The Truth About Hiring for Scale-Ups with Jo Dalton

0:00The industry that I started in, it was not focused on supporting founders and entrepreneurs. The sign of success was going and winning a big client like British Petroleum or KPMG. They literally left me cold. All that red tape, all that corporate jargon. I remember I started working for entrepreneurs. It sounds so cheesy, but I felt like I'd come home. Oh, these are my people.

0:31Alex Chisnall:Jo Dalton, serial founder, investor. She's worked with over 600 fast growth startups from Deliveroo to Trip Drinks and is a fierce champion of female founders and underrepresented talent in tech. I always say the best people just cover themselves in Velcro and all the best talent will stick to them. If you're going to scale a business in the UK, you've got to be a talent magnet. If nobody's going to work for you, you're not going to get anywhere. Welcome to Screw It, Just Do It, the show for those who decided to screw it and just did it. I'm Alex Chisnell, host of this podcast and co-founder of the Festival of Entrepreneurs at the NEC in Birmingham this October 8th and 9th.

1:10Alex Chisnall:This is the podcast that brings you face to face with the entrepreneurs and business rebels who threw caution to the wind and built something extraordinary. Quick heads up, registration is now open for this year's Festival of Entrepreneurs. Join us at the NEC in Birmingham on October the 8th and 9th for two game-changing days with 200 plus speakers and thousands of ambitious founders. Get your free limited two-day pass at festivalofentrepreneurs.co.uk or click my personal link in the show notes. Jo, welcome. Thank you for having me, Alex. Absolute pleasure. So I want to kick things off with the moment that you said to yourself, screw it, I'm going to go out and build something on my own.

1:49Alex Chisnall:Can you talk us through that? When was it and what happened next? Yes, I remember it vividly. I'd just come out of actually I did build something with some co-founders. But for me, the moment I realized that this is down to me, I have a very clear vision of what I want to build, was the start of JD Inco and the journey from there. I just realized that I think when you when you talk about entrepreneurship, it was just the moment I realized that what I wanted to do didn't exist. and so I had to build it myself. You know, some say that entrepreneurs are unemployable, so maybe it was that. I was just unemployable, so I had to go and build my own company that would employ me.

2:46Alex Chisnall:It's always that moment when you kind of think back and you go, if I had to go and get a job and then you go, no, no one would actually employ me anymore. I'm literally unemployable. I couldn't take orders from anybody. Yeah. Yeah. Was there like a defining moment that you that you can remember when you when you first had an inkling that you you wanted to build something yourself? Yeah, I think coming from the corporate world and especially the industry that I started in, it was not focused on clients, not focused on supporting founders and entrepreneurs. I was in an environment where the sign of success was going and winning a big client like British Petroleum or KPMG and nothing against them.

3:42But they literally left me cold, you know, all that red tape, all that corporate jargon. And I remember I started working for entrepreneurs and it's almost it sounds so cheesy, but I felt like I'd come home. I was like, oh, these are my people. All these years I've been trying to conform to the corporate world and behave a certain way. But actually, there they are. So where is the business and the firm that purely supports founders and entrepreneurs? And I couldn't find it. So I built it myself. I love that.

4:27Alex Chisnall:You know, until you said that, until you said that, I've never thought about this. But when I got reeled back in after leaving again corporate with Virgin Atlantic and my wife said, you'll always have an affinity with Virgin. I was there for 17 years and I started my first business. But then I got reeled back in by Virgin Startup. And it was exactly, as you said, when I started working there and I started helping founders get funding and mentoring, I literally had that moment of going to my first live event with just founders or wannabe founders. And I was like, these are the people. These are the people I've been looking for for 20 or 30 years.

5:06Alex Chisnall:You know, it's just like, wow. I hadn't thought of that until you said that. But that was the same moment for me, I think. you know that's so interesting man and I I love just I love disrupting the status quo you know the inner rebel in me came out and I love nosing into new businesses and thinking about new ways to do things all the way through school and through life until that point I was always trying to hack the system. And so I think having the opportunity to be immersed in this world where like minds are all trying to find just a quicker, smarter, better way to do something and that cuts all the red tape, speaks in simple English, no sort of corporate BS.

