Tyrells Tycoon: How William Chase built and sold Tyrells for £50 million and sold Chase Distillery to DIAGEO

0:00Hello there and welcome to Hungry. Hungry is the podcast for the next wave of challenger food and drink brand looking to pour gasoline all over their growth. Each week we'll interview successful founders, thought leaders, unpack their lessons and provide you with a toolkit to scale super fast. I am Dan Pope, I am your host and without further ado, let's get started.

0:25Hi there guys, thank you so much for listening as always, it means the absolute world to me. Before we jump into this episode, I need a really big, big, big, big favour. I have pitched us some massive guests, humongous guests, and unfortunately they've said no because my subscriber count isn't big enough. Please, please, please just hit the subscribe button on Apple or Spotify or follow. Ultimately, it helps all of us bigger guests equals better conversations equals hopefully better insights for you, which means you can scale hopefully faster with a little less stress as well. So please hit that subscribe button and yeah, enjoy this episode.

1:00Hi there guys, just a quick, quick little ickle interruption I am so, so, so gassed and thrilled to announce that Mackenzie Jones are extending their partnership with Hungry Beyond thrilled Who are Mackenzie Jones? Well, first and foremost, Billy is a great mate, known him for years Second, they are, well, FMCG recruitment specialists I know Recruiter probably gives you the ick rest assured they're not the negi norse heads who will pester you on linkedin asking you if you've had your breakfast yet i personally less recruit a more growth partner they are loved and adored and are trusted trusted by brands uh real superfood lucky saint hello fresh fever tree but why why reach out to mckenty jones very very simple if you want to launch brand into retail and you need a head of sales speak to billy if you want to in-house your marketing activities with the head of marketing rockstar speak to billy or if you want to they really specialize in d2c so if you need someone who's going to really kind of pour gasoline on your d2c channel speak to bill or if you just want a general nitter natter chew the fat have a chinwagathon speak to billy he's a top bloke message him on linkedin or ask me for an intro via email and i will get that sorted thank you there's a horror story in food and drink that absolutely no one talks about it surreptitiously scurries through the underbelly causing throbbing headaches wasted money huge amounts of pain dodgy barcodes so many brands do the hard work they create the product name the brand open the bank account and then they cut bloody corners online and they order a dodgy barcode not sort your barcodes out is like scoring your own goal before you've even laced your boots and got on the pitch it's a souffle of aggro you know you've got to relabel products waste time i've even had of pal who's um who lost the planet organic listings they had the wrong barcodes but thankfully not all heroes wear capes gs1 uk are the superhero and they are the solution barcodes from gs1 uk are globally recognized uh trusted and accepted by all retailers and marketplaces giving you the confidence to sell your products anytime anyplace anywhere but gs1 uk are so so much more than that they really are kind of a spring well of advice for buccaneering brands 95 % of their community are smes you can get free tickets to events and invites to talks big big picture opportunities who's like to put organic boots and sainsbury's and help you know with advice like exporting it's just so so so much and look don't say don't treat you and there's an oh so special offer through the podcast get 20 off your first year's membership with gs1 uk by using the code hungry 20 at to check out thank you so much checking this this is it sucks you just speak into the yeah hello hello hello how close do we want to get it got no button on and off no so it's all live is it all time okay that's all good no no i think um one of the things the biggest issues in food and drink is people watch or read silicon valley books and apple and technology is infinitely scalable and i've got this thing where it's like if my mom wants to buy a brand or sign up to paypal providing she hasn't had a glass of wine it can take her you know literally four or five minutes to sign up to paypal so technology is scalable yeah it's technology once she builds it is software as a service it just goes yeah whereas if my mom wants to buy a brand for my mom to actually go and buy a brand yeah she's got to go to the supermarket she's got to find the brand she's got to then as you said with this as i just said that check it out that that could sit in you know the challenge with this apple cider vinegar is that that could sit at home for a while yeah and so by the time you've actually the life cycle the customer journeys for a tech brand super quick yeah paypal whatever food and drink it's much longer so the issue is you've got founders reading all this stuff about tech thinking oh maybe the next day jobs was like a fucking life that happens and then and then actually i think there's i don't know grounding ground that i think of pragmatism realizing that a food group brand takes way longer and i think that's been the biggest learning of dibs since doing this podcast and interviewing people who've been there done that and sold is it's like it takes a lot longer one i know what you're talking about is actually about how much tenacity toil and just trundling through the sort of abyss and pain to get it up and going yeah but that's a whole nother subject it's all about um mental ability because today nobody's allowed to raise their voice nobody's allowed to feel so you know we've all got to be very compassionate which is i'm all for i'm totally against any forms of narcissism or any but on the other hand it's a tough place out there and if it's everybody's going to have what's that ricky chervais thing um but if everybody's going to have mansions you know it is it's it's about being spoiled and being able to earn and it doesn't just come nobody has a divine right i think it's um it's a mentality failing is is a fantastic thing and it's how many times you fail i didn't really like the entrepreneur work because everybody wants to be an entrepreneur and entrepreneurs seem very loosely i'd rather probably see myself as a builder than an entrepreneur but an entrepreneur one of my most inspiring characters that i found i loved in life is is doyle for how he did dollar shaves i just think he was a he was just a genius he's just his his charisma and his charm and how he does things who's read doyle he made a thing called dollar shaves and he made it he used to work for um as ad agency he made one film the dollar shave film and it resulted a couple of years later with 12 people he built dollar shaves into a a billion pound business in um in like a couple of years harry shaves was almost like a result of it they just did what he did but he just did one homemade youtube on a on a camera and it just went viral and it was just phenomenal but when you listen to him talking him and his irish mother when they're saying about you know she said oh he's got he was offered half a billion and oh my god the next minute he says he's offered the billions of the company and and he was so charismatic and the way he says it but i think that's what you need is that inspiration that because egon that's failed many times before and he bought a locker a lock-up garage and it was full of razor blades single blades double blades truffle blades and and that's how he just advertised them and that's how he got into it but i think i find stories inspiring and people can because they don't plan it nobody plans this all these expert entrepreneurs that that that um nobody that's why i'm sort of i'm almost a bit of um an anti to things like dragon's den i'm not a fan of dragon's den and other entrepreneurial programs where they're making it look very easy and you've got a lot of arrogance and condescending to people wanting to have a go i i just think that's quite sick it's good tv in itself being rude to people and and and d but it's it's so tough to get um nobody has a divine right to sit behind piles of money and dictate and anybody that has made it i think has been exceptionally lucky i think i've been very lucky i've had luck in my life to be able for what's worked and i think when it does work there is such a thing as luck and it's always one of the biggest arguments in entrepreneurship and business has been the balance between luck and management and i think you'd any way you can get a conclusion on that argument it says 50 50 it's 50 percent luck and 50 management or you make your own knuckle what were you what you completely and what you said there builder versus entrepreneur and it's like if you i went to business school in manchester in manchester and you know people who were like it's very romanticized like oh entrepreneur it's a french word do you know me you were to say to people well actually an entrepreneur rockstar entrepreneur is this sort of pernicious thing that's in with with youngsters now even though i am young so but like it's an I sort of bought into it as well there's actually no no mate like you've got to be a builder and builder's not romantic builder is is hard graft hard labor toil so I think the amount of people who wants to be an entrepreneur to put it on their tinder profile or their facebook page or their linkedin versus actually if you if everyone if I was to say to people right tomorrow you put it is what you've really got to do and it's what I've learned from this podcast is you going to change your name from founder to builder i think a lot of people would walk out the room this is quite interesting um but look let's let's officially jump in so i'll do i'll do a jump down jump countdown let's jump in uh three two one go hello there people and listeners of the hungry podcast today i'm absolutely ecstatic uh to welcome will chase onto the podcast will is the founder of Tyrells, Chase Distillery and now Willys.

