My Favourite Failure: Make Yourself Redundant - Andy Brown

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1:04I felt embarrassed. I felt ashamed. I felt frightened and I felt relieved. I felt massively relieved that I think this thing was now being talked about. That actually someone had gone, this is something that needs to be dealt with. That's Andy Brown, a leadership coach and advisor to founders, particularly in the agency space. He's spent decades in creative services, but the period which stings the most is what we're talking about today. Andy's first business was a thriving marketing agency. But although it looked rosy on the outside, Andy was in personal turmoil, which left him boarding a ferry to France to escape it all.

1:55it all started so well we were a general creative agency marketing agency so we would help well i'd describe this as a bit of a bottom feeder we we would take any work that came along um from design for print advertising and everything in between communications internal comms, that sort of thing. So we were a communications agency, advertising agency, and we did okay. And we were regional and we had a good reputation. So it was a business that had a right to exist. We were good at what we did, but it wasn't particularly differentiated. And subsequently, the work I do with agencies tends to be around finding a niche, but that's a different discussion.

2:41Andy started the company with a co-founder above a veggie restaurant in Brighton. They did well. They picked up some big clients like British Rail, but after a few years Andy's co-founder decided he wanted to do something else. He was a creative who wanted to focus on other things, so Andy bought him out, leaving Andy to build the business solo. The problem wasn't really growth, it was a lack of structure and focus as they hunted growth. The way I describe it now is we were a bit of a sea urchin, and a sea urchin sits on a rock, it can't move anywhere, and it's got tentacles and anything that floats past a sea urchin, it grabs in case it's food.

3:21And we were that sort of business. Anything that came along that we thought we could make money out of, we grabbed. And what that meant was we lost our focus. We lost our specialism. We started going to other sectors and other verticals. We offered other services. If a client said, I love what you do, could you do this for me? We go, no idea what that is, but we'll have a go. Yeah, sure. Of course we can. So we started to spread our service proposition too wide. We started to work in verticals where we didn't really understand the markets particularly well. And that meant we had to bring on more people.

3:53So mid-level senior hiring of people who knew those verticals and hiring senior people is really difficult. So it very quickly snowballed into an extremely challenging set of circumstances. And I guess what I'd, looking back, if I was advising myself, I'd have said, you shouldn't be a sea urchin. You want to evolve quickly and get off the rock and go searching for the food that suits you best. I mean, if not a shark, then something at least that can swim and go and find the food source. So that's where it started going wrong. I absolutely understand that's what happened. And we just lost our focus.

4:29We went after the money. I think there was a little ego involved as well. There was also a certain amount of, I think, I wanted to prove everyone that I could run it by myself. and that led to some quite that led to probably some poor decisions and to a lot of stress the stress seeped into andy's personal life so i i i recall that i didn't go to bed i used to stay up incredibly late at night and i just i don't know what i was doing i think i was working but i obviously wasn't working productively um i remember getting back really late at night and we just had our son and I crawled into bed to give him a little cuddle and I just burst into tears.

5:16I burst into tears because the magnitude of his life was happening when I wasn't there. I wasn't seeing it and there didn't seem to be any reason for me to miss it. There wasn't any compelling reason for me to be working long hours and doing the things I was doing. I wasn't on a mission. I didn't feel like I was achieving anything. I felt like a failure. And yet I was missing this little person's life, missing everything they were doing. And that hit me like a ton of bricks. The core issue was that the company was growing, but in all sorts of directions. There wasn't a coherent plan, which left Andy just trying to hold on for dear life.

5:54I ran before I could walk. I definitely hired some senior people I shouldn't have hired, because I felt they could give me that sort of instant access to the knowledge I needed. but they tend to be expensive. They tend to be difficult to onboard. They bring their own learning and their own way of doing work, which didn't necessarily suit my business. I hadn't really built out the processes and systems I needed to make everything scalable. So there wasn't enough that was repeatable. What people call cookie cutter, there wasn't enough. When I took on new staff, they didn't have a handbook. They didn't really know what our process was.

6:32So lots of things were being reinvented all the time. And those decisions or non-actions were what started to cause the biggest challenges, I think. We were reinventing ourselves all the time, which is a really labour-intensive and slightly foolish way of trying to run a business. It became very messy. At one point, the mess just became too great for Andy to bear. I was building up what I call an emotional overdraft. I was subsidising the business at my own cost. I didn't know it. No one told me that. No one said, Andy, you are getting stressed. Probably my wife did, but I think I was at the point where I was so stressed I wasn't listening to her.

