My Favourite Failure: From The Apprentice, to the teacher - Joseph Valente

0:05Look, you know I'm fascinated by AI. But until the machines take over, there's only one thing that's going to determine your company's fortunes. People. This isn't some kind of hollow point to make me look good. If you speak privately to any successful entrepreneur, they'll confirm it's true. So, if you're a leader of a growing business, then you should check out Personio. It brings together all the important HR things like hiring, onboarding, payroll data, performance reviews, and so on. You don't want loads of employees sending you emails asking for time off. you want to be able to see things objectively, like it's taking you too long to hire.

0:41You want to do performance reviews well, having clear goals for people that are logged in a centralized system. And you want to do all these things in one simple tool without having to become an HR expert. All of this is possible with Personio. Check it out at personio.com forward slash secret leaders. That's personio.com forward slash secret leaders. There's a link in the show notes. Hello and welcome to Secret Leaders. Joseph Valente was ambitious from a young age and he wanted to lift his struggling family out of hardship. He was trained as a plumber when he found a book that would change his life.

1:19It gave him a vision, a mentor and eventually a business partner. So I started in business at the age of 22, a plumber that had started a plumbing company. By the time I was 29 years of age, I'd built the largest independent boiler installation company in the UK, eight figures in sales, 100 staff, and operating in every major city in the country. And along that journey, I'd had incredible success from becoming a best-selling author to getting into Forbes 30 Under 30. And I'd convinced myself that everything I touched turned to gold. And in actual fact, at the age of 30, I got a major humbling from the universe.

1:57us.

2:04So from the age of 16 to 18, I became a qualified plumber. From the age of 18 to 19, I qualified as a gas engineer. So I'd learned this trade, I'd learned this skill that allowed me to increase my income and live a great kind of late teen adult life. But I realized that I had something in me and that was I wanted to achieve and strive for more. I didn't want to just be employed and be told to do, be told what to do. I realized that the company I worked for could improve in so many ways and they weren't willing to listen to my ideas. So I decided that actually, you know what, I could do this better myself.

2:45And like many entrepreneurs, I made a quick decision after reading this book. This book is called What You See Is What You Get. This is a gentleman from the UK called Lord Alan Sugar. He's a billionaire and he's the host of the BBC Apprentice. And it's not a small read. And I hadn't read a book for many, many years. And my mum got me Lord Sugar's autobiography for Christmas. And I read it cover to cover. I was so passionate and it changed me that much that at the end of Christmas holidays, I called my boss and I said, I'm really sorry, but I'm not coming back. I'm going to take out a loan and I'm starting my own plumbing company.

3:23So at the age of 22, I took out a£15 ,000 loan and I decided I was going to start a business. I had no business acumen. I didn't know about sales, marketing, finance, HR, recruitment. All I had was an idea, a lot of ambition and zero fear of failure. So I took out this loan. I started this company, Impregas. And that's where I became a business owner. And if you fast forward two years, when I hit 24 years of age, my company was doing half a million in sales a year. Now, while he'd had an incredible amount of success incredibly quickly, things weren't really working well. The business had no processes.

4:05He was working seven days a week non-stop. And ultimately, he was miserable. He knew something needed to change, but he wasn't sure what. And I'd had enough. And I'm a big believer in the law of attraction. I think, you know, results go where energy flows. And, you know, if you seek, you will find. And I needed an escape. I needed something. And I was looking for it. And I got my phone out and I went on to Facebook and the Apprentice page came up, Lord Sugar's page. And it said the final call for the Apprentice 2015, the application process. I looked at my phone at that very moment and I knew the universe had sent me a sign and I filled out the application.

4:51And that's where my whole apprentice journey started. He flew through the application process. The only thing left to figure out was how a business that relied almost entirely on him was supposed to function while he was away. They want me to disappear for nine weeks and you couldn't tell anybody where you were going, right? You had to go incognito, off radar and just disappear. Now, I had some really good clients. They were property management companies, social housing, and they were always contacting me. And I thought, you know what? If I take this risk and I disappear for nine weeks, I might just come home and my business is gone and half a million is gone and all that I've worked for is gone.

