Meet the Oxford Student Who Built Three Multimillion-Dollar Brands by 25 (ft. Grace Beverley)

0:00It definitely wasn't always easy at all. While still a student at Oxford, Grace Beverly generated over a million dollars in digital product sales to pay off her tuition. And since then, she's built multiple seven-figure brands and become one of the UK's leading young entrepreneurs. Hi, I'm Grace Beverly and welcome to The Burnouts. Grace, welcome to The Burnouts. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here. I want to tell you a little bit of rapid fire. So I want to ask you just a couple questions. favorite interview question to ask people. So I ask everyone at the end of my podcast, what's the best piece of advice you've ever been given?

0:36And I feel like I've been given some of my best advice purely from that question. Can I ask you, what's the best piece of advice you've ever been given? I shouldn't have done this to myself. I actually had an episode which I thought was really helpful, which I want to bring up today because I think that it will be perfect for your audience. But it was with Vanessa King-Ori, who is a managing director at Google and used to be chief business officer at Condé Nast and Vogue and, you know, incredibly impressive woman. And she said that one of the best things you can do for career progression is to manage fully the things that no one else wants to do.

1:09And I think that sounds pretty self-explanatory until you think about it in detail. And you think about the fact that the majority of the time people think in order to get the promotion or to get noticed, I need to work on the big shiny project. I need to be at this event. I need to be running this specific big thing that I don't know, it might be a magazine does or it might be a business does. I need to be running this big project. Every single manager is delegating a load of things. And then there's usually like this sludge at the bottom that there's 20 % that no one wants to do. If you can manage that really well, that will get you noticed far quicker than all of these big shiny projects that everyone wants to be on because everyone's on those projects and everyone is there and they're hustling to make that work.

1:46So you're much less likely to be noticed. She got one of her biggest promotions at GQ and the reason why she even ended up kind of climbing to where she did she wasn't even a publisher at this stage and everyone was fighting for the associate publisher role and there was something that her boss was working on and worked on every year and it was a pet project of his and no one liked it because it wasn't profitable and it was it took a lot of work and all of this and she just said she said rather than all of these other things that everyone's fighting to be put on she was like i would like to manage this project she was like i would like to manage it end to end i don't need any more resources i need a title for it i need to be publisher for the project but i'm going to do everything with zero resources all of this she managed to make that section of the magazine profitable everyone hated it like people were running away from it years before that and so i think it's there are different examples in every workplace but stop looking for the big shiny thing look for the thing that is the pain point for your manager work on that and manage that well instead and get really good at managing those types of things i think developing a project management and organizational skill as an individual, as an employee, is one of the most important things you can do because it translates to pretty much every single job role.

2:54I wanted to also ask about relationships. How does that fit into your life? You and your husband are adorable. I love watching your content. And I'm really curious, especially as an ambitious young woman, it's notoriously extremely hard to find a loving, committed partner. So what has that experience been like for you? and what advice do you have for other young women? It definitely wasn't always easy at all. I think that when you're someone who is a doer and you're out there like hustling and doing all these different things and being busy and all of that, I think that you don't always attract the right people, which is strange because you think it would just put some people off and they would just run a mile because they don't want someone that headstrong or quote unquote bossy, whatever they want to call you.

3:37A lot of the time it can attract people who want to bring you down a peg and who want to, you know, make you a little bit more realistic. And I've seen so many amazing women get into relationships. Their spark is lost a little bit purely because their partner wants to humble them. And that is categorically not what you need from a relationship. You need self-awareness, you need to be realistic and you need for your partner to be able to tell you to like be quiet for a second. I think that a lot of women get into those relationships because they feel like they can manage that like they manage everything else so I think that's you know I definitely experienced that in the past I think when I got into my relationship with my husband I was in a place where I really wasn't interested in getting into a relationship how did you guys meet so we met probably about three and a half years ago now and we met on Raya which I would not suggest as a place to meet a husband at all I would say the large majority of people on there want a very specific thing and that very specific thing is to climb like various different ranks of the social ladder um and i don't yeah not what i'm after um but i remember i was on there and i downloaded it after a breakup and i was pretty fresh out of a breakup and i downloaded it and he was on there and um he didn't have many photos of himself classic like artsy man um and so i was just a bit but i the one i once i'd seen i'd be like yeah and i really loved his work so I was like yeah great sounds like an interesting person but he lived in New York at the time um and he was in London probably a week a month for work twice he said you know I'm in London want to grab a drink and I was fresh out of work I was just like yeah yeah maybe and then you know it wouldn't happen and then we went on our first date in kind of the July and then he wasn't back in London until about two months later that's when we went on our second date And from that second date, I was like, yeah, I will fall in love with this man.

