Simon Squibb on Building Future-Proof Brands in 2025

0:00That 2 % of your life is total random luck, but only 2%. You'll hear sayings like the harder I work, the luckier I get. That's just not true. Hard work surprisingly has nothing to do with success. I actually became more successful when I started delegating to people that are better at things than me. If I worked harder in my business and not delegated things to other people, my business would not have succeeded.

0:22Alex Chisnall:I'm Simon Squibb, entrepreneur, angel investor and founder of HelpBank. He shares his mission to help 10 million people start a business and why failure is a badge of honour. 98 % of your life is luck, is controllable, take more risk. So it turns out the more risk you take, the luckier you get. And that means you need to lean into fear. Fear is actually an asset given to us to survive. Like when a lion comes towards us, that's what it was originally designed to do, we can run faster, we think differently, we're like on a hyper mode. it's a superpower that people are now turning off instead of turning off welcome to this special bite-sized episode of screw it just do it from our back catalogue of over 550 past episodes if you like what you hear don't forget to follow the show and grab your free two-day pass to the festival of entrepreneurs this october just head to festival of entrepreneurs.co.uk to claim yours and don't forget to dive into the back catalogue want to surround yourself with five to ten thousand entrepreneurs if you've already decided to screw it and just do it the festival of entrepreneurs is happening October the 8th and 9th at the NEC Birmingham, and I'm giving away free two-day pass to my listeners.

1:26Alex Chisnall:200-plus speakers, 90-plus sessions, billion-pound entrepreneurs sharing their real stories, not theory, but the actual strategies they use to scale. Head to festivalofentrepreneurs.co.uk right now and claim your free pass, because the best networking happens when you're in the room with people who've already decided to screw it and just did it. I'm here with Simon Squibb. Good to see you again. what was like the the eureka moment the aha moment the screw it just do it moment that you decided to take this idea that you had and actually do something about it rather than talk about it which 99 % of people do especially when it comes to starting a business or starting a podcast or whatever it is but you know what made you take action I think a lot of the time people think that ideas like the purposeful project start as this massive idea that you you just start doing my experience has always been that you have a little idea and and you grow it so my first business was a gardening company as people would listen to this into the previous episode it wasn't a big idea it's just like someone's got a messy garden we we we sort it out I think initially I had actually sold my last company and had more money than I will ever need and actually lost my mojo for a bit and I spent a year and a half two years doing this kind of search thing what should I do next and you know once the money bit was removed the motivation bit somehow had also kind of drifted a bit and I learned something really important that made me go screw it let's do it and that is I wanted to do something again I wanted to not be retired and put my life into something but I was missing the need to do it so a lot of people want something but don't screw it and do it because they don't need it yeah and needing it is key so I had to retrain myself and I started off actually by fitness I wanted to get really fit I wanted to get fit but I didn't need to get fit you could argue and then I actually felt like my father died quite young of a heart attack how long was your father 54 okay and so I thought to myself I don't want to go that way I just had a baby and I want to be around I want to see him grow up I I want to see him get married.

3:37I want to be a part of his life. So I told myself I was going to die if I didn't exercise. In the next 18 months, if I didn't exercise, eat better, I would die. I told my mind this. Did you? It wasn't true. But I told my mind this and then I acted like it was true. So I took my want to get fit and I made it a need.

3:56Alex Chisnall:And was that because you then also tuned in on the emotion? Yeah, it's no choice. I think when people have too much choice in a way it can confuse them and people don't screw it and do it because they've got too much choice or what they want in life isn't a need so when I was younger and I had to start a company because I couldn't get a job and I needed to eat and needed accommodation it's not wanting things I needed them and I had no way of getting them unless I did what I did which was start a company so a lot of it is taking that one and making it a need and and that's what happened to me when I started the Purposeful Project.

