£100M Exit - How Human Psychology Built Ella's Kitchen- Paul Lindley

0:00When it comes to building a thriving business, the numbers and the economics are just a piece of the puzzle. The true key to success is in understanding human psychology. That was the driving insight that led Paul Lindley to turn Ella's Kitchen into a$100 million healthy kids food brand. My philosophy around business and more about life is you need people to help you along the way, whatever you're trying to do. Paul knew real leadership means inspiring a team, giving them a compelling vision, and empowering them to relentlessly pursue that vision. even when it means taking huge risks. I'm a risk taker.

0:38I worked out that if I spent two years and X amount of pounds, I was confident in myself if I hadn't got there, I would go back to what I did before. In this episode, Paul reveals how he mastered psychology and company culture, got Ella's Kitchen noticed on a national scale on a shoestring budget, and hired for mindset over skillset to build a purpose-driven brand that changed the industry. You say you've got a lot of successful people on here. Now, if that success is defined by they built a business, it became a unicorn, they sold it and they went on to do something else, that's great. If success for them was I did something that changed the world, I did something that held my marriage together, I did something that my kids could make me feel proud of me because I did it, that's success.

1:27Paul, I'm very excited to have you here. Thank you very much. particularly enjoying the fact that obviously you're quite well renowned for serving and pleasing toddlers everywhere and mine is probably going to walk in at some point during our interview and fall over all the camera stuff and everything will be a nice little entertainment piece for us so until that happens can you please give context who are you okay great um my name is paul lindley i'm best known as the founder of ella's kitchen the biggest baby food company in the uk um but that was 10 years ago that I sold the business and I've tried to use entrepreneurship outside of mainstream business since then to help kids, which was why I started Alice Kitchen, I guess, in the first place, but be smarter, stronger, kinder, but live their lives so that they have their wellbeing, their welfare and their rights protected.

2:19And some of that is within business, I do, and much of it is without business, but trying to use entrepreneurship in those spaces. Did you always care about children, kids, youth, or is it a typical male path that became a father and realized I had emotions? It's unusual, I think, because I think I copped on in my 30s that what, like in my 50s now, what you see of me, gray hair, lines and stuff, isn't me. The inside of me is this little boy still. And I don't think I've ever grown up. and that that person has this free thinking and imagination that's helped me succeed to be an entrepreneur and helped me really connect I suppose with my childhood and therefore children and childhoods obviously when I had my own children it came in spades back of oh she's only four but she's just like me uh laughing at the same thing and I guess part of the story of how Ella's Kitchen came about was literally in feeding my daughter Ella and in messing around finding knowing the things that I was good at to try and get her to feed which was silliness games laughter and just mess and she popped her mouth open and I popped the spoon in and I thought that is the key to what my brand suddenly became and I put my head down and thought about it um so I'm a toddler at heart basically so talk to me a little bit about your background it's unusual don't hear this background through every guest.

3:45Okay. You know, I want to hear a little bit about your influences in life, the people that you respect and look up to in your family tree, you know, the people that shape who you are. I am really grounded. This will come through, I hope, in the next few minutes, but in people and how our connections to people evolve and keep us well, basically. I think we're a social animal, and I think we thrive when we interact with people. and I know our people and our family history. So I've had the privilege to look back into mine and about 20 years ago, found something that has been seminal to the light bulb to say, this is why I do what I do.

4:25And this is why this gives me some direction as to where I'm going to go next. And that was from my cousin, funnily enough, but she found, she'd done the whole family tree thing. And she found something that's in my day book. I keep it every day with me. It is my great-grandparents' marriage certificate from 1862. And, you know, for our family, okay, it's interesting. They're farm labourers. He was John and she was Sarah, blah, blah, blah. And they signed it in May 1862 with X's. So neither of them could read or write. And I thought, my goodness, in 1862, did really people in England not learn to read or write?

5:04They were farm labourers. But what didn't they get? what opportunities didn't they get because they couldn't read a newspaper or find a job ad or find read the directions to get to the nearest town there were rural people how how they may have been fully fulfilled in their lives i'm thinking maybe they weren't fulfilled in their lives and how vital literacy is to how much we take it for granted how vital it is for opportunity and i'm sort of thinking how it sent my life is that's fascinating to us as a family and i can't do anything to somebody four generations back from me. But what I can do is something to forward people to the side of me now.