5:30And he ended up moving back to London a few months later. He's originally from, well, outside of London, but he is from the UK. But I think what made this relationship different, as someone who has always really wanted that love and like really aspired to have, I don't know, not necessarily to get married, but like, I don't have a super close family. I don't, you know, I always look to that as a way to build that. and so I always really wanted it I wanted it out so I wasn't the type of person who only wanted my work I was really wanting someone to build that with but I think because I was at a stage where I didn't necessarily want that or just couldn't be bothered um I my standards were a lot higher and I think I was kind of very no-nonsense and very like I'm unbothered I was moving into an apartment by myself in a gorgeous like this beautiful penthouse flat I was like I have no interest in like I was like I'm gonna live my hot single girl life in central London like this is going to be great and so my standards were just really high in terms of like what I wanted what I would accept what I was looking for and no one was getting through that barrier and I think that allowed me to meet someone that she could get through that barrier and never wanted to take me down a peg like always wanted to really sing my praises and still be able to be humble together and like understand you know like think each other like amazing but not need to you know not need to bring each other down um and yeah he's just I mean he's he's an incredible person and he's a really really incredible husband and has been an incredible partner since the very beginning um but I think it's you know a lot of us lover girls can put ourselves in the position where we want to have a partner and you then compromise on certain things because having a partner seems more important than not having a partner and I've definitely been there one too many times.

7:19And it took me being out of that position to actually find someone who wasn't going to take advantage of that. And I was going to say, like, I saw your news on social media today. I'm so sorry. And I wanted to ask kind of like how you view family and the role of partnership within your work life. Like, how is that something that you think that you're able to balance? I think there's so many stereotypes of like whether women are able to work effectively and also have a kid, all of that. I mean, that's questions investors even asked us. And like we're 23 right now is, well, what happens when you guys have a kid?

7:51What would you say to questions like that? And how have you viewed that in your life? First of all, they're technically illegal in the UK, those questions. So and in all employment situations, like they shouldn't be being asked in any interviews or anything. But it is unfortunately not always that simple. I mean, I guess for context, for anyone listening who hasn't like doesn't follow my Instagram or whatever it might be, me and my husband were pregnant and we lost the baby a few weeks ago. And it was right before I was opening a new store in London and it was a hugely busy time. And it was just one of those moments where I was like, God, being a business owner gives you zero ability to like go through anything.

8:37because you're always going through shit with your business like you the propensity to deal with things outside of that is so low because they always come at the same time and then other things are flying and it was just one of those things where like I had to have an operation and try and make sure that I could actually be there and obviously was going through a huge amount of grief at the time but I think you know the way I see I would be lying if I said that I didn't worry about saying anything purely because investors would know that that was on the horizon for me. Like by saying that I'd had a miscarriage, essentially, I'm saying we wanted a baby and we were going to have a baby.

9:20And I think I'd be really naive to say that I don't think that's going to affect things for me in the future. And I think that's fucking terrible. Like I really think it is. I have yet to go through a single funding round where in the due diligence, there isn't the really clever question of is anyone on the leadership team going to be on maternity leave in the next year because it's essentially something that they need to know because they're investing in the leadership team but it is essentially and they're trying to ask it about you well it's it's about the leadership team i'm on the leadership team so and that's standard in documents like that's that's standard so i don't know it's really complex um and i you know i I oversee working for female founded companies, obviously.

