Nick Hird: Co-founder & Managing Director of Vidrate

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1:43This is Jazz Shapers with Elliot Moss on Jazz FM. In partnership with Mishkondorea. It's business, but it's personal.

1:56listening color welcome to jazz shapers with me elliot moss bringing the shapers of the business world together with the musician shaping jazz soul and blues my guest today is nick hurd co-founder and managing director of vidrate the natural hydration supplements created to help you drink more water he says in his stern voice passionate about fitness and nutrition nick a fitness model and the head of sales for a large drinks company was delivering hydration nutrition talks to as he says, anyone that would listen. It became clear to Nick and to his colleague and then future co-founder Rob Bennett-Bags that people weren't drinking enough water, and the hydration products on the market were loaded with sugar, calories, and artificial ingredients, and had no real functional benefits.

2:36They saw a need for a hydration drink with vitamins and electrolytes that was free from junk, and despite 30 factories telling them their holy grail was impossible to create, they persisted, and Vidrate was officially launched in 2019, having developed from a ready-to-drink product to a sachet you add to water. Vydrate now comes in at least 15 flavors and counting, and in versions tailored for children, for caffeine fans, and for sleep support. It's great to have you here. Thank you. Thank you. And I caught you when you were in London. You're north-based, based in the fine county of Yorkshire, which is brilliant.

3:10Why did you get into this thing called nutrition and hydration? Why is Nick Hurd a fanatic and a geek, as you called yourself in this space? I think to be honest it came from I've always had a passion for health fitness wellness from playing sports when I was younger and then I was the I probably say it 15 times but a geek in everything so I was the one playing rugby that didn't go out drinking didn't do anything was I had a glass of water after the game and that kind of thing and always been if I've played something or done something I've always gone full in I've got a very addictive personality so I'm either all in or not at all and just got into nutrition for that originally so got into nutrition just for performance.

3:58How old were you at the time Nick? Probably about 13 when I started getting interested in nutrition always been fairly healthy always been ridiculously active, played every sport that you can imagine. So I played cricket, rounders, football, rugby, just literally a sport, absolute dodgeball, anything that I could really. I just loved it. And just got into nutrition more and more, started playing OK level rugby league. And that's when I really got into nutrition, probably about 16, where it became a bit of an obsession. And what does obsessive look like when you're 16 years old? Does that mean...

4:36I've researched everything. Just, it was, the internet wasn't probably as readily available as it is now. So a lot of things were just reading books. And if some, I always say that I was the geek when people were out going out drinking. I was sat at home reading the effects and benefits of Stevia and things like that. That was literally me. I've just, my little boy's exactly the same. We will watch documentaries and things like that. We just geek out on it. Yeah, just for knowledge, really. So I've just had a massive passion for nutrition, and then it developed into an obsession with how the body works from a selfish personal point of view.

5:16Without fast-forwarding too much, got into fitness modelling, but the whole, I had an okay following online on Twitter. I was going to say, I should at this point interject, say Nick is easy on the eye. I think that's the phrase. If we're allowed to not objectivise you, of course, I would only do it because you're like, Please do, please do, please do. Oh, Nick, you're very handsome. Nobody's got lovely blue eyes, and if you Google him, you go, Nick Cudd, oh yes, I see why they wanted him in underpants. So he did a bit of that. Yes. Yes. He's blushing. Yeah, just to let you know. Just made the man go red.

5:44That's it, absolutely. It's because I've been married for five years, I don't get attention anymore, so he's just brilliant, I'll take it from wherever it comes. So from that, it was one of the things I had quite a big following on Twitter at the time before Instagram became a thing, and I was I suppose an influencer before influencers became a thing but my whole thing was I never wanted to make any money from the fitness modeling it was all about I'd book photo shoots four months in advance to keep me motivated and keep me in shape and then along the way I used to set up blogs and things like that where just everyday people could come on and I'd help mentor them and guide them with nutrition free of charge so I had a big following that used to essentially and it ranged from people that their level of fitness was I want to walk up and down the stairs twice a day when I don't need to through to people who want to do 10Ks.