5:44So four people I don't know, people away from people I know. What can I do in my life, in my entrepreneurship, in my ideas to help their lives be better? Because some of those people may be illiterate, and I'm sure they are, but there are other problems of today. How can we use business at first to create products and services that improve people's lives um and that's why it's going to be a successful business and outside of business how can we change society to be better and it's it's really driven me um this one piece of paper and then from my other side the other connection is the uh wedding ring that i'm wearing right now it's been on my has never come off my finger for 30 years and it was off a finger for about six months because my grandmother died just before i got married and it was on her finger for 61 years before that and she was 19 from a four family in Ireland my grandfather was 31 from a rich family in Ireland and they told that his family told him if you get married you're not inheriting the farm and kind of his land and they eloped they got up at 5 a.m they went to the church the priest gave them some coins and a ring this ring and they went to Dublin and they went to Hollyhead and they went to Sheffield and that ring has sort of taught me to be humble and to be curious, to reach out, to kind of try the impossible because they left their country, came here with nothing and built a life and their grandchild has created a super business that has made my children have a different trajectory than what their children had and I just think it's all connected.

7:23So one of my sort of things out of all this is everything is connected. we are all connected the most random person you can meet you will find something in common with them because we're human and that's the the you know we see these impossible things going on in the world now where there's protagonists and you can't see the solution once they we find the common humanity of that common denominator that's the place to start and that's what i try to do when i've been building teams across my life what have we got in common how can i set the goals for what we've got in common because here's the values here's the vision this is what we're all trying to do you might be doing your job over here that's this and you might be doing your job over there that's that but actually they're just cogs in this big wheel that we're turning something because we're doing it together so that's that's how so people really run through me but that's my background and you know from from these these great-grandparents who couldn't read or write to their children who were blue-collar basically and worked at the gasworks all their lives in world war one to my father who was white-collar but had to leave school at 16 to work because the family couldn't afford him to go on but was super bright person is super bright person to me that had the opportunity to go to university to my kids that are going to you know come from a position of wealth that's that's an incredible journey over just over 100 years before i was born um so you know that plays through to my philosophy around business and more about life is you need people to help you along the way whatever you're trying to do and the more you can get us working together for the same goal you can achieve anything i think so many questions gonna have to be careful and pick one and go through bit by bit you said 10 years ago you found this 20 20 and you exited ellis kitchen about 10 years ago right yeah so when did you start it start ellis kitchen yeah uh about eight years before i exited so right so you found this first i was trying to get the time you found this yeah what impact did this have then on your decision on how how and why to start at this what were you currently doing when you found this right yes i went to university and i first in my family to go and i started doing cellular pathology because i like to be the outsider i found i wanted courses that many universities do right something you could barely even say yeah exactly and don't know well this is the crucial bit didn't really know what it entailed because within days if not weeks you know it's like oh god i've made a mistake here should i even be here am i an imposter and all of that and i don't really understand what's going on and i i'm gonna fail at this and you know i failed fast basically i changed course within that first term to start again doing economics and politics two subjects i'd not studied at school at all but i knew i like and could pronounce and could I could spell and all the rest of it and and I thrived then at University became an accountant by default in a way I wanted a safe career and I wanted to understand business from like nuts and bolts if you like what P &L is cash flows different to it and all the rest of it and I qualified as that and then I went to Nickelodeon to be the financial controller and over ten years there I became the financial the general manager at the end of it so quite a journey across that and it's in that time that I started finding about this about my family and what it gave me the confidence to do from that kind of corporate career KPMG and you know Viacom company at Nickelodeon was to say well actually I now in my early 30s have an idea what what this gives me the confidence like my grandparents left Ireland with nothing to come you know to to to do something like that I evaluated what could go wrong um and i thought well i can risk that and i thought i'd give myself two years to be um to see if i could start a business which i did and then so i left my nickelogen job in 2004 after just discovering my family background in 2006 the first products arrived on the shelf and it really took off after that what did you evaluate could go wrong as in do you remember well yeah because um people um so my relationships with my wife and my family and you know and my Myself, you know, I've never done this before.

11:38I've never got a history of my family. I don't really know what entrepreneurship is, to be honest. And I think that naivety actually helped me in the end. And then obviously money. I was in my early 30s. We'd saved a little bit and we spent that and mortgaged the house fully. Because I wanted to, you know, maybe I'm backfilling this, but whether I knew these words kind of at the time. But I want to retain all the equity so that I could make the decisions going forward. I didn't want investors coming in early, as I saw it, screwing me over for an unfair amount of equity from a business that's not turned over anything.