5:34And I spoke to the lady that worked part-time for me. I said, listen, Debbie, I've got this opportunity to go on the show, but I need someone to run the company. She was 55. She was working three days a week. And she said to me, you know what, Joseph, I believe in you that much. I know you will win and I will run your business for you. I mean, she was taking on a hell of a task here, a hell of a task. And to her credit, she did exactly what she said she was going to do. On April the 26th, 2015, I emailed all of my corporate clients. I said, I'm really, really sorry. My auntie has become very, very ill.

6:09She lives in Italy on a goat farm in the mountains and there's no signal for wifi or telephone signal. You're not going to hear from me for a while. So please contact Debbie and I'll be back as soon as I can be. And then that Sunday night I disappeared for two and a half months. Shooting for the stars is what I've always been about. And I think you've got to take quantum leaps. And if you're not prepared to risk everything, then you're never going to get the big, big rewards. And that was one big risk for me that actually paid off. I ended up winning the show. I got£250 ,000, 10 million people watching the series a week.

6:51And Lord Sugar became my business partner at the age of 25. And in actual fact, he bought half of the company that I started only three years ago off the back of his reading his book for a quarter of a million pounds. And I got all the benefits and all of the upsides. And that was a big risk and it paid off. And so, you know, it's not just about taking risk and being worried about failure. Take the risk because you are going to succeed, but just know that failure is also an option. I could have lost. I could have gone away. My business could have gone. But in that instance, specifically, it worked out very, very well for me.

7:23With Lord Sugar by his side, within two years, Joseph doubled the value of his company. But once again, things became stagnant. The strategy that got Joseph this far wasn't going to get him past this point. He needed to change the business model to something with higher margins. This would require some radical changes. Changes that his mentor and investor, Lord Alan Sugar, didn't want to go along with. They wanted me to tick along. They wanted me to, you know, not give them any aggravation. And so I became the first apprentice to buy Lord Sugar out because I didn't want to go slow and I wanted to take the risk.

8:00I knew that he knew it was a risk and I knew it was a risk. I wasn't stupid, but I bought him out and he got out in 2017. By 2019, I'd done what I set out to do. I'd built this national company. We beat British Gas winning national installer of the year. I had the turnover, eight figures in sales, and it was a massive, massive company, but I'd also used every penny to get to a national level and all of the profit that came with it. My uncle said to me many, many years ago, Joseph, there's one thing you'll never control in business, and that is the market. Always keep your eye on it because when it changes, okay, you may have built the best business on the planet, but if it no longer is viable, you need to move fast.

8:43What happened was the winter started to get warmer. Brexit was happening in the UK. It was effectively a direct sales company. I had 15 direct national sales reps. They had to sit five opportunities a day. So go into a customer's house and sit five leads a day. And we had to make nearly 75 ,000 new sales a day to break even across the UK. It was a serious, serious organization with a huge overhead, massive fixed cost. The infrastructure to manage a national construction business is huge. And if those leads dry up or those sales don't land, that cash flow from those direct sales was basically the fuel for my organization.

9:21And up until that point, we just kept growing, growing, growing the sales. But when it plateaued and those new sales weren't coming, I was running out of the excess fuel and I'd made a mistake. I hadn't got the additional investment required to stay as a national business when you got there. And I'd given my life and soul to get there. I was done. I'd hit national status. I wanted to move on anyway. My heart wasn't in it anymore. I'd really sacrificed a lot of my physical and mental health to get there. And I was just like, I couldn't find a way out other than going to this company that was a recovery specialist.

9:59And they bought the brand, they bought the assets. It was a negligible amount of money. And all of my staff kept their jobs. That was one of my main missions. But I had a big debtors book, and that was about 2 million. And the company that said they were going to buy my business said they were going to take the debt. And on the day of signing, They longed me out for two weeks and I was running out of cash fast here. And then on the day of signing, they said, actually, we're not going to buy the business with the debt in it. We're only going to do this. These guys were sharks. I was naive. I didn't realize that they played me.

10:32And I had to take the deal because it was better that I got my staff looked after. And, you know, the brand got an opportunity to survive. But it meant that I had to shut the company down. and effectively at the age of 30, after dedicating eight to 10 years of my life building this company, I walked away with practically nothing. This, as you can imagine, leaves Joseph feeling absolutely devastated, but as if losing the company wasn't enough. Joseph was already a public figure, which meant people took notice. But it was a very, very, very difficult time, a very challenging time. Because I'd won The Apprentice, this story didn't go unnoticed.