9:56We're currently sat in Willys factory or fermentary, I should say, in Gloucestershire. It's absolutely gorgeous. We have a lovely tour. Will, in my opinion, you kind of built the first challenger brand and you kind of paved the way for everyone listening to this conversation. Founded Tyrells in 2002, reached sales of 14 million by 2008 when you sold a majority stake to Langholm Capital, 30 million. you then jumped was it sorry 50 oh 50 oh sorry my my my research isn't great all your money today yeah my apologies my research has escaped me there um obviously then you jumped back in with with chase distillery in 2008 which you then sold to diageo in in 2021 um and look i'm i'm incredibly grateful for you having me today and yeah just excited where i want to start this conversation specifically is almost in kind of a sea of of unrecognizable faces and specifically um at the airport lounge so i've done some research and it says i think it was 1992 i've got this time stamp right that you were bankrupt um you had zero in the bank account you said i was running away to australia i felt ashamed and embarrassed um what did it feel like and what were the voices in your head as you were boarding that flight to australia oh that's a good start isn't it um that's uh i suppose it's escape i always use that one as a as a point in the story um it's it's when you can't cope and uh i was probably quite suicidal at the time as well so i was probably the lowest of my life so i think as they say you've got to put your mask on first so if you're suffering and you're in a problem you've got to do so it was my escape so i was actually probably quite quite excited about doing it at the time because it was my great escape i was i was going to go and see what else there was in the world what else i could do to to escape the mental torture probably i was in at that time and when you say well because doing a lot of every guest i've done research for and you've probably been the most open about mental health to be completely honest and when you say mental torture like go into that a bit more because i think a lot of people on this journey as we're talking about before we hit the record button i don't think i think you've got to prepare yourself for the mental torture so what was your mental torture you have we all hear about failure and how you deal with failure and how you recover and um mental torture is is is it's like suffocating so i can i can sympathize and understand why people do um probably take their lives and why they get into those positions because you're in a space and there's nothing worse than you hear stories like this well if they come to me you know we could have had a chat about it it's not as simple as that if you've got something on your mind and it's torturing you and it's it's like a vortex it's like a mentally suffocating space to be in so you just simply want to get out you just simply want to find a route of of being free from that space and i think for me as well is is it's like really tough in business it's the people we were talking earlier about drawing up entrepreneurship and how easy success is and everybody's successful and that's that but it's it is a really lonely space starting up with nothing and trying to find out how to make it work it's a tough and it's a mental everybody talks about mentors but it's um there is nobody there is no answers there's no fairies there's nobody that will give you there's no wicked witch in the words that will give you the answers it's a it's it's a really tough one so it's it's that's what i experienced and and i think if you're in a hole stop digging that's one of my favorite phases as well that it's um but when when are you in a hole of when you need to stop digging and i think that's my point when i ran away was i probably got to the bottom of my hole and i knew i had to stop digging and get out i i think you've got to feel lost to appreciate feeling found you have i really you've got to have failed if you've failed to appreciate success as well and i think so you get to australia what did you do on the first day in australia oh first day in australia i ran away and there was this farm in the middle of northern perth and miles away from anywhere which all you saw all day had a few sheep and cows and you just saw a train one thing went through the farm all day that's all you got to see and after a couple of days that i thought this is not for me right and uh and it was on a yorkshire farmer who'd retired or who'd been out there for about 50 years but he hadn't lost his yorkshire accent so he was still sort of living as if he was in yorkshire um which was fascinating but i thought it's not for me i thought well i'm over here i'll just pop over to my see my friend over on the other side of the island of brisbane i didn't realize how then being quite naive how far brisbane was from perth but i just jumped on a plane and popped over there and that's that quite inspired me over there because that's why i learned some great opportunities i could have stayed out there and this guy that's ready to retire he was farming thousands of acres of cotton he wanted somebody to take it on it's quite exciting and i was on the side of the river one day talking to him and thinking about it and i thought well it's running away i thought i'll go back and i'll go and try and pick out the pieces and try and do do something else so my story there was i had to run away to go and do that to physically see the world i loved australia i thought it was a great i think a lot of people go to australia they go to different places to run away or or for whatever reason they they move and do different things or to hide or change their life but i think it was a great challenge so i was almost like rebooted then when i came back fresh with a whole clean you know new keen to go no money i didn't have anything the receiver let me keep my car so i had 15 000 bucks so i started again with nothing at 30 32 with 15 000 pounds and uh and uh but i had but i thought i had nothing when i went bust but i didn't what i did realize i had was i had 10 years of knowledge and what this told me was knowledge is worth more than money so my advice to anybody in their 20s is don't get stuck in the same job or just do things for money don't think about money in your 20s all you want to get in your 20s if you want to build a successful career is to get as much physical real experience as you can possibly get and i suppose the climax of my experience building my 20s must have been probably going best at the end of it which actually told me that the value of all that the knowledge that i'd gained just physically having to understand balance sheets having to understand you know i couldn't believe that richard branson did one the other day that he was 50 before he was told what a net profit was i still can't believe that now you know when you're 20 you have to learn the difference between a net profit and a gross profit so so and i think that's what it taught me so there's always no regrets everybody says with gritted teeth or through gritted teeth no regrets but um you just cannot beat experience and the and the more experience you put yourself through the tougher situations the more you're going to come out as they say what makes you bad makes you better it's it's fascinating i love linking the each podcast guest i've had so the other the other week i interviewed juliet barrett from grenade yes it's fascinating and she said you've got to congratulate yourself for getting to the bottom of the mountain as anglosec well this that sort of perplexed me a bit i was like do you mean the top of the mountain she was like no no no i think people don't appreciate what it takes to get on to the bottom of the mountain so she'd been a school teacher she tried all sorts of different things and then she launched grenade when she was probably about 35 so not not too dissimilar to you and i think a lot of people listening to this are in their 20s thinking i need to i need to have been a as we were saying of the rock star entrepreneur narrative or say you know build it flip it and go and smoke cigars and french for whatever right and i think what you've said there it's like learn everything you can in your 20s learn the basics what what were some of those um foundational principles in your 20s that you picked up that without those tyros would not have been a a rip-roaring success well that's a good one um whatever you do do it properly do it to the best of your ability the first thing which probably for me going broke at 30 taught me was your your know your weaknesses we all know our strengths if you don't know your strengths you're pretty we don't go there but but you know your weaknesses and a lot of people are very arrogant and very rude about looking at their own weaknesses and they don't do it so i think first of all identify your weaknesses and when you can identify your weaknesses work on those and control them and don't let them hurt the strengths and if you're lucky enough to be blessed with strengths and strengths can be from um dealing with huge companies the one thing i've learned is that in people's character there's three forms of classification the first one is ability which is qualifications it doesn't have to be measured in school results or but it's just quality if you're qualified what you're qualified at the second one is charisma character and and then the third one is just sheer work ethic if you've got the ethic to get up and work if you've got and some big companies well they should or they actually grade them they give you three points for each so if you're a nine pointer you've got three in each you are actually ceo material you've got you've ticked all the boxes and um that's the one thing i think in your 20s and 30s that you really do need to identify is what you score in each one of those boxes and if your charisma and character isn't quite working you might be a bit arrogant or how you're talking or underplay it too much learn how to you know what used to patronize me with tyrell's early days a lot of people said well you're okay but you need media training you know you need media training how to talk i'm doing okay you know it's working i'm trying to be as honest as i can and i don't want to talk bullshit and try and to be groomed into this thing that's telling people what they want to hear i want to try and tell it in the raw truth the way it is so i think that's one of the main ones is your character so if you can identify your character and your work ethic i think that all comes from our childhood and how we're brought up and and we all are parents for that that if you're brought up that you've got this conscience you should be working and you should be doing things to the best of your ability i think that's that's probably not none of it's born they always say entrepreneurs born or are they made but i definitely think we're all made we're all um a product of our own journey of of how we travel through it and what would you say so you're i think you're so right there about being self-aware of your strengths and your weaknesses what would you say your your weaknesses are now uh and you this is why i think it's fascinating is you've you know done this this is the third go well not third go this is your third business now what would you say your weaknesses are today and how are you combating them oh that's a good word um yeah weaknesses are um i probably have the concentration of a gnat i cannot focus on saving for long so i'm always looking for the next thing i'm always looking for the next challenge challenge and it's getting people to keep up with me and it's um that's probably one of the hardest thing i don't expect people to keep up with me that's probably one thing that i've changed in my life i used to expect people to keep up with me and we're going to do all these different things and where because you've got to do something as be a catalyst to do the next thing to be the catalyst and the more things you can do the more catalysts and the more reasons you've got to go higher and higher so it's it's so exciting and there's never enough i think if you're that sort of insatiable character where you've got a passion for things there's never enough and there's always more to learn and do so some people say to me why don't you sell the business why didn't you just retire well so well if i was that sort of person i wouldn't have done in the first place because i'd have been quite complacent and lazy and just happy to exist in the first place so i think it's managing that desire the hunger over what you can actually achieve and managing failure over success and and you've got to have more successes than failures otherwise the failures will kill the successes it's quite easy to be um over beaten down beaten by it so that will the business we're in at the moment trying to sell healthy products and convince people of a new healthy diet it's easier said it's easier said than done and we're human beings natural we were talking earlier about chocolate and crisp and all naughty things and from alcohol to to to sheer healthy food it's it's easier said than done everybody wants to talk about it but to physically do it especially when you get older is it is a difficult thing so so it's learning to get into that space and again i suppose after this person is i'm i've i'm a bit like that and i'm well it's interesting dead of a gnat it's probably been kind i literally just jump around i'm like a bee over a barbecue do you mean i'm like um so that's reassuring for me and then i something else that's a quality that has a huge quality to have a mind that's that's active and that business i look at it we're all looking for people to inspire us i listen to podcasts you you're doing podcasts you want to be inspired by others we all get a buzz out of being inspired don't we i think inspiration is is such a wonderful thing oh for sure and i think lots of the founders listening to this will have that because i think part of the dna of a founder and we're going to get onto that shortly um but it is this kind of ability to to hold many things at once whilst having an ambition it's you jubbed it as they say the the kind of the thing is juggling loads of plates but so so you said one of what i found really interesting is you've kind of accepted that your uh that is your weakness and you don't expect people to keep up so how do you how do you actually do that on a day-to-day with the team that you've got here because again lots of people will be listening to this who will be the founder in the sky with the blue vision and actually the team may be thinking well i'm not the founder uh i've got kids to go home to or i've got um i don't know whatever a girlfriend to see on valentine's day like how do you sever that do you know what i mean yeah i think again it's it's inspiration it's managing expectations it's not i don't expect anybody to cut you know i say to everybody if it's not for you or you're not enjoying always say it's not you've got to enjoy it to come to get involved in the race and it is a race the human race we're all in a race we're in a race in business to do whatever you want to do there is a race there's only today if you don't what you don't do a great thing of being a farmer is what you don't do today you have to wait another year before you can do it again so i think that's that's a really interesting point that how what we miss you never get back again whereas if you're complacent in life and you're laid back and you're not quite so driven you think well that's okay we'll do it manana we'll do it tomorrow or we're doing the next day but tomorrow never comes so i'm i'm a huge but i think you you you probably act the same look what we've got to do it now boimi our beloved sponsor are helping build the fastest growing challenge of food and drink brands look if you're a small brand just starting out and need your first indie stockist your first hundred stockist to wholesale boimi are the platform to categorically speed that up but if you're a big brand wanting to get bigger bohemi are also insane they make field sales marble smooth silky slick they're just epic ollie's ollie's been on this podcast twice actually they saw a 29 uplift in sales when using bohemi to check major malt listings availability insane 29 uplift by downloading an app insane lucky saying my boy aaron duff who's coming on this podcast in a couple of weeks he uses it to manage the team of 30 people and they've lucky to have unlocked 500 draft listings by using boemy look you've got 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 on islands but i think as well and this is something i'm toiling with even on the way on the way down yesterday when i was driving down here as it's a lot of people in sometimes my mom's like just switch off or like try and switch off and i'm like am i being too obsessive constantly thinking about it and it's and it's i just don't i can't change that that's my mo that's my mode you know it's just leaning into that um is is fascinating but you teed me up nicely there will in into into farms and uh farmers and i think before we hit the record button there's it's quite interesting how i don't think people who are buying weight you know gallivanting around notting hill buying strawberries appreciate the toil and the tenacity it takes to be a farmer and there's some quotes I pulled actually about to kind of open the door to this part of the conversation but one was by George Washington and it's agriculture is the most healthful, most useful and most noble employment of man.