12:17You said like a true CFO. There you go. I think I went rogue when I was at Nickelodeon in terms of I started off as the CFO. And I ended up, you know, believing that marketing is an investment rather than a cost. but I'm a big brand believer in terms of that is you know the power of communication that's a massive asset for an individual and for a company and you get that right you get the emotion and you get people buying in because they feel rather than they know if you like or that they're told and that was powerful but that's kind of a sidetrack there okay so you started Ella's Kitchen literally in a kitchen what's the you know Ella's kitchen Ella is my daughter yeah Take us to the moment in time, like describe that first, this first few months, just getting started, leaving.

13:04Love you to just paint the picture of leaving a corporate job, which is tough with a family, which is even more tough. You mentioned mortgaging the house, like take me through the sort of like conversations and emotional states about the transition from safety to insecurity. Yeah. Well, I know I'm a risk taker in life, so the kind of insecurity didn't really worry me as long as I do think through things. So I evaluated the risk. I worked out that if I spent two years and X amount of pounds, I was confident in myself if I hadn't got there, I would go back to what I did before or something similar.

13:49So I kept my networks. I knew how much I could lose in time and money and set off. But, you know, I started because of two things. And I'll explain the two things and I'll explain why I think it's really important to founders or would be founders to get this right. um i found two i found in my personal life i had my daughter and i was intrigued by her relationship with food like why when she was nine months did she love food and when she was a year she kind of explored new food she didn't like any of them and this is where i started games and mess and stuff and i copped on that if you make fun food food fun i copped on that if you make food fun then they will treat you to the game and like it and if you can make that healthy then then they'll eat healthy food and also it de-stresses the parent and then in my professional life at Nickelodeon I was seeing that our kids each generation effectively was getting less healthy than the one before and television was being blamed so I was up against like children's televisions showing bad ads they're not playing outside they're watching television what you're going to do about it and I was thinking about that and I thought well you know if we can if I can do something to create a brand along all that I'd learned and become a marketeer at Ella's Kitchen if I could fulfill this itch of I've got an idea and I've got to explore it.

15:08And I can evaluate whether it's so, but I'm prepared to take those risks. I kind of thought about it. It was like a bit of an MBA I was doing for two years. And I'd learned as much as I would have done an MBA and I could go back. But I was passionate about this idea of kids, this idea of health, seeing my daughter go through something. So how could I help other parents like de-stress weaning? How could I help kids have a healthier diet? and all of those things came together to say right I don't really know where this is going but I'm going to give up this job that I've been doing for 10 years because I want something new and let me explore let me start you know it's funny now I'm the chancellor of the University of Reading it's a figurehead position but I'm involved in academic work and a university life and I can see how academics and entrepreneurs have so much in common in that they're seeking new knowledge and new ways of using that knowledge but they're so different in an academic wants to see the nth degree of evidence to prove something before they do it an entrepreneur as my experience and my successful friends experience is like you've got a vision and you just start you've got to get the momentum to start and wherever you end up you know the quadrant you want to end up with and where it on that tangent it is you don't know just yet but you know you're kind of heading towards the setting sun sort of thing and it's somewhere over there and um so you know I started this is where I was coming back to what I think is important for for would-be founders to think about is I started with a mission and a reason why I was doing it and it was something I was passionate about and I always think you know I've done hundreds of talks to students and want to be entrepreneurs and startup up entrepreneurs and if their idea is i want to be an entrepreneur i would say caution okay think find something that excites you that you want to be an entrepreneur don't think i want to be an entrepreneur and where am i going to find the thing and certainly don't come back from going abroad somewhere and finding something and think that you can do that thing here you probably can make a successful business about it but we won't excite you and how do you evolve and adapt and innovate that thing because you're waiting for the person that you saw before to do the innovation that you can copy so it's kind of a veneer and i know people do kind of make successful businesses out of that but the truly inspiring entrepreneurs i find start with this mission of why they're passionate about something there's a problem to solve and they go about it in their own unique way and they fail and they adapt etc and they produce something that the world needs that hasn't had before and um and ultimately going back to human beings and my fascination with people is isn't that just an awesome thing that people can do no other animal can do do this is imagine something that doesn't exist and make it happen you can dream something tonight that 80 88 billion people that have ever existed have never dreamt before and if that thing are you the person that can make that thing happen do you know the people can you collaborate with those people and make it happen what are the bottlenecks and that's kind of the world that i'm in a little bit at the moment not necessarily through business through society but what are the bottlenecks and how can we solve them fascinated by the person that invented the wheel are they the person that first thought of the wheel or was it other people who just didn't have the wherewithal or the time or the networks or whatever to make it happen how do these things happen but we can invent a better future and business is the perfect opportunity to do that and the successful entrepreneurs are just the um the people that make it happen you said something just then about uh you know isn't it amazing about humans and our ability to have imagination i remember many years ago reading sapiens don't know if you're like that totally right and i just there's something very similar in that which is you know the key defining characteristic and difference of homo sapiens which I can't remember the other type sadly was it homo erectus uh yes yeah yeah right and both the bigger stronger and all of the things so technically speaking they had the upper hand on us yeah but we thrived because we had the ability to imagine yep and so we could outthink you had these unique brains and I just loved that I was like that's so interesting he goes into all these examples of how that actually is a key defining you know instinct for survival and the other analogy you could have with entrepreneurs is really around you know evolution the people that succeed through evolution aren't the ones that do something fastest or do something best they're the ones that can adapt to changing environments and circumstances best and so you've got to be fleet of foot and you've got to sort of you know there's a whole load of things when you start your businesses everyone listening will know is you can't control they're just coming at you and you've got to deal with you've got to have the resilience and the wherewithal and the network and everything to deal with it but that you can't control and you know and i know certainly my first few years at ella's kitchen the things that i learned from and failed at was trying to get tied up in all the knots of things i couldn't control what my competitors doing well sod it you they do what they want to do if they want to copy me they can copy me they're not going to know what to do next because i know what to do next i'm going to tell them but you know i can't control it worry about the things I can control and do them better.