4:34I was looking at, frankly, the fabric of society and how people have started being so self-centered, me included. We started just thinking about ourselves, you know. The banks lend us money to buy a house and then we get that house and this is ours and we close the door and we're no longer tribal. We're no longer helping our neighbor or the person down the street that's homeless. We're just closing the doors and we're all right and we've kind of separated from each other and I felt it. I felt that feeling that I'm right which I was very financially secure and had everything I need but I felt like actually there's something wrong with society and I had like a sense of fear that my son was going to grow up in this world where we're all so self-centered that no one helps anybody so I thought what can I do to change that and the one thing I know really well is entrepreneurship and although entrepreneurship might not seem like the answer to everything I have this deep down belief that entrepreneurs can save the world because let's face it politicians aren't going to do it.

5:30So we put so much power in the hands of politicians to solve homelessness, for example, or fix the education system, and they're not doing it. So I thought, what can we do? And I do believe empowering people to at least have the ability to start a business would be a good start. If I gave people the tools to think about how to build a brand, how to raise money, find your purpose in life, these things, I thought, well, if I can give that to people, at least when they leave school, they've got an option work for someone or work for themselves yeah right and and it just dawned on me that this was actually not something i wanted to do help people in this way i needed to do it if i wanted to leave the planet in a better state than i found it for my son yeah and so i turned that want to help people into a need and the first thing i did was a podcast you know and actually i made it quite a selfish endeavor there was loads of people i wanted to interview about this problem that i perceived in the world with technology also entering the universe to take away people's jobs.

6:27We'll end up, if we're not careful, with a lot of trumps in power, promising to bring back coal. And what we actually need is to help the people that were down coal mines retrain into perhaps starting something on their own, whatever that may be. Maybe there's a coal miner out there that wants to start a flower business. Maybe there's a coal miner out there that wants to paint and make a living from it. So mine was like, why don't we fix the education system from outside the education system? And why don't we educate people about business? And the first thing I did was a podcast, and it was really simple.

6:54I had a crappy mic, which by the way is in this cover just here. I've kept it. Now I've got all this very expensive equipment. But originally I had a crappy mic. I put it in the middle of the table and I started interviewing people that I know had made it with zero money, nothing, and made it into a success. And I wanted to take that knowledge and give it to other people.

7:12Alex Chisnall:If you're enjoying this conversation and thinking, I need to be around more people like this, then I've got the perfect solution for you. The Festival of Entrepreneurs is where 5 ,000 to 10 ,000 ambitious entrepreneurs come together to learn from the people who've actually done it. It's on October the 8th and 9th at the NEC in Birmingham, and I'm giving my listeners free two-day passes. Real entrepreneurs, real stories, real strategies, exactly like what you're hearing right now, but live and in person. Go to festivalofentrepreneurs.co.uk and get your free two-day pass before they're gone. Luck one's an interesting one for me, and as my audience would know, you know coming up to 500 episodes now and and that crops up a lot and what do you say with regards to that then you think they're um that people will always need luck or you just think it's being you know um being aware of the opportunity and seizing the opportunity so i studied luck quite intensely and part of my podcast was research into luck okay how it works so so it turns out basically there's a formula for luck so it's probably probably right to separate it that it turns out that 2 % of your life is total random luck, but only 2%.

8:26An example would be where you're born. You'll hear sayings like, the harder I work, the luckier I get, which is bullshit, by the way. That's just not true. Hard work, surprisingly, nearly has nothing to do with success. This is what I think a lot of people will be shocked about. I actually became more successful when I started delegating to people that are better things than me. You know, if I worked harder in my business and not delegated things to other people, my business would not have succeeded.

8:56Alex Chisnall:Yes, you can't grow scale. So people think working hard is the answer. That's not true. Now of course, there's working smart is a simple way of putting it, right? Yeah. But 2 % of your life is total random luck, only 2%. And what's really interesting, if the 2 % of your life is bad luck, ironically you have a higher chance of the other 98 % being good luck. So for example, if you're a boxer, and I won't name that boxer, but if you're a boxer and you grew up on the streets of New York, street fighting and surviving, then you end up a pretty good boxer. And you're fighting a boxer who perhaps went to a posh school, had a good life, you probably beat them.