10:06But I also like and I think it's statistically we know that female founded companies also hire more women and promote more women to leadership positions because they know if I could do this as a mum, these people could do this as a mum. And if they can't, then we probably don't have the right infrastructure in place rather than the other way around. And, you know, Tala has the most incredible CEO who's a woman and she has two kids and you know 87 % of our leadership positions are held by women um and so many people in the office have families and I think that you know I I don't know I'm gonna keep like I hope that happens for us and I hope it happens for us you know I hope I don't have to go through that again but I I'm gonna I guess keep acting as if it's not going to affect my work um until someone tries to tell me otherwise and then I guess I'll deal with that situation then um probably not very enthusiastically but like I think that I don't know I think it's I think it's really hard and I think it's shit that even when I was talking about thinking about talking about my grief on social media I was immediately like oh you know this could be detrimental to the business which is just fucking insane

11:38because I understand an investor being like oh what if you're distracted with your other business people talk about Elon Musk about that all the time like investors are worried about it with That makes sense. The asking about, you know, if you're going to be distracted if you have a kid, to me, that really upsets me because, first of all, the fact that you as such a successful woman who's had all these companies, who's had incredible success, who's shown that you can return value for investors, the fact that you are scared to put something out on social media is crazy and terrifying for someone who's not in that position of privilege.

12:06And I think that also because of the body clock, but like it means that, OK, we already know things are so weighted against female entrepreneurs. This also kind of means that if they're not going to be backed once they have children, then they probably need to be only starting companies in their 20s, which is fucking insane. You know, we would fix this is if we had equal paternity and maternity leave. Exactly. Exactly. And so it's also like, I don't know, are you distracted, Mr. Investor, by your kids? Exactly. I am unaware of where the difference seems to be here. And of course, it is there because still, statistically, women are taking on the lion's share of the housework, of the caregiving, of all of this.

12:47And that's something that I'm very vocal about as well, because it all feeds into it. But it's just, yeah, I have no doubt as well that things that would affect me, like if I'm, as you say, if I'm worried about this, imagine all of these other people who, you know, all the women who don't necessarily have to be. have a track record of starting businesses, but have done incredible work in other jobs or have a fucking fantastic idea. And people look at them and instantly are like, well, she looks like she's of childbearing age. And it's like, there is so far to go when it comes to entrepreneurship and women getting backing and not just backing, but equality in terms of the way we view it all.

13:35like the way we view the successes of female entrepreneurs the standards we hold women to like I have seen nothing equivalent to the standards we hold female entrepreneurs to online nothing like I can I can give you a list of 10 female entrepreneurs who are disgraced never to show their name again some fine Elizabeth Holmes she's in jail like you know but like other ones who it's literally like we have people who've and I'm not gonna name names because I don't want to be sued. But like we've had men who've raised money fresh out of jail or fresh out of like embezzling with another company or promising things or inflating numbers or whatever it might be.

14:16And we don't look at all female, we don't look at all male entrepreneurs and go like, oh, well, it could be another situation like that. It's just like, you know, I put a TikTok up a few weeks ago that was talking about the standards we hold female entrepreneurs to online because I'd seen two influencers in the UK that released a business and the business was a higher price point. So they were selling like robes, probably like£110. So maybe like, I don't know, close to like, I don't know,$160,$170. A candle for£50, like some slippers for£80, all of this. But if you looked at the way the products were done, like the candle was done in a custom mold like the robe was 100 cotton and like 500 gsm or something like that and so like they were quality products the out like the outrage was insane like the whole of tiktok was you know like going around like canceling these people and all of this and it was like why when women do things does it become a moral issue because there's no one here saying you have to buy something at all like joe malone has candles for this diptyque has candles for the same price like all of this we hate when we see female ownership like that that's it you don't mind when that person does a brand deal for a 200 pound shark mask like you don't mind because you're not seeing the ownership behind that you mind when you know it's going into their pocket and that is an issue because we all do it like i found myself looking at like i don't know hearing something about a woman and being like oh well apparently she's hard to work with like you never fucking hear that about men like it is internalized it's internalized misogyny we all need to fight it social media is exacerbating it so badly i've seen a lot about i think it's chelsea park who has um park the um i think in the u.s and that's not so much in the uk but i've seen a lot about like when people have said the same thing on that and were like why are you selling out all the time like it's immoral like all of this and it's like this outrage like we have to keep it in check because i understand holding people to standards and making sure things are ethical and moral like That is so important.