6:04Yeah, I was sold.

6:07Alex Chisnall:I was sold. So tell us a little bit about JD & Co now then. What do you do? Who do you help? You obviously help entrepreneurs, but can you, yeah, tell us a little bit about that. Can you remember who the very first client was and how that's, yeah, the clients that you worked with then are different to who you work with now, if that's changed at all? Yeah, well, what I'm really proud of what JD & Co do now. lots of people told me that it couldn't be done let's be clear the recruitment industry has a terrible reputation you know it's I'd rather go to dinner and sit next to you know a banker or an estate agent than sit next to a recruiter that's the sort of level the reason for that it's true and it is because it's a low bar to entry and it's a sales environment and so all of the all of the big recruiters and the the industry as a whole it's a sales-led environment and it works on commission so they pay everybody like state agency a low base salary and so the incentive is to get clients and fill the roles as quickly as possible so you can move on to the next one.

7:32So it's a stack them high, you know, spray and pray, whatever they call it. And so I hate those. I hate sales environments. I hate commission. So I thought, can I set up a business that actually just focuses on supporting founders on their entrepreneurial journey is working with clients I love that I respect that I want to you know they get me out of bed in the morning because they're projects that I want to work on and solve and work with a great group of people and so we don't have a sales environment we don't have any commission for the for the team So everybody that works alongside me, our number one focus is to deliver a great service.

8:23We're figuring out how to build the right board to take a founder led business to the next stage of growth. Or we're thinking about what they need to do to get their next round of funding. It's all those big moments. And so sometimes they're really complex and they need trusted advisors. And so we work with those businesses sometimes for years to help them at every stage. And if you're on commission, you know, you just need to get in and get out. And yeah, a decade later, it works. And we keep getting recommended and we keep delivering on the projects that we're given.

9:12Alex Chisnall:And can you name some of those early clients that you work with? Some of the people might know. Oh, gosh, yes. It's funny because it's such a buzz working with early stage founders. that then become big unicorns. So whether it's Shazam when it had seven, eight people or going in to try and work with anybody at the team of Instagram. You know, Instagram only had 10 people when we were trying to pull somebody out of there to come to the UK. And then latterly, it's just working with the founders And it's really hard with what I do because so much I can't talk about because of confidentiality. But yeah, most of the apps on your phone, most of the services, we've been there at the cutting edge.

10:16The beginning of mobility where Halo was around and we were building their first team. and now everybody uses an app to call a black cab or to get an uber and so it's a privilege actually to be at the bleeding edge of those sectors that are just starting before they become

10:43Alex Chisnall:mainstream and what were you doing before what you said corporate but what were you what were exactly before? What kind of roles, what kind of companies are you working for? So I was working for big, I worked in the city for over a decade in professional services and working in the financial services. And, you know, it was pretty dull. I had a uniform, I had my pinstripe suit and my moleskin notepad and my Mont Blanc pen. And it's just, we all looked exactly the same and there was no room for any personality um and then uh I uh sold uh the I actually started in my first job in the city um as the trainee and ended up owning um a percentage of the company so that was a really good journey for me and I'm ever grateful for uh the founders of that business for, you know, all of the training that they gave me.

11:48And then I just realised that the corporate world wasn't for me. I had one start, a go at a startup, but working with founders that I think, you know, the lesson I learned was choose your co-founders really wisely. Having worked with over a thousand founders of businesses since I set up JD & Co, I obsess about that.

12:14Alex Chisnall:A thousand, wow. Yeah, we've hired over 850 leaders and board members into some of the fastest growing scale-ups in Europe and so I feel very lucky. I'm like my own piece of AI. I've got massive pattern recognition. I can see the ones that are going to fail, I can see the ones that are going to make it and all of those stages in between. So that leads me to the question, what are some of the traits that mark out the ones very early on that you think are going to be successful? Oh, now I can just tell. Now it's a gut feeling. Is it? It's a gut feeling. It's a dark feeling, but it's somebody who is totally obsessing about the business that they are building to the point where you try and have a chat with them about what the weather's like or anything else at all.