6:41So it was an accountability group where everyone had their own challenge and each day I'd be on the treadmill at 5 in the morning for 40 minutes and I'd be sat replying to messages. So it kind of came from there. So it was a geeky obsession with nutrition and how the body works and then this kind of belief that you can help people help people to be better and and what kind of transitions massively into vibrate is the fact that my entire belief is you don't have to change your entire lifestyle to be healthier if you make lots of little changes to your day to day the impact it has on your life is is phenomenal and unbelievable and that might be do an extra few hundred steps or a thousand steps a day, drink a little bit more water, cut out a few more calories and sugar.

7:28If you do one of them, you won't notice. If you do 10 of those kind of things, the difference will be massive. Just tell me very briefly about what is Vidrate and where can I find it? Very briefly. So Vidrate has been created to help you drink more water. That is kind of the the one sentence answer um it's been created because 99 of the population uk and worldwide don't drink enough water because it's boring and until we came along every product out there that's designed to help you drink more water it's full of sugar and artificial sweeteners and calories and junk essentially so we made the first in the world still to our knowledge that zero sugar and natural only natural ingredients with added vitamins and electrolytes but the core principle is get you to drink more water.

8:16And I mentioned earlier on about the fact you went to 30 factories, and it reminds me of stories I've heard of founders sitting where you're sitting, where it was Lucky Saint, it was Luke Bowes many years ago saying, I couldn't find a brewer who would be able to produce beautiful non-alcoholic tasting beer, and then I did. When you found your person, how did you convince them that they were indeed the person? Did they know they were going to be the person that was going to make your product for you? Well, no, initially, interestingly, I did it in my kitchen um so I actually tried it which was hilarious and a big learning curve so I didn't realize that adding citric acid to a drink you put a couple of granules in so when I dipped half a teaspoon of that in it nearly turned me inside out yeah absolutely so I played around for it was probably six seven months with things in my kitchen I thought would go together and then found a factory and said, I think I've got something.

9:12I don't, my knowledge isn't enough to do the next bit and put it together and tweak things and then found a factory that could do that. And yes, I think it was about 14, 16 months, something like that. But you didn't give up? No, absolutely not. And we were told it's physically impossible. So why did you not heed that warning, which was wrong? I think it was, at that time, it wasn't just about creating a business. it was just the challenge of trying to do it and it was one of those there's a lot of stories you hear where people are told it can't be done and i genuinely sincerely believed it could be done i see why no one did it um at the time and that's why all of the factories said why do you think nobody's done it and we kind of to to get the product where it is it goes against science in a lot of ways so even if we move factories now um to a new supplier it takes me six months to teach them how to put it together even though I'm talking to a formulation scientist and technician that's been to university for years a lot of the ways the products put together isn't too conventional.

10:18Is that that sense and you know as people know I read a lot about people I'm going to meet and I get from you there's that kind of quite calm but in but deep in a steel you're from a family of builders that's a pretty hard thing to do I've spent three days of my life on a building site right that was it I was crummy you've obviously lived and breathed that is there something about the toughness sounds silly but the toughness that you get from that family values and the family environment that just said of course I'm going to keep going on I may not be building but that's just the way Nick's built is there something of that I think I think if anything it's probably the opposite to it so I wanted to be a builder my we've got a long line of family builders so um my family's the oldest building family building name in the town that we're from which is they built a lot of the bridges back before cranes existed and things like that it's quite fascinating and an interesting one that generationally the firstborn son is called tim herd in my entire family going back dozens of generations and that firstborn son is a builder until my elder brother, Timmy or Timothy, decided to be a doctor and kind of blew that out of the water.

