a veg pot business we want to buy a juice business i think it's a darling example of like brand market fit it's not the same as product market fit yeah i well i was innocent for five years as well yeah and it wasn't just veg pots it was thickies which were yogurt drinks um and also uh juicy waters which on in in their own right were pretty big businesses just just on their own they carved out juicy waters they stopped um the the dairy because they knew that dairy was a really big different thing to to juice um and of course the veg pots they've rolled out and um and that's now become an even bigger wonderful brand elsewhere um uh but you're right um we could have started looking internationally um and going we're an international business we could have tried to find different areas of the supermarket which um some brands have successfully done but we decided to stay right to the breakfast opportunity so young people were not shopping the breakfast category we were incrementally bringing young shoppers to that those shelves and we were becoming important and big to one buyer so we weren't spreading ourselves thin across the supermarket or internationally oh so you yeah Yeah, because I was going to say, again, as I said, the reason I love doing this podcast, I speak to every single person, there's no rules.

17:50William Chase, Tyrells, there are no rules to building a brand. And that's why I love it, because every single conversation is different. Did James what a couple of weeks ago says, you don't need to sell. Your marketing should be so good, you don't need to sell. Gary from Vithit is like, sell at all costs. There's two different ways to skin the cat. And yeah, with you guys, it's like, because I view the brand from the outside looking in, And it feels like you're in lots of different categories. Or maybe is it one category, but lots of different products? Is that the sort of nuance there? So you're still focused.

18:21We were very much breakfast all the way. And then that became morning. And there was a lot of chat about, do we stretch that? I mean, people are eating our stuff in the afternoon. Yeah. You keep going. Yeah, yeah. So people are eating our products throughout the whole day. And why do we just, why do we tell people that it's only for one occasion in the morning? but I think that was the supermarket opportunity and that's why we stayed true to that argument all the time if you start trying to be something to everyone then you're going to dilute somewhere and we felt that that was a very strong message and and interestingly our chocolate granola which was the first product we launched is now and tell me if I'm wrong Pamir Foods um uh january last 12 months the biggest granola skew in the uk so we've just overtaken the ones that we used to chase the the kellogg's granola the jordan's granola the dorset zero amazing and so that's a that's a powerful story and that's just bringing mostly incrementality to the category so the supermarket is going this is great we haven't we haven't cannibalized what's already there um we're we're you know future-proofing ourselves what so so i love those sort of three big levers you said and that is sort of encompasses the brand exit fit which is a event again a very nebulous thing but which can it's case by case what else do you think you sort of wish you'd known when it came to the exit uh was it like what you said you brought in that cfo guy or girl I don't remember what you said but like what else were the other things you needed you think you wish you knew about in terms of it but getting it ready to sell or making it run more smoothly I think we were learning so much on on the job um all the way through we weren't trained FMCG challenger brand people um so you had to slightly make a lot of mistakes um to to be proficient of course when you become proficient all the rules change anyway so you can never really know the answer to anything so it didn't feel like we were we were completely out of our depth, you just put a glaze of common sense over it, it's like well does that actually, does it make sense and there was a lot of long words and contracts and what have you and we have very good lawyers and very good accountants to guide us through and one of four M &A team too and so they were like the uncle figures in the process you've got to read that one and this is quite a big deal the terminology within it all you don't need to go to school for that interesting I did then take myself off to Saeed Business School to do an 8 week intense course on what the hell just happened I wish I'd done it before what did you learn on that course what was the main thing you learned on that Saeed course because Saeed is the banging business school in Paris isn't it no no this is Oxford Saeed it's part of the Oxford thing just a little bit off different country 200 miles yeah yeah yeah which is the one in is in sead in paris that's it yeah yeah same sort of thing yeah yeah um you didn't hear that guys um so uh that so the course was and i recommended to anyone it was about two grand to do it it was the best thing um uh i wish i'd done previously uh and it was the it was all about the perspectives in the process so the entrepreneurial perspective and the investor perspective and the investor could be the the buyer it could be someone putting money in it could be pvc it could be angel and the entrepreneur could be startup medium big um but but the hope what i think so many people forget is that that you think this and you see this and they see the same as you but from a different angle with a different set of agendas um it's much like the sale process to the tusco buyer say uh if you think okay well um what i really want to do is get this product on shelf but actually put yourself in the shoes of the buyer so what does the buyer really want to do they want to make more uh cash per square inch of shelf space than the previous buyer so that they look good to their boss they get their bonus and the promotion that's what they want you know they're not as invested in you as your thing so if you can speak a language that plays into what they are looking for um then you're going to be at least um closer to to potentially getting a listing but if you bang on about i'm the best and we're the best and b core and this that and the other and i put b core in there because that seems to be a big kind of selling point it's it's interesting important but it's not a reason why a buyer is going to buy you um uh and so so the course was again about perspective it's a bit like we were talking about why did premier buy us let's not worry about why we want to sell or why we think we're valuable um it's like why would a suitor buy you yeah it's the difference between product market fit which you clearly had with because you're in basically all the all the grocers versus but that nuance that brand exit fit which is which is almost as you say you went on a course for two grand which probably gives you and i think the best way you said it barley mate was the you think like this and they they see your business like from this angle for people listening i'm pointing with my right hand straight forward and left hand they're coming at it from a side what what did you learn from that course then what were the one to sort of two things that really were like fuck i wish i knew that beforehand do you know what i mean um i think that well the One of them is, if we're going to buy, invest in this, how is it going to multiply?