27:00The second was by Eisenhower which is farming looks mighty easy when your plough is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from the cornfield. I think that's really interesting where you know society kind of venerates in the nicest as possible way bank wankers but they don't appreciate the farmers and so that's the the next one and then this is what i found fascinating is by a lady called wendell berry i think i've got that right we have neglected the the truth that a good farmer is a craftsman of the highest order a kind of artist so the first question is what are some of the biggest neglected truths that people don't understand about farmers being a farmer yourself wow that's that's um that is a story close to my heart because i think farmers are probably the most underestimated race of business people on the planet because to be a successful farmer you first of all have to have a massive work ethic you have to always put the job in front of your life in your family or friends whatever the job comes that's why most family farms are quite successful where they're all together on the family farm doing it together um i think to be a multi-tasking multi-talented universal business person and get three points in all of those three characters we were talking about before is a must so first of all you have to be a fantastic they say to be a farmer is to understand husbandry and husbandry whether it's animal husbandry or crop husbandry you have to understand or when i was a potato farm sorry husbandry is that sorry for something how to do how to do it you have to run right it is the the method the means you have to be a qualified to be a qualified farmer you have to be a person of the soil or a person of the animals so i could look at the field of potatoes without even going in i could tell you exactly how were the magnesium boron the levels and how big they were what skins they'd have the exact health of that field without even going into it once i'd spent enough years with potatoes i could do the same with cows as like i could tell you in cows if they're lacking something and all good farmers could without even going near their sheep they could tell you if they're happy or not or what they need or if they're suffering or lacking and so i think that's like looking at a good business without being too philosophical about all this but it's it's looking at a business that how you you just you just it clicks you get to know so to be a good farmer you first of all have to be good at business you have to be good in numbers you have to understand how to get more money coming in and going out otherwise the first rule of any business the second thing is you have to understand how to do it and you have to be trained and qualified but the biggest skill you need is a love and passion because if you haven't got a love and passion to do it you will never make a good farmer and i think you you talk to most of the people you talk to on these podcasts and talk to about businesses they've had a passion they've had a love it's been 24 7 that business has been in their head eating away at them to make it to make it work so i think farmers would be the best the best example of this and but the main key about farmers is when you hear about multitasking individuals to be good at your own charisma character yourself your stamina how to inspire everybody around you and get the job done that's very important to sell to be able to if you can't sell there's no point growing and making if you don't know how to sell it that the one is your mechanical skills you have to understand if you watch the Clarkson thing you have to understand all about you know people says a lot of people agriculture can't even probably put a sentence together but they're so qualified they're so skilled at actually growing crops they couldn't get it into a script and put it down into a document but they could just go and do it and that is probably the best way to describe agriculture is that is natural people of the soil people that actually understand from mechanics to electrics to um pests and diseases is going through the whole spectrum i think it's a phenomenal thing and then to back that up now it wasn't very trendy to be a farmer when i probably started tools 20 years ago there was things like the viz with farmer palmer and the farmer was seen in those days 20 years ago as a as a tweed wearing ranger over driving rich landlord telling people to get off my land or he's seen as a guy with a straw in his mouth and is wearing a smock and he couldn't put a sentence together so it wasn't really cool to be farmers whereas now it's quite cool to be a farm farming is quite a cool sort of occupation it's it has the whole dynamics of has sort of changed a lot would you agree it's like chefs as well so i'm all chefs i into rural farmers yeah i i find it fascinating looking outside the boardroom you know what i think what makes you formidable in different oblique areas then translates to the boardroom which is fascinating but yeah chefs ages ago it's probably in the last six to eight years chefs have now become like this like they want to be a chef people want to be a chef i interviewed paul ainsworth who's got yeah last two weeks ago and i don't know if you've been have you been out to padstow you've been to his number six well i love that restaurant um and you know he was saying oh but when i started out people it was not cool to be a chef um and it wasn't cool to be a farmer and i think it's not cool for the right word uh my vernacular escape me but the the um it has changed for sure and i've got a friend who used to work for a brand she's now got her own brand called bold bean um who used to work for a business that would supply the it's almost like uh a delivery yeah sorry not delivery it would link farmers directly to um the restaurants in london what was it called the names the names escape me but it was like that was a really cool um business to be involved in whereas i think 15 20 years ago it probably wasn't do you know what i mean and it's it has it has changed in terms of um so you said and i think it's almost the passion bit so true and also almost just knowing here when you can go and look at your different animals or look at your different parts of the field of potatoes and just know and you said the word click is what you said and i think our listeners need to have that kind of um wingspan of scope through all areas of their business whether it's finance ops so i think that's fascinating but how else would you say being formidable in the field makes you formidable in in the boardroom or the other buyers meeting or um yeah yeah that's that's that's a great one i think it's work ethic right i've probably spent and i didn't want to admit this but i probably spent 30 000 hours of my life driving tractors from the age of probably 17 to 27 so say my 20s i've probably at least 3 000 hours a year physically driving tractors and machines and to my intelligent friends and my my um probably more intelligent friends will say would have said that was my misspend use truck but i think it's it taught me the tenacity to stick at something until it's done so if it was say 11 12 o 'clock at night and you're in this field miles from home it taught you that you'd stick at it you just do another up and down and another up and down before you know it you've been there till two or three o 'clock in the morning but you'd finished it and you'd get so tired that by the time your head hit the pillow at night it was time to wake up you didn't even realize you'd probably been asleep and um to get that tired and to get that physically physically and mentally exhausted for months on end you can see in my face now probably how many lives these kombuchas are doing their work but i think that work ethic is is is just phenomenal i think my my parents are bringing me up to have that sort of work actually i think back to those three points again if you haven't got the work ethic you can't just be sort of spoiled in life and just expecting things to come to you because you have a divine right you've got to go out there and make it happen and and that probably taught me the farming side of me taught me how to make it happen i guess make and that's funny enough make it happen is so when i sat um at paul ainsworth's restaurant they sat me opposite so i could see into the kitchen yeah and on his wall he's got a thing that says make it happen make it happen together so my first question to him was make it happen um i think it's such a great phrase and i actually wasn't it wasn't attractive but when i left uni i started delivering cheese for a wholesaler yeah they're Harvey and Brockless and I was a bit like all my mates had gone and got a job in the city and I was like what am I doing and that was kind of my lost moment but it was the best thing to ever happen to me one it told me to get up well early like I had to be in Battersea for like 4 30 um I could listen and I was in heaven eight nine ten hours of podcasts every day because that's this was 2016 so podcasts were just getting going and i was listening to this podcast i'm not getting a corporate job so that it was the best thing but then also just the ability that everything's going to go wrong every single day so i could have the most gorgeous route up to um say say they gave me milton keens right it'd be right through the countryside up and then you just get somewhere and it would just everything would go wrong and you're just thinking oh my god fuck this i just want to go home to go to a dreadful place like that with a dreadful job as well yeah yeah but but then also and also it taught me to you know i went to a good school yeah but it taught me so the first day they were like uh who's this private school kid do you know what i mean and it taught me to be able to speak to kind of anybody anybody yeah and and that one and also just see different perspectives so it's probably one of the most the best jobs i had so it's probably it was great character building for you yeah i just loved it and i think it was um i actually think a lot of people should uh one of the things one of the not that i disagree with is it's kind of this so many people have pushed through this path of just easiness yeah um and not like looking this way on that way and i think that's where the yeah whether you call it character building just i don't know i just had a good fun it was just good fun um but yeah i could i could talk about that so so um one thing i i i read and i don't know which where the article was it's it he said it's it's the farmer in me who grew up learning that what you don't get done before breakfast time you won't get done in the day i'll be land on the land for the first two hours of the morning as the sun rises it's beautiful time to spend amongst the golden orchards in herefordshire or my vineyard in province uh well provence as i should probably say um so i would love to know what nature means to you in one sentence spending so much time in nature i just think i think nature back to the mental side of it nature is probably your best escape if anybody's got a problem you just cannot beat animals and going for a walk go for a walk with with dogs.