20:20And that de-stressed me a lot. But two challenges for things you've said, if I may. Please. Okay. So the first is your sort of reflection on entrepreneurship in general. Very, I'd say, idealistic. In an ideal world, all entrepreneurs absolutely will follow their purpose and their dreams and find the thing that they really care about and all that stuff um and i actually share my own experience my current company heights is exactly all those things and i'm very lucky um my company kindling media where we make podcasts i do that i'm very lucky i you know i i have current experiences but i on my you know i've got five five companies one failure um the one that I really cut my teeth on called Gravel, which failed.

21:13I was a high growth mobile commerce startup and did really well until it didn't. Ultimately, I didn't really care about. I started for all the wrong reasons and all of the things that you're saying, they resonate with me and that they're all true. And I made all the mistakes because I was sort of chasing just a, what is an interesting problem to solve that I think is interesting and I'm excited by, but not something that I'm deeply passionate about at all. And so what happened was built a great brand and good product, but terrible business. And in the end, I, you know, it failed because it was a bad business.

21:51But also, you know, I, as a founder was completely burnt out and miserable doing it and all of the other things. And I was absolutely, I'd created my own cage. That is a negative view of things. And that is true. However, the fact that I had that experience and I dusted myself off and I tried again and I did learn from the mistakes to find the right thing that I do love and I am passionate about, which is now in brain health and gut health, you know, just like in general health fascinates me. That experience, that opportunity, that privilege comes from trying and failing the wrong thing. It's quite rare to have your experience.

22:28It happens. I have lots of guests on the show where it's happened. They have their one hit wonder. They dreamed big. They found the thing. They loved their child. they want to solve the problem with their child, they made a$100 million business, it's still quite rare. So the only thing that I would challenge back to what you said is that there is a very idealistic picture. And quite often, a lot of the founders and entrepreneurs that you will meet, and especially you who meet so many, might be pursuing the not that important thing. I'll ask a question back, and I'll reframe what I said as maybe answer.

22:58So the question I'm going to have back is which of those five businesses gave you most joy? Which of them where you reflect back or will you reflect back in 40 years time and think that was the time that I was most me and if it's the successful one or the one that makes most money great but I suspect for maybe for many people but I don't know for you it might not be yeah and so it's actually the one ironically you're like this it's the one that's the non-profit okay well that's non-profit community and then maybe the fact that there's no financial goals in there is also very beautiful about it so that is my kind of point is how we measure success you say you've got a lot of successful people on here Now, if that success is defined by they built a business, it became a unicorn, they sold it, and they went on to do something else, that's great.