16:23But we cannot burn women at the stake for every single time they make a decision that you don't agree with, because running a business is making a series of decisions over and over. Half of them wrong, half of them right, working out which ones are wrong and moving on to the next one. but it inherently means that women can't start businesses because if they are never allowed to make a mistake then they're never able to grow a business because businesses are a series of failures that you learn from and turn into success it's like perfection is the enemy of progress and women are perfectionists in a way that men are not they're demanded to be perfectionist now because we want perfection for people online

17:13when you were at oxford you were at university and you very quickly amassed millions of followers walk us through why did you decide to start posting on social media so the timeline really was that i started posting in 2015 so that was the year before i went to university in my final year of what you'd call high school. And so I was trying to get into a fitness routine and I was just the type of person that would try over and over again to like stick to the gym and wasn't sticking to it. And so I started to use it as a bit of a diary and I didn't put my face on it. I didn't put my name on it. It was very it was kind of like an anonymous fitness diary.

17:50I wanted to see if I could make some money off it to make it worth spending all weekend making all of these recipes. So I took all of the recipes I'd made and I made them into two different ebooks. I made a sweet ebook. I made a sweet ebook and then I made a savory ebook and I sold them both online for five pounds. So probably a little bit more than that in dollars, six to seven dollars. I made a few hundred pounds off of it. I it was it was nothing life changing. But as someone who was on an eighteen thousand pound salary, it was pretty I was like, wow, I've you know, I've just basically given myself a huge percentage of extra money.

18:25That next year I went to Oxford. I was in my first semester, I, around Black Friday, I put the e-books on sale. So I was just like, oh, you can get them, I don't know, 20 % off. Then what happened is I went home for the Christmas holidays, probably like the first or second week or so. I got an email from the bursar at the university saying, you haven't paid your tuition fees, therefore you are not allowed back on campus until you pay them. And I completely freaked out because I was getting a full student loan from the government. I essentially got to work and wrote the whole plan that evening um or that evening it went into the early hours so I probably finished it at about 4 or 5 a.m and I messaged my friend who was a graphic design student and she had made my other ebooks look nice so I said if I pay you 50 pounds please can you make these look nice and like sellable because I didn't want to sell people something and so I said can I pay you 50 pounds and can you do it within the next week and she said yes and then I got online and I'd already had my little Shopify set up with my digital downloads and all of this.

19:23And so I just basically add in new products to that. I remember just that day, that evening, looking at the dashboard, and it said that I had, I think it was like 14 ,500 pounds. And I was like, oh my gosh, I was like, that is unbelievable. That was a day's work. That was a day, like, it hadn't been a huge amount. It hadn't cost me anything to produce it other than that 50 pounds and it was way more than I'd ever got from those previous ebooks which were cheaper but I just remember looking at it and being like oh my god I've just printed myself my whole tuition fee nearly two years of tuition fees in this one day two days later I think a thousand people had bought it and so that was up to around like 35 45 000 pounds and I continued that ebook business for the next kind of three or so years.

20:16About nine months after that, I went into physical products for the first time and kind of wanted to expand on what that specific customer, like what equipment did they need to do these e-books, all of this. I definitely struck a goldmine. Like I was in the right place at the right time. You couldn't do that with e-books anymore. There are other things you can do it with. And so kind of in a quite unique position to be one of the people who was earning from their audience before they were even earning from kind of brand deals and things. I know you talked about like you were in the right place at the right time to do ebooks that blew up for you and then basically launched.

20:49Now what you have is this empire of different businesses. What would you say for the girl who's a freshman in college today? What side hustles would you be doing if you were back there? So I think digital products are still really strong. I just don't think they're coming in ebook form. So I would say things like, well, there's a lot out there on courses, but even just small resources. It might be that you design a template that works for something and you sell it on Etsy. There is a lot of that. And again, it's no marginal cost. So you're essentially doing something once and making money from that for however long you're marketing that from.