11:33So I was going to take over. So I worked with my dad. It used to be a big business. Now it's a small one. It was him and his dad. And I was going to take over that. And it was literally my dad saying, you don't want to do this when you're 60. It's good now, but when you're 60, doing what you're doing, it's not too good. So I think the main thing was I worked in a lot of jobs. I taught first aid for years and I just got fed up. I got bored. I learned everything and there was nothing more to learn. Got to the end of the internet. Absolutely. Yeah. And then, so I went into sales because there's no cap on sales.

12:10And then it was just kind of, it was self-taught really. It's not something that is in my family. In fact, a lot, most of my family told me I was stupid to be starting a business and don't do it it's never going to work and even to this day a lot of them not all of them quite a few of them say you've been working for five years and you've got less money than all of us and you can't afford to go on a holiday and or you can't you've not taken a day off in six years kind of thing so yeah i suppose it's there's there's part of it there that comes from family but a lot i don't i don't know where it comes from to be honest comes from nick hurd he's my business shaper and he is who he is um and we'll be finding out a lot more about this very self-driven person in front of me here on jazz shaper there's much more coming up from him in a few minutes right now we're going to hear a taster from the mishcon innovation series which you can find on all the major podcast platforms lydia kellett invites business founders to share their practical advice and industry insights for those of you thinking about starting your very own thing in this clip focused on the wellness industry we hear from richard chambers founder and ceo of get a drip the first UK high street vitamin drip and booster shot provider.

13:16The Mishcon Innovation Series. Inspiration from founders of cutting-edge businesses. In association with Jazz Shapers with Mishcon Derea. The health and wellness space has changed quite significantly over the course of the last few years. You say yourself that the attitude towards your product has changed. What advice would you give to somebody wishing to enter what is quite a fast-changing industry? I'd be looking at what's done elsewhere and not being done in the UK, see what good looks like elsewhere, and then no need to reinvent the wheel. Can you bring it to the UK? And remember, I think often people think healthcare is the NHS.

13:57It's not. The NHS is underfunded. They're there to treat acutely unwell people, and there's this huge gap of people that want to feel well, but they're not unwell enough to go into the NHS, so it could be anything. Massive focus on AI and digital. I'm diabetic, I can scan my Libra sensor on my phone and it tells me my sugar level. My sugar level automatically beeps to my phone. It's a live transmission, so I can see my sugar levels moving as a diabetic and adjust and inject my insulin. And then with AI, where you have diabetic retinopathy, where you scan the eyes, AI can now compare thousands of different eyes and predict or diagnose other illnesses.

14:35So AI has the ability to do what's a repeatable task, which might have been done by a professional, can now be done with AI and compared properly. So really, the world's your oyster. The Mishcon Innovation Series. In association with Jazz Shapers, with Mishcon Derea. Jazz Shapers on Jazz FM. In partnership with Mishcon Derea. It's business, but it's personal. You can enjoy all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast, and you can hear this very program again with Nick if you pop Jazz Shapers into your favorite podcast platform. So it's Nick Hurd. He's my Business Shapers. They co-founder and managing director of Vidrate, the natural hydration supplements created to help you drink more water.

15:17Now, I know that over the years, you have been on a mission to educate people for good reason, because you want to help them, because you know that they'll lead a better life. In parallel to that mission of it's just going to be better, obviously the business has grown. And as the business grows, Nick, and you move into some of the biggest stores that we're all familiar with, whether it's a Tesco or a Whole Foods or whatever else, things get more complicated. Scale brings complexity. You've brought in some people from industry. What's it been like talking and now interacting and having mentors, those people being from worlds that you've never inhabited?

15:52How's that developed for you? It's been a very interesting journey. I've been very lucky to have come across some very senior influential people. So our main investors, we've got Bob Wigley, who's the chair of UK Finance. We've got Andrew Morgan, who's the ex-European president of Diageo. We've also got Guy Lawrence, who's the ex-CEO and very high up at Jägermeister, guinness brockmans bacardi guy over the last 18 months i'd say has become a mentor um very very fortunate and interestingly in january of this year became chairman which if you'd have told the younger self my younger self drinking jager bombs in a nightclub with no idea where i was going to go what i wanted to do that the person responsible for for the growth and launch of that would be on my team and my board.