13:16And they bring the conversation right back to the business and the problem that they're trying to solve. I think that they're normally people that have had a bit of life experience already. I can see grit, I can see resilience and I can see a sort of dogged determination.

13:40Alex Chisnall:Antler, that reminds me. Yeah. So I've worked with them a few times. I know Magnus, the founder of Antler. And yeah, he talks about that, the grit and the resilience, because they're trying to, you know, chuck a load of founders in a room and get them to find their co-founder, come up with a problem, solve the problem. So, I mean, it's an interesting concept in itself. They weren't the ones to come up with that idea. But he talks about that a lot as well over the years since I've known Magnus. What about, you know, what did you find some of those red flags then that your gut now warned you about for those that maybe you don't want to work with because you can't see them succeeding ultimately?

14:23I think for me, the number one is just if I see that founders, and this is whether we're going to take them on as a client at JD & Co, or I'm going to invest in them, or I'm going to sit on their bored because now at this point in my career I wear quite a few hats but for me it's the have they got self-awareness have they got the ability to take feedback and if they haven't got battle scars themselves and for me if I could if I could sum up my word for resilience and grit and tenacity and da da da is battle scars I say to graduates and young people when I've hired them over the last 20 years you know you I'm going to give you some battle scars because until you've got them you're not going to be able to do anything so I think it's founders that either have got battle scars because they've they've been through those learnings or they understand how to work with people to obtain that knowledge and that wisdom to help them on their journey and then I think the last thing is just the ability to be a talent magnet I always say the best people just cover themselves in velcro and all the best talent will stick to them and that for me if you're going to scale a business in the UK you've got to be a talent magnet if nobody's going to work for you you can't attract the very best team advisors founders influence and ambassadors for your brand um you're not going to get anywhere it's interesting

16:16Alex Chisnall:and what I've learned from just doing this podcast over the last eight years like over you know 650 episodes or whatever it is and you know whether it's a julian hearn from from huell or it's an al barrett from from grenade they've they've all literally every single one has said the same thing that the hardest thing is to find the right people and the second hardest thing is to keep the right people and i'm amazed i don't know why i'm amazed anymore because they all come up with the same thing whether it's like when i initially spoke to huell it was you know 50 million business that had gone from 750 grand in year one to 50 million in year five.

16:54Alex Chisnall:And now it's another 10x and beyond that. And, you know, Julian was saying he still tries to be part of that process of the hire. And I'm just like, but, you know, how can you do that as you grow and you scale exponentially? It's so difficult, isn't it? It is the number one challenge. And I think that That's why I've been so vocal about trying to change the perception of what trusted talent advisors can be versus the recruiters that you might have had experience of in your early career. Because we've all been on the job market as somebody with no experience or a year's experience. And so our idea of the industry is very different to the sort of advisory firms that are starting to appear now, like JD & Co, that are able to really guide these founders through every stage of the journey.

18:06because you need to see all the different flavours of a new CEO that there could be. You need to really take a step back and think, what's the one skill set that if we bring it in is going to unlock the next stage of our growth? And how do we go and find that and how can we afford it? So it's such a crucial part of scaling, but people still don't take it as seriously, I think, as they should do.

18:42Alex Chisnall:And where did you or how did you get the reputation that, again, so many really interesting and ambitious people have gone to you and turned to you as the go-to person to do that? How long did that take? How easy was that to get that reputation? Is it the people you've met and the kind of referrals that you get? I mean, it's always of the people, isn't it? It's always the who you know. It is. I think I've always been I've always been really as authentic as I can be. I have always tried to be as generous as I can with advice and time. And over the years, you know, you just put so much into the good karma bank.