38:23And then if the weather or if the smells or if the countryside is there at the time, that's just a massive, that's just a massive inspiration, I think. It's just to fill your mind with freedom. I think nature is amazing freedom. And that's why I think probably farmers have the most privileged occupations in the world, in the race, because it's, you're there, you're with nature all the time. You're actually, you probably don't get to see it a lot of the time as a farmer because you're bogged down with the whole commercial side of it but it's it's to be connected with nature i think that is and and evolution and and things are moving on now i think that's becoming quite a fact isn't it everybody wants to get back to nature they want to get back to their roots that's why i love being you know you must have enjoyed being in food food and drink is is such an amazing place to be because it's the it's the most important part to life and and that's where it comes from so i guess without trying to make it sound too romantic i think that's that's just a great place for your mind if you want to take your mind somewhere and do something you could just kind of be that fill fill your mind with freedom i love that it's so it's so powerful and ironically a lot of people listen to this podcast on like a walk or whatever so i think that that's perfect um and then what is your favorite season because i think oh i just don't i definitely don't like winter in the uk i don't do the cold anymore this is really miserable it's like a lovely view isn't it looking that's gorgeous you have a gloucester and area for there but it is it isn't pleasant is it far nicer to be in the south i think you know some people seem to like it but what i do what i have learned going back to when i ran away to australia as well was to have the seasons is quite a special thing because i do actually think we enjoy the summer more after the winter than if we had say we lived in australia we had a constant warm climate they say they don't ever really appreciate it for what it is so you know you just almost so i think we should look at the winters as a as a as a break from the summer i guess isn't it so i think it's um that's quite an important thing to have a break have a change can say so for me it'd be the whole season but i think you cannot be the spring when things are bursting into life and especially when i have things like dreaded sheep and things with lambs and but we have cattle them in the calves and things but i think spring spring as a farmer has got to be the most exciting times just the smell of the soil when everything is coming alive and it's it's the beginning of of new life and it's it's quite amazing time and i think i know we're kind of briefly touching this before we hit the record button is how business and nature is so inextricably intertwined so in terms of the spring um it's like when the business is getting started started the startups going yeah obviously you've got you've got the winter and the dark days but the dark days will pass appreciate the light the good days will pass i think if you can um look at business through the lens of nature and evolution because ultimately growing a business is evolving like tinkering growing getting stronger getting better it allows you to appreciate the the dark day so the dark days allowed to allow you to appreciate the good days and i think one of the issues i listen to a lot of joe rogan and he's kind of admonishing los angeles and it's because it's too nice it's like it's too plastic it's too perfect and as much as it can be quite bleak when it's dark outside and it's just a kind of hum of gassy clouds coming over is actually really good for you because it appreciates um appreciates the good days but um kind of building on that um uh nature and uh startup so when when you found a business i generally believe the founder is the dna right these are he or she is the dna and they have core values and they have similar passions and then you get a core team that kind of like a cell growing bolster onto that dna yes and theoretically yeah theoretically um and it's a bit like um nike his first five yeah his first five ten employees were all runners so they all had similar values similar actually it's very very easy and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger and then it becomes a personality and develops its own thing i think a brand's a personality but then at some point um that brand is kind of has to cross the chasm become a bit more grown up yes or being put in a um kind of like maybe a petri dish if you want to call it that and basically i'm trying to go with this is is is corporate people coming into a business and the paradox of keeping the founder's magic alive versus um scale yes and you said something and this has made me laugh because it's one of my pet peeves that i've experienced is we were employing corporate people who are arranging meetings about more meetings and i've just like i had i've seen that firsthand like fucking on let's just get going it's so painful isn't it diabolically painful and just and actually i think some sometimes if you get a bad um it's not a bad employee i always say this is what i'm saying to perry is is it's like trying to get a cricket coach to teach rugby you know it's not it's not that they're bad people it's just the challenge of brand versus corporate it's a different sport and and probably that's a good time to take that back to a farmer so if you're a farmer you have to do everything from being an electrician to being an accountant to being um mechanic to do everything the whole thing once that business becomes a really large business you have tiny little sectors and people that just come and say well it's above my pay grade i'm not into marketing or production or i'm just in so it narrows it down so that's a fantastic subject always to dwell on that one it's like from an entrepreneur you have to have 180 you have to have such wide vision you have to be able to be an expert in everything if you're going to fit in a large company you have a very little narrow specialist subject that you focus on and that's what you have to do and i've always been a on that one i think i was watching um prince philip's funeral or maybe even the queen's but it was it was what was fascinating about that was we all have entrepreneurs and want to be entrepreneurs but when you look at the army and you know they've got a job to do they cannot be entrepreneurs otherwise any event it would just be a complete shambles so to run really large companies they have to be run like army to have the ranks and to have the people and the whole everything that goes with it to make it work what i love about small entrepreneurial companies is entrepreneurial minded people that can deal with people like me where today we're going left and tomorrow we're going right and that's the hardest thing so i think on that subject the most challenged part in business in a startup becoming a huge scale business is can people in small businesses with a small business background work for large companies and can people come from large companies work for small companies and that is where you get your because small companies don't have time they have time for meetings they don't have time for hour long one hour briefings every morning they've and i said well what's the best thing since i've all employed a lot of should we call them corporates is the most exciting thing that i love it when they say to me is welcome to the 21st century will you more or they're saying things like you know when i was at so and so we had 10 people so if somebody didn't turn out for work you know there was always lots of people to go do this now with this bloody business if somebody doesn't come for work i've got to go and do the job and i say well welcome welcome to the true world of entrepreneurship because it's it it's without looking narrow-minded about this it's it's having that character and that bra and that broad brand of being able to i i think what i'd to call entrepreneurs is and it goes back to Doyle at the dollar share his he always used to say this was an entrepreneur is a problem solver and so if you surround yourself with the right people and right entrepreneurs they're all problem solvers they're all every day you get constantly a barrage of problems all the time to deal with hurdles and fences and people putting barricades in your way and you just surround yourself with positive people who say no problem we'll go around this or we'll take this one down and we'll do this whereas if you've got people throwing problems at that is the most painful thing so i think on that subject that that is the meetings to arrange meetings part is but big companies would never operate i guess but to the side of that there are a few big companies there's ones like dyson if you have a look how richard dyson's taken dyson from a tiny little model with true to nasty and everything to where he's got to today he still carries that business still carries up and i didn't really realize this until i sold tyrell so i thought it was our product and the and the quality of what we made it wasn't really until after i left it that i realized it was the people that made it what it was there was just fantastic people they didn't need a structure they didn't need a managing director and a whole because they all had their own area and they just came to work every day and they were so well tuned they just got on with it they were such fantastic multitasking people and to create that that's what you create with a really successful small business you've got a small group of people that they treat it like their own money don't they treat it like their own business it's not just a job or a completely and i've seen that and worked in that before and it's like it's it's almost like being on a pirate ship you know what i mean it just mucks in and it's they just do it yeah they just do it and it's and it but there's a real feeling of that you can't put on a paycheck yes that just feels good absolutely um but then to sort of counter that is you know people get offered off other opportunities and one question i've been asked by listeners is how do you actually keep great talent so say for example i don't know some let's call it greg i've just made that up right they say greg's working for you he's absolutely smashing it he gets poached by someone big you don't have the budget maybe you don't have the budget but like other than just giving them more money because it's not always about money like how do you keep great talent in in the business and we could talk about tyrols as a lens for this or chase whatever yeah it was so um that's for some such a fantastic point and it is for every um where you have a business that becomes successful everybody then is targeting all headhunters are targeting your business because if it would would just take this guy out of tyrols and drop into yeah nobby no mate's chocolate cup factory and he's going to like double your sales straight away go get this person because they've been on dragon's den or they're one of the dragons and so it's this this constant barrage so if you've got that team and they're close and they trust each other they respect each other they're probably not the best people don't do it for the most money the best people do it they know it's coming if if they know it's coming and they believe in the business they won't affect they will stick with that business because they believe in that business and that is such a far i could juggle about this all day such a fantastic point because it's creating that culture now when i did it say with something like totals i'd be in it first thing in the morning and i'd be calling charge and i'd be there myself so as an entrepreneur if you're on the floor first thing in the morning and you're there through the whole day every day but then when you get older and you can't be there calling you know leading by example all the time um some great brands today you'll see that they'll be having a show and there's the probably the ceo himself is there with a hoover hoovering the stand before people come because that's the that's their leading by example it's such a wonderful and it's like brace weight that had sun seekers he'd be a fantastic example massive business grew it so well making speedboats making sun seekers but still brace weight himself until he died he'd be on those stands in the morning with the hoover hoovering the carpets getting everybody on duty to making sure everything that experience for that day he didn't have to be and that is i think the sign of a really true entrepreneur that's that's leading by example so i think if you can do that and and keep that team so in answer to why you said there i think it's you will get bombarded success breeds success everybody will be after your team of people but if everybody loves each other and they're all on the same level and they've got that respect they will say i've had because the headhunters always call at 10 o 'clock on a saturday morning apparently that's the time to call people when they've had the week and they're a bit pissed off and things are going and somebody's telling them or you single-handedly are building that business on your own come over to us and you know i've got this opportunity for you to you could be earning three times the salary you're on and um and and so it's it's whether you're going to be a tart and go for the money or whether you whether you and so if you feel respected and looked after and nourished in that business and you believe there will be a future for you i think you will stay with that the majority of staff would stay with it if they think it's coming if they don't think it's coming and they don't think they're being respected and they are money is more important than anything to them then then they're probably not the right people for the business anyway i love that and i i interviewed the founders of caravan i think i told you last week and they're they're from uh they're kiwis yes and there's this great book uh guy by a guy called james name's gone all about the all blacks and one of their values is don't be a dick and it's about cleaning the shed yes and i was like how do you you know keep everyone here kind of similar question and my friend jess had set up the interview and what chris said to me he was like if i've got to pick up the boxes i'll pick up the boxes and i said to jess we went for drinks and evening and she was he was like hand on heart like chris will be there first thing in the morning and it goes back to what you're saying the nucleus needs to keep keep being fed a bit like the mother that needs to keep being fed um yeah so for then for the team to to go into it i think it's fascinating i think it is one of the the most hard things for any founder to go through and actually the team members as well because it's and it's when you said it will come i'm i take it that's the sellout right although not the sellout but when you sell because success a lot of people say to me no but you've got a 25 year business plan you know i think you should have a hundred year business plan i think this idea of getting rich in five years yes it's just terrible it's sick you know elder banks and venture capitalists everybody wants to get rich and going back to your point with bringing the corporates in suddenly say tools as example that everybody instead of talking about investing in the business they're all thinking about buying their new range rover sports or their ferrari or thinking about their bonus and they're thinking about themselves and not the business whereas the true people are thinking about the business and they know that when the business is coming and it will look after them that they'll have all their goodies and things further down the line so that's a fantastic point and how you how we live you know because a good business should have at least a 25 year business plan what they say the average business at the moment lasts for seven years isn't it so so that's i think that was a perry perry taught me something about that about having like a hundred year vision I think it was Perry's they've been on twice and it's it's um it's just a fascinating lens to look through and I suppose that the the the other side of that is that some sometimes options and uh share options etc can be like golden handcuffs it's like I think can can a business actually sell in a food business is going to be a long game so for anyone thinking that they're gonna this is founders and for employees saying we're going to build and flip this in x time it's probably it's probably not going to happen um and i think there's just a lot in that for for both founders listening and and actually employees but on that point there is there is a way of of maybe you're not going to flip it or sell it but there is a way of people having equity because if that business cannot afford to pay them the salaries they would like but it gives them equity even if they leave and the business isn't sold and they can still get paid out with the equity and the actual value the business has got i think that's still a great way of um from emi shares and things i'm still a great um fan of that i think that's uh look a guy watson's done it with riverford he's sold out you know john lewis have done quite a successful model of it i think it created to have an owner owner i would love this business to be an owner an employee owned company i think it's it's fantastic if if you can get that cohesion together between really honest if i'd rather not have sold turtles and i should have made it an employee because the employees are so united they made they made the business such a fantastic thing that it would be far better in better health today if it was an employee-owned company than if it got the feces or you know people just looking for a short-term quick buck just thrashing it to to poke it up to discount it to get it into more to not prostitute but to get it to you know get it just going for that scale so you say i regret selling tyrols um to a to a vc yes i should have done it with employees just the way guy guy watson's done riverford if you look at guy watson's how he's done riverford is he's a brilliant business that business will be there for the next hundred years whereas anybody else just doing veg boxes or doing food boxes or whatever ready-made meals or whatever there are many businesses that would have the same you'd expect that business to be there in 100 years time because it's solid it's got a purpose to be there it's true right from its procurement from look probably one of the best ones is probably tabasco i think tabasco is such a one of my favorite food brands and look at the the work they own those seeds of those chilies right through the whole process no hot sauce you can have your new hot sauces that are trendy you know fads but nothing will ever beat tabasco from that i mean hardly i would personally from a consumer it's always interesting speaking to the founder right but from a consumer angle and you know tyrol's now ubiquitous i think one of life's greatest pleasures is having a packet of tyrol's and a pint of guinness on like a fourth day the end of friday that is just a very delicious experience which i'm probably do tonight to be honest um but let's let's let's just following following my curiosity here but let's say you're going although the week before you were to sell tyrols right we were to go back into that period of time and i was to say to you what is the hundred year vision for tyrols what do you think it would be just to be the number one i only had one competitor in the world and that was cat and chips and that was to be the number one in the world but when i sold tyrols i had about probably 40 or 50 new competitors they mushroomed up like never before same with the distillery we started we're the first bit the first person in the uk to start making gin and we're making it from scratch out of vodka and then within 10 years there's probably a gin distillery in every single postcode in so it's it's to try and own your space and what i love about this business is it'd be nice to master farming fermenting probiotic life foods if we could we have one competitor with this in the world so if we could if that's the space i think i look at business as as competition if you're going to do something if you can be the best so when i had tyrells i think tyrells could have been the best um snap company in the world in its class in its category i think if you're going to build a brand and do something and you're going to be competitive about it you have to have that good old usp you have to have that um that that magical thing so the challenge the challenge is whether you get there or not is another thing and it might take 100 years to get there also but if the business can survive because the one thing i think is great about harvard they say everybody's been at harvard they all tell me that the first thing they teach you at harvard business school is the first objective for your business is to survive and i think if you ask most entrepreneurs what's the objective of their business or a lot of people in business would just be to make loads of cash but the first first rule for any business is to survive so i think that's that's quite an interesting you know there's all different psyches of where we're looking at it so so as far as i've gone off the path there no no no i love i love going off the path i do all the time um and i think it's completely and i think it's it's be everything i think what i'm trying to summarize what you're saying there is i think everyone wants to be number one but they they want to do it in they don't want to spend maybe a hundred years at it and i think it's like get rich quick yeah they want to get rich quick and it's like following your passion is good advice to some to some extent but i actually think there's probably more value in asking yourself the question like what am i willing to suffer for the most because that's you know i'm passionate about having a pint of guinness and a packet crisp but i'm i'm willing with this to go through toil and hell and just keep bludgeoning through and i think that's a real interesting interesting lens so i want to talk about the the the the sale when you sold tyrols but i want to revert back to kind of beginning um and i read somewhere where you said it's full price or free i think with so you didn't promote which is um i suppose once you start discounting once you start and you put a sales team together anybody can sell fivers for four quid i love that expression anyone can serve for the corporates i've taken into my businesses in sales the first thing they want to do is they want to start selling five as a four quid nobody yet they all think if it's cheaper they're going to sell more and that's where most businesses go wrong is they all think they get sucked into this thing that the cheaper it is and if you've got a brand that's strong enough you know how many different prices are there for an iphone if you can buy an iphone can you can you shop around can you buy it for cheaper money anywhere else no into successful brands you you you pay the price so you give it away free to promote it or if somebody wants to buy it they they pay full price and that's how any brand can build a brand like that if the brand is strong enough and it's got a strong enough usp a fantastic book is the ben and jerry's book having ben and jerry's did it and they constantly talk about it in there as well as probably come seconds probably phil nikes um a shoe dog shoe dog yeah and and i think the lovely thing in ben and jerry's is that they have one nemesis in the world they have one competitor and that was hagen da and so they're always fighting in the world against hagen da with promotions and how they did it and and i think it's just you know how do you do it without giving how do you grow without discounting and devaluing your product how do you grow by desire and demand the one thing i think we have with tyrells are so cool was because we're so innovative we have a new flavor a new product every week every month we'd have we pioneered the veg we were frying all sorts of things from solariac it was a disaster quite often but we still make it yeah about apple chips all sorts of things we were frying a lot and sticking everything out there but the customers loved it because and the phones were ringing all day every day and and it was just we didn't need sales people i think if your marketing is right i think bill gates is always a good advocate of that sales people are just order takers nobody's successful businesses do not need sales people they need marketeers marketeers are the creative people that create the desire create the demand the sales will just come along then because they'll get the phones to ring so sales sales people really just order takers but i think if a brand if a company against marketing right create that desire then you're off to the races aren't you it's it's really reassuring for listeners because i think price i've done it before price they're a bit like in crack cocaine to be as bloody as that but it's when she's done you can't stop and it creates this sort of uh junkie in the consumer where it's like i know that that's going to be on promo again so i'll just stock up now then wait so actually you're not if you zoom out you're not getting net you're not probably not going any better absolutely you then set precedent with the retailer well they will want more investment more promotions next year um so i think it's really interesting hearing your angle it's like actually you don't need to promote and i think you know iphone don't promote ferrari don't promote most challenger brands not all but most are premiumizing categories so there's this got a desire if you've got you've got to have that demand desire if there's something else that's just as good yeah then you're struggling a bit then so so how because i read somewhere a guy called this desire uh so a question i ask all guests and we'll jump in with it uh now for you is is what in one sentence is a brand so a brand is a product is nine times out of ten a product it happened with a desire to fulfill a need to fulfill the need i love yeah so so with marketing you have to go and create the desire there's two things in life you need to make a brand a success the first thing is desire is demand call it whatever you like demand or desire and the second thing is a margin now if you've got those two things you're off to the races you're making hey you've got something you're you've got a business but if you haven't got that if you haven't got the desire and the demand and you haven't got the margin you're always and there's just so many businesses that are crowdfunded we've got this clever idea we're going to go and do this thing they they they're every year they're going for another round they're getting more crowdfunded and they're building this thing but there's no profit there's no margin it's just like a thing and they're hoping that one day it'll stick and it'll and so there is the cash about to build brands like that but i think you have to have that margin if you've got a margin on a product and you can own your space you've got a you've got a chance to to win no no it makes complete sorry if i'm trying to absorb it all in that's how i've tried to do it that's how we did it with tyrells i think we had because let's face it if everybody has this buys the film off the same people in the oil and the potatoes all come out about what's the difference in a potato from waitrose to sainsbury's to mark suspenders they all came out the ground might cost different money in different stores but they're still a potato they're still going to taste the same so most brands of products they made they come out the same the products come on the same ground that the flavors come from the same flavor house and the oils so whatever they're made and this comes back to this thing then always that should you outsource it so one of the best food and drink brands of all times not that i ever promote it is is is probably one of the most valuable brands on the planet at the moment now they have never spent a penny on production everything's gone into branding and their best marketing campaign cost them what did it cost them five million and they reckon it made them 50 million profit straight away on the back of it and that was when they put that no it cost them 50 million so sorry what brand is it that's red bull when they said the guy up into the clouds to jump out of that um the highest skydive it cost us i mean like 50 million to do that but that 50 million brand campaign resulted them in a few hundred million i think it was to be in sales it's worth looking at one up but that is a good example of getting rich quick do a brand it's not healthy isn't it's the the things it causes and what it does we shouldn't do others know but it's it's it's just marketing campaigns and then talking about marketing that's why i love things like guerrilla marketing that you can do marketing without spending any any money if you if you can do that if you can get your brand across without going to ad agencies and without paying for it and if you can do it organically and that's where clever marketing books have gone guerrilla marketing how people have got their brands out there from some clever well that's what i think is is really great fun and i wanted 100 go into that because i think yeah i want to go into that but i interviewed a guy called rory sutherland who's um he's a vice chairman at ogilvy yeah really written a book called alchemy and it's all about it's got a whole piece from red bull and how they were doing consumer research um with red bull and they purposefully wanted it to taste not that nice because it would um invoke the feeling of giving you more energy and going back to what you said there about the desire is really fascinating and obviously now at this this this um red bull's in a sort of similar can to this but when Red Bull started is you had the short stubby you know, adenine things so for them to go into a shorter thing it almost looked like a battery and it's all these little things create this subconscious desire so sorry no that's alright because they're campaigning with micro-influencers in universities so they pay other university students to go around each other's campus and put on the doors, hang these crates with the thing, yeah, and the cans they well of course they're going to have cans for free so they're all going to have six cans on there so every next morning all these little crates are free are full of cans these guys are drinking these cans so they'd ask them to take them on the way to lectures and throw them in a pile in the middle of on the way so all these guys going to lectures in these unis would be walking by us this big pile of of red bull cans subconsciously thinking that's a mess but then they're seeing the brand and then they pay the same guys to put them there to go and pick them up so without paying for advertising that is and it's it's universities it's that age that is the critical age to be a lot of successful brands today as micro influencers at unions those are the next generation that's the that's the place especially with social media people with time on their hands probably as well to be spending more time looking at years yeah what's strong have you heard of the brand jubel yes have you they so they did this it's actually one of my friends from school um they rented a driveway at twickenham this is about wherever the last rugby games were on and just gave away bucket loads of Jubell.