16:53I just wouldn't have believed it. I think one of the big things I remember the conversation with Guy when I asked if he'd become chair and be on the board, one of the things which I think kind of ties into what he was asking, one of the things I said to him is, my big belief is that you can do business without being ruthless. It's not the words that I used, but you can be in business and actually do the right thing, is my belief. and had a chat with Guy and anybody that comes on board and said that's something I'm very passionate about. And what did he say when you said that? He absolutely agreed.

17:29I just said if we do this, that's one thing I'd like us to bear in mind and he completely agreed. Guy's been involved, as I said, for the last 18 months and knows that we're a different company. We actually care. We care about customers and that's where customer first, every flavour is chosen by my customers and our community. They put the flavour forward. I go develop it we still put a handwritten note in every single online order which is something that myself my business partner started when I was working six jobs and packing an hour a night on the floor we still wrote a handwritten note our in-house fulfillment team we're the only brand that has that of local people who work for us in our headquarters picking every single sachet to order still write that handwritten note and that's that's the one thing that I refuse to lose and I think that's where we're different is the answer that it doesn't matter who's coming on board if it doesn't fit the ethos, it doesn't happen and we've turned down a few big companies we were going to raise investment, seven figures recently myself and Guy did probably 50 calls we got a lot of people interested and actually we had the value that we wanted committed and we turned it down in the end because we felt, one, the business is going in a very positive direction and two, it would completely change things if we're answering to people outside the business that don't understand it.

18:53So we actually got the yes and then turned it down. Stick to your principles with Nick Kerr, my business shaper, co-founder of Vidrate. Those worlds, Nick, sometimes people say if you don't see it, you can't be it. You've come from a part of the world where you weren't involved in entrepreneurial life really, although you're obviously a very famous building family. I suppose that is, I mean, it's a different kind of business, but kind of straight line. You've gone and made your own future, as it were, and you've met people like Guy and some of the other investors. Are you surprised by how similar you are rather than how different, considering they come from such different worlds?

19:32Yes, absolutely. And again, I can only speak for the people that I've come into contact with, Guy and that kind of thing. I'd say the big similarity is the kind of morals and the reason that we do things. which so happens to be again Guy as an example you've just mentioned very family orientated which is brilliant and that's the entire reason that I do everything and I'd say there's a lot of similarities there the work ethic but the main thing is those kind of morals I'd say that underpin it absolutely and beyond that that combo there what else do you think all these people are backing because obviously the last year has seen Vydrate go through the roof I mean, I think I've read somewhere there's 120 % growth on one side.

20:20Lease, is that right? 140 % last year. I think we're on 210 so far this year. So what are they backing? Why is it happening for Nick and the business? To be honest, initially speaking to at least a couple of the investors, they said on various occasions that the reason that they backed it was that they didn't believe I could fail, was what they'd said, which was nice and pleasant. And why do you think they said that? Well, he said that at the time I had an 18-month-old son, had a mortgage, quit my job. So I was working six jobs at one point, sleeping in the back of the van, getting to meetings.

21:02So when I won Holland and Barrett, I slept in the back of the van the night before because I couldn't afford a hotel and then went to a gym, three-pound gym pass, showered, then went in there and did that three days a week without my wife knowing because she wouldn't have let me do it. so she thought I was staying in hotels, I was sleeping in the back of the van and one of the guys said you just can't fail, you've got too much to lose and it was the, I don't know the best phrase to use but I think it was the story of not coming from this world having no idea on business and things like that I got, and again a guy on the team would vouch I think I got a D in maths and now my spreadsheets rival the finance directors I'm so data-driven and analytical because it interests me.