19:37It comes back. But we haven't spent any money on marketing, for instance. And we've got over 50 ,000 followers. And that is is is genuinely going out and meeting every single person, having a coffee with them, getting to know them. And at the end, they'll follow you to find out more about your journey. And it's as simple as that. There are no shortcuts. It's just about being trusted. That's why I always get very guarded on these sorts of things about the clients and the people and the projects, because you have to be totally trusted. You know, if you're just about to exit one of the co-founders that isn't isn't cutting it and was there right at the beginning, could be a cousin or a best friend or, you know, of of the other founders.

20:40um so I spend a lot of the time uh really conscious that I can't talk too much about a current situation but I think that pays off over the long term because they know that um I'm somebody that people founders can come and just talk about the sorts of real challenges rather than the public persona that they have to have these days as the CEO of a brand in the public eye. They can they can have real talk. Do you turn people down?

21:16Alex Chisnall:How often do you turn people down that you think are maybe not the right fit to work with, aren't maybe at the right stage for you to work with, that you feel you can't add the value at that part of the journey? Does that happen quite often? Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. There's nothing worse than just saying yes, yes, yes. Over the years, I think really early on, you always you always become I think that's the beauty of age is the wisdom that I'm so grateful for the that you amass over the years. And there are a couple of times early on in my journey where I said yes to clients and the project because, hey, we're a small business.

22:06We're trying to pay the bills and earn money. But just knew in my heart that their moral compass and my moral compass and that of my team were not aligned. um you know it's really really hard to hire for a-holes isn't it so you know we we we see them now and um politely uh move to one side but I'm really proud of what we've achieved because we've backed uh some some real winners and and we become consumers of them as well you know Our office is absolutely full of all the products and all the brands and businesses. So I love that as well. We become part of the team, honorary members.

23:01Alex Chisnall:I was going to say people who follow you on your Instagram can see that when you've got something like a Heights from, you know, and again, a lot of them are past guests of the podcast, like a Dan Maricerta from Heights, or you've got Laura Fullerton from Monk and everybody in between. so it's my new surrey toothbrush it is the best on the planet uh and i'm not biased at all even though we we've just helped them with a big project yeah no he's we had him on the show and uh yeah it's a great story i really really like mark a lot and and again he's one of those people that you kind of referred to earlier that you try and have other conversations but he brings everything back to the journey that they're on at the moment you know and the problem that they're solving um when did you first kind of twig that you might be onto something because like you say everybody has to start from zero with with no clients and and you know no staff etc what at what point how early on did you actually think hang on a minute we're really onto something here i i was really lucky the the very first uh client um was uh a founder that was building and i can't say too much about it but building the most extraordinary business and so he found me and I became his talent advisor and he had an unlimited budget to go and find out where were the best people in the world in product in technology in growth hacking in brand in design etc etc and so for me it was like doing a mini MBA because I was able to use all of those insights when I finished that project.

24:58But I think it's only really been reconfirmed in the last year where things are really challenging in the UK economy right now. Let's not beat around the bush and being able to help some of those founders unlock growth where it's never been more competitive meta is uh is is a fool's game diminishing return so what are the alternatives and sharing some of those insights and wisdom to help uh those brands grow and scale i think has been invaluable in getting that feedback that we've been able to find where is it in their business that they need help and support and help them grow whether it's a short, sharp shot of expertise, or somebody that's going to actually become their co-founder.

25:57Alex 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 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. Where do you think the best talent is hanging out right now then?

26:35Alex Chisnall:Where's it coming from? Oh, such a controversial question. I think I was lucky enough in my early career to be hiring the very first product people in tech that they were only in Silicon Valley. We used to have to headhunt them out the valley, persuade them to come to Europe and really roll out the red carpet for them. Now, product as a function, we've got some superb product leaders across Europe now. When it comes to marketing and growth hacking, there are little pockets of talent all over Europe. But post-COVID, you know, talent is globally mobile. It is everywhere. I think the only change in the last year is that there has been a real move to leaders being in the office.

27:41And so the talent pools and where we can go is changing because although there might be a pocket in Europe for them or in the US or further afield, I think people are realising that time in the office together, sharing learnings, learning through osmosis and just hanging out together is the most important things.