24:09And how much could it multiply? So what's a good result for doing the job that I'm in for? Yep. I think quite a lot of it also is down to personalities. People buy from people. And people inherently have emotions. and if you like it and if the CEO takes a box of granola back home and the kids like it back home that's going to have a positive impact effect on just generally how without all the science and the spreadsheets and everything else that's someone else's perspective on your thing and so I suppose the message there is that there's lots of ways of skinning a cat's the wrong phrase um in this vegan world um but um lots of different perspectives to consider um and different people have different agendas um and i think that's what's the most out of all those different perspectives what do you think are some of the most underrated perspectives that you weren't thinking about gosh um uh i i actually think that i i always take everything down to people because I think people make the world go around.

25:27And I genuinely think that you can sometimes have what you might consider a good buyer or a bad buyer in a sale situation when you're trying to pitch to a buyer at a supermarket. And you will sit in front of that buyer and almost instantly you know whether the meeting's going to go well or not. Regardless of anything, you haven't even opened up your laptop or anything. and I think trying to predict that and doing your research on who you're about to sit in front of was pretty key and the other thing that that we sort of planned to do in in that situation was to make sure that we had two characters going into the same meeting from our side one that would lean much more towards the spreadsheets and much more analytical sort of approach and the other one was much more about how the football was at the weekend and much more kind of uh creative character so which one were you i was banned from going in after a while but but but we did have these two characters so when they went in particularly to see a new buyer um depending how the buyer was would depend on which guy would lead the meeting from our side and you get a lot I don't want to see presentations.

26:44Just talk to me. Tell me about it. Some people, I want to see the numbers. And we've all been in that situation. If you're a sales guy, you just have. It's like, oh, my God, I am not. This is not going well. Yeah. As soon as it comes to numbers, I'm flummoxed. I'm definitely the football at the weekend sort of person. I would have put you there. But what's mental to me, mate, is how, you know, as I said to you, and I called it Exit El Dorado. was um well you know el dorado where you go to the the gold thing the gold long lost underworld gold thing is a program i watched as a kid or film very good um but i did say as i went to that hula hand loki event i was like this is mad like i never even i went in there everyone was suited and booted i was like i was just like in this piece i was so out of place but it is this it's this exit el dorado it's this you go along this path and you get there and you're like wow it's so different so different to the fact that you had to do this course so different to the fact that you had to you know the different perspectives and stuff i think it's just endlessly fascinating and what i didn't realize is how it kind of boils back to a principle of sales which is people buy from people and you wouldn't think that i just wouldn't think i thought it'd be all spreadsheets and numbers and there's plenty of that there's plenty of i as in but i thought there would be none of the almost thought when it gets yeah yeah which is which is so fascinating and then um when you said you were sort of doing your homework on these different people like you were speaking to was that different buyers and like well how are you doing that yeah i think the i think if you're interested in people generally and you've you've got a a reasonable amount of empathy um uh it it makes sense to to just try and morph yourself um towards the character you're about to sit in front of um and and i think that it but is that a building is that something you can train yourself to do i think you if you're aware of it just in the in the very first instance that's that's a step ahead of many people i think um and so you're not bulldozing your message you're actually appreciating you know what other people are the inputs of other people and what how did you what else did you take from that course um well the course really Yeah, the reason I did it was I was being asked so much about kind of what just happened last year.

29:04He's like, how do you do that? He's like, well, I don't know. I've got my version. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I wanted to learn the terminology. I wanted to understand the language and the thought process. And the Saeed guys had a fantastic way of doing it in quite a simple way. I'm not a trained accountant or anything, but I could understand kind of the theory behind it all. and I wanted to learn and then be able to put that in motion with the guys who I was talking to the founders of different companies and what have you I suppose to try and yeah build a bit of credibility and anything I say it's in sort of simple to you allow two-year-old language like what were some of those learnings are the best thing I mean literally you don't even have to go on the course you stay you can go and chat GPT and I don't know about you but I have it more open than I do Google.

29:56And I always put in, explain like you're explaining to a seven-year-old, what is quantitative easing? You read it down and it's like, well, imagine there's a jar of sweeties. Yeah, that's what I'd love to get into that. Like, I am, yeah, I mean, we've got a jar of sweeties right here, Barney. It's like you knew I was coming. Well, you haven't been swearing enough. Yeah, I'm just saying some fucks I can get. I just wish we had. That's another one. Yeah. Are they celebrations? I don't know. There's whatever I can find. Yeah, celebrations are great, but I love them. The sweat and swear jar here. Yeah, the sweat jar's there.

30:27If only they were sort of, what are the Cadbury's ones? Heroes. I'd be swearing every other sentence then. Just to get another hero. Yeah, just to get another. They do the cream egg one, which is just otherworldly. But yeah, so pretend I am a seven-year-old. What are those sort of just really boiling it down to simple language, simple terminology that you took from that course? um so we had a running um we had a few running themes actually so bit businesses and you start so it was an eight-week course and the first week you're you're learning about these two storylines one is a space suit company um and the other is a telecoms business that's trying to um get africa uh online um and you start with the founders and the characters behind it you then move on to the the business plan and then as you progress you get into them now they want to fundraise and and then now they want to exit um all the way so those are the themes throughout the whole course and then all the way through you have the various stages of well they could go and crowdsource they could they could speak to angels they need to bulk up their their board members or have some sort of dream team they can fall back on and all the different steps uh along the way trying to show a full cycle from start-up right the way through to exit.