21:48I'm very, very clever when I want to be. If I like something and enjoy it, I'd say... Stay with me for my final chat with my very clever when he wants to be business shaper. That's Nick Hurd, co-founder of Vidrate. Jazz Shapers on Jazz FM. In partnership with Mishkondorea. It's business, but it's personal. Nick Hurd is my business shaper, just for a few more minutes. So we've heard a lot about what makes you tick. I think it's clear that you're pretty disciplined. You work really hard. It's not normal to sleep in the back of a van and not tell your wife, Nick, but that's okay. You got away with it.

22:25What are the things that you would say to someone not to do? What have you learned over the last few years? You go, do not do that under any circumstances because you're sort of six years into this adventure and yes, the family are going to go, you haven't made any money yet. Well, just you wait. It would be my guidance to the family. I've got a feeling Nick Herb may well just keep pumping up and going through this hard time tell me what it is that you would not do if you were advising somebody top one or two things I think I'd be very hypocritical because I still do absolutely everything that I shouldn't do I think the don't not set boundaries is probably the biggest thing so set boundaries yeah so people need to set boundaries I was and still am fairly terrible at it something comes up and I've just got to do it and got to be there.

23:13I am much better than I was. I'd say that's one thing to definitely do. Is there a sense, just thinking flipping it slightly, because that's a big not to do and I think it's really good though and I'm happy with one. I'll take one, it's plenty. In terms of where this business is going to go, what's going to ensure that you are successful over the next three to five years? If I got you back here in a few years time and you said, Elliot, I wanted to do that then and now we're doing it, what would be that thing where do you want to be so the big thing is team that's the big thing it's the thing that we've done better than any other brand I'd say and we need to keep that going so Ollie is an example Ollie heads up my marketing he started with me at 17 as a digital marketing apprentice he's now head of marketing and we've got a lot of stories like that people that are in senior positions who have grown through the ranks we're at the point now as well where we need to surround ourselves with highly qualified people that are much more clever and better at their roles and remits than I am that's the next step and the next step is I love what I do there's not a day that I wish I didn't there's not a day that I I'm frustrated with the 16 hour days or anything like that but the next step is having people that embrace what we're doing that can help drive vibrate to that next step one for the business but two to let me kind of not to be as involved in things that I shouldn't be involved in if that makes sense.

24:43Makes perfect sense makes perfect sense good luck thank you setting boundaries um and good luck with the phenomenal growth I hope it continues um you certainly I think you deserve it just before I let you go what's your song choice and why have you chosen it? My song choice is James Brown Sex Machine randomly I used to train kickboxing just to keep fit and the person I used to train with was obsessed with James Brown that's all we listened to and we myself and my eldest Jacob who's eight we cook fakeaways so we'll cook five guys and things like that from scratch every Saturday and we have this blasting out he's obsessed so anything James Brown but this is the one that just makes you feel amazing Sex Machine from James Brown of course the song choice of my business shaper today Nick Hurd.

25:32He talked about being full in. This is a person who is 100 % committed. He wanted to help people. That's the origin of the business. And it still infuses exactly what this business is about. You can be in business and do the right thing. A really important tenet of his in his business, and indeed of the people that have become invested in his business and advise him. And why did they back him? Because he was the kind of person that could not fail. And that, by the way, tempered with this thought he said about setting boundaries. So great that you're full in, great that you're not going to fail, but make sure you set boundaries as a founder.

26:07Really important. That's it from Jazz Shapers. Have a lovely weekend. Jazz Shapers on Jazz FM. In partnership with Mishkondorea. It's business, but it's personal. We hope you enjoy that edition of Jazz Shapers. You'll find hundreds more guests available for you to listen to in our archive. To find out more, just search Jazz Shapers on iTunes or your favorite podcast platform. Or head over to mishkon.com forward slash Jazz Shapers. Today's episode is brought to you by Apple Ads. Ads on Apple Maps are changing the way local businesses get discovered. Reach customers when it counts, right when they turn I'm looking into I'm going.

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27:26Thank you.