21:20I would still really look at digital products, particularly if you don't have a lot of cash to put into something. I think that, you know, the barriers to entry for entrepreneurship have massively decreased, but they are still there. And I don't think that necessarily most new entrepreneurs need to be going out and immediately raising loads of funding to, as I say, reinvent the wheel. I would really look at the things that are low cost to start. Social media is even technically one of those things. Like the ability to build yourself a following has been hugely democratised over the time and has allowed people to be able to, I guess, springboard off that to sell all sorts of other things, whether it's with your face or not.

21:58I think people often look for those gold mines and miss a lot of other things that could be really strong because they're just looking for that one quick fix. Like dropshipping was that at one point, like Bitcoin, like a number of these different things that are just like the get rich quick stuff. Totally understand why. And I, having been lucky and having been in that time, I understand that it's easy to look at that and want to get that. I think there are fewer and fewer of those things as technology has become more sophisticated and consumers have become more educated on different things, essentially.

22:31When did it stop working for you? Was there a point when you realized, okay, I struck gold. I have mined all the gold. I need to move on to something else. My concentration was always around evolving even before it was necessary to evolve. And I think that's been a pretty essential part of my journey. And so I think that I probably stopped it before it actually could have stopped fully. I put a lot of the money that we'd earned from that business into developing an app version of it so that it was something that was subscription based and was able to be more interactive and work with someone for a lot longer time.

23:07So I did that about three years after. But within that time, I was still evolving and still trying so many different things. If you were to break down your revenue streams, how much of it is each business? Like how much of it is social media deals versus podcast stuff? So I have a salary at Tala. I take some shreddy and TPM, a very profitable and a run to be very profitable like I don't need and so the if you were looking at my income you'd probably look at social media and things that come along with the personal brand so things like speaking events or consultancy things along that line probably balances out with Shreddy and TPM which I specifically run to be profitable businesses that I can withdraw money out of I have two businesses then Tala and Retrograde that are both venture capital backed fast growth businesses so they're not designed for me to be taking money out of them every year.

23:58And the idea is that we're putting as much money into growth as possible. And so those would be the least, which is funny, because I think probably people probably look at Tala and the size it's reached and automatically like, oh, God, you know, you must be seeing so much of that. I have a salary because I have a role there. Well, that's really interesting because I wanted to better understand what was the reason behind raising venture capital because you raised 4.2 million pounds for Tala. Why did you decide to do that? Different businesses need different things. And I would absolutely not ever blanket say, oh, you should go out and raise funding.

24:26I think it looks cool and exciting. And it's an amazing achievement, particularly as women. We know that only 2 % of venture capital goes to women, and that's the highest year ever. You reached out to famously to all the VCs you ended up pitching. What does a cold email from you look like? When I started raising for Tala, we were post-revenue by two and a half years. So to even launch the business, again, because it was capital intensive, At that stage, I had a significant amount of savings, which is necessary for a fashion business. So I think that, you know, it is a hard business to get into.

24:57So being totally honest, I don't think I can give a kind of template cold email that would be appropriate for most people. Because I think a lot of the time when you're raising for the first time, you are raising seed. You're raising either when you've made a little bit or pre-seed when you haven't made anything at all. So really what I was going out to people and saying was, this is our CAC. This is how much we've made. This is how profitable we are. Like all of the, I was going metrics based. And then I was saying, and these are our values. And these are the values we're going to maintain. We're not going to entertain any investors that are not aligned with these values because we're going to end up in arguments in a few months time.

25:31Obviously, then I've raised since then with Retrograde, which is an AI company. And at that point, I guess my track record spoke for a lot of that. So I want to be transparent in the way that I don't want to kind of say, oh, you can come out of university and send this email to people and people are going to respond in the same way as they did to me because I was in an extremely privileged position to have already made a lot of money, got a lot of customers, proven that I could run businesses. And then when I raised for retrograde, that was last year and I was four businesses in. Well, that's why I'm also really curious to understand is you have your podcast, your personal brand, Shreddy, Tala.