31:51And the assumption is that there's an exit. But for many, many brands, exit might not be the right idea. And plenty of people carry on. You take people like Charlie Biggin. He's just rocketed. And I don't know what he's planning to do when he's had enough. But there's no chat about kind of stepping off. Dyson's another one. you know these you know so exit doesn't have to and then a lot of people turn it into lifestyle and they're earning great cash and and just keep earning great cash and employ the kids and they take over one day that kind of thing so there's no formula to it but the the course i went on was trying to appreciate the whole circuit as it were what were some of the hardest modules on that course the valuation bit actually i found that really difficult um because in my mind um a bit like selling anything um it's as much as someone's prepared to buy it for um and and companies are so different it's not like you can go well we've sold 10 cars and they were all this sort of price and so it's about this sort of price um uh it and if there's hype in there um as you see in the tech world or the crypto world or um some brands are really good at hype um and some brands um aren't and so a lot of it depends on who's going to buy it and why they want to buy it and how desperate they are to buy it so you get these phenomenal exits um where the buying company just wants it and the good mna advisor will go we've got a real hungry one here and let's get some competitive tension in there and what have you and they all start off trying to i don't know pinpoint evaluation uh somehow and there's lots of different ways of doing that what so when you say evaluation it's like how much the multiple of revenue sort of or like again it's so nebulous to me it's like it is a typically kind of two main ways of valuing something it's either on the profit that the company's making or the market share that someone might be buying and typically with smaller businesses with sort of 20 30 million or so and i say that sounds that's not doesn't sound small but that's kind of when trade might scoop down um because a lot of these companies weetabix can make that profit in a weekend promo i mean it just makes us all feel so small um uh but um the uh Where did I get to?

34:23Yeah, but how you evaluate the two things in different ways. So profit or net revenue. And net revenue is after promotion, which is something that we never really recognize until going through that 2022 moment. A lot of people report on retail revenue, so what's going through the till, which is a little bit disingenuous because it's not their turnover, it's the retailer's turnover. and then a lot of people do well over the last three years this was our revenue added together um so there's an awful lot of weird reporting that goes on out there wait so over the last three years how could you fudge fudge the numbers on that well people if you were reading an im a one-page investment memorandum yeah um which i've read a few um there are a number that they might have been in business for three four years or so and they just add up their whole revenue and their volume and they go one million so it's not annualized and i suppose no one's saying what the rules are but if you are going to invest you need to know what you're comparing stuff to and how you assess the value of stuff um so that world is difficult and i think also there's a lot of people who um particularly in the startup world where they're coming out the hatches they've done their first year second year maybe um they've got a revenue of 500 000 or so and and they go we're valuing it at four million it's like well we're based on what well we think we're going to get a listing in somewhere next year it's like so you're going to bake in that maybe listing um into your four million um uh and it's you end up having quite awkward conversations with people if you want to invest.

36:12Also, there's that whole thing Adam from Innocent was telling me about the hollow, no, Giles was about the hollow revenue curse. So it's like you base your rate of sale on your first, say, 100 stores, and then you assume as you extrapolate that to 1 ,000. Nice straight lines. Yeah, that the rate of sale will stay the same. But obviously, like, if you've got 100, 900 of those stores could be nowhere near your core customer and or in the arse end of nowhere. It just pillages your revenue because you've based it on this hollow forecasting. I think that was, that's been one of the biggest learnings from the podcast and something that, as I say, like, I speak to, I'm not as close to it anymore, but I speak to some new brands.

36:46And that, you know, that those things happen to us at ManLife. You think, oh, we go into a big retail, like co-op, you know, then, oh, fuck. Oh, yeah, there you go. and then um yeah it's quite i think that's quite interesting because um uh you often but again if it's if it's a year two year three even year five you might be investing in something that that it's not necessarily about their performance today but the opportunity ahead so they might have some clever way of manufacturing something that no one else has or they might have found something that actually if they do get it right this thing could explode um so again you can't you can't use kind of rates of sale figures because it might be that they start on this product but then they twist out and they turn into something else which could could massively accelerate but it's not even made yet and so you get you get back down to the people behind the brand are these people capable and hungry enough um to and and and and got that persistence to to actually build this thing uh or do they have second jobs which they could fall back on if if they if they need if they needed to if all things went to shit yeah i love one thing i've been thinking about a lot is just the all-in thing like something magical happens when you go all like this is what i did with this but like when you just go all in there's nothing there's nothing else happening like i've already i'm quite a spiritual person but i believe all these like the universe does come behind your back and just i'm going to try to help you and force you through this hard pit but as you say all all your chips in it's like a beautiful thing scary but beautiful well it makes it much more at risk and interestingly with our fresh marketing thing we we didn't go all in with fuel we had fresh marketing to fall back on um uh but before fuel 10k we made loads of other mistakes yeah talk to me about that because i i think the greater the wound the greater the wisdom and i'd love to go into some of those mistakes where the wound at the time was sore deep felt like sort of vinegar in the wound it was horrible but retrospectively it's linked to the retrospective strategy stuff that was there's a lot of wisdom in those wounds like what was maybe the one or two maybe even to get more specific like whatever you think those are actually to begin with I like that analogy I think the other one necessity is the greatest motivator if you need something you're more likely to get up earlier in the morning and beg borrow still harder if it's all slightly gifted to you and you've got a million pounds in the bank because you've just raised lots of money you kind of get a little bit more I don't know less kind of protective about it But I had left Innocent Drinks in 2005, the end of 2005, so nearly 20 years ago.

39:39And how many, we'll get onto the wounds, but just give some context. How big was the business then in terms of people and revenue? I think it was about 30 million or so turnover at the time. It zipped off to whatever it is now. and I'd been there five years and I knew that if I wasn't going to jump off anytime soon it was going to become more and more difficult. Got married, had the first kid on the way, really liked the idea of moving to Dorset, which we did. And I never really meant to leave the space rocket that was innocent drinks, but it wasn't my doing. I learned an amazing sort of MBA life, as it were, with incredible people and just got very lucky but I needed to do my own thing so that was a tough thing and so fresh marketing was formed to then help challenger brands at that time launch into international markets because my last role at Innocent was to try and open up new markets so I kind of felt I knew roughly how to make it work and so took on a few early brands and then over time built up fresh marketing but realized that when those challenger brands sold or things changed or management direction or they hire an export manager they don't need the services of fresh marketing anymore so we needed to build something that that would build our own capital and something of our own value which meant doing our own brand and so we started looking at things that we could create um we launched the the first flavored popcorn brand in this country there was a company in america called oogies um and i've got loads of samples of their product found a manufacturer who was making cinema popcorn we decided to go air popped rather than oil popped um thinking that was the healthier way to go we had balsamic vinegar flavor and we had chili Chipotle and all the kind of funky flavors of that time But we didn't have any money and the product wasn't actually that good and the brand was just off the chart crazy It basically a combination of all the brands that I'd ever seen or poured into one which was messy diva popcorn it was cool and Said that actually didn't well.