28:09Alex Chisnall:I had a really interesting conversation, I think it must have been last week now, with Piers Linney and, you know, his business Implement AI. So we know what Piers is going to be talking about. And it kind of left me, you know, part excited, but probably 95 % terrified as to what the future potentially looks like. And, you know, he's got two daughters exactly the same age as my two daughters. And I was saying, you know, kind of having those conversations at the moment, I've got, you know, an 18 year old who's off to performing arts college because she's a dancer. And I love the fact that she wants to pursue her passion.

28:46Alex Chisnall:And then I've got 16 year old who's finishing her GCSEs on Monday, who'd alluded to potentially becoming a lawyer and going to that route. And he was like two years and he's an ex-lawyer, right? Corporate lawyers. He's like two years ago, I would have said trained to be to be a lawyer. Now, I'm not so sure. and then he started using examples of call centres, like call centre workers. There's a million of them in the UK. That's going to disappear. I saw Simon Squibb, who I know, been on the show a number of times, saying bus drivers in five years. Humans won't be driving buses. It's like, wow, where do we even have these conversations with kids?

29:22Alex Chisnall:I know you've got kids as well. It's like, how do you even have these conversations? Because things are changing so quickly, right? I think the biggest challenge with AI and how I'm seeing it in real terms in far-scaling businesses is that you just can't plan because the rate of innovation is so fast that you can't risk dedicating six months to building something and the budget that it takes and the resources because something might come along in four years. weeks time that means that it's either obsolete or you could build it in three days so I think I think we've got to lean into our humanity our creativity our critical thinking and when I talk to young people the two routes that I talk to them about of course when it comes to robotics and machine learning, LLMs, you know, that whole space, of course.

30:29The other area that I also think is going to explode is maybe saying to your daughters to look at things like philosophy and psychology, because I just think that the human race is going to have some big challenges ahead you know who are we and why are we here and how if we don't get our identity through work how do we how do we identify so I think I think there's a lot but if I think about all the businesses that I've invested in or that I run and oversee as a board my I'm pushing them all to be working alongside an AI tool every single day and figuring out how they can use it to make sure that we're going to have knowledge everywhere but we're not going to have wisdom so it's that it's that wisdom um that we need to focus on interestingly she's

31:45Alex Chisnall:chosen psychology as one of our a-level so there we go that's a good uh good start good um and and did some of those comments that you just made there with with they uh kind of reinforced when you went to that event the other night with brian johnson that uh that we were just talking about before we started the podcast oh yeah it was absolutely incredible um i have been an amateur biohacker for about seven, eight years. And the reason for that is, for me, is being an entrepreneur in scaling businesses, you know, a year in a scale up is three months in the normal world, as you know, things happen so quickly, the energy, the sharpness, of your mind, your ability to make really quick decisions and keep the energy is like you're a 10 out of 10 every day.

32:57So I started looking into how can I hack at this system because I need to be on my A game all the time. I'm working with some of the most talented minds in the world who are building things that nobody can even comprehend, but will use every day in the future. So I started biohacking my way through my life. And so the chance to have an evening with Brian Johnson was pretty incredible. and talking about his ideology and the is there a future for humanity do we need to look at embracing the whole idea of becoming a superhuman or a transhuman where a lot of your day is going to be governed by an algorithm and is there an algorithm that we could follow if we release uh and and give over uh the free will um to an algorithm that could ensure that we live uh for another hundred years you know it was it was a an insane evening yeah i could literally

34:18Alex Chisnall:talk to you for the rest of today about that and or biohacking, but I find it absolutely fascinating. I'd love to have been at something like that because, again, I've followed him for a couple of years now and it's the whole subject's fascinating and he's clearly a fascinating person as well. But let me bring it back to something you talked about earlier, which was leadership, when it comes to progress on inclusion in startup leadership, are we still miles off or are we close to cracking it? I'd like to say that we're closer, but we're still miles off. And I think what I've noticed is that JD and Co have had huge success building more inclusive leadership teams and boards.