1:08:36I think it cost them like£88 to rent the driveway. Brewdog got wind of it, sent a message to whoever owned the flats. You know, you've been tricking me as you're walking from the station towards the ground. Yeah. And they did this whole thing. She replied saying, oh, look, Brewdog have booked it. So I'm sorry. He's like, so what they did, and again being shrewd, frugal yet forceful is they did this thing called loo dog. So they had a toilet. This was literally last weekend. They had a toilet. And anyone who got their brew dog can and didn't like it could put it in the loo dog and then they'd give them the jubel.

1:09:16And I think that is just insane. And it's how it gains this landscape or sorry, this mindset of how can we be frugal yet forceful? um promotions are probably lazy secondary space costs you money um so so other than promotions and we can talk about any of the brands you've created so other than promotions other than investing in secondary space what are some of the ways you frugally yet forcefully drove rate of sale i just think constant product placement i have a battle with everybody around me that they just hate mail acts they can't see when we started tyrells the first two years we used to fill up a whole truckload a whole arctic every day of samples and we didn't have google and so we had to yellow pages find all these people to send samples to and ring them up and see and and just just get your product out there i think product placement if your product is better and it tastes and it's got the message it's it's product product placement is far better than um they said with advertising you can light something up in neon lights in the sky but people will walk past it until you've got a friend or somebody that um you know my favorite place in the food and drink world is just to watch people cruising around stores especially places like sort of you got a whole foods in town or you've got selfridges and then different sort of smart trendy shops where you've got two or three people walking around together and they're just sort of wasting a bit of time and then some of their walking and they're picking things up they're telling their friends or they're having their dinner parties and they've got this thing they've discovered that is the best marketing is one telling two telling you know four telling eight sixteen although i said that's it's like almost galvanizing word of mouth isn't it it is and to keep the momentum i don't think you can stop i think with a brand if a brand stops and it goes stale you've got to sort of kick start it again i think once you find the magic um i did a book about it and it started off as um it starts off as an autobiography but in the end it just finished up as a brand book because i've got such short concentration it just i'll go on here for you and it's amazing but it's it's it's uh i'm not that proud of it now because things have moved on when did you write that i didn't know it's research i didn't even know you'd wrote that about um yeah i didn't end up like alan partridge we did sell them but i didn't end up putting them in the polka and getting rid of them but they did all go we did um but it was it's it's like i have got a very we're talking about concentrations but i i think it's it's like a brand discovery once people discover it it's got to keep giving them more and more and more things like you meet a really exciting person and once you start talking to them you don't want to leave them because there's more and more and you can't wait to see them next time because they're going to teach you more and more and more whereas if you if you've got somebody and there's nothing there and the conversation dries up it's and i look at brands like people i think a brand is a character it's what it's got to be it's got to give you so much it's got be so exciting it must be too loud and too overpowering but it's just got it and so the one thing i've learned in marketing is write and communicate with people as if they're your friends most people say at our beautiful company well delicious we're making this and we get up early in the morning we brush the dew off our our what's its and we um we've won 10 awards for this they're talking to customers as if they're aliens of the strangers but i think if you just talk to your customers as if they're just as you'd write to a friend whether it's virtually physically however i think we're in an age now where people love that honesty i think um completely and so So when I asked that question to, again, the founders of Caravan, Chris said a brand is a friend you take on holiday, which I thought was such a delicious way of putting it.

1:12:48And I think marketing is great. Packaging is great. And they say packaging is a moat to starve off competition. But I wrote this thing on LinkedIn the other day, and I think tone of voice and how you speak as a brand. Storytelling. Storytelling. And I actually think what I said is, you know, packaging is a moat. Yes. but tone of voice is is a 10 foot wall with barbed wire and sniper rifles because that is there's so many and you've created that you've created that oh yeah and it's like and i think tone of voice is a is a special dialect you have with your consumer yes and the tyrol's tone voice is brilliant it's just it's just so punchy um uh cheap like it just is unique do you know i mean you can't copy those those are people piled in to copy your product it will bastardize your packaging i should say but it's very hard to get the tone of voice um i i love that and and you talked about a guy called is it charles campion um i read somewhere he was probably my first touch experience with journalism and i just started tyrell so i was quite a sort of narrow-minded ready-faced farmer that was struggling a bit so he loved the story and he loved the story about how i struggled to make money out of growing was telling potatoes to supermarkets i was going thousands of tons i had to keep growing and growing to make more then one day i had the re-eerie idea to turn my potatoes into chips and so he wrote i must have left us i must have waffled on for hours and then he actually he wrote four or five pages in the middle of the in the middle of the times which was just amazing article and what it taught me the first thing that taught me was probably one of the hardest things is probably like journalism because you've got to find boring stories you've got to turn all these boring things and you're going to make them exciting and sexy and people want to pick them up and read them and the second thing is that from journalism still this podcast i've probably waffled on for hours and you'll pick out the bits you want to pick out hopefully the right bits but it but if you can if you can spot so when i've done different pieces before in the past i love to read it back and then i like to pick out the bits so that journalist has found this will be of interest to the reader so like there's willies now with the mother everybody picks on my 300 year old mother and they want to talk about her and how sexy she is or why she's alive how come she's not your actual mother probably what even the mother yeah it's good it's just for listeners you know what she what she actually is so she probably is my real mother now i've lost my but she's she's quite um that that's that's that's quite a you know it's finding something of interest in those stories that you can dig into so so that charles campion thing was was for me my first massive break for tyrols and my whole of going from being a potato farmer to a potato cooker fryer whatever it was my first lesson in in articulating story turning shall we say and i'm just piecing this together so on the way down here uh i was it was a bit weird i was listening sort of hip-hop whilst driving through the countryside it was a bit of a juxtaposition but for some reason on my car there was the the traffic reporter and there was about three different radios but they all sounded the same different different um different people and i think a brand without a tone of voice is basically that traffic person doesn't matter what station you're on you're just going to sound the same to the consumer so i think developing that unique voice if that makes sense yeah um a bit weird there um and i want to talk about uh

1:16:19specifically when, like, negotiation, to be honest, because I think every single person listening to this will have to negotiate, whether that's with retailers. I think life's a negotiation. Life's a negotiation. With our friends, family, yeah. And I'd love to know, I think there was somewhere I read about you having a lunch, I think it was in Barbados, I think that might be in the genesis of Chase, if I'm writing to say, if I've read that right. There's a quote I love, and it's by Tim Ferriss. It says, you are the sum of the uncomfortable conversations you have with yourself and others. So I think it's getting comfortable at being uncomfortable.

1:17:01What's been the most uncomfortable business lunch you've ever had with a negotiation, and where was it? um probably the most uncomfortable place there are many aren't there we have so so so many but i'd say my most uncomfortable moment was the time when i had um a meeting with tesco's and um they'd been on to me wanting to sell tyrrels i wouldn't sell tyrrels still at the time because we could sell all we could make and they'd rung me and they'd written to me saying you know come and sell come and sell tyrols in our stores um and we'll you know we should be selling your products and our customers want them and we want to be selling them in our shop and i said well okay if you pay our prices but they say no if you if you sell them to us you'll have to come down 30 percent in price and you'll have to sell them the same as walker sensations and kettle chips well so i'm not prepared to do that because that's why waitrose all all sell tyrols and sainsbury's because they're making more money out of tyrols than any other crisp brand and they cost more to make and that's why they're that's why it's all the magic is happening there so um they called me up to a meeting and i went to the meeting that day and they said um they offered me about five million because of the business i could have made their own label chris so i could have you know they offered me the business and it was in days things are totally different there's a guy called terry lee that was in charge of tesco's and it's when food had been wheat had been for the same price the price of loaf of bread had been the same price for 30 years so it's the luxury of being in europe we're not going to talk about that one but um and so this the big supermarkets then had done quite well had had years of beating farmers up and squeezing them squeezing them on price and by farmers being more efficient being able to probably keep their head above water by producing more and more volume so um it was that sort of peak i'd say just at the end of that time there was a guy called terry lee he ran it so i said no you've got you've got me in front of me he said you've got to list it you've got to list it you know we're going to give you all this business so um the paper got hang of it and then they said you know this interesting story do you want to and so i thought till i shall i go shall i just succumb and chop tyrols down 30 percent in value and succumb and just go mass market or should we stand our ground keep the quality of the product keep making it to a standard and not to a price and um so we thought yeah bugger it we'll stick as we are so we so we um we said no we'd like to decline and we wanted to remove them from your store so we we almost had to get legal help to get them to remove them because they were buying on the gray market of different merchants and then selling them you know and we're a small company so we knew which merchants they were buying them from it wasn't too hard to trace it didn't need a lot of forensic time yeah but um but the moral of the story was that then um the papers got hold of it and we on the sunday one of sunday papers wanted to do an article or i thought it'll be interesting so it was a tiny little box and it was hardly anything so i thought well that was um that was a waste of time and then the phone went on the sunday night the today program wanted to do a feature with the the on the today program and then that just sprung there was nothing bad luckily going off in the world on that monday and then we had full bbc coverage for the whole day it was my first experience of having pr um and we must have we were on from radio one to four every single channel and it was it was like this david and glider thing with with how you know standing up for our brand i guess as a farmer grower to um and and so afterwards did it make any difference to ourselves i don't we didn't see any spike or any distance ourselves but it just gave the brand so much pedigree and stature that it was big enough to stand up to the to the biggest retailer in the country that the brand was actually bigger than or stronger not bigger but it was stronger than that with its ethics and its morals so that's why i've always been quite a quite a strong one for true brands that actually do make their own stuff or they can't tell you where it comes from and not being allowed to get beaten up as they grow by scale and taking shortcuts i guess but it was that was the most uncomfortable time when i had that meeting and And in scenario after that meeting...