42:08It was just when Metcalf popcorn was coming out and so we were both trying to fight for the Sainsbury's listing he won it we got into nice food service areas and we're just starting to get going then our manufacturer got bought and they decided they weren't going to make third-party brands so we were left without manufacturers we had to go and find another one by that time the great popcorn wars of whatever year this is 2010 probably erupted and anyone could buy a popcorn machine on a credit card and And I think at one point Tesco had six own label flavored popcorn products. And we were just kind of, we missed our opportunity.

42:50Tried another thing. We got involved in soup. We launched a coconut water brand. Well, we did a first production up a mountain in Austria where coconuts don't grow. and all the bottles panelled on the first production and the label then had a fold over, which went over the barcodes. And on the barcodes, it was chaos after chaos after chaos. But eventually the fuel opportunity came along and we found a chance encounter with a Tesco buyer who said, bring me the Red Bull of granola. and so we started out being an energy granola and then soon twisted into becoming a protein granola and then added other bits and pieces from porridge to drinks to to bars amazing and then what were yeah as i said what were those sort of deep wounds that provided lots of wisdom on that journey i think the more you um run your own business the more you feel you're deeply unemployable so that it was probably the necessity is the greatest motivator um i think the deep wounds i would i never call it no mistakes are cool you learn from mistakes i call them heffalump traps you fall into heffalump traps heffalump heffalump is a uh winnie the pooh and yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah holes in the ground and they're trying to catch the heffalump but no one's seen a heffalump it seems that again that's a very nuanced point is um is the word mistake versus failure and i think there's this whole thing of failure porn which i see like a lot of um people talk about on socials as like we want to fail fast fail fail fail to fail is awful to fail is to close your business and also encouraging a culture where people fail is is fucking stupid in my opinion another one that's the last one but i'm gonna start again the um the the idea of mistakes cultures that's brilliant because mistakes are like a little learning little learning nuggets of wisdom and you want lots of mistakes because mistakes so i'll speak to henry dimmer about stakes if you plan this sort of at least evolutionary terms are adaptive that you know it's that trial error trial error trial error stronger stronger stronger but it's those little errors but the word failure i think we've sort of there's failure porn going around which i just thinks kind of it's it's not good and you see these big figures in social media being like yeah we just fail the whole time it's like progress not good but mistakes are beautiful test and test and learn i think um this is the reason i think why big companies buy small companies that the culture in a big company typically is that there's a lot of middle management that that aren't encouraged to take risk um and if you're not encouraged to take risk then you're not going to know whether it would have worked or not would have worked because a long spreadsheet and crikey life is about taking risk if you if you put kids on a spreadsheet you'd never have them you know it's um uh scary numbers um and so i think the the change makers um are the people who are prepared to to take that risk and often it might not work out and entrepreneurship Not for everyone either.