7:11She's still my wife, so I do now listen to her. But I was running up this emotional overdraft. I was getting stressed. I was becoming overwhelmed. And I wasn't dealing with it at all well, but I hadn't acknowledged it. I couldn't acknowledge it was happening. Even if I was I was aware something was wrong, but I couldn't define it in any way other than this was running a business is supposed to feel like this was how I was supposed to feel. But I knew something had gone badly wrong. I had a meeting planned with a client in Dover. In fact, it was Dover Castle, which would be in Dover. And I was driving to the meeting.

7:47One minute I was driving to the meeting thinking I wonder where to park the car. The next minute I found myself driving onto a cross-channel ferry and heading off to France. I don't know, it's an hour or two from Dover. It's not very far. I spent the day in France. I bought some beer. Back in the day, you get duty-free beer. I got back on the ferry and came back and drove home. I didn't tell anyone I hadn't been to the meeting. I didn't tell the client I wasn't going. I just tripped out. I literally tripped out and And couldn't face the meeting, couldn't go to the meeting. And the only thing my brain said was, well, you're in the car, you're in Dover, keep going.

8:27You're either going to get wet or you're going to get on a ferry and go somewhere else. And I can almost understand how people get to the point where, you know, this extension of that might be that people just disappear. They just throw in the towel. They just go. At that point, I recognized something was going badly wrong. I knew. And my team, I lied to my team. I told my team that I'd had the meeting. And then it becomes very evident very quickly when Dover Castle phone up and say, well, where's Andy? That that hadn't happened. So I don't know what I thought was going to happen. But my team then sat me down and said, Andy, what's going on?

9:00You didn't go to that. What's happening to you? What's happening to the business? What's happening to our jobs? What are we supposed to be doing here? And there was a sort of intervention, I think, at that point. There was some denial initially, but that quickly gave way to honesty and reality. Andy realised he'd built a business reliant on him and it all came crashing down. He took a cold hard look at his business and decided to go through with a distress cell to protect his people's jobs and the clients. That worked out alright in the end and gave Andy a new perspective on failure. I think failure is okay.

9:35I definitely felt that I couldn't fail. I wasn't allowed to fail. And there's a great story about Pixar with Toy Story 2, which apparently is their most financially successful film of all time. But they consider it to be one of their great failures because they failed so little when they were filming it, when they were creating it. And their measure of success was, if we're not failing, we're not pushing the envelope. We're not trying hard enough. We're not experimenting enough. If there aren't failures, but because it came on the back of Toy Story, which was very successful and changed cinema, they knew they felt they had to create something that was very similar.

10:15So it was incredibly financially successful, but very few failures. And internally, they looked at that as one of the worst films they produced because of that, which is fascinating. And I think there's a lesson there, which is I felt I couldn't fail. Whereas as long as you fail fast, that old Mark Spencer Maxim, fail fast, learn from it and do something differently, that's great. And thinking back to the bubble of a business that was growing, we didn't really see failure. We didn't label failure. We just carried on and did something else. We ignored it. We tried something else. So we weren't learning.

10:49So the first bit of advice I'd give anyone is it's okay to fail. The second thing, importantly, if you're going to fail then is to have a culture where people are allowed to fail and talk about failure, where they're allowed to try things, where they're allowed to challenge each other where they're allowed to ask questions. So that's really, you can't have one without the other. And it seems odd when we're talking about founding businesses, about rapidly growing startups, maybe, that you can fail, but you really can. You really can because it's at the edge of failure where you're going to discover the stuff that has the most value.

11:28So if you're playing it safe all the time, you're not going to get anywhere, not in the long run. So I think that's That's critical. I learned, ironically, the value of hiring amazing people and also trusting the people around you. So whilst it was inadvertent, I absolutely had an object lesson in allowing great people to do great things. And a lot of founders in my research and my experience find it very difficult when they're moving from founder mode to growth mode, and it's still called a growth mode, but founder mode to growth mode to let go, to not be the smartest person in the room, to not be the person having the ideas.

12:13The businesses that thrive, the businesses that go really well are the ones where the founder goes, I want to be the stupidest person in the room. I want to have smart people making smart decisions. I want people who are going to challenge me, who are going to take this away from me and do things I never knew about. As I said earlier, it's the idea of making yourself redundant. I think that's hugely important. And subsequently, I've had a career in mergers and acquisitions before my advisory career. And the number one thing that people look for when they're buying a business is if we give this person, this main shareholder, loads of money and they disappear with the cash, because why wouldn't they?

12:51What's left underneath them? And this idea of a fundamentally sustainable and structured business is really important. And I don't think you can start that too early. That was Andy Brown. Thanks for listening to this episode. I've been your host, Dan Murray-Surter.

13:22And we genuinely love reading what you think. We read every single review. I've been your host, Dan Murray-Surter. And we'll be back next week with more lessons for entrepreneurs and leaders. See you next time.