23:37If success for them was I did something that changed the world, I did something that held my marriage together, I did something that my kids could make me feel proud of me because I did it, my parents, that's success. 100%. So, you know, as I, you know, if we look forward and say, how can business change the world? How can entrepreneurs change the world? I take a question back saying, what are you trying to change? What's the metric of success that we're trying to measure against that change? And I don't think it's maximizing profits, maximizing exit values, maximizing countries' GDP. Because we all know that GDP, you know, we sell more cigarettes.

24:15Brilliant. GDP is going to go up because we have to sell not only cigarettes, but we can sell all the vapes and then we can sell all the drugs that are going to have to. And GDP has gone up. Now, it's such a blunt sort of sort of guide to we're doing well. But there's so many other things that we don't measure. And, you know, if I got the opportunity, I'd love to share how within Ella's Kitchen, super successful businesses from from a financial point of view. It made profits every single year of its existence. It doubled its turnover for the first seven years before I sold it, from$1 million the first year to$60x million in the year that we exited.

24:50And so Ellis Kitchen is successful from a financial point of view. But the way we did it wasn't at the expense of being successful in other ways. I am so proud. The most proud, I think, I am of what Ellis Kitchen has become is it's a B Corporation. So it stands for something. It is standing and to be measured against something and to be counted against something. It's values that I, at the back of my mind, like passively put in, then a few years in actively said, okay, this is like what our purpose is and this is how I want all our staff to behave and this is who we are. You know, we built, we motivated people on those behaviours and those values and that mission beyond just the financial performance.

25:35So if people had lived our values, yet we didn't hit our financial targets, there would still have been a bonus and recognition. And sort of the development of other human beings, the development of our team as people to find their passions, to help them deliver their careers and their lives, we invested in. And they stayed longer. And they thought about stuff when they were walking the dog or having a shower. And it helped. so the other thing that i would free frame i think around this idealistic way of ideal entrepreneurship is um around reframing purpose to values i think you know i think if you can you'll head hold your head up high if you operate your business however successful or not it is as you as the things that you believe in especially when people aren't looking so you're not tempted to get away with cutting some costs or not paying somebody or substituting something, not telling anyone, if you can get away with it, because that's not who you are.

26:41Before we get on Taylor's Kitchen, the other thing that you said. Oh, yeah. Academia, a lot of, you know, your Chancellor of Reading, a lot of similarities with entrepreneurship. I was surprised that you say that because a very commonly cited thing is how our education system university downwards rewards perfection ultimately and entrepreneurship is all about failing fast which you also referred to earlier how do those two things actually coexist in reality from someone who literally is sitting in the chancellor's seat and working with entrepreneurs i think universities have got to fundamentally adapt in the next generation to provide the skills for business and for society needs that non-university payers who effectively pay tax with the privilege of people to go to university, give back to society.

27:28So I don't think it's fit for purpose at the moment, if I'm absolutely honest. I don't think the evaluation of who gets to go to university is right based on academic performance only. I don't think what comes out in your degree should solely be based on your expertise in the chosen subject that you've got. How has those three, four years at university added to your ability to be a better citizen, to help your fellow citizens and your community. That should be taught at the university. So what Bristol University does fantastically, it does a course in innovation. You can get a degree, I think you can get innovation with 16 other things, some obvious things like entrepreneurship and perhaps engineering, but then drama and archaeology and stuff like that.

28:12And that half of the course, there are no exams through those three years because exams are designed to pass and innovation is all about failure so there's a whole load of workshops and you get people like me or other entrepreneurs coming in and kind of helping them through their workshops and evaluating stuff but at the end of the day it flips that thing to say you get best innovation when you fail and what you do with that failure and how you learn to do that failure and you know more universities have got to do more stuff like that so and you know i thought you were going to get down the question of you know there's a big debate as you know if you if somebody with an entrepreneurial idea age 18 is it worth them going to university and doing an academic stuff and getting that understanding of that side of the world or just getting out and doing and exploring and failing and working in it and that's obviously a big debate as well but um with somebody who's got a son who's just graduating this year and going on to do a master's in innovation and entrepreneurship next year um i've been having those conversations in my own home about that yeah because you did say earlier and i was like that's just spot on and then it's antithetical to what you've just said with your son which is fascinating uh you left nickelodeon and could have messed around in an nba or we didn't say mess around but that's my interpretation of most nbas but you could have done that or you could have just gone straight into business and you know in society we we judge the reputation of an nba is a great investment for your future and going into entrepreneurship is a risk.