46:09It's not for the faint-hearted and it also suits certain life Periods of your own life, but when you're wrapped when in debt from a mortgage and you you've got a load of kids to feed and what? Have you your risk profile changes as well? and so there are moments in your life when when this is going to be more suitable but I loved the I came across a thing. I don't know if you come across term called skunk works so skunk works was was adopted by lockheed martin it's one of the big engineering companies and and basically they recognized that the smaller companies around them were were growing at speed and and innovating quicker and they were like this big sort of juggernaut and just couldn't produce the innovation they wanted and they were going well we could buy them i suppose um what they decided to do was to lock on to the side of the big juggernaut business this concept of a high-powered innovation team that could use all the resources from the big business without any of the red tape and they were encouraged to take risk try things out try new things with the resources as big thing but not to the detriment if they failed of the big business and i've started seeing quite a lot of that in in big industry the supermarkets are doing it with their innovation teams and the apiary and the and the brands brands new and and the one or two others as well um big companies like tetra pack and um the packaging firms and even nielsen iq big huge companies are trying to get in at that innovation level but they're terrified of doing that so they're actually creating teams to to make that happen and i think all we were was that team without the big juggernaut we were prepared to take the risk um the problem is we we didn't have a job afterwards if it if it didn't work out and yeah so and then the mistakes that provided really delicious learnings what were some of those oh crikey i mean where do you start um um i think the so many there's not it's a series of of mistakes i suppose um i do think that um you make your own luck um and a mistake is not to try and make your own luck and what i mean by luck is is putting yourself in the path of luck by making yourself look as attractive as possible and doing a lot of the right things um because you're learning on the job and eventually good things start happening um but you've got to get through the chaos of of the mistakes first to figure out what that is what were the what was the chaos of mistakes but the chaos mistakes would be that we would try to go too fast in places we would you'd take a listing and they give you 600 stores it should have probably been 200 stores you haven't got your order profiles right you're not hiring ahead of the curve you haven't got any money what are you going to do if if you're paid late by your customers and how your cash flow is going to work so every time we came across a problem we would try and seek to remedy it and and and and put a cork in it and wait for the next thing and literally we we would wait and there would be some other horrific thing that would happen and quickly go and solve that put remedy and cork it and off to the next one yeah well that that is that that's the that's the adaptive thing isn't it remedy cork it is making the the body stronger is is the evolutionary and there's no book yeah there's no book yeah yeah yeah you just need to yeah as you say there's there's just the constant tinkering and trial and error um and i think yeah it's interesting i don't know who i was speaking to this about but there's a guy called matt ridley who wrote wrote the rational optimist who's a genius one of the best books i've ever read and he talks about like we mythological me we love these sort of uh god-like figures throughout the whole of history and uh sort of mythic figures and today entrepreneurs are those figures we sort of we levitate sort of uh you know elon musk's deceive jobs these almost mad genius and stuff which they are but his whole point is it's like once you pull past that curtain it's basically just dogged persistence as michael palin says keep buggering on and just trial error trial error or like find the error cork it next and it'd be it's when when people see entrepreneurs as actually that we we want to sort of as i say mythologize these people as sort of these godlike figures whereas actually it's just dog it dog it dog it dog it persistence and trial and error it's this it's basically what you're saying there it's like right mistake what's the next one that'll make us better it's a bit like the lion at the end of the yellow brick road you know we all think he's this big terrifying lion but you pull back the curtain it's like oh yes and so and you were saying earlier now you you see the head of the duck but you don't see the you don't see the paddling going on oh yeah yeah and that's basically my whole life is that is the swan analogy let's talk about innocent so you're employee number seven double oh seven double oh seven amazing um describe what it's like walking to the office um on a tuesday morning during that in that sort of first year describe the scene paint the picture for me wow um i always struggled with um um commuting so as soon as i got the job i moved very very close so my walk was about 150 meters they were still in uh labbrook grove no they weren't labbrook grove they were they were down on goldhawk road in breckenbury village um so that's where i was i never where's that that's gold road shepherd's bush okay yeah and then they actually moved to lab but i never worked up there i left before then um it was do you know for me it was a revelation um and i've and i've thanked the three founders um many times for opening the lid on on what can be done um the three of them were incredibly smart guys and I just learned on like this this learn how to do it a different way I think Innocent were pioneers and in in a way that that we can never really appreciate and I actually assumed that all other brands were doing the same sort of thing until I left and it was like okay that was a really unique experience the that's what Adam was saying to me on the pod he was saying you know like it's so commonplace to sort of um codify your values but back then it was so revolutionary is what he was saying to me yeah they basically wrote the book for bcore without even realizing it yeah you know we were doing all of that and even in our second third year um there was an innocent foundation set up while i was there there was so much unique sort of gifting to age um age uk with the woolly hats you know um there's some pioneering sort of marketing um things that went on too it was great it was really really phenomenal and i ended up sitting in front of the starbucks buyer trying to put together a pitch saying no no we are a serious company and we might have to dress up in suits um uh for that particular one just so it would take us seriously and then they realized that that was a joke too um uh and and i was there just as we were getting into supermarkets as well it was just a phenomenal sort of fast growth high octane a lot of learning on the job but with really smart skippers at the helm and yeah so so when you but when what i'm trying to get into is that as we and a lot of we're going to get eventually get onto this is is retrospect strategizing but when you were walking into the office and i don't know how old you are but you're in point number seven it's a tuesday morning it's in hawker's rover wherever it was like did you guys did the seven of you in that team know what how big this thing you were creating was going to be or is it like we're just trying to take it day by day and build an amazing juice company so i was i was 25 when i joined them right um and um i had had about four years or so after union between there and there um jumping from almost every single job you can imagine um trying to figure out what i was good at what i wasn't good at what i enjoy what i didn't enjoy um what skill set did i have and what industry did i want to put it into i i worked a parcel force on the helpline i had five phone lines coming into my one number and I had to keep and everyone was angry every time I picked up the phone I worked in St Thomas's Hospital wheeling patients around I worked in a bank in the city of London and had to borrow a suit and a tie to walk over London Bridge just loads of experiences which I would implore any kind of young person to just go and figure out what you don't like and what you do like but when I landed in in Innocent that first Tuesday I felt like I'd found my my my thing it was something tangible it was in the food and drink industry where you use your five senses your smell your touch your tastes everybody understood it and when i explained what i did to people they kind of knew what i did and they didn't at the time know what a smoothie was my poor parents beside themselves going what's this next one um because no one knew what it was going to then turn into um i just got really lucky and this is back to the point of you

56:25Putting yourself in the path of luck and to join this upstart back in 2005 back in 2000 it was so 2000 so that's 24 years ago um you can guess my age now um but it took those four years to find innocent my innocent my ying or yang or whatever you want to call it um which then catapulted me off into this new sort of direction if you're a challenger brand that's absolutely killing it in d2c but you're struggling to crack retail, then you've got to listen to this. Maybe you've got an Ocado listing, maybe you've got a Whole Foods listing, maybe you're absolutely killing it in Selfridges, maybe you're absolutely killing it in your farm shop and your indies, but my friends, making the leap, crossing El Chasum, crossing El Rubicon to grocery retail is not easy.

57:13It's the Champions League of FMCG. It's super hard. It means playing at a higher level and that's where some of your amazing brands sadly stumble. Look, retailers want stories backed by data, not dreams and a pretty pitch deck. And let's be real, supermarkets are not just going to magically make a space for you and your little brand. They need data. Something's got to go for you to get in, for you to get on shelf. And that is why I've got to tell you about Northstar. They are the team that's helping purpose-led FMCG brands go from gut instinct dreams to unstoppable pitch decks that actually unlock retailers north star i'm not like another data company that force feeds you data like foie guac that act like a nasa space mission it's super super simple to use their team are amazing and they actually get the challenger mindset north star are your shortcut to smarter decisions stronger pitches and investor confidence all built specifically for challenger brands like yours you don't need a massive sales team you need north star link in the show notes click that link and you'd be able to book a free demo with northstar highly highly recommend that and thank me later and what were you talking about in the office like you said there are three great skippers i'd love to go into like as i said i've spoken to adam about how he how he got it up to 100 employees and what he was doing to manage it then but i'd love to i've never sort of learned about that sort of when it's seven people in an office because there'll be lots of people listening to this So we've got teams of seven to 15.