11:12every person that wanted to see me lose came out of the woodwork you can imagine everyone for that had been secretly behind the scenes wanted to see me fail they came out in the droves and but this is 2020 we're talking about right so at the time i didn't know if i was a one-trick pony i didn't know if i was going to be able to bounce back i didn't know if i was going to recover um from you know all of the negative press whether people were going to take me seriously whether i actually had it in me. And so that was a journey that I've been on. This is one of the hardest parts about experiencing a failure at this level.

11:48You can convince yourself that all of your success was a fluke, that you'll never have a good idea again, but you will. And Joseph did too. For about two weeks, couldn't really leave my apartment, didn't want to get out of bed, didn't want to open up social media. Everything I was posting was getting hammered. and it was a tough old time. And then Lord Sugar did me another massive favor, a massive, massive favor. And he retweeted one of the articles on Twitter saying, it said Apprentice Wooders plumbing firm went bust. And he retweeted it because I'd bought him out two years before. We weren't still partners or anything.

12:27He retweeted it saying, you can't win them all. and seeing that message from him after I'd put so much respect on his name and put him on a pedestal all those years it gave me the fire I literally jumped out of bed and I was like right I'm gonna come back so big so strong that nobody is ever gonna make a fall out of me like this again and so his tweet was the motivation that I needed to get up and go again and so if he hears this I want to say thank you to him because he did me an incredible favor. Then four weeks later, I have this idea that I'm going to run this training company. I went online, went onto my social media, and I started promoting that I was going to coach plumbing businesses, teaching them how to grow.

13:17Within a matter of days, I'd signed up 20 customers paying me£1 ,000 pounds an hour on 12-month subscriptions. So I was getting paid£20 ,000 for 20 hours work of coaching. Then within another four weeks, I was about to launch our event section where I was going to get people into a room. I'd been a big student of personal development for many, many years. I love training businesses. I pay for courses. I pay for mentors. I pay for masterminds. So my characteristics and style fitted the personal development sector anyway. So I was about to start running events and then lockdown happened. And it forced me to change from events to webinars.

14:00And it was the greatest thing that ever happened to me because within a matter of weeks, I was doing a webinar a week from my apartment in lockdown, selling a thousand pound an hour sales course, teaching people how to drive sales in construction. and I was making£25 ,000 in sales every webinar in cash upfront. So I was doing about£100 ,000 a month. So I'd gone from nothing to within eight weeks, making£100 ,000 a month on webinars, selling e-learning courses to tradespeople, teaching them how to sell. And what I didn't realise was how successful and how in demand this was going to be. And very, very quickly, These tradespeople's businesses were scaling up at a significant rate.

14:47With his new business, Joseph has learned that his setbacks have made him a better entrepreneur and an even better teacher. They said, you can't train businesses. Your business went busto in two million pounds. Who are you to teach anybody? You're a failure, they would say on my posts. And technically, to a level, they're exactly right with what happened. But what they don't understand is that some of the greatest mentors are the ones that have experienced big failings. I would much rather learn from somebody that failed on a catastrophic level than I would for just somebody that have achieved great success.

15:26I've come to realize that success is easy. Failing is hard. And a great mentor can teach you both. Because if you've only ever experienced success in your life, and this is a message to everybody. Failure is coming, okay? You can't outrun it. It will catch up with you because it's a cycle and nobody ever lives at the top of the mountain. But just when you go down, it doesn't mean you have to stay there. You can climb back up. And currently, I'm in a success cycle. I'm on the up again. At the minute, I'm conscious to know I'm back on the up. But I'm also now humble enough to know that this isn't going to last and that actually, you know, things are going to get hard again at some point.

16:10So, you know, you just become a more experienced sailor.

16:20Joseph Valente is now a more experienced sailor and teaches other people who work in the trades how they can replicate his successes and avoid his failures. I want to thank Joseph for sharing his story and advice and you. Thanks for listening. I've been your host Dan Murray-Surter See you next time