26:07How do you time manage and what do you think that the investors thought? At any point, were they worried you would be distracted? A hundred percent. I've had a lot of conversations with potential or prospective investors who have said, OK, well, we would love a founder with your profile, but we wouldn't want them to have any of the other things. I've had to convince people to see it in the opposite way around a lot of the time and really position it as a strength because it is a strength. And I think it shows the amount I'm juggling outside of Tala, for example. I'm juggling just the same amount inside.

26:39And I have been very active in the businesses at all points. I am fiercely organized, like have always been, will always be, wish I had another setting, would love to have a choice. But it is, I'm hardwired that way. When I was at university, for example, I was doing full days at the library, 10 ,000 words a week in my degree. I would wake up and film often back to back like three YouTube videos. And I was doing at least three uploads a week. I was posting on social media every day. And I was running the businesses. And so everything had to be very blocked out and always has been very blocked out.

27:16So it is my comfort zone, really, to have a very jam-packed schedule. I think that I've developed an ability over time to be a fierce prioritiser and a very quick decision maker. You just have to be making decisions. Decision paralysis is what is going to freeze a business. You have to be moving. You might not be moving in the right direction, but you're only going to learn that if you start moving. So I think that's over and over again, that's been taught to me. So I've got faster and faster at making decisions. But at the same time, I have teams, people are still going to look on my social media and be like, Oh, she's doing this and this and this and this.

27:49Every single area you see me do anything, I have help in like every single area. There are nearly 70 people at Tala. There are about 20 people at Shreddy TPM. There are you know, there's a whole team at retrograde. I have people to help at home. Like I have a cleaner, I, you know, have a PA, I have a personal team to help with my kind of side of social stuff. It's never just me. Like it's been about building teams of people who are better than me at what they do so that the capacity of the business can increase and being able to then effectively delegate to them. I 100 % agree. That's been such a huge learning for us when we work on our business of just how important it is to have a team that you can delegate to that you can lean on.

28:31And I I wanted to understand also with Retrograde, what was the reason why you decided to start a fourth business? And you started it venture backed from the very beginning. What was the reaction of investors? Investors have been very excited about it. And I think for good reason. To explain the concept behind it, essentially, Retrograde is a virtual talent agency. So it's AI powered and it's designed to help creators be able to earn what they should be earning. So the concept behind it and the reason I even got on board because it wasn't my idea in the first place at all. It was my co-founder Jake's idea and he's built and sold a tech company before.

29:06His last tech company was in the creator space and he built and sold that within 18 months for a very impressive sum and he kind of came to me knowing that I had been very vocal about the creator space and also spend a lot of time helping creators get to where they need to get to in terms of earnings because I find they get taken advantage of a lot and I don't like women being taken advantage of in any sense. This was essential for the industry. I see creators every single day who are not earning what they should be or who have I see creators who have amazing agents I always want to say that but I also see creators who have missed out on a 10 grand brand deal because it wasn't responded to in time or they know they're with an agent that's managing 20 other people who isn't going to prioritize their 300 pound brand deal even though that will make a huge difference to them I knew it was essential and I really wanted to be on board I was not looking for anything new I spent a lot of time talking back and forth with Jake to make sure that it was the right thing I felt like the right co-founder in terms of everything I know about the industry and firsthand experience as well.

30:04And I wanted to do it with Jake because he's a very successful tech founder. I feel like when those opportunities come along, you make them work. So I never, I think it's easy to look at my, I guess, portfolio of what I do and think, you know, that's a lot of things. It must be here, there and everywhere. I've never started a business and moved away from it, even in any way, in different areas, different departments until that has been ready to be run by someone who is better than me. Never, ever. Like I've never just, it's not that I see something shiny and I run off to the next thing. I build something.

30:38I hire incredible teams that go in there and that run what they need to run in the different departments. I then still stay at an approvals level to I'm still involved in all the businesses. But it's not that I'm suddenly missing from the office on Thursdays because I'm now spending that full day at Retrograde. I'm also not a day-to-day co-founder in Retrograde. So Jake is the day to day. I'm the week to week. And that was important for me to be able to take the opportunity because I said I just don't have capacity. And in terms of investors, it's always been around conversations. I've always under promised and over delivered on all of my businesses in pretty much all metrics.