1:21:13So what does it... Just to try to interrupt, we're just trying to really get into this. So what does it feel like? You're walking in this... You're walking through the door, you're in the car to the meeting. What does that feel like? It was a very difficult meeting because they had got a brief, you know, they've got to list my product in their stores and what are they going to do? And I said, well, you've got to put the price, you've got to pay what everybody else pays. They said, we're not going to do that, but we're going to offer you all this business. So I did feel a bit victimized. I felt a bit...

1:21:38They offered you volume, essentially. They offered me volume. Right, okay. and i did feel a bit brother and they said well well you're in our store and you're here now so you might as well just get on with it and then they actually said to me that really did piss me off at the time they said look mr chase in all honesty we think you should get back on your farming and your business and do what you do best and do your farming and make your chris and these are retailing and the marketing to us and that's the bit that but times have changed and attitudes that they're supermarkets those days big ones had a very toxic mentality and attitude towards their sort of customers so it was that was that was the bit that probably in my life that somebody you know when somebody's they say like red rag or whatever or that or the bit the flags up that was the bit i found really patronizing they said i should go back on my file and then the most interesting thing about this then was actually the times writing about it and the and the sort of like the mail to the express the difference in the same story given to the tabloids to the to the to the so the telegraph and the times were right in a very articulate way and then the tabloids are saying you know this farmer jumps on his tractor and drives to london and he's met by some shiny suited nylon suited crofted hairstyle supermarket buyers and he's told to get back on his tractor so he's just it was just quite interesting the whole story that my first exposure to sort of a media story where and and and they say you know all pr's good pr but it wasn't with gerald rachner i always find that one fascinating but i did but there is you know there is if you if you believe in what you believe in and you're prepared to stand behind it i think we're in an age now where people do want a genuine you know and i think delicious story and there's just so much i want to kind of pick out there but i think the first thing is i know you said it didn't have like a catalysmic i'm sorry not a catalysic but didn't have a big spike in your sales personal sales but i do think i had a change in the zeitgeist of how uh big retailers speak small brands they certainly do and i think like now you look at you've got future brands all these uh retailers have incubated programs and the future brands have been fantastic with willis future brands they paid us straight away they've they've given so much support over big companies it's i can't you know i just think it's amazing future brands what we saw it with supermarkets 10 20 years ago they were trying to stock a few products locally and trying to get local managers but nothing from the top it was all sort of done a little bit of a local thing here and there local managers were allowed and then i think most of them got a bit of a pickle because they didn't really know with tyrols we used to supply local supermarkets to start with and then they were always run out so we'd have to send them more than they wanted or but then things like future brands i think that has to be so commended because it's just fantastic what he's done you know supermarkets and they do have to work for their lovers from especially startups in that aspect completely and i want to go back to this uh kind of negotiation and we were once negotiating with um an irish retailer i was in japan for world cup and i met this irish farmer funnily enough and i was oh how much should i do because the irish are really good at negotiating and they're just compared to the brit nowadays brit's like just i can do it behind email which i think is weird and he was like just hold your bars hold your bars and i think what you did is you you it takes a lot of balls to say say no yeah so like so i'm just really trying to get into my book because that's so much volume i thought on the friday night i thought i've just turned out five minutes of business you know because i've grown the business by 50 percent so how do you say no in that situation because that's so hard to say no isn't it for like everything in life it's quite hard for um but it it is it is and that is the true test to a brand if the brand is strong enough and that's why i didn't realize until after i lost tyros that i realized what a massive part of me it actually was and everybody wants to build a food brand they all want to build something but to build something with this natural inner magic finding and that's why i wrote on that book finding the magic because when i start talking about the magic in a brand most people except for probably something like perry hayden taylor but most people think i'm crazy they think i'm the average thinks no you don't know what you're talking about and and probably the older i get the more of a silly old jubber and git i feel i'm turning into because there is a magic there is a i don't know what it is and that goes back there's 50 percent left and 50 percent management and and so everybody wants to see christ to success they all want to get rich quick they all want to get lucky they all want to know how many frogs they got a kiss or lick or whatever before they're going to get lucky and um and you do make your own luck you do make it but then you still want to be lucky but i have the stars aligned things have got to be right at the time you can't make you know if you really like somebody and you want to be friends and they don't want to be friends with you it's just like that with a brand you've got to be friends with your with with your with your community you've got to you've got to strike get out it's got to be it's it's so one of the questions i asked paul ainsworth i said to him is is food art or magic um and he basically said it's both so so he says he says the the food the actual food you're eating is the art yeah and the magic is the service and you know when people but as people say because i'm i love all that stuff and it's stuff you can't really quantify but it is it's almost like the moments in between the moments and uh the way perry put it actually this in typical Perry fashions.

1:27:08He was like, it's basically like foreplay on a supermarket shelf, which is his kind of way of saying it. And I... It's got to be such... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So what would you say that... I know it's a... Some would say a ethereal thing and hard to quantify, but what would you say the magic is in a brand and how can our listeners like... The magical thing in a brand is when somebody has to tell their friend about it. They've discovered it and they've got... And they see it and they think, wow this is cool i've got to i've got to share this with my friends and i think it's the natural growth of transmitting the message without it was like and it takes many many different things like tools if you ask people about tools early days if you have you come across the brand they'd say um and is that the one with the vegetable chip so is the vegetable chips actually made turrells famous you've got to have that that magic that widget call it whatever you like you've got to have that little thing that makes you you know if richard branson hadn't had michael oldfield as number one for two years and he hadn't got that all that work he took to get michael field out there and to get him to do to work together where would he be today it's it's you know if james dyson hadn't made the wheelbarrow with a big red wheel that that he's always going to be every every gardener's dream that that didn't work but failed he wouldn't have made the bag was hoover so it's you know if i was the potato farmer and i hadn't gone into that trouble i've had to potatoes and getting my potatoes rejected so he i've got to change more i've got it you know from going fast and changing my life we all need catalysts so can you bring those catalysts on faster into your life it's like origins that book origins is a beautiful book you know origin was string regions by um what's his facts i mean this is how atomic habits uh no i listened to that actually yeah he's on the podcast as well but it's it's it's how little things like it takes um it takes that's a fantastic book atomic habits it takes 60 days to make something a habit so you know if you're going to get up and go running every day or you're going to give up something if you're going to give a booze don't just give it up for january give it up for january and it's with all things like that so it's that that's that's that's inspiring to me how yeah no for sure and i i think yeah it is something you can't kind of quantify um what i want to talk about now is there's a quote by charlie munger who's warren buffett's yeah uh i think to say sidemans a sort of a very derogatory way of saying it's as big yeah as as big um it's like chook's dad poor dad almost yeah yeah exactly and he's now the power of podcasts has also come on all the power of virals yeah yeah for sure and he's got a quote which is wisdom is prevention which i love wisdom is intervention and i think a lot of people listen to are listening to this to hear your story and actually i think to go through and we talked about you need the failures but they're actually listening to this like if i can avoid some of these pitfalls then hallelujah unless let's go on the races life just yeah so i'd love to know like what were the mistakes and what was the biggest mistake or key failure that happened at tyrell's that you didn't allow to happen at chase

1:30:32um that is you've got me there that is um because all of these things i just run not to a plan everything yes it's organized chaos here so we just we just get go to work every day and do it when we're in a cul-de-sac we back up and we go down another one um i think what i did at tyrell's which was a good thing was innovation so we did lots and lots of different things we kept bringing more products in from popcorn to to dips to all sorts of different things we're looking at doing juices drinks once you've got a brand and you're selling locally well i mean locally just your own country the more products you can get on to sell to all those people the better but then as you want to take a brand into the world you have to sort of put it on a diet it's when the corporates come in as our people they call it a tail and they want to chop the tail off and they want to rationalize it streamline it So what we did with Tyrells was, I don't think we did anything too badly wrong, to be honest.