58:43So what were they saying to you? You said they're great skippers. How? How are they being prudent? How are they showing the prudent path to the future? I think there are two big things for me. One was how inspirational the three of them were in their own fields. So they dovetailed each other very well. There was one on marketing, one on operations. and then adam was in the middle pretty much kind of overseeing the whole thing but he was the commercial guy yeah um so they each had their own areas and each of them were phenomenally brilliant at their areas um and what they were also very good at doing was was was this word strategy forward strategy not back strategy um and what i always found every year that we were there whatever they said at the beginning of the year actually happened it was like such as like they set a number that we were aiming for and we're going to launch this number of flavors and we're going to have a team this big and we're going to get cow vans in and grass vans and dancing this and we're going to put on a festival in the park and and everything they said they they delivered and i used to think wow these guys are just midas midas touch but they they were very good at creating a strategy that seemed to hang together but then what they were even better at was was doing what they said they were going to do which made them very investable um because when you when you're clear about your your purpose and your end goal um and then you deliver it which that's pretty rare in this this day and age um just got to look at the politicians around this but let's not go there yeah yeah yeah um and so what were we talking about it was like well they were very good at pooling our thought our energy the way we saw our perspective on things and brought that into the middle and then created a strategy and then we all went right we've all decided we've all input we're going this way and we worked hard really hard but you've wanted to because you wanted you didn't want to let anyone down they've got that culture there but how do they do that though because i don't know it's it's like that's what i'm trying to really dig at and sort of chip away culture is the most important thing to get right because that you know people is everything as we've said yeah already yeah if you get an energized team um they can work at at tens if not hundreds of percent better than if they're not kind of motivated in the right way you said high octane giles has described his time in this and his high octane like un unpack that a bit more like describe what's high octane day to day um i think just the fury of of of of the work the workload um i think i think it was the laser focus um a bit like you were saying earlier you know you you've gone all in um you put all your chips over i'm gonna do this and i'm gonna do it to the best of my ability we were all in there's not much time for anything else frankly um and i I was at a stage in my life where I was so happy to just do nothing else but sell smoothies.

1:01:53And I would go off on big trips and I had my own little cow van with a tail and these eyelashes and it moved. And I'd go off around Scotland and Ireland and down the Cornwall and all the fringes of the GB. How old were Adam and stuff at this point? A couple of years older than me, I guess. That's mad. They were so young. Yeah. Like they were so young in the grand scheme of things. Yeah. were they what they were like 24 25 when they set that up they would start in 99 so they were they they were yeah about that so nuts what they've actually achieved and then yeah so i think yeah i think high updane is really interesting and um it's almost it's that word which again a lot of brands not unless to talk about it's like intensity and it's that sort of just like that together the obvious examples of someone like bold bean or perfect head you just see it in their team it's just that kind of like committed to the cause yeah um but again back to the team thing you've got to have the right team and i think anyone listening to this we i spent so much time trying to finesse that at fuel 10k trying to get the best players in the right place and understanding what motivated them a bit like we were saying the supermarket buyer wants to sell more than you know the predecessor so that they can get this and that and the other it's the same as any staffer as well they've got things that are really important to them that you might not understand as a as a founder or a boss um that will change their energy it could an example of that could be a day at home a week it could be i i'm really crap in the morning can i come in at 10 it could be detail like that um it could be job title it could be actually i i want to be seen as a bigger piece of this i know you can't give me chairs in it but can i come on the right and so you might do a press release about an individual who's done particularly well and put them up in the spotlight which costs you nothing but gives them a huge amount um share options was a key one as we got nearer to to the finish line um and and also making people feel like they own their bit so you ask everyone's opinion all the time if you're the crusading founder and no one's got a chance to to chip in um you're gonna lose some of your team along the way um because they won't necessarily trust your single judgment um to better together and everyone pumping on all cylinders and the what what are some of the other learnings you took from sort of fruit tower well you weren't at fruit towers but like from the innocent well it was called fruit towers saying uh it was called fruit so yeah what are some learnings you took from fruit towers um some of the underrated learnings that you just you think are responsible for fuel 10k's success ultimately um i think i probably learned the word perspective there um i certainly team sorry perspective perspective yeah as as in as in when you are doing a sale process someone you you look at it from whoever you're selling to's point of view yeah rather than just just your own yeah um I think the team bit is probably the biggest thing that I took from it.

1:05:08I couldn't duplicate their processes. I couldn't duplicate Juice. And their brand was off the chart, which, again, I'm not a brand person. Like that, they poured so much energy into that in a very incredible way. So when I created the fresh marketing with my business partner and then tried all of these other projects and brands and then eventually got to fuel. I knew the bits that I was strong at, but the bits that I wasn't so good at, we really needed to try and hire in the very best. I'd call myself a generalist. I like lots of shiny things, but I'm not actually particularly good at anything.