9:36So your 2 % bad luck or growing up in a difficult neighborhood ends up later in life being your good luck.

9:42Alex Chisnall:Got it, got it. And the 98 % of your life that is luck for sure is controllable. And there's three ways to control it. It's a very long story, but there's three ways. One is take more risk. So it turns out the more risk you take, the luckier you get. It's got absolutely nothing to do. This is great. Really, bizarrely, nothing to do with hard work. Wow. And people think that you can sit and take one hour's worth of risk and then sit back for the rest of the day and probably be more lucky than someone that's taken no risk and just worked all day driving a bus. So the more risk you take, the luckier you get.

10:15And that means you need to lean into fear, which a lot of people don't want to do. But if you learn that fear is actually an asset given to us to survive, like when lying comes towards us, that's what it was originally designed to do, we can run faster, we think differently, we're like on a hyper mode. It's a superpower that people are now turning off instead of turning on. You're meant to feel fear. If you're feeling fear, you're growing. If you're not feeling fear, you're not growing. So taking risk. The second thing, there's three things in the formula of risk. So risk is one of them, loving fear.

10:41The second is knowing your destination. So many people don't. So I've invested in 76 businesses, and one of the things I always ask people is, where are you going with this business? And the ones that don't get investment often say, well, we're going to sell it to, I had this recently, I'm going to sell it to Uber for a billion dollars. That's not a destination, really. Money, actually, turns out it's just a fuel for the car. And if you're focused on the money, you end up going around in circles, because you don't know where you're going, right? And actually, ironically, you don't need as much money as you think.

11:10So once you know your destination, sometimes you can get there on a bike, right? Once you know your destination, you can hitchhike. Once you know your destination, you can get other people in the car with you to make the journey pleasurable. You know what to pack when you get there in the car. So people don't know their destination. Once you know your destination, it's like a target. Once you know your target, you can hit it. If you don't know your target, you won't. The third thing is persistence. Now, you've got to know when to quit as well. A form of persistence is quitting and starting again.

11:36Right, so you only fail if you stop. You only fail if you stop, but that's not the same as not stopping something that's not working. So persistence is a whole thing that Harvard did on like for example salespeople, and they did this research study which was basically, they looked at the top 10 % of salespeople, these are the best salespeople, and the on average salesperson in the top 10%, so these are the best, contact them on five times before they give up. So they're given a lead, and they might send them an email, do a follow up email, leave them a voice message, wait a few weeks send them another message and maybe if they're good they'll send something in a post or some sort of follow-up yeah five times or they're like and I've had this myself in sales meetings like they're not interested I'm like well what happened they didn't get back to me they're not interested yeah I'm like have they said no right turns out the top one percent of sales people and I didn't know I was personally one of these people but it turns out I am do a never-ending sales cycle they never stop so when I started fluid I took 50 companies that I wanted to work with.

12:35And I never stopped until they became my clients. And one client in particular took me nine years to get them on board as a client.

12:41Alex Chisnall:That conversation just proved something. You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. So here's my challenge. Upgrade your network. The Festival of Entrepreneurs is happening October the 8th and 9th. And I'm giving my listeners free two-day passes to get in the room with 5 ,000 to 10 ,000 entrepreneurs who are actually building something. This is where the risk takers, the game changers and the people who've decided to screw it and just do it come for inspiration, education and connection. Don't just listen to their success stories. Go meet the people living them. Grab your free pass now because the biggest risk isn't taking a chance.

13:17Alex Chisnall:It's missing the opportunity entirely. I hope you enjoyed that bite-sized episode with Simon Squibb. Couple of things I want to flag up here. Simon is super honest and open about what didn't work. And that's what makes his message so powerful. Give first, then build. So there's real power again in Simon's belief that helping others is the business model. So Simon's vision is definitely one of the most ambitious I've heard. And he's backing it up with action, clearly.