1:31:34I think everything we did at Tyrells was great moves. We created something that... I think Sarah's... Are you okay? I just wanted to say no. We're all good. Yeah. Done? No, no, we're okay. Yeah, yeah, still got a few more things to jump through. Yeah, that's all right. Yeah. you did think uh i would i would demolish another kombucha beer to be honest with you yeah i think yeah come everything everything goes well in threes doesn't it again what do you like to live i'm all right thanks august yeah yeah yeah i still got this fella to go on no give it give it journey in account this is experimental this is this is quite a live of a price that's got a lot yeah yeah that's got the uh is that the scobbing oh is that the mother I don't think there's a lot of customers they'll be having that in Nando's they'll be sending that back the thing is that's when we were talking about that's the good stuff there but it's like how do you get there's such a big educational piece in booze and crisps and chocolate I mean fuck me everyone's going to eat that whereas with that that looks like alien drink in a nice way it's like we don't start doing and don't be a pioneer you get shocked by the latest yeah yeah yeah oh thank you so much yeah sorry do we start that one again then yeah so we were so we were talking about like you well you were i asked what the biggest pitfalls were or mistakes that you didn't allow to happen at that happened at chase stuck on that one i waffled didn't i so um but i think sometimes what you said is that you go into one cul-de-sac and then you reverse out and i think it's only it's only retrospectively when you sort pause what you think okay that was a failure so it's not yeah so it's making the same mistake twice yeah well like basically our listeners are probably learning about your mistake yeah listening to this and thinking right i shouldn't do that so it could be something like right if you're hiring a corporate person and be really careful so yeah no that that is probably it you you've turned the light on it even inspired me to find the answer then yes so so yes my the thing i learned with tools was i wouldn't do again is to let the corporates in is be told by others things that you inherently know so for me my mistake with tyrell's is left in the corporate sense their example to like yeah many are many and they probably all came from a big company so they'll bring their other friends to that large company and they try and suddenly inject this this new reporting and this new structure and this which is probably too far ahead of the business system because the business if a business is managing fine if it works don't mend it you know if you're making money and you're growing as fast as you possibly can don't complicate it if you bring corporates in they have to complicate it they can they think there's a book of rules and that sadly to most people there is no book of they don't realize there is no book of rules there are laws we all have laws we have to obey but in business there's no book of rules so if you have a that's what i love about entrepreneurs entrepreneurs when somebody's truly called an entrepreneur they realize they've they've burned they've thrown away the book of rules because if there's a problem you have to work your way around to get it if you believe there is a book of rules you're constantly hit by problems so so yes i'd say my biggest fear my biggest thing i did wrong and i think all the people who work for me at the time intervals would would blame me for that as well is probably bringing the corporates in and i probably made the same mistake with the distillery again as well as i probably bought the corporates in again which which when you've got the small mentality of a beautiful business that everybody is i never believed in bonuses if i was working somewhere and somebody said look if you work harder we'll pay you more money i think hold on you know i'm doing as much as i can here you can throw all the money at the world of me and i couldn't do any more but i do realize that a lot of human beings a lot of mortals do need to be incentivized they need to be reminded in their monthly fashions in these corporate meetings so they've got targets to hit and they've got to hit them and if they want to get that extra bonus they've got to work which i think is an awful way of working i think human beings we've got ability and and i just hate that with us so i love small come so this company is a beautiful little company i hate the bonuses and the kpis and all of those so that's probably something i allowed in materials but probably you need it sometimes to make a business function amazing thank you sarah the um i completely agree with that and i think um well i'm probably very bad for that and i shouldn't talk about and say that one but i think it's true it's like it's i also think sometimes sometimes brands pay for whether it's i'm not like my dad's like the most corporate person you'll ever meet so it's not it's not it's nothing about them personally it's just as i said it's like getting a cricket coach who coach rugby it's just a different sport and a different mindset yeah they're not bad people um but i also think it's like sometimes brands pay for a market research report and perry's words of this is it's completely a load of bollocks and david ogilvy said i'm gonna butcher this but it's like the issue with market research is people don't tell you what they think they do what they feel or something like that it's basically a bollocks and um i think when it comes to rebranding brands get quite insecure they pay all this money to a marketing agency say it's 15 grand imagine if you paid a marketing agency they said you're right mate you look brilliant as you are you'd be like i've spent 15 grand and it's the same with i'm paying a corporate person 150 grand so you feel like you have to listen to them and as you said they're telling me stuff i already know and i think it's really interesting for a listener i don't know where what it's almost like a brand gets a bit insature as they get older and they need they feel they need to get well the first thing with the corporates with most brands is they'd want to bring a branding agency and i've seen that with everything they bring a branding agency and they say look we have to get all this tidied up it's all too crazy um it's in the brand's evolution it has to um it has to evolve and it probably to a degree it does because if you're i look at the market as a pyramid so if you're starting at the top of the market and at the bottom is total discounters is is mass market at the top people are buying it for its quality for its reason so they're buying into its pedigree whatever it's got about it that other products haven't got when you get down to the bottom of the market the mass market you're just selling to people be a price or because they're told they have not got to these people to work out why the brand is good or cool unless it's got celebrity endorsement on it or something you know we found out with a distillery probably if we put buff daddy on it or we'd put something it might have been george clooney or something it could have been a lot a shortcut but it's it's trying to find the brand to have its own magic its own reason to be alive and its own celebrity stardom and its own whatever it's got completely and there's the uh the brand oh au vodka yeah for the goals yeah yeah they've got charlie's saw from yeah that's incredible isn't it how and that just goes to show there's not my bag at all but it is just incredible how slap the right thing on there and also go after the right people yeah what i love about them is their strength straight off to mass market yeah but but also like sold they've really won't sell that much in the waitress where they've gone that's in every kind of convenience store while occasionally go and get a vape on a weekend trying to get um they've absolutely smashed it um that's so convenience so will i like to try and push myself to ask some hard questions but you're in you're in the driving seat so tell me to bugger off if you need me to um but i think i read somewhere that you know you lost your mother i think at the age of 14 which was which is very very young i'd love to know if you were to kind of go for a drink or dinner with her to say tonight like what would you say to her i would just say thank you for being such a great um a great parent i think if if a while parents are alive and i think we all forget that we all spend time spending time with them really and it's just finding time and not emails or texts it's just physically talking to them so my point on that is if anybody's lucky enough still to have their parents alive is make sure you find time for them and because i'd love to have that time you can't have that time back again and i'd just like to say thank you for making because i think our parents do make us and so our work ethic and how we laugh and my mother was just a phenomenal worker she just worked so hard what did she do she did well they were quite entrepreneurial my my parents had a very small farm sort of 30 miles west of here over towards the welsh border where we had a very small farm so they're running 100 acres but we had my they were a lot in the 70s things like polytunnels growing croissants and peppers my mum had tried everything from growing croissants to for funerals to peppers for different chefs and in those days it was quite a sort of pioneering thing so she she would do everything and she she'd inspire me she'd have time i don't know how they did it in those days but they had time to even dance socks knit knit things make wine she used to make all these wines used to i remember freezing stuff or picking all the vegetables and things and freezing them to do and she'd do the accounts and she'd have all these acres of polytunnels and growing these different crops so it's quite she was a she was a massive inspiration to me but i didn't realize and you don't realize until they're gone until time moves on how lucky you are to have them so so for me my message to yeah that would be my message is he's just thank you for being and it's like he's giving me giving me this when you hear other entrepreneurial stories you hear people are quite rubbishing their parents and things there was one we were talking about this guy that's um that's making quite a few noises with his podcast but he's not very complimentary towards his parents and i think we're all products of our parents and i think we should be really really thankful for for what we have because i don't realize what your parents do for you until you've either got children or you're around or you've lost your you've lost them i'm being i'm probably i'm being a bit of a spoiled brat in that i you know moved home to kind of really go for this yes and you know my dad will come in when i'm working i'm like i'm fucking working let me crack on and i'm just like um this is i'm learning this live now it's like well actually like that's not gonna like be grateful for that and you know i was just saying i was just saying i'm getting all my life here leave me alone i'm i'm i'm busy don't you know i've not talked about but but it is and it's this balance i guess yeah it is we're all products of our of our parents and and you know my parents you know would have been proud of me for for for what i've probably done in some ways and not done in others but it's it's it's growing up and having respect and keeping that respect because we have such a tiny time on this on this earth and we're alive such a short time that it's trying to a try to make the most of it and be trying to have that balance as you said then that balance to completely um and next question is when was the last time you cried oh um i suppose probably when i lost my father was the last time or that was not that long ago that was last year and that was um that was again because didn't really realize what you know until somebody's gone they're they're what you've got what you know you only have it while it's alive so it's making the most of the moment isn't it so that would probably be about a year ago so is that leonard yeah because he was quite uh he was a was he what's he around here he did a lot with like the local water authorities and he do a lot of lots of different committees he was quite a he was quite i was always busy looking after my own businesses my father had a lot of time which was amazing thing for lots of lots of other people and organizations and from my experience with that I don't know if you ever really get thanked for spending time doing things for, for, but it is a good thing.

1:43:45We do need people in communities that do have time to go and, to go and help organizations and to go and do, and it's quite hard if you've got a quite demanding business to be, and I suppose that all right leads on to philanthropy and things, doesn't it? That it's quite difficult for sure. And this is a question I've just got from my own curiosity. So what does it feel? So you sold Tiro's for 50 million. So what does it feel like when that sort of money lands? because i know a lot of founders will say it's and it's a bit uncouth to say it's not about the money and i and i don't i do think i think it's a it's it can be about both is what i think i think it can be like about doing your passion about building something with a legacy but also it can be quite nice to chase a pound note right um so what did that feel like when that landed in your account like was it good bad or ugly it was like a surreal moment really that you say wow is that you realize it's not until you're in the winner's enclosure that you realize the fun was in the race and well i started tools and in the first year i got a wonderful guy he was a local accountant and he was he was in the factory we'd had the horrendous days and he was in there with his suit on and they got fat splashed across him and um we're having a conversation later and he and he was just telling me that from one of his other customers had said no i was so paranoid all these things going on we bought this packaging machine it was checking out bad packets and they said the anything is like almost like suicide is almost a serious alternative to a bad packaging machine because you just couldn't fix it and everything was going wrong and then and he told me that story he said one of his old farmer customers had said it's not until you're in the winner's enclosure you realize the fun was in the race and it's not until you actually do see them when you're young you think oh yeah blah blah blah but it's not until you're actually there that you do so so that so that was it and so you think well is that it and it sounds quite um and money and then and this is a fantastic point because a lot of people have got friend that sells property in the belaric isles and he meets a lot of people with a lot of money and they all come over and they're spending 10 20 30 million on the houses he's like i can't understand all these customers he said they're they're just moaning about their businesses they're making piles of money and they're successful people but he said they're not happy and they're not happy and they're and that is quite fascinating so a lot of entrepreneurs that sell their businesses out or whatever they're not happy and this and that is that is a fantastic subject because it's not money and people don't understand this you're not doing it for money people saying well you can write checks out you can pay for this that that's not the point here it's the it's the that's why i don't know how to put into words i get i get exactly what you're saying and it's such a junior from grenade said this she said she cried when the money came in yeah she on the sunday soldier babe she was on yeah exactly and she hadn't she one of her biggest regrets is that she didn't have kids and she was like like this out of my hands now it's and it's just interesting getting your perspective because i'm going to make no apologies like i do want to make money like that's not and i think as you say once you're in the winners enclosure like you are i'm still in the race but it's just i think always be in the race i never actually want to go in the windows enclosure again i really want to be in the right okay i want to surround myself with young enthusiastic i'm always looking for entrepreneurs anybody that wants to learn i can't believe that there's not more people in their 20s just come and work for work for people like us just even work for nothing just go go and work for for companies get that experience because um i just think it's you cannot buy experience and it's um but it it is i don't i'll know i've just realized now in my life and then i had a cancer scare a couple of years ago and i'm actually about gut health problems and i've that's probably made this business even more apparent to me because i've learned all about the whole medical side of of gut health now how it's treated and and it's it's sort of it makes you realize that that it's again back to that thing it's not until you're in miller's enclosure realize the fun was in the race that it's it's here for now it's not it's not about making money it's probably more than most people you'll talk to it's about more about the achievements of putting a product if you can put a product on a shelf and somebody reaches out and picks it up then that to me is is fantastic it's like such a massive if you can make this thing happen and it become everybody's friend you know things like even actors and things how they have the natural magic to be able to you know look look people like tom hanks how many films he's made and he manages to keep the magic and keeps it rolling on on with him and i think a whole romance of a brand so the challenge to me and so selling tyrols it was probably more than my arrogance well i look back there the arrogance i saw i can build i think one global household brand is enough for one individual if you can do that in life to think to think you've got the arrogance to go and do it again and then again is is is it does like worry me a little bit now so it is um i'm not saying like i'm doubting myself but i'm always looking for the the holy grail and and as you watch the monty pithons you we never there's no such thing we'll never we'll never find it doesn't exist well they're doing it again now they're used to know that they're doing the monty john please is like 83 i think and they're doing a another Monty Python and I do agree with what you're saying although I'm still going to be chasing a pound no but like I think it's when you said about the arrogance and I'd love to kind of go into that because I think you've got to have almost blind self-belief yes you do with sprinklings of self-awareness is probably the nice sort of ingredient there what made you go back into the mixer with Willys everyone's about willies now because i think we're here it's been quite a nice way to begin to wrap up this conversation um but like you did it once for tyrell you did it twice with with chase big global brands like why again and and because i want to build that ultimate global brand right that is my holy grail and this this is my holy grail and i've just found a secret source now as well that i'm made out of the holy grail that i probably will have gone completely off the planet and completely mad by the time as probably perry advises me if i'm not careful i will do so it's it's it's just a challenge the fun of producing growing and producing something that is that is its own celebrity it doesn't need to pay it doesn't need me it doesn't need because that was a good thing with tools it showed that once you created this this being this brand it'll go off and run on its own once it's at a university and it's in the world it can be its own thing um this is obviously very much an infancy of the at the moment it's very easily influenced by different people to which what clothes it wears how it talks what it does but to get the need and to get a following it's so especially with social media it should be so easy today as well and i'm beginning to feel older that it's i'm getting distant and the audience today is definitely is definitely young you know things like tiktok once something works as you said with different brands once you can strike it up and you can go it's just phenomenal the coverage you can get them but i think i agree with that but i also think then you get loads of light brands so so for example so little moons yeah uh erupted on tiktok yes then you get every every brand piling in and doing the same thing and that's when it's like it's a bit like if we're talking about brands as adolescents growing up it's a bit like everyone wearing the same clothes to the school disco so you know now every you've got to have your different you've got to have your difference so now every brand will probably dance around carnaby street do you know what I mean giving stuff out then the next brand does that and the next brand does it so I think there's where I reason I love doing this is there's so much nuance everything it's like how can you latch on to the macro trend but do it in a micro point of difference yes I think that's there's something in that um for our listeners so look a couple more questions because um i'm very grateful for your for your time will um so we talked about your mum and dad um you said actually sorry before that is i'd love to know i know money doesn't make you happy um but i'd love to know what is what material what's your favorite material possession because i think um you know like for example so my car it's like it's just like being the world one series but for me it's not a car it's not like a for me getting in that thing it's like it's my meditation it's my podcast it's my time and it's even though it is material to me it's really i really that actually helps my mental health i know it sounds a bit crazy but i love i love driving it it's like i could fall asleep in it like i love it but i'd love to know is there like a um what you most would have had i would have had many from steam engines to all sorts of things but now i would say it's probably the brand the brand is the one thing that i would um want to see that no harm comes to it that you can create it into this into this thing i'd say the brand would be would be up there as um yeah because i think i've changed so much and it comes back to this whole current topic about possessions that we don't need possessions um that we're chasing in life after possessions of all sorts of wonderful cars and and from cars to boats to different things you know i love i love boats i love sailing boats i love sailing yachts i just think it's it's but it's it they're just possessions but i think i think to be true assets are your are your sort of outside your family would for me would be would be the sort of brand would be trying to and you can't it's not a tangible asset either it's this thing that's sort of um the sort of very much living and very much needs feeding and looking after every day and if you've got to love it like that and if you didn't and you switched off from it on the weekends or you turned it off it would it would need to be on that support that love support thing all the time whereas whereas one of my favorite i had a pair of um farlow steam plowing engines i love very much but um you know to most people like they're they were probably the most boring thing but these things were such amazing actual steams yeah plowing engines you put one each end of the field they pull this plow up and down across the field that's right so when you say like a train or well they were like a train but on yeah steam train but they were just on steam tractors basically oh right we just winch this plow across the field so so things like that i used to find fascinating but but it's it's and i see It's wonderful cars I could talk about.