1:05:49Well, that's what Adam said to me along the curve. You go, start with lots of bright generalists, and as you scale up, go to, I think, meaningful specifics or expertise, specialist expertise, something like that. that's exactly it he's got that bang on and he got a bang on generalist bunch like us which is why an awful lot of that first cohort who else was in that 7 or 8 or 10 with you? gosh I mean during those first two years we took on a number of different people who then went off and did their own thing so Mike Stevens went off and did Peppersmith, Paul Brown took on on Boll Bronte set up a Scandinavian restaurant lots of people did interesting things out of innocent but that first co-op and it's not really a surprise that the the previous the the co-ops afterwards because they were more specialist they didn't they weren't necessarily the more dare i say entrepreneurial minded um they knew their thing but that's what that's what they were comfortable with yeah it's mad and it's like i think if we zoom out and it's again back to that rational optimist book is like when you zoom out you can see when you zoom out and look at things over 50, 60, 70 year time periods you realise how positive things have become and how good they are and actually it's like everyone kind of, I know it's hard at the minute but people say it's really hard to build a brand at the minute, I'm like it's never been easier to get access to funding, you can actually speak to your buyers on fucking LinkedIn, do you know what I mean another one you know it's never been easier and I think if we really zoom out and it's the whole thing of you know bad news travels quickly good news travels slowly but when you zoom out there'll be a dot on the challenger brand timeline which is innocence creation and then it comes then fuel 10k is born and then uh you know a whole myriad of different brands are born and then those brands then lead to again if we're zooming out to sort of pip a nudge it means iced coffee and then a mojo then that leads to and it's like this but that what those three adam um um they built the roots to start yes it's mad it's mad and it's like stuff that we look back on now and think oh you know that it's of course you decode you you know you put your codify your values but that was just so revolutionary and um it's it's mad just yeah hearing your experience experience of that's what i love that's what i love about our industry is that there's so many people having a go you know we're really innovative here in the uk and you look at america and they're pretty good at it but they got a lot more cash swilling around than we do and you can go to the silicon valley of food which is the the expo west trade show in anna i'm going to that in uh do it i go every year and you literally look into the future of what's about to come over and then you'll see mushroom crisps everywhere on eutropics or whatever it is um uh hit hard and then then then there'll be a sort of receding uh ebb and then two or three will stick with it um and it may stay or not and we did that's where we got the idea for protein you know we saw that protein was normalizing it wasn't just for the gym junkie it was you know you have an eight hour sleep the best thing in the morning is to have some protein we weren't trying to be a sports nutrition brand we were just trying to be a bit better than what was there already but we did focus on flavor taste price um because if we didn't do that we just wouldn't have ever got out the hatches um let's talk about export then because i know we use fresh marketing was your export business which kind of fueled the brand pardon the pun there but um i think there's an art and a science to export science whereby it's like being quite pragmatic and prudent about where you actually which countries you go into the first thing so that's the science the art is almost like the nuance on the ground um my only example of this well my example of this is rude health who i spoke to camilla about and who i've got a lot of friends at rude health or had a lot of friends they've sold on but like they did really well in portugal and really well in costa rica and i was in costa rica at the beginning of the year for a month and a half and i was like fucking out rude health's everywhere like it's crazy and i was like this is wild like you're in portugal and rude health's everywhere and then you're in costa rica health everywhere and so there is this sort of science and that's real like art i suppose is where you go science is how you get in and then what is discombobulating to me is when i went over to wyland and this is what i was speaking to gary about the other day but we did did duns got money life into duns and i went over there this is very kind of naive thinking oh it's only just over there it'll be it'll be basically like here my god it's how wildly complex and different and just perplexing it is um so like you've obviously done lots of export like what would you say for the challenge of brands is best practice in terms of the science of like do you go into lots of countries do you go into one country and absolutely nail it do you even need to go into another country first part second part is what's the nuance on the ground with across different brands like the consumers like where is the consumer different do you mean like it's yeah i've got a pretty clear view on this yeah and it does very much depend on what kind of a business you're trying to build if you're building a lifestyle business that you're not necessarily planning to exit from anytime soon then export can be really fun you go to golf food in dubai and get it into spanish or lulu over there and then over to Singapore and there's some wonderful kind of stores out there, but it's, it's quite a lot of paperwork, not much volume.

1:11:33Uh, and actually you can't really support it properly from, from over here. Um, it's a great thing to say to your mates at the park. Oh yeah. I mean, and then some Singapore, buddy. Look what I saw at the airport. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so yeah, there's a definitely a bit of ego, uh, massaging to do of any founder that wants to just go and see what it's like. And I probably recommend anyone does go to these shows if they can afford it or at least just go and visit. But the real thing, so if we're talking about exiting and you put yourself at that exit point and you've just been bought and you look backwards, what were all the things that you did that created value to maximize the value of your business?

1:12:17the theory goes that you plow all your energy into getting your one market your home market absolutely pumping because any time spent not on that is is distracting from the core and then if you get to a certain size or you've got some sort of opening where you can start seeding another big market america germany australia south africa portugal and you do you start what I call you do the planning permission in that market, you don't necessarily have to do it, which can be immensely expensive, if you imagine how much you've poured into trying to get the UK going and then you're talking about oh and we're going to go and launch in America now it's like really?

1:13:04I mean that's big bucks what you can do is set up an Amazon account that you can try and target a Costco or you can try and do a little bit of bricks and mortar, but not the whole thing, because you can get sucked in very quickly. And then you start shelling out for kind of slotting fees and agents and all sorts of things. It does depend what sort of product and brand you've got, but you don't idly wander into that market, because what might happen is that you could have a really good business in the UK, fail in the US, and your buyer goes, I've just done the due diligence on you, and we love your uk business but we thought we were going to grow you out and in the us and you've been there and slightly ruined the market and so you'll be quite cautious of of that sort of thing although all the things that we did we looked at almost everything what markets did you go into at fuel tank fuel 10k so we we looked at america um we actually had a listing in walmart we were doing very good numbers in asda walmart owned asda they could see our numbers we did a tour of all the retailers that we thought were the ones we wanted to speak to in America.