29:38And actually the cost is probably the same. You being the risk assessor and risky person all in one probably work those two things out and realize that the cost is probably the same. So you might as well just do the entrepreneurship track because it gets you to the finish line two years faster. Yet here you are with a son that's going into further education to learn about entrepreneurship rather than do entrepreneurship. So how do you square that out in your own family? Most people who do MBAs don't end up being entrepreneurs they end up with a corporate career and it does help in that it's seemed to help anyway whether that's right or wrong yeah um we're all individuals so his motivations to do that are beyond i want to i want to be an entrepreneur or i want to use that to help my innovation he's doing a design degree so he he's got he's kind of he's buying him time to work out what he really wants to do um and um you know i take my hat off to entrepreneurs who are 18 and 21 around that age who actually get going i was in my mid-30s for having the clarity or the confidence or you know the understanding or maybe it's the night you know they're just going with the naivety but you know so i imagine it's a lot easier when you in your 30s than when you're maybe it's not maybe that's an antithetical as well it's interesting isn't it like i sort of think that if you think about the lessons you need in entrepreneurship most of the most of the things you come back to are just like learning resilience yeah um and you know of course there's other practical things as well but a lot of it's that and it is learning people i mean we can come back to people you know i but so just but to this point earlier you learn these things the better right yeah so you compound growth is the eighth wonder of the world then learning how to manage and deal with people and learning how to deal with setbacks and stuff from the age of 18 and real life experiences, there's some magic to that, right?

31:29Yeah. Maybe by the time you're 30, I didn't start at 18 either, by the way, so I'm not singing my own praises here. It's more that I also meet 18-year-old entrepreneurs like you. I'm enamored by them. I'm like, wow, the bravery. But I'm also slightly jealous because I'm like, you'll be so developed by the age of 26. You'll just understand so much more. It's quite amazing. Yeah. It's a real maturity. You talked earlier about Homo sapiens as a book. That has been really important to me. on my little shelf with another called A Hundred Year Life, which is also fascinating. Written by an economist and a psychologist around the fact that a child born today is likely, more than likely, than not to live to over 100.

32:11But our society is not set up in any which way to cope with that from all sorts of angles. And the outcome of that in this book is that although in the 20th, in the 20th century we had childhood adolescents the teenagers i guess uh adults and retired people as four kind of separate um things he they see in this next century as we we should have had already that there's this gap between sort of 18 and 30 if you like that sort of after education piece where people explore a lot more about what their purpose is or what they're good at or get wider skills or see the world or meet more people before they knuckle down to what their career becomes because their career is likely to have to go into their 70s or or whatever so you know and that's that's a massive opportunity for an individual but humankind i think that we can explore how that's funded and paid for and it's likely two people are going to have to lift it you know relationships really count like personal relationships count then um but um you know that's That's a fascinating thing of how our society might evolve.

33:25And that might be there might be a lot more exploration of entrepreneurial-type stuff, whether that's physically setting up a business or wondering, being curious about the world and kind of trying to change it or trying to do new stuff. And so that remains to be seen. And I hope, going back to the university point, I hope universities can create the confidence in young people to not just go out and join the rat race. When I do my speeches at graduations, I say my only advice to you is to be you. Find you. You're great now. Don't let somebody make you conform just to conformity's sake. Find you.

34:07Explore. Continue to explore, as Mark Twain quote I often use. To summarise, life is a journey. Go travel. And just going back to then Ella's Kitchen, you traveled into a kitchen you uh mortgage your house so take me through the funding journey yeah no funding journey funders at some point like how did it work and also can I just say as someone who runs a physical product company with uh supply chains and vertical integration and stuff is insanely amazing that you got profitable in your first year that's incredible yeah um probably more luck than by design. But, you know, I was an accountant, so I did know sort of what...