1:54:32It's fantastic cars. And the older I get, the more older cars, cars with character, cars they've got. It's like that little Mini downstairs. That Mini has been around the world with these two girls and took it for a charity, drove it right around. It's done the whole world that Mini has. So it's got so much penicillin with it. So even a little 1960 Mini like that has got so much. It's almost if your materialistic possessions fuel your curiosity. I think that they have that. Then they have that. no but only if they do only if they do but only what i've learned at my age is you must have chased them yeah and and your love for any cars or anything you've got will go and it's like most cars you don't have a brand new one it's all clean or if you ever do it i know i always try to buy used cars but if you buy a new one once it gets dirty and the boot gets the dog hairs and stuff and it all gets a bit dirty then no longer is it it's lost that sort of the the smell and the newness of it so it's it's it's uh it's possessions is so topical what do we know there's two things and you mentioned la earlier and i love this so the center of the earth if you want to go for inspiration or trending ideas or whatever's happening sadly it is still la it is still west northwest america so you've got obviously got silicon valley there you've got la you've got the whole so whatever's trending avocados smashed avocados on soda bread would have started is in LA blueberry trend with the stars in LA the whole kombucha thing the kombucha billionaires are all in LA every trending food and drink at the moment starts in LA so it's it's for inspiration I think that's that's an amazing place and it's um and and it's it's it's quite a it's quite a fascinating thing how to get inspiration to go there for it that's so so so for me that's that's that's quite interesting on on that one and it's also like just because something works in la does it mean it's going to work here so free sweetened in the alcoholic sodas alcoholic waters and things it's massive it's it's white floor over there was a billion pound company in no time people over here suddenly try putting alcohol and fizzy water it's not worked has it yeah no no for sure i had a few uh few mates who had our and seltzer brands you know it kind of just yeah just didn't didn't work um so you said somewhere judge chases was not you said it was in a paper chases strong views about the rich spoiling their children and you said who must learn how to turn 50p into a pound which took me into my 30s i love that quote um look i went to a good school i don't know this was a bit of a petulant brat growing up like i wanted a bloody playstation i probably got one and i'm having to sort of re re go through that so how do you not spoil spoil your kids i'm a hypocrite there and i don't know okay i cannot i cannot i think i do i i'm so so um admire parents that don't take their children to mcdonald's that don't give their children coke and they actually teach their children the benefits from a young age how to work hard and um and i think that's such a difficult thing to be as a parent to you and and that's a little amazing conversation because i've met some stringy wealthy successful people that say you should never be you should never be friends with your children because if you're friends with your children they're gonna you know it's like in work you know you you have to pay people you have to entertain with the awful expression and it's the same with sort of with with children you um if you so it's so hard not to spoil them it is just so difficult but i do have massive admiration for parents that manage to bring their children up that don't have sugar that don't go to mcdonald's that don't go that don't have coca-cola that do actually understand it's it's if you look forward to things then it's quite special if you're given everything i think because i had quite a tight upbringing um to me to have something like coca-cola was like a massive luxury you know i grew up at the time where a miles a day helps you work rest and play you know and that would never be allowed.

1:58:37I still live by that mantra. I think they're that. And Dr. Peppers was like 10 to 4, one at 10, one at 2, one at 4, gave you energy to work through the day, apparently, and all these amazing campaigns that Coca-Cola gave free Coke to all of its American GIs and things with Coke taxes. So it's not to spoil kids, your children, it's so, so difficult to do, and it takes two, it takes two parents as well to do it. I think if you haven't got the means, what I'm going to with this, I think there's a lot to be said for having a very humble upbringing. If it makes you hungry, it's probably better than being spoiled.

1:59:14And that's an amazing subject. Just say you're brought up and you're given the best thing, so you're going to stay in five-star hotels when you're young, or you go, you know, I never went on a plane until I was at least 18, and the furthest I'd been to was sort of a bit of a trip to the Dordogne in France when I was 16, whereas today, kids are flying all over the world, they're doing everything, and it's it is what you are spoiled is there a thing about hungry there's two arguments besides this argument one is that if you give them all of the things that they'll naturally expect it and they'll work for it or the other side of the argument is if you bring them up really tight and hard and they don't see it then quite hungry too it's like breeding cows if you overfeed cows and make them too fat they don't breed very well and they don't they don't work at all whereas if you Kikau's really hungry.

2:00:01They breed fantastic, prolific, and they grow. I think it has to be almost like the bottom. It has to be in the extremes, whereby you're either given so much that you expect and you just work at it, or that you've got nothing, and you're just like Alan Sugar. So Alan Sugar would be this left-hand side. Richard Branson had a great upbringing at Stowe is the last side. As I don't expect, but I think where you get lost is if you're in the middle when that can be. But Richard Branson says he didn't know what a net profit was on you. it is crazy uh two more yes that was on stephen barton it well i can can believe that i don't i don't know if that's good pr personally like if i'm if i'm just being he's a good he's a good he's uh because i i don't know so i don't know if i i mean who am i like of to say this but i think i think it's a great analogy though it was you see how the fish in the sea that's your profit and if you take a net and the one you can actually get in the net that's the one you've got that's your own net profit but i think that's it was a great analogy oh yeah oh yeah no really good um so so two more questions so the the the the first is like what's your what's your favorite book because i like to ask guests what that is and i'll go and read it just for my personal curiosity other than other than your own one potato too i think no it's not i think my my my most go-to at the moment would probably be that stephen dawkins um darwin um i'll give the title of it over to you it's um quite perry recommended it to me so it came from it came as a perry recommendation that's all once you get into that that's quite the rich richard dawkins it's richard dawkins so the self guy does the selfish gene this is oh i did try that i was like this is mental me i need to give it a way you've got to be off somewhere to be doing that yeah and not a read it you can't if you're doing it as a as a as a listen to your minds on something else you've got to you've almost got to read it but it's just it's just amazing it's it's it's so inspirational all the things we've spoken about in this podcast that if you actually want the answers to all those things it's actually there darwin's what what happened with it was the way he put things over is just phenomenal how if you want the answers it's all in there and then final question to wrap up with so we talked at the beginning kind of about you feeling lost getting on the plane escaping the mental torture is what you said yeah uh getting on the on the plane to australia i would love to know now like are you happy no i'll never be happy i'll be in search i'm always in search of that thing it's on it's on the horizon don't know what it is but it's on the horizon over there and there's this thing that i'm going for and i'll tell you when i get there but i don't know what it is but it's does your happiness come from from the journey then it does yeah it does now but but the journey incites you to to travel that to travel that journey as well so does that won't make sense but um it back to that thing it's not until you're in the winner's enclosure you realize the film was in the race so the secret is never get in the winner's enclosure in life don't ever get in there just keep it moving all the time keep it keep it moving on in front of you and this is what podcasts i listen to podcasts now where people in their they get to 40s that oh my god i'm old now i'm 40 or i'm coming up to 40 i think you're retiring you're thinking you've hardly started yet you don't get into your prime until you're in your 40s because you spend your 20s my advice to anybody in their 20s is just go and learn work for as many people different job every six months if you work for nothing but just guide into the world and get experience 30s start to condense it a bit you still won't do that well in your 30s but but condense it but put it into get all your weaknesses and your strength and get all your dust and then when you get to your late 30s and you're ready just go for it because you've got all the tools and you've got all the knowledge to go for it that's that's my advice and then your 50s then you just condense it and the rest of your life you should be able to fine tune it i i love it and i think thank you so much firstly i think so much in this but i think some of the central themes is is a brand is ultimately like like you're growing a baby and it's a long-term project so i think for our listeners is see it as that um i think when you zoom out it gives you more perspective in terms of dealing with the ups and the downs of the business yeah um and just seeing just seeing your journey and and kind of everything you've learned it's just being it's been amazing so yeah thank you so much well thank you it's been a it's been a pleasure what was last there was there is just one um on the book so if you'd asked me that question last year when i was going through quite a low one i was going through um it was like letting go i forget the author of it but it's apparently the book if anybody's suffering mentally it's a fantastic book i've read it about three times i love this book and um what's who's it i'm just going that it's called let it's called letting go i don't know i forget who the author is of but it's but it's the best one for if you're suffering mentally but i read it about three times and then the third time i was halfway through it and i just threw it in the sea i thought where were you when you threw it in the seat it's just on that house going around the corner of ibiza and i just threw it in the sea and i thought i thought you're over analyzing all this whole mental it's just like it's just too much you don't don't don't don't don't richard hawkins sorry david hawkins sorry the pathway to surrender the pathway to surrender i didn't get it did you go to ibiza or not then yeah i've got a place out there i love it i've got a place out there i love it in state and great fantastic i run up on the north right up at the top on the cliffs of north good place and it's quite a it's quite a cool place but the whole island i've always loved the island i think it's quite um a lot of people don't get it but i think it's just um there's so much more to it than the raves and the part there is like i used because i actually used to go with my parents as well when i used to be a bit hedonistic i used to go to the rave scene and party but there there's all those just magical beaches so there's everybody like you that goes back there so i've got two friends there the one guy close to the he sells um these properties and he's the one who always says i said i can't believe guys like you and all everybody he said nobody's ever happy they're always they're always you know they'll that nobody's ever quite happy about it they all they never get there you know and it's and the reason they're going back to now you'll go back there because you've got there you'll probably go there for the rest of your life if you could there isn't there's mick and arse there's lots of other places you can go but they'll never be anywhere quite i don't think yeah i think it's it's and the money now it's just kind of stupid oh it's ridiculous but you've been to the el churinguito yeah that's probably one of my favorite restaurants you like yeah i just think it's uh i think i was in there a few months ago and there was um like vanilla thing and everybody loves ferment so they're all into fermented sauces and it's quite um but it is but it's the ambience if you go there in the winter when it's closed you think well this is nothing this is a what is what is this all about and it's um yeah next door to it as well what's the one called next door to it's quite cool there in june or june is there which are but that is uh but down there yeah that's quite a good place to be on a boat so i to go down the boat right there just go from there across the form into it oh yeah no that's how i could literally as much as i love the glockless view i could definitely be any thank you so so much for listening to the podcast i really really do appreciate it if you like that episode only if you liked it please do give it five stars subscribe tell all your friends families foes next door but one cat dog whatever please tell everyone about this podcast it means the world to me and i really want to understand what your pain points are as the new wave of challenger food and drink brands please do hit me up on linkedin search dan pope and hopefully we can together create a more meaningful and powerful podcast for the next wave of challenger food and drink brands thank you so much