1:14:12So literally phoned up from here and planned a trip and got meetings with buyers, Publix, Kroger, I mean, the Whole Foods, the whole lot of them, really. I think there were about eight or nine of them. And we came back with this listing with Walmart, 2 ,000 stores, East Coast. We were like, oh, my God, this is amazing. but it meant having to set up local manufacture there were an awful lot of issues at the time with import duties of dairy products and they wanted our porridge pots and our breakfast drinks um and so it's all good yeah yeah yeah um uh and um whilst it all looked very exciting and we did set up a company fuel 10k inc in delaware we looked at everything um at the 11th hour we decided to pull back and say do you know what this is we're not big enough in the uk and this is a massive distraction and it could be very painful if it doesn't work it's interesting opportunities masquerade sorry distractions masquerade opportunities i think and i think one of the the things from like scars or mistakes or learning is is being able to like and i think it's something you can only build through experiences that ability to sort of say this is a distraction masquerading opportunity it's 2 000 stores in america but it takes real sort of gumption to pull back from that like how did you do that a big man walking away it was i mean i'm naturally a positive sales kind of guy yeah that was painful yeah and that was lucky that i had a business partner and a management team that were like should we just get some hard truths around this so this is what will happen if and so we started what were some of those hard truths the scenario playing of what happens okay so you get on walmart and you've got to get this hurdle rate and we've got to get loads of product there the minimum production runs were four times bigger than what we were used to over here so that was one the cash flow required we also fuel 10k inc was a new business so there and that was the going to be the trading company and there was no there was no credit history on that so we were going to pay for four times the production runs on pro forma so cash flow we were buggered already um and uh and it all just seemed whatever what way can we make this work why can't we there must be a way to make this work but i think having set back and then also then seen a number of other uk brands do the same thing and some of them went for it and then it didn't really work and they had to pull back and the time that it takes to exit a market like that it's quite painful but actually much better would have been to just do a little bit just get a few pallets over there and get it into a mom and pop store and just prove that americans want to buy your product um and then if you feel a little bit more you can push it let's get onto amazon let's go for just one retailer but not the big biggest in the world let's go for something a bit more regional and manageable again it's mad how it's just like it's kind of the city's building the grassroots like you would over here with the indies but just doing it over there yeah what are some of the so i think again this is what i talked to adam about about there was a period of time when he was like dead set on france working uh and he just knew but but he was getting a shitload of heat from the board and he was basically like he was having to be pretty like stoic and and you know having the courage of his convictions to say france is going to work and but it was like very much like it was a thread of a sort of thing or hanging by a thread and he managed to turn it around he was like look we've we're doing well in these 10 stores it will eventually um if we put put enough in there it will work and he managed to make it work what are some of the countries you've gone into which have have been like a roaring success and it doesn't have to be um like it doesn't have to be with fuel it can be with like any of the brands you've gone into like some random countries so the The French thing is quite interesting.

1:18:14So how does it work in France? You've got Carrefour. Yeah, you've got a bunch of retailers. Not all of them operate in the same way as what we're used to here. Quite a lot of them are sort of fragmented. So you might get a central listing, but then you have to sell to all the individual stores. Yeah. They're like Spa, I suppose, here. And like Leclerc is like that. Yeah. And then you've got Casino, Group Casino, that also owns a number of fashions as well. so you have to understand the whole kind of layout of it and my when I left innocent I was Opening up new markets in France was our first market and when I Left in this and I wanted to go and try and make France work as I was so determined it could work at the time The three guys were innocent were looking at the States through the Starbucks Deal that they'd done in the UK.

1:19:09It was looking like there could be a Starbucks opening in America So in my view that was a distraction and so they have America and maybe I could have innocent in France and and And so I became a sort of agent for innocent for that first year there and we opened up monoprene Casino and and got into some of the smaller food service e stores, but it was so hard I had such confidence that having been front line sales, every door I knocked on in the UK, and then Ireland as well, the door opened. And I would just say, just put a free bottle on the shelf and I'll come back next week. And if it's gone, you can only place an order.

1:19:52And almost every time it worked like that. And that was happening in France? And that wasn't happening in France. Why do you think that was? It wasn't as straightforward. I think the French struggled a little bit with, then just not as early adoptery as we are generally. And I could go on quite a lot longer about that. Go on. No, I can't. Why? I'll get in trouble. We're just different. Yeah. And France is also not a particularly entrepreneurial country. What's really interesting, though, is... Lasing around smoking fags on the beach. Yeah, I'm joking. Get another pun of chocolat and be moody for a few hours.

1:20:33you said it but the word entrepreneur is a french word entre means between and prenneur yeah taker that's hilarious that that's at least entrepreneurial country so that sums up entrepreneur is between taker so you know not an in-betweener like between taker um and and it's really good that saying i think because literally that's what entrepreneurs do okay there's the market and this is my product and i'm going to take the bit in the middle um genius but so and you can probably go back through history as to why they're the way they are um and so a funky little juice brand with a weird quirky brand you know lots of color and and t-shirt what is this cow vans and they literally just go yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah uh but a massive experience but it still came back down to consumers and consumers so was that the con the issue was not the retailers it was the consumer it was the retailers yeah they're just just very hierarchical so you so you'd never have entrepreneurial buyers in there which you do in the uk you know i think there are some buyers who who want to buy because they want to buy well and buy the right things um whereas in france it's like the big boss makes all the decisions um and trying to try and send a message through this guide up the chain to the big boss is like what are the other if we were to sort of look at the panoply of different consumers maybe across europe like what would you say are some of the other nuances with all the countries you've exported to oh so i used to always think um uh the germ the germ is the dutch the french that's a wonderful sort of combo uh you couldn't meet more different people in all three of those countries how they differ from a business point of view yeah yeah so um so for example if you want to if If you wanted to go into Germany, it's actually quite price sensitive.