34:49My business partner's an accountant, so maybe he's just not at PwC though, so maybe he was at the wrong... Yeah, exactly. I'll have to blame him for our... We're profitable now, but we certainly weren't in our first year. Well, there's a few things in that. Just on that point, I think it's so easy to get seduced when you're producing stuff, goods as a business, and to be seduced by the fact that, oh, when the volume grows, the cost will come down and I'll make money then. and I didn't believe any of that. I thought my customers are actually these big supermarkets who aren't known for their philanthropy, who there are too few of that skews the balance of power anyway.

35:23And when they see I'm successful, they're going to turn the screws rather than release the screws. Is that what happened? Yeah, really. And the economies of scale that you think, some things do come about, but then there's other costs you haven't even thought about that come in. A system upgrade, you haven't thought about a blooming system or a pension scale, all these things you don't think about that add other layers of cost. But so for me, the gross margin had to work from day one. And there was one major retailer who I held out for for two years. You know, I launched exclusively with Sainsbury's, 360 stores from nothing.

36:03So that was a big risk from them, but it was a blooming, you know. And I remember they gave me the listing and I thought, yes, I've done it. And then within seconds, it was, I haven't even started because now I've got to produce enough stuff to get into 360 stores in six weeks and I don't even know where my broccoli is coming from sort of thing. That's a really good name for a toddler book. I don't even know where my broccoli is coming from. Very middle class, isn't it?

36:32So funding you asked about. So I did mortgage my house and that gave me enough money to buy that initial lot of stock and I'd use my savings on the product development to get the product to a recipe that kind of would work. And then I sort of used my two things of, okay, be a little boy and just imagine things and kind of work the impossible and like let nobody tell you you can't do this. So a lot of that was around the branding and around what the brand stood for and became. So all the experts were saying, it's organic. Organic's new in this market and like you want to be pastels and greens and browns and all of that and ellis kitchen is big bold colors and it's because i thought you've got to attract the baby the toddler and they know bright colors and primary colors and and then we use lexicon of language that is all about toddler light which pisses some people off probably because it's kind of childish child was childlike it's not childish they see it as childish some but it's childlike but but it also but it gets it It takes some of the stress out of weaning.

37:33Anyway, it was very successful. And then as far as marketing, I knew that the other big cost is marketing. I'm going into a market where the only customers are big supermarkets and the only competitors are huge multinational companies, Heinz, Danone, those sort of organizations. And I've got next to no money and I've spent all my money that I can afford. So do I get new shareholders in and I've got this thing about, I don't want to dilute because it's going to be successful this and I'm not going to. And I don't know what other value they could bring. And so what I went, the creative thing that I did is I went back to Nickelodeon where I'd been for 10 years.

38:12And I said, look, I've been responsible for your revenue for years. I know that from an advertising point of view, you don't sell all your advertising all year. And I know what you do. You either give it to your existing advertisers who then come back next year and say, they are, well, you gave me 15 spots for that pound last time, and now I want 15 going forward. Or they use it for their own advertising, for promotions, for their own stuff, for which they don't get any money. And I said, look, why don't you give me some of those spots? And I will give you a percentage of anything that I sell because of those sorts.

38:42And from the very beginning, I've sold nothing before. I won't do any other advertising. We'll create a cheap and cheerful ad, which you can help me create to go on your channel. You can play it in the spots that you wouldn't have sold anywhere. You're not losing anything. and then you can show, you can do all the data and show other small companies that they can afford to do advertising on television. And they said, yep, we'll do that. And I did that deal that lasted two or three years and that got me going. Because then I could go to Sainsbury's and say, I'm going to give you national advertising from day one.

39:10And it worked. And the really interesting thing I found was about a year in and I was thinking, you know, now I've got other advertising going and should I really be giving the same percentage of the pennies to them? And I thought, okay, went to them and I said, we had baby food products and we had smoothies at that time. The smoothie range is all based on colors. So there's the red one and the yellow one at that time. There's many colors now. And I said, why don't you do some ads? Why don't we do like just two weeks of ads, only the red one? No, actually, it was only the yellow one. The red one was the better seller.

39:43Only the yellow one. See if its sales go up. See if it goes up and red go down or they all go up or what happens. and there was a statistical meaningful difference in the effect of that and that gave me so much that is changing behaviors and that gave them so it's a long way of saying i found a way of not having to raise cash to get national marketing and anyone listening to this you know this was 20 years ago so television may be less relevant now it's very relevant but the internet or even trade magazines the local paper and anywhere where your market is they're not selling it they'll be interested in a conversation if there's a potential revenue share from that.